The Screengrab : leonard pierce

Th-Th-That's All Folks: THE SCREENGRAB CURTAIN CALL!

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:00:00 GMT

So, th-th-that's all folks. Enjoy the last precious remaining hours of the Screengrab while you can, and be sure to look for us here at Nerve.com, in the archives at www.thescreengrab.com, at our new blog the Screengrab In Exile, and also...

Andrew Osborne:
Look for me at The Ol' Bait Shop, The Ol' Blog Shop, New England Screenwriters, and if The Meat City Beatniks ever comes to a theater near you, be sure to buy a ticket!

Scott Von Doviak:
Check out Scott's blog, his tweets, his book Hick Flicks and the continuation of his journey into Unwatchable madness!

Leonard Pierce:
Look for Leonard at A schediastic hootenany and the Onion A.V. Club!

Phil Nugent:
The Phil Nugent experience rolls on at The Phil Nugent Experience!

Hayden Childs:
Read Hayden at From Here To Obscurity, and check out his book, Shoot Out The Lights!

Paul Clark:
I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to write for the Screengrab for the last two years or so. In the future, I’ll be devoting more of my energy to my blog Silly Hats Only, where I’ll be carrying on a few of my favorite Screengrab traditions- including the reincarnated Famous Last Words, starting in June- and exploring some new ideas as well, I hope. I’ll also continue to be involved in The Muriel Awards, and you can follow me on Twitter under the username “opalfilms”. Be seeing you.

Nick Schager:
Nick can be found at Lessons of Darkness, Slant magazine, IFC News, Cinematical, and on Twitter.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg:
For more Sarah go to: http://www.sarahclynesundberg.com/

Vadim Rizov:
Vadim lives on at The House Next Door.

Lauren Wissot:
Lauren's work can be found at Beyond The Green Door.

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

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part Eleven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

A.I. (2001)

One of my day jobs is teaching various screenwriting courses, and I always use A.I. as a prime example of how NOT to end a movie. Of course, Steven Spielberg pretty much deserves his own wing in the terrible ending hall of fame: Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Schindler’s List and the tacky, tacked-on “Special Edition” ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which pretty much robbed the original ending of all its original mystery and wonder by not freakin’ knowing when to leave well enough alone. Of course, this unnatural, Brundlefly amalgam of the director’s flashy Hollywood huckster instincts and the Kubrickian darkness of the project’s original father (who died while the project was still mired in development hell) is pretty hapless throughout its running time, but it does manage a nice, poetic moment when David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot programmed to yearn for love from a mother who despises him, winds up trapped beneath the ocean, staring at a statue of the Blue Fairy, wishing endlessly for something he can never have. Hmm, I thought watching the movie for the first time, not a bad little dramatization of the human condition there, Spielberg...for don’t we all wish for things we’re programmed to want but can never achieve? Yet Spielberg, being the kind of guy who DOES get everything he wants, apparently has no use for the bittersweet frustrations of the great unwashed. Nope, Spielberg’s all about happy endings...and, apparently, mommy issues, because the movie doesn’t stop there: instead, it goes on and on and interminably on, getting sillier (and creepier) with each passing moment, as millennia pass and magical future robots allow little David to finally get what he always wanted...alone time in bed with a mother who LOVES him and ONLY him, dammit! C.G.I. + T.M.I. = ick. (AO)

CONTACT (1997)

Seriously, Robert Zemeckis and Carl Sagan? After all the mind-numbing science-vs.-faith arguments between Jody Foster’s astronomer and Matthew McConaughey’s minster, all you deliver is a silly-looking CG beach landscape – snow white sand! glowing blue water! – and the revelation that the much-discussed alien/God is Foster’s dearly departed daddy? It’s a figurative punch in the stomach from a film that’s already spent two hours slapping us in the face with faux-profound jibber-jabber and wannabe-2001 “trippy” sequences. (NS)

SCHOOL DAZE (1988)

So far, so good: by the time he reached the end of his second feature, School Daze, Spike Lee had opened up to new filmmaking techniques as well as expanding his political and emotional canvas to much wider and deeper topics than he’d attempted in She’s Gotta Have It. As the final moments of the two-hour film approached, Lee had introduced elements as far-ranging and controversial as class and race issues in the black community, date rape, divestiture, careerism and gentrification, and revolution vs. assimilation. It would be difficult to tie all those threads together, but Lee had matured so much as a filmmaker, viewers were confident he could pull it off. So what happens? Lawrence Fishburne lumbers all over campus, hollering “WAKE UP!” to audience and actors alike, all of whom seem surprised that he’s gone off script. Viewers wanted to wake up, all right – to a world in which Lee hadn’t pissed away all the goodwill of the rest of the movie on this obnoxious, go-nowhere student film ending. (LP)

JUICE (1992)

Whatever alien virus possessed Spike Lee to give School Daze such a flimsy cop-out of an ending, he apparently passed it on to his cinematographer. Four years later, when the talented but inconsistent Ernest Dickerson made his debut as a feature film director, it was with Juice, his own take on the gangsta epic that was then sweeping Hollywood; for most of its running time, it was a particularly compelling example of the genre, buoyed by solid performances in the lead roles by Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur. Then, in the movie’s climactic moments, bam! Spike Lee Disease strikes again: in a turn of events that is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely, Epps’ character tosses aside his piece and then pursues and disarms Shakur, who obligingly falls off of a building. A random partygoer tells Epps that now, he’s got the “juice”, which explains and/or resolves exactly nothing when it comes to everything that has gone before. All that talent on display, and not a script doctor in sight. (LP)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

It’s not exactly Stanley Kubrick’s fault that the ending of A Clockwork Orange falls short. At the time he did his infamous adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, the actual end of the book, the 21st chapter, was not available in American versions. (Kubrick lived in England, but he’d first read an American edition of the novel.) So when the script was written, he had no idea that the chapter even existed. It features an older if not wiser Alex growing bored with his utra-violent lifestyle and contemplating going straight, getting a job, and raising his own family – a contemplation which, turning the book’s themes of moral panic on their ears, includes the vital possibility that his children might seem as nightmarish to him as he seems to be to his parents’ generation. Without this insight, Burgess considered the American version of the book to be deeply flawed; and without its subversive self-criticism, the movie Kubrick made of it seems morally and philosophically confused. Still, he’s not entirely blameless; when filming started, he got hold of an English edition with the complete 21st chapter, and decided not to change the script one bit. (LP)

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION (1984)

Okay, the ending of this neo-pulp cult classic isn’t great. It’s one of those big cast mashups that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, with the whole cast walking purposefully together while music blared on the soundtrack and the camera jumped around showing the audience what it looked like when people walked from one place to another from different angles. But that isn’t what makes it one of the most disappointing endings of all time. It’s the very last thing we see before the movie fades to black: a title card promising that Buckaroo Banzai and His Hong Kong Cavaliers will be back, in Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Twenty-five years later, it’s a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. Today, deals are inked to make multi-picture franchises long before they know whether the first movie will be a hit or a dud; even as we speak, a sequel to the nearly universally panned (and not nearly as popular as it was anticipated to be) Transformers movie is gearing up to hit theaters. So why, every time we watch this widely beloved cult hit, must we be reminded of a sequel that’s never going to come? (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:45:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

Some comedian, possibly Seinfeld, did a routine once that perfectly captured my own pubescent experience during the final moments of The Empire Strikes Back, that sinking, slowly dawning realization that...holy shit! To Be Continued? Is THAT where this is heading? Are you fucking kidding me, Lucas? You’re gonna make me wait THREE YEARS to find out what happens to Han Solo? Last time around, the big finale was the Rebels blowing up the Death Star and this time it’s...Luke getting a new hand? As an adult, of course, I eventually learned to accept years-long gaps between, say, seasons of The Sopranos and Lost (and...uh...girlfriends), but way back when, it seemed like George Lucas was pulling a cruel prank on his faithful fans. (Little did we freakin’ know...) (AO)

RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

Bad:

Worse:

My esteemed colleague Andrew Osborne said of this last week: "And then, to make matters worse, Egghead suddenly materializes at the grand finale Ewok rave with the shiny, happy ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi...a scene Lucas inconceivably managed to make even worse decades later by adding Hayden Christensen." Yessir, this movie was the first clue that George Lucas had no idea how to separate his best impulses from his worst. What can I say? I was 11, and I knew that bouncing Ewoks singing a creepy-awful song while the ghosts of Jedis past grin at Luke was a miserable way to end things. Then, when Lucas got around to taking a crap on his legacy with the three prequels, suddenly we had to deal with whiny ol' block of wood Hayden Christensen taking scary ol' Egghead Vader's place, while the Ewoks sang a New Age anthem that left me longing for the relative greatness of the "Yub Jub" song. Hey, Lucas, here's an idea: you put Lawrence Tierney under that mask and then have the Rebels celebrate their victory on a planet where the inhabitants aren't covered in fur. Because when the furry people in your universe get together to celebrate, everyone loses. (HC)

DR. T & THE WOMEN (2000)

Critics were unkind to this movie, but I'm willing to cut Altman some slack. It's not that bad. Even as it states that Dallas society forces its women to interact with constant near-brainless patter, it suggests that underneath each perfectly coiffed hairstyle is a powerful intelligence trapped in a socially empty cage. But it all falls apart at the end. After the above clip, when Dr. Travis' daughter runs away from her wedding with her maid of honor, everything in Dr. Travis' life cruelly falls to pieces and he drives off in an increasingly frantic rain, which suddenly turns into the tornado from The Wizard of Oz, and then he's deposited in Big Bend, where he helps a young woman deliver a baby. I mean, I get the point: somewhere over the rainbow, Dr. Travis is practicing the business of bringing life into this world for the needy rather than assisting rich women with their petty neuroses. But Altman asks too much of the viewer with his sudden left turn, and it doesn't make a lick of sense. (HC)

PLANET OF THE APES (2001)

Tim Burton was in a bind when it came to ending his remake or reboot or re-imagining or retardification of Planet of the Apes in 2001. After all, he couldn’t go with the original surprise ending and expect it to wow audiences all over again. At the same time, it’s Planet of the Apes, so it needs some sort of mind-blower of a twist ending. Ultimately, Burton decided not to spend too much time thinking it through. Wouldn’t it be cool if the astronaut played by Mark Wahlberg manages to get back to his own time…only when he looks up at the Lincoln Memorial, he sees the face of his ape nemesis Tim Roth? And then a bunch of ape police show up with guns? Whoa! It was a nifty image to be sure, but could it possibly be explained by the events leading up to it in the movie? Attempts were made to justify it, but none by Tim Burton. "It was a reasonable cliffhanger that could be used in case Fox or another filmmaker wanted to do another movie," Burton claimed on the DVD commentary. Sadly (or not), no one has taken on the challenge…although as you’ll see in the clip above, some enterprising young people did make an attempt to improve on Burton’s finale. There may be some plausibility issues here, as well. (SVD)

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE (2003)

Run, Kate Winslet, run! Look to the sky and scream, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" And then, ohmigodIdidn'tseethatcoming, it turns out that the anti-death penalty activist framed his own death so that they could prove that the Texas legal system gives innocent people the death penalty. No! And the smoking gun (or, in this case, unsmoking gun) was always right there, just beyond her fingertips! No! No! No! Well, actually yes. As in Alan Parker's repulsive Mississippi Burning, which suggested that change came to Mississippi in the 1960s through the work of white FBI agents rather than the brave, but inconveniently often non-white, people of the Civil Rights Movement, here Alan Parker tries to suggest that an anti-capital punishment advocate in freakin' kill-happy Texas has to frame himself to prove that the Texas justice system occasionally puts innocent people on death row. Jesus, a thousand times no. Here's Roger Ebert from his review: "let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein." I might have gone with Idi Amin, but I think you get the point. (HC)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

Since we spoke earlier of how a great movie earns its ending by putting us through so much with the characters we feel they deserve their closing moments, let’s look at a movie that goes about it entirely the wrong way. There’s no question that the Lord of the Rings trilogy earns a good ending; the cast of characters we know and love absolutely deserve a great moment of closure after all that we’ve been through with them over the space of three entire movies. The problem is, Peter Jackson doesn’t give us one ending; he gives us a dozen. There are so many moments of building climax and rest that it starts to seem like a joke when the credits don’t actually roll through one false stop after another. Sure, Jackson and his writers were working with an incredibly long source trilogy, and to their credit, they did cut out plenty; it was just all the wrong stuff. For a director who seemed all too willing to hack bits out at the beginning of the series, he seemed downright reluctant to lose anything at the end, no matter how tedious it became; and even then, some of the choices he made were dubious. Why did we lose the Harrowing of the Shire – one of the more gripping parts of the final novel – so we could have ten minutes of the hobbits bouncing around on a feather bed? For a movie that gave us scene after scene of excitement in the early goings – for that matter, for a movie whose every installment left you begging for the next movie to come out – the endgame left even the most diehard fans longing for the credits to roll.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

EASY RIDER (1969)

I remember this one time a friend of mine was running behind on an elementary school creative writing assignment, scribbling the last lines of his composition just before the teacher collected our papers, and so his otherwise well-written tale of Old West adventure ended with a coyote suddenly popping up and devouring his cowboy protagonist. The abrupt, nihilistic climax of Easy Rider has a similar slap-dash quality (and why Peter Fonda’s Captain America would follow the gun-toting rednecks who just shot Dennis Hopper’s Billy the Kid rather than, say, driving away from them must have something to do with them funny cigarettes he was always smoking). On the other hand, gun-toting rednecks aren’t exactly known for their tolerance or decision-making skills, so a couple of yahoos taking potshots at hippies doesn’t exactly challenge my willing suspension of disbelief, even today. And considering the apocalyptic culture wars of the 1960s (which claimed RFK towards the end of the film’s production phase) and the outlaw mythos deep in the story’s marrow, some kind of fatal downer was probably inevitable. But Easy Rider’s characters don’t even get the dignity of a last stand. “We blew it,” Fonda’s biker states in a prescient epitaph for the end of hippie optimism and the rise of Nixonian neo-conservatism, just before Captain America gets killed by his own gas tank and his life savings goes up in smoke while he and his buddy die like dogs on the side of a road to nowhere. (AO)

8 ½ (1963)

Fellini’s semi-autobiographical fantasia inspires and infuriates in equal measure, the film’s whimsical imaginativeness somewhat offset by its indulgent self-satisfaction. Nonetheless, even if some of Fellini’s phantasmagoric flights of fancy rub me the wrong way, the ending is a stunner, a carnival-esque This Is Your Life procession of a director’s (Marcello Mastroianni) past and present acquaintances that resonates as an evocative representation of the myriad lives we touch, and are touched by, throughout our fleeting years. (NS)

THE LEOPARD (1963)

Luchino Visconti's epic masterpiece, set in Sicily in the 1960s, is a rich evocation of a whole society on the verge of disappearing, with the changes that Garibaldi's revolution were about to effect seen through the eyes of a middle-aged aristocrat, the Prince, played by Burt Lancaster. The film's long last section -- which gave the Coppola of the Godfather films and the Cimino of The Deer Hunter a high bar to aim at -- is the Prince's world at its apotheosis; the final moments give you a rare sense of a man feeling the summation of his life up to that point and sadly accepting the feeling of his potency slipping away. (PN)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

For most of its running time, this Cold War conspiracy fantasy dances on the line between thriller and satirical comedy, which makes it all the more unnerving when the clock ticks down and the picture suddenly becomes very serious in tone. It's as if the filmmakers' amusement at the ridiculousness of the McCarthyite witch hunters who inspired their story was gradually swamped by their disgust at what they'd done to their country. Sinatra's final speech, lamenting the fact that no one will ever know about the true heroism of Raymond Shaw, is one of the most hearfelt moments of his film career, and the sobering end point that the movie deserves. (PN)

KISS ME DEADLY (1955)

Restored ending:

Chopped ending:

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer is a nasty piece of work on the page, a misogynistic thug with a fascist mentality who lives in a world of strawmen who are always proving him right. When adapting Spillane's novel Kiss Me Deadly, screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides played up Hammer's sadism and narcissism, showing him to be a bully rather than the tough-guy hero Spillane obviously saw. The movie Kiss Me Deadly adds a great McGuffin, too, in the form of a suitcase full of some sort of glowing atomic energy that quickly becomes a nuclear blast when explosed to the air. In the original ending of Kiss Me Deadly, when the femme fatale unleashes the bomb, Hammer and his assistant Velda escape into the surf while the house explodes. At some point soon after its release, however, someone cut up the ending so that it appears that the house explodes before Hammer and Velda escape. This version won many admirers for its raw pessimism. But it wasn't the intended ending, and the restored version, in which Hammer is shot and has to be supported in his escape by his assistant who he's treated like crap throughout the flick, actually seems more narratively satisfying. (HC)

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Despite its sincere hero, its elaborate plot, and its European trappings, The Third Man is a film noir through and through, and though Joseph Cotten plays the hero as a man on the good side of the law, he’s no less doomed. It’s also one of the most devastating film portraits of unrequited love. Even though he makes it through the film alive, unlike his memorable friend (and later foe), the roguish Harry Lime, like any good noir anti-hero, he’s sunk by his desperate desire for something that will forever elude him. In this case, it’s the love of Alida Valli’s Anna, who can’t shake her passion for Harry even after she finds out that he was a murderous criminal who didn’t love her the way she loved him. Cotten foolishly attempts to apply reason to matters of the heart, and simply can’t understand why Anna would be so devoted to a cruel man who treated her – and everyone else – so shabbily, instead of a good man who really loves her (like, of course, himself). Anyone who’s seen the end of the movie, where Cotten’s Holly Martins waits patiently for Anna outside of Lime’s funeral only to have her walk past him without even a perfunctory glance, has a hard time thinking that the twice-dead Harry is the one who got the better end of the deal. Director Carol Reed and producer David Selznick – who had argued about everything else during the production – agreed on the ending, against the wishes of author Graham Greene, who wanted a more upbeat finish. Greene was a great writer, but Reed and Selznick were right; no happy ending could have bested this heartbreaking scene. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

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

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

REPO MAN (1984)

Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

Love him or hate him -- and there are plenty of cinephiles in both camps -- it’s hard to deny that nobody could end a movie quite like Michelangelo Antonioni. With plenty of wonderful conclusions in his work, it was hard to confine ourselves to just one Antonioni film (or even two, as we ended up doing), but ultimately we couldn’t possibly overlook the finale of this, his most critically-savaged work. Taken as a whole, Zabriskie Point is a scattershot vision of late-sixties America -- sometimes visionary, sometimes ponderous, often both. But even if you aren’t a fan of the movie, the ending packs a wallop. Sure, it’s somewhat obvious what Antonioni’s up to here, blowing up a gaudy “modern” house that has intruded on the natural majesty of the desert, even showing the explosion from multiple angles for extra emphasis. But it’s how he does it that turns the scene from sledgehammer symbolism to transcendent cinema (besides, this is relatively subtle compared to Antonioni’s other proposed ending, which involved an airplane writing “Fuck You, America” across the sky). As Antonioni shifts the film into some of the slowest slow-motion the cinema has ever seen in order to capture the explosions in exhaustive detail, he manages to exact his cinematic revenge on consumer culture -- watch as he blows up a television, a refrigerator, even a loaf of Wonder Bread -- while simultaneously transforming the destruction into something beautiful, with an assist from a modified version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” For lack of a better phrase, it’s pure cinema. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the notion that even a director as art-damaged as Antonioni knows sometimes his hardened audiences just want to watch stuff blow up real good. (PC)

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) & BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Sorry to ruin it for you, but the planet of the apes? It was Earth all along! Charlton Heston sure feels silly now. But not as silly as he’ll feel when he finds himself the prisoner of underground mutants in the sequel. Now he’s really had enough, and it’s hard to blame him for overreacting. I’ve told this story before, but one more time before they turn out the lights: Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen." (SVD)

WEEKEND (1967)

By the end of the ‘60s, it was clear to everyone that Jean-Luc Godard was through fucking around. He was using cinema less as a means of communication and more as a weapon, but how deadly serious he was about deploying that weapon didn’t become clear until the final scenes of his dizzying film Weekend. The circumstances are brutal enough; the bourgeois couple we’ve followed throughout the film, cheated of their inheritance, resort to murder and end up in cahoots with a pack of radical revolutionaries with a taste for human flesh. But throughout Weekend, Godard was operating on a higher level: it’s full of meta-reference, and the director makes no bones about his characters being tuned into their own artificiality at every juncture. He planned it not as a mere statement, but as a command: this art form, he said, is dead; leave the theatre not to discuss it, but to seize and tear down. It was a powerful message, and a prescient one a year before Paris exploded into a nearly miraculous revolution. But even in that atmosphere, only Godard would have had the balls to give Weekend its famous ending: a simple title card reading “END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD.” (LP)

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY (1966)

Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Leone's, aren't concerned with Western realism, but the myth of the West, which they blow up like Greco-Roman gods. This might be the most iconic and expressionist movie ending outside of, y'know, German Expressionism. The clip above starts after Tuco and Blondie find the graveyard, with the camera spinning through the graves as Tuco races through the rows, looking for the right name. Then Blondie forces him to dig. Angel Eyes appears and there's the first double-cross: the grave Tuco is digging up has bones rather than money in it. The Mexican standoff. The second and third double-cross: Tuco's gun is empty and Blondie didn't write anything on the rock. Tuco digs at the right grave, but as soon as he strikes the gold, there's the fourth double-cross: Blondie has hung a noose over his head while he was working. The camera stays with Tuco as Blondie rides away, and we all watch him disappear, thinking, "wait, that one is The Good?" But he returns and frees Tuco, calling back to an earlier scene of camaraderie between them. It sounds like a story from The Odyssey even as I describe it here. If there had been such a thing as a Mexican standoff when Homer was writing, I'm certain that Odysseus would have found himself at one point of the triangle, one step ahead of the others. (HC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)

Okay, first of all...how cool is it that John Waters was the officiant at David “The Wire” Simon’s wedding? But, of course, a certain brotherhood between the seemingly unlikely pair makes perfect sense, given their shared warts-and-all love of Charm City, a.k.a. Bodymore, Murderland. And before he became pop culture’s deviant bon vivant uncle, Waters also shared the hustler rebel aesthetic of Simon characters like Omar and Bubbles, conceiving Divine’s infamous shit-eating grin at the end of Pink Flamingos as more of a calculated publicity stunt than an attempt to pervert the fabric of decent society. As the director says in his book, Shock Value, “I knew I only had $10,000 to work with, so I figured I had to give the audiences something no other studio could dare give them even with multimillion-dollar budgets. Something to leave them gagging in the aisles. Something they could never forget.” Mission accomplished. (AO)

NASHVILLE (1975)

Robert Altman’s clearest claim to having made the Great American Movie has an ending that pulls off the neat trick of seeming both surprising and inevitable. It’s another of those movies that absolutely earns its ending, with the exhausting and exhilarating feeling that we have followed its many fascinating characters to the logical extreme of their stories; and when they all gather for a political rally in honor of the unseen candidate Hal Philip Walker, it seems inexorable, in light of what we’ve seen before, that there will be an attempt on his life. But the gunshot, when it finally comes, finds an unexpected target – and, what’s even more unexpected, the movie doesn’t end there. Instead, it throws out a new wrinkle, as the little-known striver Barbara Harris, in one of the show biz tropes that is rarely handled so masterfully, steps up to calm the crowd and forge her own legend singing “It Don’t Worry Me” as the fallen Ronee Blakey is carried away. The song turns into a transcendent chant for all of America as Altman’s camera, which has captured absolutely everything, goes the only place it has left to go: up, out, and away. (LP)

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

What was it about 1976 that made losing acceptable at the movies? Was it a Vietnam hangover? The famous malaise Jimmy Carter spoke of? There must be some significance to the fact that the two most successful sports-themed movies of the year – Rocky and The Bad News Bears – ended with the heroes on the losing side. As losing goes, however, the Bears do it right. A thrilling rally in the bottom of the ninth that falls just short. A round of beers in the dugout. And of course, Tanner’s immortal response to the fake rah-rah good sportsmanship of the privileged: “Hey, Yankees! You can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!” Words to live by. (SVD)

DROWNING BY NUMBERS (1988)

For someone so relentlessly postmodern, director Peter Greenaway has often proven himself a master of what Barthes called the “proairetic sequence” – the movement of the narrative through signifiers related to plot and action. Although Drowning By Numbers is as beautifully designed as any of his less narrative structural work, Greenaway creates an almost tangible, physical need to see the plot (involving the murder by drowning of three men at the hands of their identically-named lovers) all the way through to its conclusion. He does this through a trick that’s elegant in its simplicity: almost every scene features a number, starting with 1 and increasing by one in every scene, going all the way up to 100. Greenaway cleverly snares you into an addiction for spotting the next number before you’re really even aware what he’s doing, and by the end of the movie, the number 100 shows up as the typically brilliant Michael Nyman score reaches its frantic crescendo and the story reaches its grim but inescapable conclusion. (LP)

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

I covered this for a previous list of romantic moments, so pardon me for repeating myself: It's a safe bet that few people who watched backpacking Gen X-ers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a memorable night together in Vienna in 1995's Before Sunrise ever expected to see a sequel, much less wait nine years for one. When that follow-up finally did arrive in 2004, it could hardly have been confused with a traditional movie romance. As befitting a Richard Linklater film, their belated reunion in Paris is all talk — talk about missed connections, the impermanence of youth and the mysteries of love. Jesse has a flight to catch, so we're always aware of the ticking clock — that is, until the sublime final moments, when the urgency melts away to the appropriate tones of Nina Simone singing "Just in Time." Delpy does a shuffling little dance. Hawke sinks into the couch with a silly grin on his face. And we all learn that the most romantic words of all are not "I love you" — they're "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane." (SVD)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Last week we saluted Slim Pickens’ whooping death trip aboard a nuclear bomb, but of course, that was only the beginning of the end of Dr. Strangelove. There’s no pie fight as Stanley Kubrick had originally planned, but we do get to see the great minds of the War Room contemplating the bright side of nuclear annihilation (10 women for every man!), the continuation of Cold War tension through the end of the world and beyond, and of course, the song we hope will be playing in your head as the Screengrab fades to black: We’ll meet again…don’t know where, don’t know when... (SVD)

THE PASSENGER (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s ennui-drenched cinema reached something of an apex with The Passenger, the tale of a reporter (Jack Nicholson) who, while in Africa on assignment, assumes a dead stranger’s identity to escape the soul-crushing disaffection of his own life. It’s a beguiling pseudo-noir that culminates with one of cinema’s most awe-inspiring shots, a 7-minute single take – in which the camera magically passes through a room’s iron-barred window and then rotates 180-degrees – that expresses the film’s faith-and-philosophy-tinged portrait of the folly of dreaming about escape. (NS)

CARRIE (1976)

The shock ending of Brian De Palma's horror classic provides a hint as to how De Palma got the reputation in some quarters as a rip-off artist: it's a direct steal from the ending of John Boorman's Deliverance, from just four years earlier. But it's also a clear indicator of how De Palma, in the quarters that matter, earned the reputation of a master director: his execution smokes Boorman, whose scene was a bit of a botch. By contrast, De Palma's makes audiences jump as high as anyone has ever managed without installing ejector seats in the theater. (PN)

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Just a quick word to acknowledge how clever Spielberg was to have the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holies, the subject of all of this strife and death, crated and boxed away in an anonymous government warehouse, presumably one of thousands of forgotten treasures. That's a wry sense of humor there. (HC)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

The best movie endings are the ones that come at great cost, the ones that make us feel that we’ve lived with these characters and that their eventual fate, whatever it is, has been earned. The greatest recent example of this is Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a truly epic sequence of events, changes of scenery and direction, life, death, moral redirection, and any number of other twists and turns, the young lovers Jen and Lo, hiding out at the Wudan temple, fondly recall their time together in the forbidding, barbaric deserts, where their love had first blossomed. “Make a wish, Lo,” says Jen, in one of the most perfect deliveries of a movie line in modern memory; “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again,” he replies. Jen then silently hurls herself off the edge of the temple, into the clouds below, suspended first and then flying, calling back to a legend they’d discussed during their desert idyll as Tan Dun’s majestic, gorgeous music plays us to the credits. It’s one of the most romantic endings imaginable, and guaranteed to raise a lump in the throat of all but the coldest viewer – a scene that’s truly earned. (LP)

25TH HOUR (2002)

For most of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton) is shown coming to grips with his upcoming incarceration -- saying goodbye to his loved ones, trying to determine who sold him up the river, even asking his best friends to beat the snot out of him so he won’t look like an easy target for prison rape. But just when Monty has more or less accepted his fate, the morning he’s scheduled to make the trip up to prison, his dad James (Brian Cox) meets him for the trip with an alternative -- to escape and start a new life. Over the next ten minutes, James paints a beautiful picture of this way out -- go West, find a little town in the desert, get a new identity, and so on -- and with Terence Blanchard’s elegiac score playing behind him, the plan is as tempting as it is far-fetched. But there’s a steep price for this escape, as Monty could never return to his old life. And so, the central theme of the movie snaps sharply into focus -- the choices we all must make in life. James is prepared for the possibility of never seeing his son again as long as he knows he’ll be okay, but is Monty ready to give up everything he knows for freedom? As we see him passing all those New Yorkers he once railed against, now smiling at him and seeing him off, we wonder if he can sacrifice his past to save his future. And just when he’s come to the end of his imagined life, all of a sudden he snaps back to his real one, back in the car on the road to destiny, and Lee’s camera lingers once again on Norton’s face. The choice is yours, Monty. (PC)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:05:00 GMT

The Worst:

Anakin Skywalker in RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

So after three films and six ardent years of my impressionable childhood and pubescence, George Lucas delivers an incredibly satisfying climax as Darth Vader finally comes back to the righteous side of the Force by killing the Emperor (in one of the very best “villain falls screaming to his death” scenes ever), and then, after a tantalizing glimpse beneath the mask in The Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Lord of the Sith is finally revealed...as Egghead? As soon as Vader’s face was uncovered, I immediately wanted to un-see the image, which completely undermined everything that was cool and mysterious about the galaxy’s biggest badass, turning what could have been a heart-tugging farewell into an embarrassing goof. And then, to make matters worse, Egghead suddenly materializes at the grand finale Ewok rave with the shiny, happy ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi...a scene Lucas inconceivably managed to make even worse decades later by adding Hayden Christensen. What’s that thing the kids say nowadays? Oh, yes: epic fail. (AO)

Jimmy Durante in IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD, WORLD (1963)

Stanley Kramer's "ultimate" slapstick comedy attempts to compensate for its director's lack of any sense of humor with sheer tonnage of comic performers. And what better way to set the tone for what follows than with a series of close-ups of a beloved old man looking very uncomfortable as he lies against some rocks coughing and raving while dying in pain? Judgement at Nuremburg was funnier. (PN)

Some poor bit player in RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART II (1985)

Nothing sums up Sylvester Stallone's distinctive brand of cheeseball heroism like the scene from this movie in which Rambo encounters a Vietnamese soldier who reacts to the sight of the leathery white war god by staring at him in gaping awe, patiently waiting for John Boy to take aim with his bow and exploding arrow and blow the fellow to bits. One theory holds that the guy had reached the point of welcoming the chance to get out of the movie and couldn't find a good, hard rock to beat his head against. (PN)

SHIRLEY MACLAINE, THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961)

There’s nothing particularly grotesque or shocking about Martha Dobie’s suicide in The Children’s Hour. The character, nicely played by a young Shirley MacLaine, hangs herself in the barely-seen way characters used to do in the old Hays Code days; in fact, it’s considerably less gory than the Lillian Hellman play upon which the film was based, in which she shot herself in the head. The reason it belongs in the Cinematic Graveyard of Infamy isn’t because of the circumstance, but rather the cause: The Children’s Hour, despite a substantial clean-up job by producer Sam Goldwyn, director William Wyler, and screenwriter John Michael Hayes, was a play about two women accused of lesbianism. The storyline is changed to hinge on the sin of adultery to satisfy the Production Code, but there’s plenty of subtext still in place, and most filmgoers at the time were hardly ignorant of the attendant publicity surrounding the film that made it perfectly clear what was really going on. The death of Martha Dobie thus became the most prominent example (though hardly the last) of the “that gay’s gonna die” syndrome in American motion pictures, where any prominent homosexual character, or even one that’s hinted to be homosexual, is guaranteed to be dead by the end credits. (LP)

ROBBI MORGAN, FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

Robyn “Robbi” Morgan isn’t the best-known actress in the world. She hasn’t had a film or TV credit in 25 years, and if she’s known at all today, it’s for being the wife of third-tier game show host Mark Walberg. Likewise, her character in the first Friday the 13th movie wasn’t important; she had no key lines, a forgettable personality, and no impact on the plot at all. She even died in a fairly ordinary way for a movie of this sort, getting her throat slit as she sat behind the wheel of a car. So why are we including her on the list of the all-time worst movie death scenes? Call it our very own Tomb of the Unknown Victim. Morgan’s death at the hands of Ma Voorhees was the first contemporary murder in the first Friday the 13th movie, and thus, the first of a massive wave of teenage mortality in the dismal 1980s heyday of the slasher flick. More teens died on screen at the hands of vengeful psychopaths from 1980 to 1990 than died in the real world from violence, car crashes and drug overdoses combined, and the very first of them was Mrs. Mark Walberg. It seems her suffering will never end. (LP)

JACKIE EARLE HALEY, WATCHMEN (2009)

Jackie Earle Haley already had one memorable on-screen death to his credit when he started filming Watchmen. In 1975’s Day of the Locust, he plays a child star who is gruesomely murdered by a character with the not-yet-ironic name of Homer Simpson. Many fans of the Watchmen comic believe that the death scene of the brutal vigilante Rorschach, played by Haley in the film version, is an emotional high point of the book; terminally dedicated to his own unshakable sense of justice, he determines to expose the film’s villain, but he’s confronted by Dr. Manhattan. Knowing his fate, Rorschach shows emotion for the first time in the book, crying in the snow and screaming “DO IT!” to the man who will, seconds later, murder him. The movie, as it does with many scenes from the book, gets it exactly wrong; by implicating Dr. Manhattan in the villainous scheme, it changes the whole dynamic of the action. Haley plays the scene defiantly instead of helplessly. And worst of all, when the deed is done, we cut to the character of Nite Owl witnessing the killing (no one sees it happen in the book), and he reacts with the biggest dramatic cliché in movies: he raises his arms to the sky and shouts “NOOOOOOOO!” (LP)

WOLFGANG KEILING, TORN CURTAIN (1966)

Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed torturing both his leading ladies and his audiences, so it’s no surprise that his films featured a number of memorable demises (see Psycho, elsewhere on this list) or near-demises (who can forget the sight of Grace Kelly being brutally strangled in Dial M for Murder – from an audience point-of-view shot, no less?). Torn Curtain isn’t one of Hitch’s better movies; it’s a slow-moving, generally weightless Cold War spy thriller made after his post-Birds career short-circuit. But it does feature a death scene that, if it’s not one of the worst ever made, is at least one of the most uncomfortable to watch. Wolfgang Keiling plays East German espionage officer Hermann Gromek, who Paul Newman finds himself in the position of assassinating in a remote farmhouse. Gromek turns out to be harder to kill than Rasputin, and the battle between the two men turns into an agonizingly brutal showdown: the German is beaten with a heavy kitchen tool, choked, pummeled with a shovel, stabbed with a butcher knife, battered about the head repeatedly, and finally crammed head-first into a gas oven, where he slowly and painfully suffocates. It’s hard to watch, even by Hitchcock standards. (LP)

AL PACINO, SCARFACE (1983)

Al Pacino, apparently, is well on his way to becoming the movie biz’s King of Bad Deaths (see The Godfather Part III elsewhere on this list). You can almost trace the point of his career decline to the day he decided to take the lead role in Brian De Palma’s Scarface, an influential and endlessly watchable but not actually any good movie in which he does not so much play Cuban drug lord Tony Montana as overplay him. Or, to be precise, over-overplay him. There is not a single drop of subtlety in this entire movie, from the first frame to the last, and Pacino passes up no chance to not only chew the scenery, but eat it completely and swallow it in one gulp. Everything from his outrageous accent to his beyond broad body language is yards over the top, and that applies to his death scene as well: playing like a parody of the video game it would eventually become, the movie shows us Tony Montana, coked to the gills from a sandbox-sized pile of powder on his desk, mowing down wave after wave of faceless assassins, and twitchily spitting out Oliver Stone’s amusingly loopy dialogue until his final, gory, spasmodic exit. Just like the rest of the movie, you know it’s terrible, but damn – you simply can’t look away. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)

How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River. Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence? For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Hauer’s Roy Batty is one of the screen’s most nuanced villains; while he’s a ruthless killer who’s not above playing with his victims the way a cat does a gutted rat, he’s also got a higher purpose. Roy is a replicant – an artificial life-form programmed to live only a short time so his intellect and emotions won’t develop to a human level – but in his case, it’s too late: he reaches a near-total self-awareness before his time is up. At the end of this science-fiction masterpiece, Roy toys with Detective Rick Deckard, who has wiped out most of his friends; he brutalizes him while taunting his own moral superiority: “Aren’t you the good man?” But nothing can be done; Roy knows he’s on the way out, and his last act isn’t to kill, but to save Deckard’s life. As he fades out into nonexistence, he drives home the film’s central question of what it means to be human, reminding Deckard that when he dies, his unique mind and irreplaceable memories will be gone forever, “like tears in the rain.” It’s a philosophically deep and emotionally powerful ending in a genre that rarely sees the two combined. (LP)

Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The zombie movie has reached its oversaturation point and is now just kind of annoying, but the movie that started it all, George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, still holds the power to chill, and its final scene – extremely massive spoiler alert, for those of you who have somehow missed out on seeing this over the last forty years – is a real gut-punch. Level-headed, competent Ben (played by Duane Jones in what was at the time a controversial casting decision, placing an African-American actor in the lead against a group of whites) has managed to fend off seemingly endless onslaughts of flesh-hungry zombies, conquering threats from without and within, over the course of a nightmarish day when his life was constantly in danger. Finally securing a measure of peace, he beds down in the abandoned farmhouse for the night, plotting how he will make his escape the following morning; when he awakens, without foreshadowing and without fanfare, he is fatally shot by a passing sheriff’s posse who mistake him for one of the living dead he’s spent the entire rest of the movie fighting. It’s an inspired, if exceptionally cruel, ending, and it gives us the first glimpse of the nasty social commentary that would feature in Romero’s later work. (LP)

Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

The demise of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the end of Arthur Penn’s paradigm-busting gangster epic shouldn’t have come as any kind of surprise; after all, anyone who knew the history of the two criminals knew how they met their end, and had probably seen the photos of their car, pierced with hundreds of bullet holes. What Penn’s unforgettable death scene accomplishes, then, isn’t shock because of what happens, but rather how it’s depicted; refusing to take the easy way out, Penn forces us to watch Bonnie and Clyde (with whom we’ve spend the entire movie being forced into a bizarre sympathy) die the way they likely did in real life: in a horrible, convulsing, twitching, gory, pitiful mass of blood and gore. Different people took the ending in different ways, from the straights who saw it as a long-overdue comeuppance to the heads who felt it was another example of rebel heroes dying at the hands of the Man; but no one who saw it forgot it easily, and it substantially upped the ante for violence in Hollywood. From then on, no death would be simple and bloodless and abstracted; over the next two decades, the town would be drowned in gore from movies that picked up the gauntlet that Bonnie and Clyde threw down. (LP)

Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Orson Welles was already a restless, experimental genius at the astonishingly young age of 26 when he brought Citizen Kane to the screen. It’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for good reasons, many of which stem from Welles’ desire to rewrite the rules of filmmaking and start fresh from the ground up; and he doesn’t waste any time, putting the central character’s dramatic death scene at the beginning of the movie and working back from there to solve the mystery. At the top of the film, we see Charles Foster Kane as a bedridden old man, and before we even know who this man surrounded by opulent treasures is, he expires, letting a snow globe crash to the floor, and with his last breath, hissing the word ‘Rosebud’ – the key to the rest of the story. Welles later expressed dissatisfaction with this scene, saying he never quite felt right about it and writing off ‘Rosebud’ as a cheap Freudian gimmick, but its power has remained: it’s still counted as one of the most remembered death scenes in cinema, ‘Rosebud’ is at the top of the list of cinematic famous last words, and the whole sequence has been parodied thousands of times in dozens of media. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A lot of my friends have been going through break-ups and divorces lately, which means they’ve probably also been hearing that old familiar friends/family/Facebook folk wisdom about how the end of a relationship is like a death, which must be properly mourned.

And, given that we're down to our next-to-last Thursday list before getting dumped for some younger, sexier blogs by Nerve, your pals here at the Screengrab, having moved beyond denial, anger and bargaining, figured we oughta tackle grief -- well, grief and “holy shit, did you see that guy’s head explode? How frickin' cool was that?” -- with THE SCREENGRAB’S FAVORITE DEATH SCENES OF ALL TIME, including...

The Guy With The Exploding Head, SCANNERS (1981)

Holy shit! How frickin' cool was that? I remember first seeing the aforementioned Exploding Head Guy during one of the montage sequences of the 1984 theatrical clip show Terror in the Aisles (a horror film comprised entirely of classic moments from other horror films, kind of like the Scary Movie franchise without the dick jokes). Later, I saw David Cronenberg’s Scanners in its entirety, although the only thing I really remember about it now is the scene above, where renegade telepath Darryl Revok (B-Movie Hall of Fame villain extraordinaire Michael Ironside) totally blows that bald dude’s skull apart -- with his mind! -- in one of the most memorable death scenes in cinematic history...second only, I suppose, to John Hurt’s demise in Alien (below) for its shock value imagery. In a way, then, it’s sad to realize that, in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and the recent wave of torture porn cinema, the image of a bloody cranium bursting like a ripe watermelon is now considered tame enough to show as a sight gag on The Daily Show. (AO)

John Hurt in ALIEN (1979)

Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) goes to investigate an abandoned spaceship. He finds a chamber full of eggs. One of the eggs hatches, releasing a creature that latches onto his face, knocking him unconscious. His fellow crew members take him back to their ship, where they watch over him until the creature lets go and he awakens, seemingly okay. Then, during a meal, Kane gets violently ill, and a screeching, phallic monster bursts out of his chest cavity...in the process terrifying a generation, immediately elevating Alien above the majority of its contemporary peers, and providing one of the most horrific birth-rape images in the annals of cinema. (NS)

John Cassavettes in THE FURY (1978)

Some men just make you want to get to the point, big-time. Cassavettes is of course legendary as the man who, some say, created the independent American film movement -- but he earned his rent as an actor in other people's movies, and as an actor, he made his strongest impact in man-you-love-to-hate roles. The one that everyone probably remembers best is Guy, the hungry New York actor who pimped his wife out to Satan, a gesture that his character here -- Childress, a top-secret government operative with a dead arm and deader eyes -- would sniff at as the move of a rank amateur. Childress lays waste to most of the cast of Brian De Palma's visually lush horror thriller, only to meet his match in a telekinetic teenager who must share her director's movie-geek interests and black sense of humor, since what she has planned for him is actually a choice parody of the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. (PN)

Robert Shaw in JAWS (1975) & Samuel L. Jackson in DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Hitchcock used to talk about the difference between suspense and surprise in terms of a bomb under the kitchen table. If it suddenly goes off in the midst of a breakfast conversation, you have a moment of surprise. But if you keep cutting to the bomb ticking away while your characters sip their coffee and chomp their bacon…well, now you have suspense. Hitchcock’s thesis can also be applied to movies in which characters are eaten by sharks. (Hitch didn’t mention farce, although that’s a third option.) In Jaws, we have Quint, the old man of the sea, a man seemingly destined to be eaten by sharks ever since he escaped that fate after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the end of World War II. He goes kicking and screaming, sliding down the deck, reaching for a hand that can pull him to safety…suspense! In Deep Blue Sea, we have Samuel L. Jackson giving one of those action movie “rouse the troops” speeches. Just at the moment we’re sure he’s going to lead his team to victory over the shark menace…surprise! (SVD)

JAMES CAGNEY IN WHITE HEAT (1949)

From the first time you get a look at Jimmy Cagney’s unhinged, short-tempered gangster Cody Jarrett, you know he’s not going to end well. Cody is ruthless, bloodthirsty and marginally sane, and like Hamlet, he likes his mother…a lot. When Ma Jarrett (who’s just as crooked and crazy as her boy Cody) finally catches a bullet in the back, he goes completely off the rails and turns from a colorful, hot-headed gangster to one of the most murderous psychotics in the history of crime dramas. Finally betrayed by an undercover cop posing as a trusted member of his gang, Cody’s end comes when he desperately scrambles up the side of a gas storage tank. Fighting it out through a hail of bullets and a cloud of tear gas, he spits death at the cops below, refusing to go out without a fight, but the end seems near when the police snitch catches him with a couple of sniper shots. Even then, he’s got a bloody-minded determination to go out on his own terms: he recklessly fires his pistol into the gas tank, and just before it goes up in a huge, fiery explosion, he screams a defiant echo of the toast he used to raise to his late mother: “Top of the world!” (LP)

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

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

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)

It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

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

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

3. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

The year 2001 has long since come and gone, but the movie named for it seems to exist outside of time. There was nothing like it before and there’s been nothing quite like it since, although Stanley Kubrick’s space odyssey has influenced filmmakers as dissimilar as David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson. Ranging from the dawn of man to beyond the infinite, it’s larger than life and should be experienced that way, preferably on 70mm, as I once saw it at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. (A screening at which it seemed self-evident that the intermission coming rather late in the game is timed perfectly for the audience to slip out to the parking lot and get into the proper headspace for the grand finale.) You could fit all of its dialogue on a greeting card, and little of it means anything at all. Kubrick’s epic is all about exploding the structure of narrative film, marrying big, bold imagery to minimalist plotting – it’s about a filmmaker reaching for the stars. Kubrick’s reach may have exceeded his grasp, but he took us on a hell of a ride along the way. (SVD)

To watch 2001 is to marvel at how big Stanley Kubrick’s ideas really were. Most movies, even the best ones, are content to confine themselves to the concerns of man, but the scope of 2001 stands astride human history, observing the beginning before leaping forward to behold the beginning of the end. He did this through bravura filmmaking to be sure, but also an uncanny ability to make his ideas visual rather than spelling them out in dialogue. Long portions of 2001 play without dialogue, and when the human characters speak, they have almost nothing of consequence to say. They go about their business as momentous events play around them, and even after they learn of an important extraterrestrial presence on the moon, they pass the time by prattling on about the sandwiches they’ve been given. Of course the effects are lovely, even today -- a feat that’s all the more impressive for the fact that Kubrick and his technicians had to invent many of them for the movie. But the technical wizardry doesn’t stand alone: rather, it's part of a directorial tour de force that was made with genuine care by one of the most gifted filmmakers ever to pick up a camera. (PC)

2. THE GODFATHER (1972)

There’s no real debate – maybe there hasn’t been for 35 years – about whether or not The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are masterpieces of Hollywood filmmaking. The only real debate is which of the two is superior. Many critics and viewers simply refuse to choose and lump the two together as a single film; it’s a decision I can fully understand and support. Most critics, though, when asked to pick just one, go for the second film, with its epic scope, its ramped-up internecine complexity, and its darker vision of violence and betrayal. When the wind is south-southwest, I agree with them; the two films are of such phenomenal merit that any given day, either one could be considered the greatest movie ever made. But if I had to carve in stone my favorite, it would be the first. It may have not had the engaging complexity of its sequel, and it left its ending far more ambiguous than the blood-soaked tragedy of Part II, but its cast was note-perfect in every single scene, anchored by the monumental presence of Marlon Brando, and its structure was untouchable, serving as a moving textbook of how to craft a great film. It built the towering edifice that its sequel would so brilliantly destroy, and it was one of those rare films that arrived in the world instantly recognizable as a thing of greatness. If Part II shocked the world by surpassing it, it’s because The Godfather was so great it seemed impossible to surpass. (LP)

I can’t recall if I ever posted this story before...but what the heck, I’m outta here soon anyway, so: I once had a girlfriend (now sadly and tragically departed, and way, way too young) who was obsessed with both parts of The Godfather. During our years together, we watched the whole epic dozens of times, and eventually came to know every scene and line by heart (especially Luca Brasi’s stated hope for “a masculine child” on the day of Connie’s wedding, a line delivered with absolutely believable nervousness by actor Lenny Montana, reportedly due to his own absolute nervousness on the day of filming). Very few movies stand up to so many repeat viewings...and then one night, a freshly-struck print of The Godfather screened at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, and I was astonished to discover even more sumptuous visual detail packed into the frame than I’d ever noticed before, which only heightened my awareness of the nearly unparalleled genius of the film...as well as the staggering crappiness of The Godfather: Part III. (AO)

And now, the Screengrab's pick for the Number One Film Of All Time...

1. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Robert Altman's take on the Western is as upside-down as Sam Peckinpah's. Where The Wild Bunch is epic and bloody, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is about being small and transient in the great landscape of the West. As big as John McCabe's dreams are, they're only in his head. All the poetry in his soul doesn't mean anything in this tiny community grasping at civilization. His 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. W.H. Auden wrote of this painting in his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts":

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In Presbyterian Church, the burning of the unfinished titular church takes precedence over McCabe's last stand. And there's always something else happening when humanity takes its last stand. Where Peckinpah mixed the myth with realism, Robert Altman always preferred the real. (HC)

You know what always gets me? When Mr. "I don't make deals!" says of McCabe, "That man never killed anybody," he sounds as if he were describing a character defect. The movies have always been populated by guys like this, and it's sobering to realize how many times the movies they were in didn't recoil from them in dismay; on more occasions than I think I want to know, these guys were the heroes! By the end of the movie, McCabe will have killed somebody, all right, before settling in to be covered over with snow as if he were a statue commemorating the town that he'd built. The town will go on, and the woman he loves may eventually notice that he's not around anymore, but at the moment of his death, she barely knows what planet she's on. (PN)

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pearce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)
2. THE POSTMAN (1997)

After the half-billion-dollar disaster that was Waterworld, it’s a wonder that any studio would give Kevin Costner money for anything, let alone another massively budgeted post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic. But Warner Brothers ponied up the jack, and auteur Costner decided to show them what he could really do. Wasting another quarter-billion dollars, and bringing eternal shame to the MPAA voters who had, less than a decade before, awarded him a Best Director Oscar, Costner created one of the worst films of all time. Wasting a decent source novel by David Brin, The Postman is noisy, stupid, indulgent, witless, and interminable, and it ends with one of the biggest cop-out endings in motion picture history; but what makes it truly special (by which I mean wretched) is what a colossal vanity project it is for its director/star. Cramming the movie with his relatives, he turns his character from a relatable idealist to an impossibly perfect superman who is loved by everyone who encounters him. It’s the kind of manically overindulgent ego-stroke that used to kill entire careers in the old Hollywood system; unluckily for moviegoers worldwide, it didn’t do the same for Costner.

3. SHOWGIRLS (1995)
4. CALIGULA (1979)

Anyone can make a shitty movie with a bad cast and a crap writer. But it takes a special level of awfulness to take one of America’s leading literary lights, have him write a script to be performed by some of the world’s greatest actors, and spend tens of millions of dollars recreating the period in which your film is set, and still have it end up so horrible that it’s rightly considered one of the worst movies ever made. Conceived (and originally directed, until even he figured out what a colossal piece of shit he had on his hands) by Bob Guccione as a sort of combination of highbrow historical drama and low-grade softcore pornography, the story of the deranged Roman emperor Caligula was such a disaster that original screenwriter Gore Vidal sued to have his name removed from the final project – which, considering the stuff he left his name on, is a pretty powerful indictment of the film. Tinto Brass did most of the directing after Guccione bailed, and seriously bad directing it is, though if both the writer and the director have bailed on the project, it’s probably going to suck no matter who takes the helm. Not only did the eight-digit catastrophe waste the talents of big-leaguers like John Gielgud, Malcolm McDowell (in his worst venue until he decided to appear on Heroes), Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole, but – criminally unforgivable for a movie funded by the head man at Penthouse – it was so incompetent, enervating and ill-conceived that it wasn’t even remotely sexy.

5. THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)
6. URBAN MENACE (1999)

As a rule, I’ve tried to avoid sticking low-budget indie fare like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster and Manos: The Hands of Fate on my list of the worst movies of all time. For one thing, it’s too easy – these films were often made in isolation by untrained filmmakers with zero budget, second-hand equipment and amateur actors. It’s amazing they made those films at all; expecting them to be good was expecting too much. For another, they’re from a different era; some of the acclaimed and popular films coming out of Hollywood featured dialogue just as hokey and scenarios just as idiotic, only they were assayed by skilled professionals in front of and behind the camera. But I’ll make an exception for the dreadfully bad 1999 gangsta-horror flick Urban Menace. Directed by the criminally awful Albert Pyun – whose career as an auteur of crap puts even Uwe Boll to shame – it was directed by a seasoned studio filmmaker; it had a budget that could have paid for everything Ed Wood ever made ten times over; and its target audience was the presumably more sophisticated filmgoer of today. But for all that, it plays like Plan 9 Goes Gangsta: Snoop Dogg’s stand-in is a lanky, faceless nobody who looks nothing like him. The script is through the bottom of the barrel and three feet into the ground below the barrel. The ‘actors’ include theatrically deficient rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe, who not only can’t act, but can’t even be understood. The plot can barely be said to exist, and the setting consists of a warehouse that was undoubtedly chosen for its proximity to the director’s house. It’s the kind of hacked-out garbage that’s so amazingly bad that you’ll be shocked they even make movies this bad anymore.

7. THE HAPPENING (2008)

There’s a 1967 hippies-on-a-rampage flick called The Happening that, oddly enough, could also arguably qualify as one of the most awful movies ever, but the worst-case scenario we’re discussing here is the one that may have provided a final capper to director M. Night Shyamalan’s downward career spiral. Usually, a stupid plot alone isn’t enough to make a movie qualify for all-time-worst status, but the plot of The Happening (trees turn against mankind and use some kind of floral pheremones to trigger a wave of mass suicide and madness) is Navy vs. the Night Monsters-level bad, and utterly dashes any hopes the movie had of being good by its very existence. Luckily for us, though, Shyamalan throws in tons of extra bad-movie elements in case the asinine plot isn’t enough: a ridiculous lead performance by Mark Wahlberg, interaction between the lead actors utterly free of charisma, hooty special effects, a subpar script, and set pieces that are meant to be dramatic and terrifying but instead come across as laughable, or, worse yet, boring and pointless. Shyamalan went from shocking the world with his seemingly unique gifts to shocking the world at how bad his movies were; it seems unlikely that he has the ability to make a movie worse than The Happening (assuming any studio will give him money to make a movie ever again). But then again, that’s what people said about The Village, too.

8. BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)
9. MOMENT BY MOMENT (1978)
10. TOMMY BOY (1995)

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

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

5. INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Atlanta, July 4th weekend, 1996. I was in town to visit friends, celebrate the holiday, and check in on the progress of the centennial Olympic games. Finding myself downtown early one afternoon with nothing much to do, I ducked into a movie theater, which was showing the mega-hyped blockbuster Independence Day. I wasn’t expecting much; the cast was crammed with big-budget line-readers, and Roland Emmerich was already, by virtue of Universal Soldier, one of the worst directors in Hollywood. But I was just looking to kill a couple of hours until the bars opened; how bad, I reasoned, could it be? The answer turned out to be not only “incredibly bad”, but “one of the worst of all time”. Independence Day would have been bad enough even if it was nothing but what it appeared to be – an utterly witless sci-fi action movie that substituted explosions for plot, motivation, characterization, and anything else worth watching – but it added some of the most egregious stereotyping seen in films this side of the 1930s. In addition to the name actors – including Will Smith as a wisecracking fighter pilot, Bill Pullman as a Fightin’ President, Jeff Goldblum as a nerdy computer scientist, Judd Hirsch as a Jewish father straight out of a Julius Streicher publication, Randy Quaid as the crazy town drunk no one will believe, Margaret Colin as a ball-busting corporate hard-ass, Vivica Fox as a whore with a heart of gold, and Harvey Fierstein as a mincing queen – even the bit parts were insulting caricatures. After the alien motherships are brought down, we’re treated to such rare sights as bone-through-the-nose, booga-booga-shouting African tribesmen and gibbering, ululating Arabs who can’t be understood – at least, until a civilized British officer steps in to translate. (LP)

4. BATMAN & ROBIN (1997)

No matter how many awards he may win, or magazine covers he adorns, or starlets he beds, or good causes he spearheads, no one will ever let George Clooney forget he once wore the Bat-suit with the nipples. And that’s as it should be. It’s astounding to think Arnold Schwarzenegger was able to overcome the scandalous footage of himself in full Mr. Freeze drag, willingly uttering lines like “Da ice man cometh!” and still be elected governor of California. And while it’s nice that Joel Schumacher was finally able to achieve his lifelong dream of directing the Ice Capades, maybe someone should have pulled him aside and explained that this was actually supposed to be a Batman movie. Scientists have been unable to pinpoint with any exactitude the lowest moment of the Bat-franchise. Was it Robin surfing through the air, howling “Cowabunga!” or the close-up of Clooney’s bat-buttocks as he fastens his utility belt or Schwarzenegger leading his minions in a chorus of “He’s Mr. Snow-Miser”? To answer the question definitively would entail sitting through the entire movie again, and so far no one has been willing to take on the challenge. (SVD)

3. BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)

There are quite a few lessons to be learned from Battlefield Earth. L. Ron Hubbard wasn’t much of a fictional storyteller. The sight of John Travolta decked out in alien dreadlocks is not pleasant. And most important of all for aspiring directors, tilting the camera at a 45-degree angle for every other shot of a two-hour film is the quickest and most conclusive way to tip audiences off to your directorial ineptitude. (NS)

2. SHOWGIRLS (1995)

I posted the following about a year ago in our list "Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors," but I'd say it pretty much sums up why Showgirls ranked so high on our Top Ten list of all-time rankest films:

“Do you know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!” And that hilarious quip from strip club “comedienne” Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom pretty much sums up the philosophy towards women in this abortion of a cult classic by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I get it...this campy, overwrought drag show bitch-fest about amoral sex worker Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is so bad it’s good! And we can all just laugh through the parts where Gina Ravera’s Molly (the only vaguely redeemable or recognizably human character in the movie, and a black woman to boot) gets brutally raped by a loathsome white rock star. (I love it when they act out that part in the drag queen version of the show at my favorite hipster bar!) Garish, ridiculous and aggressively stupid, Showgirls is hard for me to enjoy ironically, since it so clearly embraces and truly believes in its own fetid realpolitik Hollywood philosophy that love is a lie, “art” is whatever makes money, winning is everything, men are scumbags, women are worthless (especially if they’re not hot, naked and young), the world is a shithole, if you’re not clawing your way to the top every single minute (and/or don’t know how to properly pronounce the most expensive status symbol brand names) you’re a fool and a loser and deserve what you get. Yeccch. Showgirls ain't just misogynistic: it pretty much hates everyone. And the feeling is mutual. (AO)

And now, the Screengrab's #1 Worst Movie Of All Time...

1. BABY GENIUSES (1999)

Let's see...cynical, lowest-common-denominator high-concept plot that's pretty much summed up in the title? Check! Hacky script featuring way-past-their-expiration date pop culture catch phrases? Check! Depressing lead performance by an actress who deserves better but can't find any decent roles in Hollywood because she doesn't have the off-the-chart talent of, um, Kate Hudson? Check! All that, plus creepy baby fetish CGI and the directorial flourish of the auteur behind Porky's II: The Next Day and you've got the perfect movie to fit in a double feature with Ow! My Balls! The Motion Picture in the future Idiocracy multiplex that waits for us all. (AO)

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STING (1973)

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

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

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

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

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

CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940)

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

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

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THREE KINGS (1999)

By all accounts, writer/director David O. Russell is the kind of tantrum-throwing brat even Christian Bale would recommend for anger management classes. George Clooney came to blows with him on the set of Three Kings, and Lily Tomlin surely contemplated crushing his nuts during his notorious freak-out on the set of I ♥ Huckabees...but even Clooney admits the dude’s got chops, and Russell’s tale of U.S. soldiers attempting to heist millions in Kuwaiti bullion from Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War is still the best (fictional) cinematic depiction of America’s poisonous love-hate relationship with Hussein and Iraq. I learned more about our nation’s cynical, fucked-up Middle East policy from Russell’s entertaining “comedy” caper than I did from ten years of Bush family press conferences. The moral of the story: there’s definitely money to be made in Iraq, if your conscience isn’t bothered (like Clooney’s Major Archie Gates) by the thought of letting innocent civilians die as collateral damage, or (like Nora Dunn’s TV reporter Adriana Cruz) by the sight of birds dying in war-made oil slicks, or (like Mark Wahlberg’s Sgt. Troy Barlow) the realization that even the bad guys (here represented by Saïd Taghmaoui’s electrifying Iraqi interrogator) are suffering while the war profiteers get plenty rich, plenty quick. (AO)

BOTTLE ROCKET (1996)

Wes Anderson’s debut boasts few of the stylistic hallmarks of his subsequent work, though that doesn’t make it any less distinctive. Bottle Rocket focuses on the misadventures of wannabe-criminal Dignan (Owen Wilson) and his best friend Anthony (Luke Wilson), both of them aimlessly searching for contentment, companionship and love in the Texas suburbs. Instead of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums’ meticulously arranged compositions, Anderson’s cinematography is much more loose, which leaves the proceedings visually bland but, unlike the stultifying The Darjeeling Limited, full of ramshackle life. The director’s attempts at pathos are somewhat undercut by his scripting, most notably with regards to Anthony’s sketchy, preposterous relationship with motel housekeeper Inez (Lumi Cavazo). Yet if the film lacks a bit of polish, it nonetheless is both consistently funny and narratively efficient, two vital qualities that are most fully on display during Dignan and Anthony’s outstanding robbery of a local bookstore. (NS)

KIDS IN THE HALL: BRAIN CANDY (1996)

Sometimes a get-rich-quick scheme isn’t exactly a scheme, as such. Sometimes it’s not even intentional. All Kevin McDonald’s Dr. Chris Cooper and his team of pharmaceuticals technicians wanted to do was create a pill that helped chronically depressed people cope with their daily lives…chemically. What they ended up doing was creating Gleemonex, a drug that isolates your happiest moment and replays it over and over in your head, condemning you to comatose bliss forever. Naturally, Cooper’s employers recognize the potential to make obscene amounts of money, and the race is on to see if Dr. Cooper will be corrupted by the cash himself, or do the right thing. The first (and, so far, only) Kids in the Hall movie is inconsistent and occasionally pretty bad, but give it credit for one of the darkest-toned comedies of the last few decades, in which doing the right thing and condemning millions of people to paralyzing depression and sadness are synonymous. (LP)

LOST IN AMERICA (1985)

In Albert Brooks' anti-yuppie satire, Brooks plays an ad executive who is so programmed with his fantasy of how his career should go that when he isn't given the promotion he's expecting -- because, his boss explains, he's "too clever" to be wasted on the empty-suit job -- and offered a different promotion that involves a move to New York City, he blows his top and takes a flame thrower to every bridge in sight. Convinced that they've reached a stage in their lives where they're ready to move beyond conventional standards of success, Brooks and his wife (Julie Hagerty) liquidate their assets, including their house, and set out to explore the country in a Winnebago the size of Rhode Island with a $145,000 nest egg tucked in their purse. Unfortunately, Hagerty is seized by a gambling mania in Las Vegas and pisses away the bulk of their money, and Brooks makes a stab at using his professional skills to persuade the casino boss (Garry Marshall) to return their money; he improvises a whole campaign about how the casino can benefit from the free publicity it'll get once the story gets out that it's a gambling den with "heart." Technically, this is not a get-rich scheme but a desperate, sweaty, make-it-as-if-this-hadn't-happened scheme. But if more people would react this way to the loss of everything they have instead of turning ashen and wandering into traffic, the past six or seven months would have been a lot more fun. (PN)

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

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

FARGO (1996)

Any number of Coen Brothers movies revolve around bumbling get-rich-quick schemes, many of them involving kidnapping, but few characters in film history have gotten in as far over their heads as car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). Jerry’s not looking to make a big score just for the sake of accumulating wealth; as the movie begins, he’s already in deep financial doodoo, although we never find out the exact nature of his troubles. To his credit, one of his schemes is not so boneheaded: a property investment proposal he brings to his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson. In fact, the plan is so good Wade decides to take on the investment himself rather than lending the necessary money to Jerry – though he does offer a nominal finder’s fee. In Jerry’s mind, this betrayal may make his alternate plan more palatable – arranging for the kidnapping of his wife and bilking Wade out of the ransom money. This plan goes much, much worse, however, and before it’s over Wade and his daughter are dead, Jerry is led away in handcuffs and Steve Buscemi is fed into a wood chipper. All that for a little bit of money. (SVD)

THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Stephen Frears’ tight little modern noir is immeasurably aided by strong efforts at every level: the source novel is one of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson’s best, the screenplay is provided by Donald Westlake, another crime novel pro, and of course, the cast is dynamite, from the leads to bit parts to Pat Hingle’s chilling mob boss, Bobo Justus. But one of the least-noticed thematic bits of brilliance is how it treats the different layers of confidence games, and how getting rich quick through the art of the con means very different things to different people. John Cusack’s Roy Dillon is strictly a short-con operator: pulling little hustles, tricks and sleight-of-hand jobs that keep him in nice suits and decent hotels as long as he keeps moving. His mother, the determined Lilly, is much more the get-rich-quick type, handling her mobster employer’s money as he manipulates the outcome of horse races through cleverly spread-out bets. And the seductive Myra Langtry is a long con type – although she’s reduced to hustling, her specialty is big-money cons that take months or years to pay off, but when they do, they pay off in the millions. It’s a fascinating look at the economics and expectations of the day-to-day life of the habitual criminal. (LP)

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)

There’s no heist in David Mamet’s House of Games, but there are more cons than one film should be able to support. That Mamet’s debut delivers its endless barrage of tricks and ruses with exhilarating proficiency is a tribute to the writer/director, whose interest in hard men living hard lives and pulling off very hard endeavors is encapsulated by this tale of a psychologist (Lindsay Crouse) lured by a master crook (Joe Mantegna) into a web of lies. As with most of Mamet’s work, women – in this case, Crouse’s protagonist, the lone female in a story full of men – don’t fare very well. Yet there’s something fascinating about the way the writer/director stages Crouse and Mantegna’s duel as a sort of primal battle of the sexes, the latter’s attempts to swindle the former coming off as a conflict of both gender and education (she the intellectual, he the graduate of the school of hard knocks). House of Game’s psychological warfare may not always be pleasant, but the head-games played by Mamet remain magnetic, so skillfully constructed and executed that one relishes the opportunity to be duped. (NS)

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)

This Roger Corman sci-fi flick stars Ray Milland as Dr. Xavier, whose experiments give him the special X-ray vision that he first uses to turn a suburban dance party into his own personal stag show, only to find himself reduced to plying his trade at a carny operated by Don Rickles. Finally, though, Xavier makes the trek to Vegas to use his creepy peepers to clean up at the tables, using perhaps the best method of outsmarting Sin City that the movies have ever come up with, since it doesn't require knowledge of advanced math or buying a suit for Dustin Hoffman. We eagerly await the day when some gifted film student has the brainstorm of doing, as his thesis project, a mash-up of this movie and Scorsese's Casino, so that the haunted Xavier can flee from Don Rickles only to find himself running into Don Rickles. How could Hell be any worse? (PN)

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

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

RISKY BUSINESS (1983)

Sex sells...especially here on Nerve.com, which is why I included the HOT!!!! train sex clip above rather than, say, a clip of Bronson Pinchot counting money in the suburban bordello launched by Tom Cruise’s home-alone upper-middle-class teen wanker Joel and Rebecca De Mornay’s hooker with a heart of coal, Lana, the better to separate Joel’s horny friends from their virginity (not to mention their trust funds). But, in the same way Deadwood’s Machiavellian barkeep Al Swearengen realized the best way to get rich quick during the South Dakota gold rush was simply to bilk the prospectors, Joe Pantoliano -- in his breakthrough role as Guido the Killer Pimp -- is the movie's real schemer, winding up with all the money from Joel’s Young Enterpriser start-up. In a similar way, Tom Cruise wound up reaping most of the benefits from Risky Business, which launched his career into the A-list stratosphere while writer/director Paul Brickman somehow didn’t get to direct another movie until 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, by which point his once seemingly promising career had gone in the drink like Joel’s Porsche (along with the A-list dreams of Mornay and my own personal rooting interest, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong). But that’s capitalism, for ya! (AO)

LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s second-to-last film finds the auteur reuniting with his Le Samouraï star Alain Delon for another romantically fatalistic, existential crime saga. The expansive plot involves Delon’s thief, who’s released from prison, promptly rips off his mob employer, and then enlists the aid of a fugitive murderer (Gian Maria Volonte) and a boozehound ex-cop (Yves Montand) for a jewelry heist. Melville’s orchestration of the robbery boasts his trademark efficiency and lucidity, though what resonates more forcefully is his loving portrait of male camaraderie, as well as his tough-guys’ adherence to male codes of honor and conduct. As in most of the director’s neo-noirs, Delon and company are defined by their professional rituals, by the scrupulousness with which they carry out their tasks. As such, they’re ideal stand-ins for Melville himself, a master of the cinematic form who – as ably illustrated by the prolonged, taut central swindle – blended formal rigorousness with off-the-cuff jazziness to create an entrancing movie’s-movie vision of hoods, dames and doom. (NS)

THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Broadway producer Max Bialystock used to live the good life. Champagne, limousines, and girls, girls, girls! But now he’s reduced to wearing a cardboard belt, avoiding his landlord, and hustling old ladies to get money to pay his bills. He’d become used to high living, and it’s an addiction he can’t shake. What’s more, he’s no spring chicken; he’s only about 20 years behind his elderly clients like “Hold Me Touch Me”. He’s the very definition of someone who needs to get rich, and quick. Lucky for him, into his life – and his office – walks nervous accountant Leo Bloom, whose nebbishy temperament and genius with figures are just what Max needs to hatch his plan: to produce a play so awful that it will close on the first night – thus allowing him to pocket all the money he intends to bilk his little old ladies into overpaying. Like most great get-rich schemes, its elegant simplicity is its appeal – and likewise its downfall. Max picks a play, a cast, and a crew so profoundly awful that there’s no way they can possibly succeed, which, naturally, they do, and watching how it all plays out is one of the great joys of 1960s comedy. (LP)

THE KILLING (1956)

Those of us who were introduced to the cinema of Stanley Kubrick through his later Baroque Period and worked our way backward may have initially felt like this tight, twisty crime picture was the work of another filmmaker entirely. Kubrick’s bleak view of humanity is already fully formed, however, in this case ably assisted by noir novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), and his technical proficiency – notably as it relates to the movie’s innovative and influential time-shifting structure – is unmistakable. The granddaddy of all “one last heist” movies, The Killing boasts a rock-solid cast of retro roughnecks (including Sterling Hayden, Ted de Corsia and the inimitable Timothy Carey), a well-oiled racetrack robbery that can’t possibly go wrong, and a vicious, noose-tightening sense of impending doom when it inevitably does go wrong. The final image is the essence of noir fatalism boiled down to a bitter punchline – a peerless visual representation of the get-rich-quick scheme gone awry. (SVD)

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951)

Henry Holland, the London bank clerk played by Alec Guinness in this dry British heist comedy, has spent twenty years working on the slow part of his "get rich quick" scheme -- i.e., building up a supremely boring image so that his employers will trust him implicitly with the gold bullion whose transportation he regularly supervises. Holland decides that he's waited long enough when he meets Stanley Holloway, the owner of a foundry that manufactures cheap souvenirs and the last piece of his plan clicks into place: how to smuggle the gold out of the country once it's been stolen. The two melt down their swag and use it to make little Eiffel tower-shaped paperweights, then race to Paris to intersect them before they're sold in the gift shops to lucky tourists. In the end, they must pay for their dastardly deed, but at least Holland gets to meet Audrey Hepburn. (PN)

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

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding: in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

By the time Mike Judge’s half-brilliant Office Space gets around to its get-rich-quick scheme, its best moments are behind it. It starts out so well, with the story of a chronically bored office drone (Ron Livingston) who finds himself – after an accidental dose of post-hypnotic suggestion – completely incapable of giving a shit about his job. This is Office Space at its best, a note-perfect satire of cubicle life enlightened hugely by the appearance of a character who upends the whole idea of consequence and thus makes for some of the most viciously barbed gags of its day. Once it gets around to Livingston and his colleagues hatching a Superman III-inspired, computer-aided plan to steal millions by shaving half-pennies off of every transaction, it becomes more or less a goofy caper comedy, which, while well-executed, can’t hold a candle to its truly inspired first half. Still, as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s a classic, and damned if it doesn’t almost work. (LP)

HEAT (1995)

Heat famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on-screen – if only for one diner conversation and a climactic chase sequence – yet it’s Michael Mann’s direction that elevates this cat-and-mouse saga to near-greatness. The story revolves around the efforts of Pacino’s cop to catch De Niro’s crook, two kindred warriors on opposite sides of the law. Though this dynamic is, to put it mildly, hackneyed, Mann’s film is an energized, invigorated work that recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirs, which also focused on peerlessly cool lawmen and thieves whose dedication to customs, habits and ethical codes leaves them isolated. As the criminal struggling to reconcile personal desires for happiness with instincts that warn against being something he’s not, De Niro delivers his last great performance. Pacino’s trademark quiet-screaming overacting and a few too many narrative diversions prove occasionally aggravating, but De Niro’s superb turn helps offset these slight missteps, as does the thrilling in-broad-daylight centerpiece robbery that cements Heat’s status in the pantheon of heist films. (NS)

OCEAN’S 11, 12, 13… (1960, 2001, etc.)

The original 1960 Ocean’s 11’s best get-rich quick scheme didn’t take place onscreen; it was the Rat Pack’s all night, every night ring-a-ding-ding showcase at the Sands while shooting the film on location in Las Vegas. Sure, knocking over five casinos during a blackout on New Year’s Eve has a certain flair to it, but there’s nothing like working 22 hours a day for six straight weeks to really fatten the wallet. In 2001, a Frat Pack led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt staged their own Vegas heist, lifting $150 million from the Bellagio vault with the help of a Chinese acrobat, a Cockney explosives expert mysteriously played by Don Cheadle, and the always indispensible Elliott Gould. The remake took in even more than $150 million at the box office, which led to two further get-rich-quick schemes: the winky, self-referential Ocean’s 12, a sort of spiritual cousin to The Cannonball Run II, and Ocean’s 13, which proved once again that the death knell of a franchise sounds a lot like Al Pacino yelling. (SVD)

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Part of the point of John Huston's classic is that prospecting for gold isn't actually an easy or quick way to strike it rich at all, but once you've laid out for the tools and traveled all the way out into the middle of the Mexican desert and gotten used to the sight of Walter Huston jeering at you without his dentures, you're more than likely to stick with it until you've got something to show for it. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your paranoid, half-mad partner is going to be able to convince himself that you're plotting to steal his share of the "goods" so that he can feel justified in knocking you off and helping himself to your share. Whatever moral and practical defects can be found in Bogart's plan, it has to be said that he's a sage and a prince compared to the hippopotamus-toothed bandit played by the immortal Alfonso Bedoya, whose master plan involves decapitating Bogart and stealing his burros, after he's thrown away those saddlebags filled with the funny yellow powder that's weighing them down. (PN)

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

ALIENS (1986) & GALAXY QUEST (1999)

Life will be more stressful in the future, partly because of the ravenous extraterrestrials and tyrannical galactic tyrants we’ll encounter, but mostly because the ticking clocks in our race-against-time adventures will be replaced by soothing female voices announcing our impending doom every few seconds. That’s the case in Aliens anyway, a movie Roger Ebert called “so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?” How’s this for suspense: not only does Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley find herself trapped in a space colony infested with slimy, ravenous xenomorphs (and the equally slimy Paul Reiser), but following a mishap with a nuclear reactor, the whole joint winds up on the verge of self-destruction! And then the evil Alien Queen grabs Newt (Carrie Henn), the sweet little orphan girl Ripley’s been trying to save for most of the movie!! And then, just when Ripley and Newt finally escape to the roof of the burning, exploding complex, they discover their ride is gone!!! And then it turns out the Alien Queen knows how to use elevators!!!! And she’s got David Fincher with her!!!!! And that damn soothing female voice won’t stop reminding everyone how close they are to death!!!!!! Aiiiieeeeee!!!!!!!!! Later, in the smartly high-concept Galaxy Quest, Weaver once again winds up in a desperate space race against time, trapped with co-star Tim Allen in a real-life starship designed by a much friendlier bunch of aliens to mimic the specs of their old TV starship...including the standard issue self-destruct gizmo that always counts down to zero in the most suspenseful possible way. (AO)

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

At first, time doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in the visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Harrison Ford’s Deckard has to hunt down the escaped replicants, true, but they don’t seem to have a particular goal in mind, and for a while, his search for them is discursive, even leisurely. But it soon becomes clear that even if he’s not racing against time, the replicants are – their leader, Roy Batty, beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, knows that his kind is programmed with a finite lifespan, and that any moment could be his last. The brutish Leon taunts Deckard with this information in their confrontation, but in the end, Roy turns it into a tragedy. His death is the only thing that saves Deckard’s life, but by that time, it’s clear that something truly unique and precious is being lost, and the sensation is not one of relief, but of profound grief and regret. Fading from existence, Roy half-sneers, half-laments that he has seen things that Deckard cannot even begin to imagine; but because he is both more and less than human, it will all be lost at that moment the clock makes its final tick. (LP)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Lean, mean and exhilarating, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York confirmed that the Halloween auteur was capable of delivering more than just horror. In a nightmarish future 1997, New York City has been transformed into a massive, walled-off maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One crashes on the island and the president is taken hostage one day before an all-important nuclear summit, badass criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited for a daring rescue mission. Plissken is given a 24-hour deadline that’s made more pressing by the fact that he’s been injected with micro-explosives that’ll blow if he fails his task in the allotted time-frame, a set-up that Carpenter mines for as much rousing action as possible. From a fight with an enormous bruiser, to a cab ride over a bridge covered in mines, iconic anti-hero Plissken’s efforts to save the commander-in-chief from the clutches of Isaac Hayes’ baddie – an undertaking that involves enlisting help from Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau – remains a thrilling, kick-ass sci-fi saga, and a testament to Carpenter’s still-underappreciated directorial greatness. (NS)

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

There are endless thrillers and caper flicks that depend on split-second timing for the bad guys’ nefarious plan to succeed, but the genius of Joseph Sargent’s tight little ‘70s thriller is that it places the action on a New York subway train, a milieu in which people already get terribly bent out of shape if there’s any deviation from the strict timetable. Populated by a cast of old-school character actors (including Walter Matthau Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller) who virtually define the word “craggy”, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three features a quartet of criminals – presciently given colors as code names, twenty years before Reservoir Dogs – who must ensure perfect timing and clever planning to overcome the fact that they’re committing their caper on a form of transportation that can’t possibly deviate from its course. A big-budget remake is being released later this year, but its flashy cast and jillion-dollar price tag almost guarantee it won’t have any of the grubby charm or jangling energy of the original. (LP)

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

CELLULAR (2004)

Despite flying under many moviegoers’ radars in 2004, David R. Ellis’ Cellular is a crackerjack thriller that overcomes its somewhat preposterous central conceit via unflagging breakneck energy. Co-written by B-movie master Larry Cohen, the story hinges on a kidnapped woman (Kim Basinger) using a smashed telephone to make a random call to the cell phone of a stranger (Chris Evans). Basinger successfully convinces Evans to help her escape her predicament, though complications arise at every turn, from dying cell phone batteries, to the cops’ unwillingness to lend a hand, to a bit of signal-crossing that forces Evans to steal someone else’s cell phone and car. Bolstered by a strong cast that also includes Jessica Biel as Evans’ ex-girlfriend, Jason Statham as Basinger’s kidnapper, and William H. Macy as a police officer, and enlivened by director Ellis’ no-nonsense, pulse-pounding orchestration of his various high-wire set pieces, Cellular remains the type of efficient, no-frills genre flick that Hollywood has – save for the rare exception – mostly given up on in favor of high-concept, big-budget spectaculars. (NS)

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Jonathan Demme’s 1991 serial-killer fantasia has been so celebrated (after winning a shocking number of Oscars and turning Dr. Hannibal Lecter into a household name) and its performances so justifiably celebrated that it’s easy to forget: at its heart beats a good old-fashioned thriller, cleverly conceived and exquisitely realized. A huge amount of the tension in a movie crammed full of it derives from the fact that Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Lecter knows exactly what the murderous Buffalo Bill is up to, but he doesn’t care. As he notes, he has all the time in the world, but as for Bill’s latest victim – “Tick tock”, he says with casual menace. Even after it’s become clear that Lecter is doling out information as part of an overarching plan to free himself, the movie never stops screwing with the bloody deadline it’s set; when Buffalo Bill’s house is finally raided, it’s a masterful fake-out that only increases the tension. Demme and his screenwriter, Ted Tally, deserve tons of credit for adding psychological depth and character to what is, at heart, a terrifically paced old-school murder mystery. (LP)

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

This camp horror classic stars Vincent Price as a brilliant madman outfitted with a voice box, a Moe Howard haircut, and the red-rimmed eyes of a lifetime High Times subscriber. Peeved at the medical team he blames for the death of his beloved wife -- and if you looked like this and managed to find a beautiful woman who wanted to marry you, you'd take the loss of her hard, too -- Price sets about dispatching them by means of a series of murder plots inspired by the plagues that God, under Charlton Heston's supervision, once inflicted on Egypt. The climactic zinger is a terrifically tense draining-hourglass sequence that is Price's version of the curse that claimed the country's first born sons. Instead of killing the chief surgeon (Joseph Cotten), he kidnaps and drugs the man's son, implants a key inside the boy's chest near his heart, and leaves him lying on a surgical table beneath an acid-filled container. Doc Cotten has six minutes to perform the delicate surgery necessary to retrieve the key so he can free the boy and move him out of the way before the acid eats its way through and destroys his face. In the end, Cotten pulls it off, and the acid falls on Price's mysterious woman assistant, who thus forfeited the chance to appear in the sequel. (PN)

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

This little-seen but influential 81-minute noir, directed by Irving Lerner on a low budget, stars Vince Edwards as a businesslike hit man who hits Los Angeles and hooks up with a couple of mooks who are to support him in his efforts to kill a government witness who is being kept under heavy guard while waiting to give testimony against Mr. Big. Despite its brief running time, the movie is to most race-against-time films what O. J. Simpson's televised 2004 tour of California was to Vanishing Point. To his assistants' consternation, the brainy Vince chooses to while away his first few days in the city before turning to his work, only to explode when he discovers that the target is a woman -- not because he has any philosophical or sentimental objections to killing a woman, but because he regards women as more "unpredictable" than men, which makes them more likely to veer from the routines on which he bases his elaborate murder plans. After a re-negotiation of his fee, Vince sets to work, but damned if there doesn't seem to be something to his gender-based theory. After bombing out a couple of times. and with the clock ticking down, Vince breaks character and makes a last, desperate, hands-on stab at dispatching his target, finally coming to grief in the end. It's an unusually zen thriller. (PN)

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Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963) & RAT RACE (2001)

I can’t say for sure whether I’ve ever watched It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World all the way from beginning to end in one uninterrupted sitting, but I’ve definitely seen every part of the movie numerous times: mostly during lazy Sundays as a kid, when Stanley Kramer’s three-hour, star-studded tale of random strangers racing for treasure played (thanks to endless commercial breaks) like an all-day Laff-Olympics, featuring generations of comedy all-stars ranging from Buster Keaton to Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by the 1963 edition of the Three Stooges (with Joe DeRita on drums). More than a few strands of Mad, Mad’s chaotic, uneven DNA wound up in the seminal fluids of the far less epic (and epochal) yet funnier than expected Rat Race, featuring another group of random celebrity strangers (including John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Seth Green, Jon Lovitz, Kathy Najimy, Whoopi Goldberg, Dave Thomas, Amy Smart, Breckin Meyer and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) involved in another episodic race against time for treasure...but this time, with original songs by the Baha Men! (AO)

BREWSTER'S MILLIONS (1985)

Walter Hill’s Brewster’s Millions was the seventh big-screen adaptation of George Barr McCutcheon’s 1902 novel and, thanks to the participation of headliner Richard Pryor and co-star John Candy, it remains the most well-known and popular. Taking its basic narrative cue from prior versions, Pryor plays a washed-up minor league pitcher who discovers that he’s the sole remaining heir of a long-lost kooky relative who, from beyond the grave, offers him a stunning deal: if he can spend $30 million in 30 days, he’ll inherit $300 million. It’s a too-good-to-be-true offer that, of course, proves more troublesome than it initially seems, as Pryor’s nobody finds it increasingly difficult to successfully relieve himself of so much money, a predicament from which Hill squeezes mild laughs as well as a predictable money’s-not-everything moral. Pryor’s dynamically profane humor is blunted by the proceedings’ safe PG conventionality, and the film is far less funny than Hill’s prior 48 Hours. Yet in Brewster’s Millions’ defense, its time-tested conceit still manages, over a century after its initial birth, to effectively ignite the imagination. (NS)

JUGGERNAUT (1974)

Richard Lester's there's-a-bomb-on-this-ship thriller brings class and wit to the disaster genre. The plot involves a demolitions wizard who secrets a collection of big-ass bombs on Skipper Omar Sharif's cruise ship, which are set to go off unless he's handed a wad of extortion money. While Lester scans the landscape for signs of the throwaway slapstick bits and eccentric, comic character moments that were his stock in trade, Richard Harris brings it on a rocket sled as the dashing, showboating cynic leading the team of bomb defusers who are flown in and dive down to join the ship in the middle of the ocean during a very photogenic storm. After his best mate is killed, Harris takes a break to get roaring drunk and deliver his Oscar-reel speech before getting back to work. You might think that getting roaring drunk when attempting to defuse a bunch of bombs is next on your to-do list would be be ill-advised, but if you do, what part of "Richard Harris" do you not understand? (PN)

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove is beginning to rival Psycho as one of the movies we can find a reason to cram on to pretty much any list, but we couldn’t very well compile the greatest races against time without including it. After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: if President Muffley and his advisors don’t succeed, the endgame will be the utter annihilation of life on Earth. Stanley Kubrick uses the simplest possible device to remind us of how close the world is coming to Armageddon: the little electric bulbs on the “Big Board” blink ever closer to the interior of a map of Russia. And yet, while everyone in the room knows the importance of what’s going on, no one can seem to focus on the matter at hand: General Turgidson is more concerned with being hoodwinked by the commies, Ambassador DeSadesky wants fresh fish and Cuban cigars, and the President gets into arguments with the Russian premier over who’s more sorry about this turn of events. It’s brilliant because it’s so ridiculously plausible: the end of the world is nigh, and no one can be bothered to pay attention. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...before it's too late!

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I was a younger man, summer vacations seemed to last 100 years and every day was at least 24 hours long.

Now, as an old geezer, I can’t help but notice how time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future at an alarming rate. Summers, at best, tend to flash by in a matter of days -- and my days, like everything else, have apparently been downsized...

...or at least that’s how it feels here beneath the mountain of overdue assignments, unfinished projects and blown deadlines I find myself tunneling through of late, with less than a week remaining to file that damn “married filing jointly” 1040 form I haven’t even started yet...

...tick...tick...tick...

...but even as the clock ticks down to the April 15th tax deadline (not to mention the end of the Mayan calendar -- AND THE WORLD!!!!! -- in 2012), we here at the Screengrab figured we could spare a few seconds to salute THE BEST RACE AGAINST TIME FLICKS OF ALL...uh...TIME!

D.O.A. (1950)

This sweaty, 83-minute noir is pretty much all gimmick, but it's the ultimate in race-against-time gimmicks. Edmund O'Brien, who barks out his lines as if trying to reach the pork chop hanging around his neck, plays an accountant who hits San Francisco for a working vacation and discovers that he's been slipped a dose of a "luminous poison" for which there is no antidote. Given no more than a few days to live, O'Brien blows off the guided tour of Alcatraz and tears around the city, doing his unsubtle best to solve his own impending murder and wreak vengeance on his murderer before it's tag-on-the-toe time. The 1988 sequel, directed by Max Headroom creators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and starring Dennis Quaid, feels padded at 93 minutes, but it does have a couple of witty strokes in relocating the action to the world of academia -- Quaid plays a lapsed novelist and college professor whose motto of "publish or perish" is used against him by someone who has taken it a little too literally -- and setting it on a sweltering Texas college campus at Christmas time, thus giving Quaid an excuse to sweat even more profusely than Edmund O'Brien even with holiday decorations in the background. (PN)

HIGH NOON (1952)

Fred Zinnemann takes all the suspense out of the race against time; there’s no question of escaping the consequences, only of how they’re going to be dealt with. No one doubts that a gang of badmen are going to arrive in town at high noon, and that they’re going to call out Gary Cooper’s marshal, Will Kane, and seek revenge for him sending them up. Everyone knows what’s going to happen. So why is it one of the most tense Westerns ever made? That’s a testament to Zinnemann’s skill as a director: he manages to work endless amounts of tension, suspense and discomfort out of something we all know is going to happen. The only question is: will the townsfolk stand with Kane, who has protected them before, or will they abandon him in hopes of safety? That’s what makes the passage of time so excruciating in High Noon, and nowhere is it more explicit than in the famous scene where the clock ticks down, inexorably, in a stunning montage accompanied by Dmitri Tiomkin’s pitiless score, and the thing we all knew was going to happen finally happens. It’s one of the best examples in classic Hollywood of wrenching tension out of the inevitable. (LP)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

Many years and many outbreaks of paranoia later, John Frankenheimer's satirical yet stirring Cold War thriller is still the gold standard for political-assassination fantasies. Among its other virtues, it remains one of the most blackly funny movies ever to come out of Hollywood, but the laughter dies as the noose tightens and Frank Sinatra, losing faith that things will work out, races through the traffic-clogged streets to arrive at the convention hall, just in time to see Laurence Harvey finally earn his Medal of Honor. (PN)

RUN LOLA RUN (1999)

Run Lola Run, about Lola’s (Franka Potente) efforts to save her boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) from death by procuring 100,000 deutschmarks in 20 minutes, is a tour de force of blistering kineticism that predictably achieved cult canon status the moment it hit theaters in 1999. Yet what elevates Tom Tykwer’s debut above so many other beat-the-clock sagas is its aesthetic flair and inventiveness, its storytelling and visual intricacy, and its deft use of its unique style in the service of a subtly thoughtful meditation on time and fate. Segmented into three sections, each of which finds Lola attempting to achieve her goal, Run Lola Run’s race-against-time narrative presents a free will-vs.-determinism debate in the guise of a frenzied videogame, one in which Lola must use her allotted three lives to figure out how to complete her mission. Playfully philosophical without being pretentious, and excessively flashy without being shallow, Tykwer’s film delivers edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster thrills as well as enough sly substance to warrant coming back for a return ride. (NS)

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

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

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

CLORIS LEACHMAN AS FRAU BLÜCHER & GENE HACKMAN AS THE BLIND MAN IN YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

April Fool! Uh...by which I mean I apparently miscounted, and there are actually 38 great comedic performances on this list instead of 35 -- (it's been that kind of week) -- but I couldn’t bring myself to skip two of the funniest characters in the history of cinema (especially now that we know the actors who portrayed them were bonin’). Indeed, the topical bonin’ reference is pretty much the main reason I decided to single just Leach and Hack out from Young Frankenstein's perfect storm ensemble (including Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn and Peter Boyle). But as great as all the rest of the cast may be, I have to admit, Gene Hackman’s cameo in Brooks' horror parody is one of those magical movie moments that literally makes me laugh every single goddamn time I see it...and while some may be suffering from Leachman fatigue after the performer’s stint on Dancing With The Stars, I’ll always love the lady for going on TV and shaking her badonkadonk a year after being told she was “too old” to reprise her role as Frau Blücher (insert horse whinny) in the Broadway adaptation of Brooks' film. Or, as Lisa Timmons posted at Socialite Life: “...by God, if she wants to die by acting her ass off on...Broadway, then get the heck out of her way, I say. It's like refusing to let a cowboy die with his boots on. Blasphemy.” To which I say: amen, sister. (AO)

GEORGE C. SCOTT AS GENERAL BUCK TURGIDSON IN DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Not to take anything away from Peter Sellers – who played three roles in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black nuclear holocaust comedy and played them to perfection – but the best comic performance in the movie came from George C. Scott, an actor not normally known for his comedic roles. And, in fact, Kubrick had to trick him into the performance: Scott was encouraged to play way over the top in what he thought were piss-takes, but which Kubrick ended up using in the film. Scott was furious and reportedly vowed not to work with the director again, but it’s that supremely hysterical overacting that sells the role. Writer Terry Southern specialized in creating authority figures whose behavior was entirely inappropriate to their station, and no one fits that role better than Turgidson: allegedly patterned on gung-ho anti-communist General Curtis LeMay, Buck seems completely incapable of treating the imminent nuclear exchange seriously. He fields calls from his mistress, starts fistfights with the Soviet ambassador, and displays a childishly enthusiastic pride at the possibility that one of his damaged planes will bust through Russian radar and trigger a doomsday bomb. Scott’s wild enthusiasm actually leads him to topple ass over teakettle in one scene, a happy accident that perfectly fits his character’s role as an egomaniacal child who has been placed in charge of unthinkable power. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:45:00 GMT

BILL MURRAY AS JEFF SLATER IN TOOTSIE (1982)

Bill Murray is one of those people with such a long, varied career of starring and supporting roles in so many beloved mainstream and indie films -- from Carl Spackler in Caddyshack to “Bill Murray” in Coffee and Cigarettes -- that he could easily fill up this week’s list almost single-handedly. But of all his roles, his understated, largely improvised performance in Tootsie has always been my favorite: a toned-down version of his cocky '80s persona that hinted at the bemused, melancholy range of his later work, his Jeff Slater is the perfect roommate and wing-man: a wise, mellow pal who gently informs you when you’re "getting into a weird area" with your career or social life, yet who doesn’t scold or judge when he walks in to find you in a dress being groped by a horny old soap opera star. The yin to Dustin Hoffman’s neurotic actor yang, he’s the kind of playwright who’d prefer a half-empty theater filled with people who just came out of the rain to a packed house (and yet somehow doesn’t sound pretentious saying it). And best of all, I actually got to have a roommate very much like him once (hi, Hari!), during a year I still recall as fondly as my memories of Tootsie and the late, great Sydney Pollack. ("You were a tomato!") (AO)

MICHAEL KEATON AS BEETLEJUICE IN BEETLEJUICE (1988)

Keaton made this movie with the director Tim Burton at a time when Burton had more experience working with cartoon characters than live actors. It was a sweet gesture on Keaton's part to meet him more than halfway. At the time, Keaton was six years past his impressive movie debut in Night Shift (as a pimp who operated out of a morgue and preferred to be called a "love broker") and overdue to take his career to another level, but even those who guessed that he had untapped potential couldn't have guessed that maggoty would be such a great look for him. Few actors have turned themselves into a special effect with such happy results. (PN)

KEVIN KLINE AS OTTO WEST IN A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988)

It’s a testament to John Cleese’s generosity as a comic author that he gave the absolute best role in A Fish Called Wanda to someone else. That someone else was Kevin Kline, who, in a performance he’d never again equal, took the ball and ran with it: his grasp on the character of Otto West, a short-tempered, virile, violent, and not altogether bright criminal and Ugly American par excellence is vice-tight. The great thing about Otto is that he’s not a typical dumb goon: he’s a fairly skillful criminal, a stone cold killer, and best of all, he’s very slightly aware of how dumb he is. While most stupid characters milk comedy out of their obliviousness, the genius of Otto’s stupidity (and Kline’s astute assessment of same) is that he knows he’s not the brightest bulb on the marquee, and it drives him crazy. Hence his one great taboo – he can’t stand it when people call him stupid. What’s more, Kline milks gallons of comic frustration out of Otto’s inability to wrap his head around complex problems; he’s never angrier than when he senses someone has the advantage of him, but since he’s not smart enough to fake it, he just gets angrier (and stupider). One of the best throwaway gags in A Fish Called Wanda comes when an elaborate plan starts to go awry and Otto is called upon to help think of a solution; obviously infuriated, he pointlessly fires a couple of rounds from his silenced pistol into a steel safe and bellows “I’m THINKING!”. (LP)

STEVE ZAHN AS GLENN MICHAELS IN OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

Steve Zahn specializes in characters who have a negative genius for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; in That Thing You Do!, things got dramatic while he was off enjoying a rollercoaster ride. Here, he takes it so far that he barely seems to be in the right movie, though you're glad he stopped by. After arriving to help bust George Clooney out of prison -- a favor for which Clooney thanks him by threatening to throw his sunglasses "off the overpass while they're still on your head" -- he hooks up with Don Cheadle's mob just in time to participate in a massacre that soon has him sneaking around in search of the back exit. If all petty criminals were more like Zahn's Glenn, the world would be a much more entertaining place, and practically a crime-free one. (PN)

JEFF BRIDGES AS JEFFREY “THE DUDE” LEBOWSKI IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Although he’s not the most clownish figure in the Coen Brothers’ endlessly quotable cult comedy – that title belongs to gun-toting, dog-sitting Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak, played with gusto by John Goodman – you’d be hard-pressed to find a figure more hilariously suited to the archetype of the Holy Fool than Jeff Bridges’ Dude. Conceived as a stoner upturning of Raymond Chandler’s hard-nosed detective Philip Marlowe, the Dude, a perpetually out-of-it former roadie whose life revolves around bowling, weed, and White Russians, is caught up in a web of mistaken identity, kidnapping and blackmail. While Marlowe stubbornly refused to be warned off a case, doggedly pursuing the truth for its own sake, the Dude barely even seems to be aware that he’s on a case, and yet, in his own shambolic, shaggy-dog way, has the instincts and aptitude of a real detective. Based on film promoter and ex-‘60s radical Jeff Dowd, the Dude is an immortal comic creation, a stumbling bum who outwits people more or less by default and lives in the sunshiney flipside of Los Angeles noir. His mind is never far from his next frame, and his dress sense isn’t quite tailored suits and ties, but let’s see Philip Marlowe disarm a rival simply by saying “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

NICOLAS CAGE AS H.I. MCDUNNOUGH IN RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

The Coen brothers have turned out some truly amazing fools over time (Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Are Thou? is a standout), but their first full-fisted idiot, H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona, was their best. As the above chase sequence shows, H.I. lives in a world of blasé, gun-happy morons who easily compartmentalize the absurdity of their lives. It's cartoonish in the best way, like a live-action Merrie Melody that features lots and lots of guns and ammo and bizarre double-crossing and for some reason all the men resemble Elmer Fudd. One of the nicest touches is that the baby Nathan Jr. generally has a pacifying effect on the idiotic adults around him: H.I.'s prison buddies Gale and Evelle Snoats, the nightmarish Leonard Smalls, and even Nathan Arizona, Sr., who shows no propensity towards compassion until his baby boy comes back to him. It's ultimately a sweet movie about fools who can make a better world for themselves. Because if there's one thing that is true in every movie directed by the Coen brothers, it's that everyone in the world fools themselves and plays the idiot, and somehow, by the grace of luck and sheer numbers, the human race keeps creeping forward for better or for worse. We're all the punchlines in an elaborate joke, so we have to find some way of enjoying it. That's a very particular type of existential gallows humor, but it's my favorite type. (HC)

PETER O'TOOLE AS ALAN SWAN IN MY FAVORITE YEAR (1982)

Flipping out and in the throes of an attack of stage fright, Alan Swan declares, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" Both terms seem inadequate for whatever the hell he really is. Broken down, bankrupt, and alcoholic, Swan is both a coward who plays heroes and a universal object of adoration who despises himself; he works as hard as he does to live up to people's romantic image of him because he's always disappointed in himself, and he'd hate to have other people feel as bad about how pathetic he is as he does himself. The paradox is that the effort to conceal what a wreck he is really does make him a romantic hero. To see this performance when you're young is to be filled with the desire to be middle-aged and dissolute as quickly as possible, so that you can be worth a damn. (PN)

ANTONIO FARGAS AS THE ARAB IN PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)

Robert Downey, Sr.'s feature-length put-on about a subversively "honest" advertising agency is all over the place, but it has one strong center of focus in Fargas, playing a character so far-out that nobody had the guts to name him: ranting at top speed and top volume in a burnoose, he's just called "the Arab." Everybody in the movie is out for himself, but Fargas is the one who manages to make this seem not just hip but enlightened. Brandishing his cane and alternating haranguing people and reaching out to them by telling them how impressed he is that they have the sense to see things his way, he's funny, threatening, insane, philosophical, and irresistible, all at the same time. If you've ever wondered just what the hell it is that Flavor Flav thinks he's doing, here's what it looks like when somebody actually pulls it off. (PN)

PETER SELLERS AS HRUNDI V. BAKSHI IN THE PARTY (1968)

Of all the subtly anti-establishment movies to come out of Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s, The Party may be one of the best. Why wouldn't you want to watch film extra Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers — in brown-face no less *ahem*) methodically fuck up the glitzy party of a Bizniz hot shot. (With nothing but the best of intentions, of course.) Hrundi ensures that the party becomes infinitely better than it ever would have uninterrupted. By the end of it all, the face-lifted fat-deprived Hollywood wives are dancing with abandon amidst soap suds gone amok while the maid who demurely opened the door in the first scene gets down to the band. Let the revolution begin. (SCS)

ZERO MOSTEL AS MAX BIALYSTOCK IN THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Generally speaking, the best comic performances have at least some element of subtlety to them. When all you have is shouting and playing to the balcony, like as not, you come off as obnoxious instead of funny. Zero Mostel’s gargantuan overacting as failing show producer Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ debut feature puts that generality to its most severe test. From the first moment we see him, putting on outrageous airs to seduce the rich widows who finance his rapidly decaying lifestyle, he’s so far over the top that he’s coming back at it from beneath. When he hatches a scheme to make millions by luring investors to a play (Springtime for Hitler) that he knows will be a flop, he essentially terrorizes nervous accountant Leo Bloom (played by a fragile Gene Wilder) into going along with it – and when Leo isn’t being intimidated by Max’s bellicose bellowing, he’s being seduced by his insanely unrealistic lust for life. Mostel and Brooks apparently didn’t get along well during filming (possibly because they shared a similarly vulgar and explosive sense of showmanship, and there wasn’t room enough on the set for two such rampaging egos), but Brooks didn’t dare fire him – he knew he’d caught pure comedic lightning when he saw what Mostel was capable of. Brooks’ script has such great one-liners that almost anyone could make them funny, but Mostel’s Hindenburg-going-down style lent genius even to shouted throwaway lines like “I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” (LP)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

WILL FERRELL AS RICKY BOBBY IN TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (2006)

Will Ferrell’s Anchorman may be more absurd, but Talladega Nights is still the SNL alum’s greatest big-screen achievement to date, a NASCAR-set bit of lunacy that mocks American culture while simultaneously exhibiting fondness for it. Via the character of Ricky Bobby, a nitwit car-racing star, Ferrell manages to send up our national gluttony and materialism, as well as Southern political and social conservatism, with a no-holds-barred goofiness that’s nonetheless underscored by affection for his redneck milieu and its inhabitants. To keep things evenhanded, Sacha Baron Cohen’s aggressively homosexual French F-1 champ Jean Girard provides a hilarious caricature of liberalism. It’s Ferrell’s titular clown, however, that truly embodies the film’s fair-minded attitude, his Ricky Bobby an egotistical good ol’ boy whose jingoism is as inane as his predilection for saying grace to the baby Jesus – an extended bit that gets funnier with every subsequent viewing – and yet whose me-first ridiculousness is laced with a childish kindness that makes him both an embarrassing and endearing personification of 21st century southern America. (NS)

CHEVY CHASE AS CLARK GRISWOLD IN CHRISTMAS VACATION (1989)

While the original remains the most popular, and European Vacation is probably the funniest, the Vacation series’ most heartwarming entry was 1989’s Yuletide saga, in large part because its holiday setting provided Chevy Chase with the best opportunities to convey not only Clark Griswold’s buffoonery, but to root that silliness in his deep, abiding love of family and tradition. In this second sequel, Clark’s homestead is invaded by parents, in-laws and the clan of Cousin Eddy (Randy Quaid), and this raft of supporting players – which also comes to include the Griswold’s prissy Yuppie neighbors (Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) – helps take some of the comedic burden off of Chase. Despite surrounding him with talented co-stars, however, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’s spotlight nonetheless remains squarely on its headliner, whose pratfall skills are in fine form, and whose sympathetic embodiment of his well-intentioned doofus patriarch – aggravated by his kin, disappointed over not receiving the work bonus he was counting on, and tormented by a squirrel let loose in his abode – lends the manic, messy proceedings real warmth. (NS)

PAUL REUBENS AS PEE-WEE HERMAN IN PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985)

Too much fun in a porn theater may have destroyed Paul Reubens' career – and, consequently, the life of his iconic Pee-Wee Herman character – but his 1985 big-screen debut, helmed by first-time director Tim Burton, stands up as a perfectly realized idiosyncratic original. In this fanciful, carnival-esque saga, Reubens' strange-talking man-child Pee-Wee embarks on a cross-country odyssey to recover his beloved red bike, which he believes was stolen by his rich, spoiled, nasty neighbor Francis (Mark Holton). Even on his first feature, Burton’s flair for crafting strange, wild, wondrous visions was in full effect, as was Danny Elfman’s aptitude for offbeat scores. Nonetheless, it’s Pee-Wee who cements his place in the film-comedy pantheon. From the colorful, gadgety confines of his home (where he chows down on some Mr. T breakfast cereal), to the Alamo (whose basement he foolishly hopes to investigate), to a roadside bar where he famously displays his dance moves while surrounded by a horde of nasty-looking bikers, Pee-Wee proves himself a one-of-a-kind weirdo whose irrepressible cheer is infectious, and whose childlike innocence is endearing. (NS)

ALBERT BROOKS AS ALBERT BROOKS IN REAL LIFE (1979)

Albert Brooks has built a career – and a pretty fine one, if you ask us – out of portraying himself as a complete jerkoff. Even when he’s not playing a fictional character who’s kind of a schmuck, he’s kind of a schmuck: the “Albert Brooks” he plays in his films is a rampaging egomaniac who’s completely oblivious to how he comes across to people. Nowhere is this better realized than in his first full-length feature as a writer and director, 1979’s Real Life. This criminally underseen comedy, which brilliantly anticipates the reality-TV craze of 20 years later, sees Brooks playing himself as a desperate-to-please filmmaker who decides to film a normal, average American family; the comedy lies in the fact that he quickly assesses that the moviegoing public will be bored stiff by normality and averageness, and immediately sets about interfering with their lives for entertainment value. Unsurprisingly, this ruins the experiment, and starts to ruin the family’s life as well – but right up until the very end (where he hits upon the brilliant idea of burning their house down in order to provide his disastrous movie with a suitably exciting ending), Brooks is completely blind to the fact that the only thing wrong with his movie is that he’s the one making it. “Albert Brooks”, as portrayed by Albert Brooks, is so fine a portrait of a self-absorbed Hollywood phony it must have made Robert Evans blush.

CHICO MARX AS BARAVELLI IN HORSE FEATHERS (1932)

Although we’ve chosen his role as Baravelli in the campus comedy Horse Feathers as representative, it’s really just a stand-in for any Chico Marx performance. In the Marx Brothers’ films, Groucho’s role was to be the anarchist, the fly in the ointment, the wild card who refused to play by society’s rules and hilariously wrecks the smooth running order of things; Chico’s role was to do the same thing – only to Groucho. Often stereotyped as the dimwitted punster, Chico’s roles went far deeper than that: he was a true comic foil to his younger brother, reminding him that he couldn’t always win, that there was always someone there who could outhustle even the great Groucho – even if it was by playing dumb. Groucho was the subversive riddle that brought down authority, and Harpo was the dynamite bomb thrown right in the middle of the room, but Chico was a Chinese finger puzzle: it looked so simple, but once you were caught in it, no matter how smart you were, you couldn’t get out. Nowhere is that more clear than in the famous “Tutti Frutti” scene in Horse Feathers, where a supremely confident Chico prevents a slow-burning Groucho from betting on the horse he wants to win. It’s one of the greatest examples of pure comic timing ever captured on film.

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

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, the other day, my lovely Polish bride was attending a work function at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, when she looked up and saw a tall, craggy guy dressed in camouflage, surrounded by a gaggle of teenage sons, and suddenly realized she was face-to-face with none other than Bill Ghostbustin’ Ass Murray...

...April Fool!

Oh...no, wait...that actually happened...and, indeed, America’s annual Day of Pranks is blessedly over for another year...yet considering we already kicked off the month with a salute to fools, and considering Entertainment Weekly just ran a big, page-wasting spread on the Greatest Heroes and Villains of All Time, your pals here at the Screengrab figured now would be as good a time as any to salute our real heroes...the Comic Relief.

Now, of course, the second we started compiling this list, we realized we’d undoubtedly forget at least two worthy choices for every name we picked...so feel free to remind us who we missed down below in the Comments section, and mayhaps we’ll run a Reader’s Choice list of faves at some future date. But in the meantime, please to enjoy our picks for THE 35 FUNNIEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME!

DANNY KAYE AS HUBERT HAWKINS IN THE COURT JESTER (1955)

Most people know that comedy isn’t pretty, but it need not necessarily be mean. Consider the career of Danny Kaye -- in his heyday, one of the biggest draws in Hollywood, not only because he was funny but also because he was so darn likable. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his most enduring movie, The Court Jester -- a film so benignly hilarious that it’s equally enjoyable for children and cinephiles. Taking his cue from the Technicolor swashbucklers of yore, Kaye throws himself into the role of the hapless resistance fighter-turned-jester with a childlike glee, even during the Errol Flynn-esque sword fights. But he’s at his best when engaging in his trademark wordplay. Who can forget the famous "pellet with the poison" exchange? Even better is the extended "Maladjusted Jester" number, in which Kaye, playing a hapless carnival performer-turned-freedom fighter masquerading as the "king of jesters and jester of kings" (long story), gets his chance to entertain the court. The story is put on hold while Kaye sings, dances, and jokes -- a risky move, because if the scene doesn’t work, the movie has nothing to do but stand… "and stand… and staaaaaaaaand…" Thankfully, it’s brilliant, thanks primarily to Kaye’s formidable talents and, it must be said, his innate likability. It’s this latter quality that makes the film work even today: at plenty of times during the film, Hubert has the option of resorting to violence or devious tactics, but that would be out of character for Kaye, so he must come up with more creative (and humorous) alternatives. It’s rare to find a movie that’ll make one smile throughout even between the laughs, but The Court Jester fits the bill perfectly. (PC)

PETER SELLERS AS INSPECTOR JACQUES CLOUSEAU IN A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)

Every year, the legend of the Pink Panther films gets a little more tarnished. The endless remakes and reboots, the franchise sequels Steve Martin cranks out when he wants to restock his wine cellar, and the fact that they were never great pieces of cinema in the first place all conspire to rob the original Blake Edwards films of their magic, year after year. But lest we forget, the Pink Panther movies, as poorly as they have aged, were a showcase for the comedic talents of Peter Sellers, and in this film – the best of the series by a mile – it’s easy to see why he was once considered the funniest man in the world. What’s made the Clouseau character last is that Sellers made him a vehicle for so many types of comedy: gross physical slapstick, outrageous (for the time) sexual gags, wordplay, linguistic tomfoolery, broad ethnic comedy, improvisational brilliance, and even the odd subtle character moment. No comedian alive at the time could so deftly blend all those elements into a single character, and no one has been able to do it since, which is why the latter-day films, even starring as they do a once-gifted comic like Martin, are such a travesty. As if all that’s not enough, consider that Sellers made A Shot in the Dark in the same year that he did Dr. Strangelove! That’s a one-two punch that proves that there was literally no type of comedy he couldn’t make completely his own. (LP)

JOHN BELUSHI AS BLUTO IN ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)

Some might say "Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life." Happily others beg to differ. The loose cannon and gross-out pre-med under-acheiver John "Bluto" Blutarski is John Belushi at his slovenly best. He's that guy you kind of hate for being obtuse, but love for providing a breath of fresh air in pretentious situations like college, work and life. Bluto is the dispenser of such pearls of wisdom as "My advice to you is to start drinking heavily." Also, who can forget the crashing apart of the black & white reconciliation float in the homecoming parade? There would be no Animal House without Belushi's cherubic moron with a heart of gold (and stand-up ethics). (SCS)

ALYSON HANNIGAN AS MICHELLE FLAHERTY IN AMERICAN PIE (1999)

Hannigan, had already spent two years using Buffy the Vampire Slayer as her delivery system for the message that sexy dorks rule the universe, before jumping at the chance to really put that idea across here. Popping her words like gum and making "Like you have a shot at anyone else!" sound like a siren's love lyric, she instantly created a generation of men who will die empty and unfulfilled if they never meet a friendly-seeming bookish geek who's just biding her time until the moment is right to slap them across the face and scream, "Say my name, bitch!" Her absence from movies since then, except for an American Pie sequel or three and the even sorrier Date Movie, has been a real sore spot for some of us, made no easier to take by the possibility it raises that she might just be too happy at home with that wimp bastard she married to be seeking out work. Out of respect for her personal happiness, some of us have refrained from attempting to murder her spouse, even though we suspect that she'd look adorable in black. Enjoy motherhood, sugar britches. (PN)

SACHA BARON COHEN AS BORAT IN BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Overexposed? Sure. Mimicked to death? Definitely. Still one of the decade’s most iconic and consistently hilarious lunatics? Without question. Sasha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani journalist made his stateside debut on HBO’s Da Ali G Show in 2003 but came to national prominence with Larry Cohen’s 2006 hit, in which he traveled across America “learning” about the country while searching for his dream girl, Pamela Anderson. Posing as the inappropriate Borat amidst real people supposedly not in on the joke, Cohen pokes, prods and enrages citizens in an attempt to reveal something humorously honest about their patience, prejudices and standards of propriety. The social critique provided by Borat’s discomfiting gags, however, never takes precedence over the outrageous hilarity of his scenarios. Whether convincing an all-too-willing group of Southern bar patrons to sing along to “Throw the Jew Down the Well” on HBO, or engaging in a nude hotel wrestling match with his obese sidekick Azamat (Ken Davitian) in Borat, Cohen’s faux-reporter is a preeminent absurdist prankster whose comedy is best summed up by his own catchphrase: Is Nice!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I claimed the period from New Year's to Oscar Night was the most wonderful time of the year for movie geeks, what with all the Best-Of Lists and awards season festivities...but for movie AND music geeks (not to mention the small but powerful barbecue geek lobby), there is no better place or time than mid-March in sunny Austin, when the South-By-Southwest Festival unleashes 1,800 bands from around the world on the capital of Texas, along with several zillion filmmakers, wannabes, hucksters, tourists, web designers, Industry sleazeballs and bloggers (including yours truly, my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce and, heck, maybe half the Nerve.com staff for all I know...see you at the Yard Dog, guys)!

Thus, in celebration of SXSW’s yearly combo of films & fretboards, your pals here at the Screengrab are launching a two-week tribute to OUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC!

Andrew Osborne’s Favorites:

IMAGINE (1988)

As far as I can remember, the first pop song I ever knew by heart was “Yellow Submarine” -- well, the chorus, anyway, which my brother and me would sing endlessly to the delight (and eventually, I’m sure, to the ear-piercing annoyance of) my parents on numerous long car trips throughout the early ‘70s. So I guess that would make the Beatles my first favorite band...and brilliant, heroic, sarcastic, acerbic, mean, funny, shit-stirring, peace-loving John was always my favorite Beatle (even if he didn’t lend his voice to his cartoon incarnation in the film version of Submarine...a deeply disillusioning trivia fact I’ve been trying to erase from my brain through strategic drinking ever since I learned it). My hipster college roommate cried conspicuously on the fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death (and possibly every year since), whereas I save my tears over the Smart One’s tragically premature and sinfully meaningless demise for periodic viewings of Andrew Solt’s warts-and-all (but ultimately loving) tribute, Imagine (allegedly released in part to counteract the warts-and-nothing-else Lennon biography published by icky toad Albert Goldman the same year). Narrated by Lennon himself, the film chronicles the life and times (and music and feuds and love affairs and political activism) of its subject while evoking the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s far more effectively than a certain reverse-aging button enthusiast I could mention...I only wish Solt's documentary had a better ending.

BIG TIME (1988)

I may have started off loving the Beatles, but after that my tastes wandered from the pop and rock aisles to the musical theater section. Thankfully, my cooler friends were kind enough to broaden my horizons just in time for adolescence with an endless series of mix-tapes, bringing me up to speed on punk, New Wave and, eventually, the one-man genre known as Tom Waits. As it happened, I became a fan smack dab in the midst of Waits' Island years, when he was recording the game-changing trilogy of albums (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs & Frank’s Wild Years) considered by many to be the high-water mark of the singer/songwriter/Conundrummer’s more or less consistently brilliant career...and so I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to catch the Boston stop of the tour captured (or, more specifically, reimagined) in Chris Blum’s barking, bantering concert film Big Time, which depicts Waits both onstage and wandering the periphery as Frank, the mysterious, muttering song character who infamously doused his house in gasoline and torched it, then got on the Hollywood Freeway headed North (and some time later, apparently, wound up working as an usher in a creepy old vaudeville house). Unfortunately, I had to leave that long-ago Boston concert halfway through to get to a stupid play rehearsal (...stupid! ...stupid! ...stupid!), little knowing I wouldn’t get to see Waits in the flesh again for 20+ years (and counting): in the ‘90s, I kept leaving cities just before Waits’ tour arrived in them, and here in the oughts, his infrequent tour stops always seem to be far, far away. So until I finally manage to track the man down again, Big Time will have to do.

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984)

The first time Talking Heads entered my consciousness was on the soundtrack of Risky Business, growling the dirty stomp of “Swamp” over scenes of teen sex in Tom Cruise’s suburban bordello. Shortly thereafter but around the same period, I put a face to the distinctive voice...specifically David Byrne’s weird moony face projected on the side of a house and the dotted white line of a highway in the wicked pissa video for “Burning Down The House” (back when videos were wicked pissa and MTV wasn’t a 24/7 suck-fest). Then, a year later, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense finally gave me a full dose of Talking Heads (thus hooking me on the band for a lot longer than the band stayed hooked on each other). I never got a chance to see David, Tina, Chris & Jerry play live -- not all at the same time, anyway -- but dancing in the aisles with dozens of fellow Head-heads during the classic concert film’s theatrical run was the next best thing...kinda like Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience without the special glasses and shitty music. Indeed, Demme makes his subjects pop off the screen without 3D technology, pyrotechnics or any of the usual rock-doc clichés: all he needed was a lamp, a big suit, a good shot list and one of the best rock bands of all time.

WOODSTOCK (1970)

In the 1971 film The Omega Man, not-quite-last-man-alive Charlton Heston spends his lonely days in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles watching Michael Wadleigh’s super-size documentary of the mother of all concerts again and again...and, frankly, if I wind up being the sole survivor when the world ends in 2012, I’d be pretty psyched to find Woodstock in the projector of my local movie house. For one thing, it’s 184 minutes long (or roughly one hour for each of the three days of peace and music it chronicles)...and the special director’s cut released in 1994 contains an additional 40 minutes of still yet more peace, music and damn, dirty hippies. But what makes Woodstock perfect for repeat viewings is how much Wadleigh and his editors (including Martin Scorsese and BFF Thelma Schoonmaker) pack into the running time, using split-screen sensory overload to capture every conceivable angle of the epochal event, from the iconic onstage performances by Jimi, Joan, Joe, Country Joe, Richie, Arlo and the surprisingly awesome Sha Na Na (among many, many others) to the brown acid, Porta-Potty maintenance and holy-shit meltdowns of the poor bastards trying to keep the whole event from spiraling into the sort of madness and catastrophe captured by the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin in 1970’s other notable concert documentary, Gimme Shelter, the yang to Woodstock’s yin and definitely not the sort of movie likely to cheer you up in an empty theater surrounded by killer mutants.

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

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Screengrab Presents The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:30:00 GMT

The Best:

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Forget best comic book movies...Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Dan Clowes’ cool blue-black graphic novel (distilled from the bizarre alt-comic Eightball) is one of the best movies of ANY genre to emerge in the past decade. While most of the films on this list are super-powered adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, Ghost World is a dead-on portrayal of life as it really is for many American teens (as well as the aging misfits some of them...okay, some of us...grow into). Recent high school grads Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, peaking early in her best role ever) slouch through a dystopic Los Angeles, floating on attitude to keep from drowning in a world of suck...add cranky Steve Buscemi as a hapless, lonely object of affection and you've got a near-perfect black comedy about alienation and the slow death of individualism in America, from the blissful escapism of Enid's private "Jaan Pehechan Ho" Bollywood dance party curtain raiser to her bitter, existential fade-out on a literal road to nowhere.

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

By the time the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies came around, no one was seriously questioning the idea that a movie based on a comic book could actually be good. But nobody suspected how good until they’d managed to live through The Dark Knight. Nolan and his brother Jonathan tried to cram a huge amount of story into the movie’s heavy running time, but while it didn’t always work out – the Two-Face plot sagged a bit at the end, and there were moments that would have been better placed in a lesser movie – it justified its length and left you wishing there was even more. A great deal of attention is heaped on Heath Ledger’s terrifying, hypnotic (and Oscar-winning) performance as the Joker, and rightly so; but there’s so much more to the movie than that. The Nolans are always willing to sidestep the traditional conflicts of superhero stories and introduce powerful shades of moral ambiguity, which comes across in spades in The Dark Knight; and while Batman himself is left alone and lost at the edge of right and wrong, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon provides the movie’s true moral center. And, given the numerous ways it manages to transcend simplistic blockbuster-movie tropes, it’s also an amazing-looking movie, with brutal fights, set pieces, and that rarest of things, an exciting and interesting chase scene, all of which helped make it one of the most successful motion pictures in the history of the world.

The Worst:

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I understand why Nic Cage took the lead role in Ghost Rider. It’s because Nic Cage is a hack who will pretty much do anything for money, as evidenced by, oh, let’s say Bangkok Dangerous or any other movie he’s made in the last half-decade. He’s also a major comic book geek (his son’s name is Kal-El, for Christ’s sake), and he probably sized up the script, counted the number of zeroes after the initial digit, realized he’d be performing most of the movie under layers of CGI anyway, and went shopping for a new boat. What’s less easy to understand is why anyone bothered to make Ghost Rider in the first place. The character was always pretty absurd, even by the bong-rattled standards of the 1970s Marvel Bullpen that produced him: a motorcycle stunt rider who gets possessed by the Devil and fights crime for some reason. He was never really that popular, even by the standards of juveniles who find that description totally bad-ass, and was mostly remembered until this movie came out as the only character based on a tattoo to star in his own title. Still, in the right hands, a decent movie could have been made of Ghost Rider, but the right hands are not those of the disgraceful Mark Steven Johnson. The biggest mystery of all is why anyone in Hollywood would give this guy a job doing anything after he made the horrible Daredevil and wrote the even more horrible Elektra, and yet, here he is again, screwing up another comic book character. The sole consolation of Ghost Rider is that nobody appears to have seen it, so maybe my bad memories of it are just a nightmare.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

This big-budget belly flop marked a true historic moment in the twinned histories of both movies and comics; never before had a major studio release been widely criticized for having dumbed-down a comic book. The illustrator Kevin O'Neill gave a deliciously perverse period look to Alan Moore's parodic adventure serial about a Victorian era Super Friends team comprised of Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula's old flame, Mina Harker. The director, Stephen Norrington, began work on the project by casting Sean Connery as Quartermain, apparently a sadistic act designed to get fans' hopes up by giving a false impression that he knew what he was doing. Elsewhere, Norrington and his screenwriter, James Dale Robinson (a comics scribe best known for his work on DC's Starman and the miniseries The Golden Age), coarsened and blunted the comic's sly edge, altering its characters for the worse (such as in the wrong call of making Mina Harker explicitly vampiric, even though the starchy proto-feminist of the comic was much more intimidating than any mere bloodsucker) and added new personnel, including a twentyish Tom Sawyer, presumably intended as a sop to the American market, and Dorian Gray, apparently included so that Norrington could hire, and then not fire, Stuart Townsend, just to show that he was stupider than Peter Jackson. The movie provided news for gossip columnists throughout its production, thanks to the battles between Connery and the director. When it was finally over, Connery announced that the experience had inspired him to retire from acting, and it didn't do anybody else's career any favors either.

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT (1974)

Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, an adults-only feature animation based on a Robert Crumb character, helped attract Crumb's work a lot of attention, and the cartoonist has been bitching about it ever since; he can be seen early in the documentary Crumb complaining about how Bakshi browbeat him into giving him the rights and then debased his work. Bakshi's film wasn't very good, but the sequel, which he had nothing to do with, makes Bakshi's work look like the second coming of Winsor McKay. Most of the film, which includes Fritz's encounters with Hitler and various stereotypical mid-'70s "street" characters, settles for being ugly-looking and obnoxious, but it goes for broke in the last section, a mess of racist and anti-Semitic cariactures in which President Henry Kissinger sends Fritz on a mission to New Jersey, which has fallen under black rule and changed its name to "New Africa." If the actual Crumb's work was twice as offensive as his most hard-assed detractors claim that it is, and not funny or aesthetically pleasing at all, it would still be better than this.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent