The Screengrab : lolita

Video of the Day: "Karate Kid III" After Dark

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

In the Screengrab's ongoing attempt to bring you the beautiful, the bold, and the bodacious in hard-to-find screen tests, we occasionally stumble upon something...odd. For example, here's a test reel from The Karate Kid III, where Daniel (Ralph Macchio) meets Snake (John Avildsen -- son of the movie's director, which will seem more shocking after you've seen the clip) for the first time. The dialogue was largely improvised, and we warn you, is not safe for work:

All we can tell you is, if the whole movie had been like that, we would have enjoyed it a lot more.

Related Posts:

Yesterday's Hits: The Karate Kid

Video of the Day: Lolita Screen Test

Unwatchable #80: “The Smokers”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Take a look at that DVD cover and you’ll probably think you have a pretty good idea what to expect from The Smokers – a “chick clique” flick in the vein of Heathers, Mean Girls and Jawbreaker. At times it does play like that sort of movie, but at other times, it strives to present some big ideas. Some big, dumb ideas.

The Smokers was clearly made by someone who once read that a gun introduced in the first act must go off in the third, but didn’t get much beyond that chestnut as far as the finer points of storytelling are concerned. When it was over, I immediately went to the IMDb to find out who was responsible and what else they might have done. The writer/director in question is one Kat Slater, and here are some of the films she has made since The Smokers: Young Sluts, Inc. 4, Young Sluts, Inc. 6, Cum Swappers 1, Cum Swappers 2, Cum Swallowers, Cum Swallowers 3 and Campus Confessions 6-9. Those titles being a little too subtle for me, I did some research and it turns out they’re all hardcore porn releases from Hustler. I found this a bit surprising, given the extreme feminist ideas explored in The Smokers, but as I believe I mentioned, they are very dumb feminist ideas, explored very poorly.

The Smokers are Jefferson (Dominique Swain, Adrian Lyne’s Lolita), Karen (Busy Phillips of Freaks and Geeks) and Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt, Miss Teen New Hampshire 1994), three students at the upscale boarding school Lindenhurst Academy. They smoke. They smoke a lot. They smoke the cigarettes and they smoke the pot. Also, they have boy troubles. Lisa’s boyfriend David cheats on her, Jefferson falls for a gay singer and Karen gets the brush-off after a one-night stand in the back of a limo. After Jefferson’s wacko sister Lincoln (where have you gone, Thora Birch?) pulls a gun on Karen (all in good fun, of course), the Smokers decide to use the weapon to turn the tables on the male of the species.

Thanks to the movie’s wildly inconsistent tone, it’s hard to say how we’re supposed to take this development. Is it just a goof when they sexually humiliate David at gunpoint, or is it rape? If it is just a goof and we’re meant to take it all lightly, what about the later scene in which Karen is date-raped on the hood of her one-night stand’s limo? It’s a disturbing moment deprived of any meaningful context. If The Smokers can’t decide how it feels about its own message of empowerment – that is, whether it’s a satirical take or a cautionary tale or even a genuine call to arms – then how are we supposed to figure it out? It’s not that the movie is being deliberately ambiguous, it’s just inept filmmaking hardly aided by unappealing performances, notably by the shrill Phillips.

I did find one hint as to the filmmaker’s intentions after the fact. If you check out the Amazon customer reviews of The Smokers, you’ll find this comment from one Kat Slater: “Finally a chic flick without all the wimpy girls. These girls are cool. It's very stylish and great preformances by Thora Birch and Dominique Swain. I loved it! And guys... you want to see what girls are all about... this is it!” So…this is the same person who went on to make movies with titles referring to women as semen receptacles? I think I’m more confused than ever.

Previously on Unwatchable:
81. Soccer Dog: The Movie
82. American Soldiers
83. First Sunday
84. It’s Pat
85. Battlefield Earth

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

PRETTY BABY (1978) & THE BLUE LAGOON (1980)

Europe is a very different place than America, and the seventies were a very different time. From Socrates to Roman Polanski, Europeans have always had a much more, uh, relaxed attitude when it comes to May/December (or even early April/December) relationships. Whether said social mores indicate healthy, sex-positive liberation or sick, twisted perversion, the fact remains: them foreigners sure do make a lot of movies about sexed-up youngsters. In 1971, Louis Malle directed Murmur of the Heart, about a 15-year-old boy who gets hit on by priests and has sex with his mother. A few years later, Malle hit the controversy jackpot with Pretty Baby, the lurid yet turgid tale of a young girl raised by prostitutes whose virginity is auctioned off prior to her marriage to an older man. Brooke Shields, rouged and naked throughout, became the (literal) poster girl for commodified, sexualized “innocence” and a precursor to the sexualization of even younger girls in those creepy JonBenét Ramsey-esque pre-pubescent beauty pageants that Little Miss Sunshine mocked so brilliantly. Two years after Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields lost her virginity again in The Blue Lagoon, this time to a barely legal Christopher Atkins (who would later shake his groove thing for cougar Lesley Ann Warren as a male stripper in the 1983 cheese-whiz classic A Night In Heaven). That Lagoon was such a smash hit in the U.S. had everything to do with the movie’s lush cinematography and wholesome depiction of pure, innocent love and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that its hot teenage stars were (tastefully!) naked half the time...because, of course, we Americans have superior morals.

PALE RIDER (1985)

In this inflated imitation of his own High Plains Drifter, the director-star Clint Eastwood plays a mystical, supernatural gunslinger who materializes after a 14-year-old girl (Sydney Penny) has prayed for a hero to come and deal with the meanies making things hard for her gold-mining community. Once he's arrived, though, Penny isn't content with having him shoot all the bad guys; she also puts the moves on him, only to have him turn her down, maybe because he's got something going on with her mother (Carrie Snodgress). In a snit, Penny has the bright idea of trying to make him jealous by riding off to where the bad guys are holed up so that Eastwood has to come and collect her before a drooling Richard Kiel can club her and drag her off to his cave. Pale Rider is just one of several films in the Eastwood oeuvre that can make you wonder if, back in the early seventies, Clint left some part of his brain unclaimed on the set of The Beguiled.

THE KID (1921)

The title character in this Charlie Chaplin silent is played by the seven-year-old Jackie Coogan, but the movie features a dream sequence set in Heaven, and in that sequence, Chaplin contrived an attention-getting bit for Lita Grey, an untested young actress who, decades before Nabokov wrote his novel, was sometimes known as "Lolita." In the movie, Gray, looking very cute, and playing a character known as "Flirtatious Angel", traipses out wearing big wings and starts cuddling up to Chaplin like a friendly kitten. She encourages him to chase after her by skipping away and flashing what she would later describe as "a very skinny leg", and he obligingly goes literally flying after her. Chaplin used her again in The Idle Rich and planned to cast her as the female lead in The Gold Rush, but she wound up playing a small role in movie history and a considerably larger one in Chaplin's scandal-plagued personal life; he had to recast her role, and marry her, when he got her pregnant at age 16. (Chaplin was 35.) Their marriage, which produced two children and ended in an ugly public divorce, lasted only three years, and her professional and intimate personal life with Chaplin was over by the time she was twenty.

BULLY (2001)

Larry Clark gets accused of a lot of things by critics. I mean, a lot. In the view of some film writers, he’s second only to Lars von Trier as the filmmaker most likely to be Nosferatu reincarnated. But the most common charge is that he’s some kind of dirty old man – a guy who makes movies for no better reason than to look at attractive young people cavorting in front of his camera lens so he can yell “AROO-GA!”. This charge is not only a tad conspiratorial (Clark lives in New York, a city where it’s pretty easy to get a gander at naked teenagers, and making expensive, highly controversial films would seem to be an awfully roundabout way of doing it), but also pretty fatuous when directed specifically at Clark. I mean, can you name a major Hollywood movie of the last 30 years that didn’t feature an attractive, overly sexualized young man or woman in a leading role? Most critics were pretty indulgent of the alleged Chester-the-Molester qualities of Clark’s 1999 debut feature, Kids, because they bought into its sense of impending moral panic; but by 2001, when the world had decided it had bigger problems than that of 17-year-olds having sex, a lot of people decided that Bully, his loose adaptation of a real Florida murder case, was nothing but a justification for Clark to see pretty young things in their altogether. But then, as now, this charge was ignorant of history and tone-deaf to reality. Clark has always been obsessed with beautiful young people who obliviously hurtle into self-destruction, including himself: he’s a brilliant photographer whose first book, Tulsa, featured his speed-freak friends shooting themselves into early graves, and like his films – Bully in particular – the grim realities of death and insanity gave a distinctively un-erotic charge to even the most beautiful bodies in his photographs. It was also released when he was 27 years old (and many of the photos were taken when he was much younger), exempting him from the charge of simply being a horny old coot. Later photographic works would focus on his own drug addiction, the tragic lives of handsome but damaged Times Square hustlers, and, tellingly, the way that media images of young people shape – and warp – youth culture. Far from being a dirty old man, the artist who made Bully was simply following a path he had been on for over 30 years. There’s no denying it’s a film crammed with prurient interest, but that serves only to solidify Clark’s central obsession: that the ignorant self-destruction of youth is all the more tragic because they are so vibrant and beautiful.

FREEWAY II: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Society’s moral strictures being what they are, film directors, when they bring to us a movie featuring a bunch of hot young things romping around in their birthday suits, must think of some way to convince us that we’re not watching for the obvious reason. There are many ways to do this: dramatic tension, outright deception, or the pretense of imparting some sort of grand moral lesson. Matthew Bright, the deranged auteur behind the Freeway movies, has discovered a method that’s, as far as we know, unique to him: he wedges his nymphomaniacal teenagers in between a bizarre framework of re-imagined postmodernist fairy tales tinged with a truly surreal sense of humor. The second movie in a proposed trilogy, Freeway II is, believe it or not, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel”, only with lesbian shower scenes, cannibalistic transvestite nuns, and David Alan Grier. Absent the deranged trappings, it’s unlikely that this movie would ever have gotten made; Natasha Lyonne was of age in the female lead, but she’s meant to be playing an 18-year-old juvenile delinquent, and her partner in crime, the demented serial killer La Ciclona (played by the riveting Maria Celedonio), is explicity, and we mean explicitly, portrayed as being sixteen years old. Were this a mainstream movie aimed at a mainstream audience, it probably would have generated a Senate investigation when Lyonne and Celedonio get it on in a beer-fueled makeout session in a hotel bathroom; but Bright had already set the scene for this sort of nonsense by presenting us with a mass prison vomiting scene (choreographed like a Busby Berkley musical, with the bulimic prisoners as chorines) and a striptease involving a girl with a prosthetic leg. He continues in this vein, ultimately asking us to cope with the image of Vincent Gallo in nun drag trying to bake the hapless Ms. Lyonne into a pie. In the face of all that, there’s simply no room for self-incrimination for ogling teen girls; you just have to sit back and go where the ride takes you.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

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

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

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

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

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

FREEWAY (1996)

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

KIDS (1995)

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

HARD CANDY (2005)

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

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous (Part One)

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

If we all hit puberty overnight on our 21st birthdays, American life would be a helluva lot less complicated. But, as the recent Miley Cyrus “back-gate” scandal revealed, teenage sexuality is a topic that America doesn’t want to think about, even as it just can't seem to stop thinking about it.

On the one hand, most of us had (or at least thought about) sex in high school...on the other hand, once we’re adults, we’re all supposed to conveniently forget our memories and fantasies of adolescent lust. On the one hand, sex education is viewed as promoting underage promiscuity...but on the other hand, abstinence-only education tends to lead to a lot of unwanted pregnancy, since teenagers somehow figure out how to have sex even without classroom lectures about condoms. On the one hand, innocent teachers, day care workers, 19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends and that 6-year-old boy who smacked a female classmate on the butt have all been branded for life as sexual offenders based on false or flimsy charges in hysterical witch hunts to “protect the children” at all costs...on the other hand, research indicates 20-25% of girls and 5-15% of boys in the U.S. experience some form of molestation at the hands of adults, the Catholic Church ignored its own institutional abuse scandals and the international sex trade in young flesh is thriving.

Clearly, we’re a little conflicted about the whole sex thing. Sure, we’re all shocked and disgusted by those creeps on To Catch A Predator...but somebody out there is watching Gossip Girl, sneaking peeks at Barely Legal magazine, lusting after Zac Efron and buying sexy cheerleader outfits from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue...and it’s not all just teens and predators. In fact, if we here at the Screengrab didn’t know better, we’d almost think Americans fetishize taboos instead of just being honest about them, leading to some pretty screwy behavior...AND the following list of films that reside in that dangerous grey area between sexual initiation and exploitation.

LOLITA (1962 & 1997)

Of course, no list of jailbait cinema would be complete without the grandmother of them all, or this previous Screengrab post on the screen adaptations of Nabokov's novel.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

The best joke in Martin Scorsese’s masterful meditation on violence and alienation is when Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is turned into a hero for ‘rescuing’ Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute by gunning down her pimps and johns; the best joke outside Taxi Driver is that a lot of critics actually believed Scorsese was being sincere in his depiction of the event. More than one film writer, including a few who should have know better, saw in the movie’s chaotic ending an endorsement of vigilantism, a baffling interpretation that came back to haunt Scorsese – who clearly couldn’t have been more taken aback by this turn of events – when realities like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the saga of subway shooter Bernard Goetz impinged on the fantasy of his film. The notion that Bickle is any kind of a hero is subverted at every turn: his diary is filled with racism and paranoia, his targeting of lowlifes and criminals only happens when he’s frustrated in his attempt to assassinate a politician; ordinary people can’t spend more than a few minutes in his presence without thinking he’s crazy; and even his targeting of Iris’ pimp (as with his targeting of presidential candidate Charles Palatine) is motivated as much by sexual jealousy as it is any kind of desire for justice. Travis is rightly appalled by the menu of sexual acts Iris will perform when read to him by the pimp Sport, and he does seem to have some genuine concern for her well-being, but he’s as oblivious to his own sexual desire for her as he is the impropriety of taking a date to a porno theater. Iris herself treats Bickle like he’s from another planet, and the film’s crowning irony comes at the end, when Travis, a marginalized psychotic only saved from suicide by a redemptive bloodbath and only saved from being a spree killer by his fortuitous choice of victim, receives a letter from Iris’ parents, filled with gratitude for having saved their daughter. It’s certain that if Travis ever took up the Steensmas’ invitation to visit them on their farm, they’d peg him for a maniac within seconds, but it’s the intricate chain of happenstance that turns a maniac into a hero which forms part of the genius of Taxi Driver – and totally upends Travis and Iris’ ‘relationship’ in a way no other jailbait movie has managed.

MANHATTAN (1979)

Woody Allen’s lovely, funny Manhattan is to movies about jailbait-chasing creeps what Citizen Kane is to, er, movies not about jailbait-chasing creeps. Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as Tracy, the high school paramour of Woody’s Isaac Davis, and the Wood-Man himself got a nod from the Academy for his light, adept screenplay. So successful was Manhattan as a breezy, skillful romantic comedy that hardly anyone got creeped out by the fact that Woody’s character was technically committing statutory rape; when he explained “She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father; can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father”, he wasn’t being grammatical, but he was at least being really funny and self-deprecating. Those were the qualities that let us overcome our moral compunctions about what was really happening in the movie, and ignore the fact that, when Isaac tries to convince Tracy not to go away for six months to act with a theater group, he’s actually trying to talk her out of leaving him just long enough to be legal when she comes back. It was all very amusing, and even redeeming when he makes the ‘mature’ decision to start seeing Diane Keaton’s Mary Wilkie instead. Of course, all good things must come to an end, and the plot of Manhattan, one of the few times a Hollywood movie allowed us to not be utterly skeezed out by a middle-aged man jumping into the sack with a 17-year-old, took on a whole different dimension when the Soon-Yi Previn scandal broke. The prospect of a real-life Woody, then in his mid-50s, carrying on an illicit affair with a girl barely in her 20s was, somehow, much less appealing and light than a fictional Woody carrying on with a teenage girl, and all the worse that he was still married and the girl was his adopted daughter. For moviegoers, the worst thing about the scandal is that it’s made Manhattan almost impossible to watch without feeling an edge of ickiness it hadn’t previously possessed.

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Jailbait all-star Thora Birch’s performance as Enid Coleslaw in Ghost World is well-played on a number of levels: as we showed in our Girl Geeks list a few weeks back, she appealed to audiences (especially the, uh, male members thereof) because of her intelligence, hipness, cynicism and what seemed to be a wisdom beyond her years. But the other edge of the blade was the fact that for all her toughness and sophistication, she was still a high school girl. She was vulnerable and emotionally fragile and bound to get herself into situations she couldn’t handle. When she first encounters Steve Buscemi’s sad-sack loser Seymour, she toys with him the way she does her bewildered peer Josh; but when she gets to know him, she discovers that he’s as bitter, resentful, and out of step with the mainstream world as she is. They begin to develop a deep friendship based on the things they mutually hate (hey, there are worse things on which to base a relationship), but the astonishing thing about the way things develop between Enid and Seymour is that it’s an almost total inversion of the normal jailbait romance. Almost from the beginning, we sense that somehow, the two are going to end up in bed together, but unlike in most such movies, where no matter how much the writers try to pretty it up with the language of love, it’s still a predatorial relationship where the man has all the power, in Ghost World, we feel just as sorry for Seymour as we do for Enid. They’re both out of their depth, and as much as we like them both and are glad they’ve found each other, we know it can only end in disaster and we almost beg them not to hook up. When they do, we can tell it’s the beginning of the end for Seymour – and sure enough, he disappears from the film soon after, leaving Enid more vulnerable than she’s ever been. Because of this sense of sadness and loss, it’s one of the truest portrayals of such relationships ever put on film.

INNOCENCE (2004)

One of the principal allures of cinema has always been the way it affords its audience a chance to peek in on activities that would normally go unseen. However, this sort of voyeurism can occasionally feel like a curse when it confronts people with images they aren’t comfortable seeing. So it is with Innocence, a strange yet somehow magical film about a remote boarding school for young girls. Sequestered from the world, the girls are free to live and play without a single male gaze being cast upon them, which makes for the movie’s most fascinating conundrum- by showing us this hidden world founded upon the girls not being seen, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic forces us to deal with the question of why we’re so uncomfortable seeing them this way. Hadzihalilovic (wife of Irreversible director Gaspar Noé) doesn’t shy away from some potentially controversial images- a group of prepubescent girls swimming, a bathing teenager staring at her still-developing nude body in the mirror- which played a large part in the film being dismissed by many critics as fodder for the raincoat crowd. Yet Hadzihalilovic knows exactly what she’s doing, and this becomes obvious in the film’s final reel when we discover that the girls’ dance lessons are designed to train them for nightly performances the school puts on for shadowy male benefactors. That this revelation coincides with the beginning of the girls’ sexual development is deliberate, as Hadzihalilovic suddenly re-introduces men back into the lives of the girls just at the time they would begin paying them serious attention. With this final twist of the knife, Innocence asks whether the loss of the girls’ innocence is merely part of nature, or if others force it upon them, and Hadzihalilovic wisely leaves it for us to decide.

THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

Luc Besson's violent fantasy about a hit man (Jean Reno) who takes in an orphaned twelve-year-old (Natalie Portman) and tutors her in the art of murder may go farther than any other commercial Hollywood movie in blatantly eroticizing a preteen girl. Other actresses not much older than Portman was here have played girls who aroused inappropriate feelings in older men; Portman, with her perfect little features set off by a Louise Brooks haircut and something around her neck that makes her look gift-wrapped, is treated as an object, or a pet, who first begs to be taken in by Leon the professional, and then (in a scene that was first cut from the American prints) begs him to make love to her. How did Besson get away with this? Partly by casting Jean Reno, who's a whiz at holding the camera while signaling that his pilot light has long since gone out, so you can feel confident that he'll stoically decline her entreaties. (Before she showed up, his best friend was a plant.) And partly by the black humor scenes of Leon teaching his little soul mate to become a killer, so that if you object to the film on moral grounds, you're liable to become dizzy from not being able to decide where to begin. It seems a little odd to complain about the unrequited, consensual pedophilia if you have no problems with the violence, but complaining about the violence just makes you feel like a square. The Professional is a truly outrageous movie, but it's extremely (and self-protectively) calculated in its outrageousness.

For more jailbait: Part Two, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 3-9, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This was the week that was at the Screengrab:

We offered free career advice to the 21st century Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds.

We watched Nicolas Cage, Michael J. Fox and Bruce Willis debase themselves in the Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials.

We compared two versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, two versions of Lolita, and the two faces of Aaron Eckhart.

We climbed The Towering Inferno and floated down the Apocalypse Now river.

We saw a naked Bo Derek drenched in honey and milk in Bolero, the latest entry in the Unwatchable series of 100 worst movies ever.

We expressed concern for Christina Ricci, hailed Jonathan Pryce and looked forward to seeing Bardot’s ass in high definition.

We told you about the 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows and you told us we forgot about Serenity. Sorry about that.

And finally, we got sweet, sweet revenge.

What a week, no?

No, But I've Read the Movie: LOLITA

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Usually, Hollywood is a tad standoffish about tackling the great novels. If they do it right, they win the admiration of critics, but risk losing the mainstream audience, who will think of their project as snooty and highbrow. If they do it wrong, people still won't go see the movie, plus the critics will turn the whole thing into a laughingstock. Producers are generally willing to let someone take a crack at one of the classics once and only once, and then only if they're an established filmmaker and there's nothing too controversial about the book. How, then, did not one but two movie versions get made of one of the most inflammatory, misunderstood and potentially dangerous books of the 21st century — a book that not only quite openly asks us to identify, to a certain degree, with an effete intellectual pederast, but which was written by one of the pioneers of postmodernism? Some might suggest that certain producers and/or directors simply jump at the chance to cast a movie starring a hot nymphet, but we are not so cynical here at the Screengrab, oh goodness no. We will not speculate how it came to pass that two high-profile film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant, subtle, subversive and daring story came to pass — one of them, by a titan of the silver screen, made less than a decade after the novel's publication and the other, by a flaky British director whose movies have always been a heartbeat away from softcore porn — and instead focus on the respective qualities of the two films.

A lot of people didn't think Lolita would ever make it to the big screen once, let alone twice. For all the pretentious, self-deluding protagonist Humbert Humbert's talk of "nymphets", he is nakedly and, for the most part, blindly and unrepentently a pederast — a dirty old man who chases after young girls and compensates for his failings by passing intellectual judgment on everyone else around him. This was, and is, considered a pretty volatile subject, even considering Hollywood's history of sexualizing young women; indeed, the tagline for the 1962 Stanley Kubrick version of Lolita was "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" Part of the answer to that is by soft-pedaling Dolores Haze's age: in the Kubrick film, she's sixteen and in the Adrian Lyne version, she's a year younger — both a level of remove from the highly uncomfortable fact that in Nabokov's novel, she's twelve. Regardless of the controversy that raged (and will probably always continue to rage) around the book, especially from people who haven't read it, Lolita is rightly considered one of the greatest books of the post-war and post-modern era. The films, however, are a touch more difficult to critically assess. Kubrick's 1962 version was well-received at the time, snaring an Oscar nomination and a handful of Golden Globe noms, but has it stood up to the test of time? Adrian Lyne's 1997 edition wasn't expected to be very good, and after a successful run overseas had a hard time finding distribution in the U.S. from controversy-shy studios until it eventually had to debut on cable. Was it better than its reputation? Let's you and me find out.

WHAT THEY HAD: Aside from being directed by a genuine master of the medium, the best thing Kubrick's Lolita had going for it was the coup it scored in getting Nabokov himself to pen the screenplay. If this didn't exactly ensure that it would remain faithful to the book (see below), it would at least ensure that the script wasn't a total wash. It was a gorgeous-looking movie, and with a couple of notable exceptions (see, again, below), the cast was top-notch, even if Peter Sellers was so overblown and overused in his role that a number of commentators (including Nabokov himself) suggested that the movie should be called Quilty. Lyne's version wasn't as assured in terms of filmmaking, largely because Adrian Lyne is worth about one and a half feet of Stanley Kubrick, but it was very stylish, and the always-terrific Jeremy Irons as Humbert was ably matched with the phenomenal Dominique Swain as Lolita. If Swain's career never let her equal this performance, she could at least be proud that she took one of the most difficult roles in modern drama and absolutely nailed it to the wall. Additionally, and to their credit, both films managed to weather the storms of controversy they met with, and although both suffered from studio interference to make the story palatable to sex-shy American tastes, neither was entirely wrecked because of it.

WHAT THEY LACKED: Kubrick's Lolita may have suffered the most; it doesn't hold up well compared to most of his other films, and at times comes across as lifeless and flat on the screen. Sue Lyons is pretty much a disaster as Lolita, having the right look but not even remotely the necessary acting chops, and Shelley Winters sometimes seems completely lost as her mother, Charlotte Haze. Studio tinkering and his own lack of familiarity with the discipline of screenwriting blunted the impact of Nabokov's script, and the whole thing, overall, comes across as one of those noble experiments that you want to like a lot more than you really do — not that it's a bad film by any means, but to call it, as some critics do, a great one is to force yourself to overlook a lot of its flaws. If Lyne's movie succeeded more on its own terms, that's only because no one expected anything out of it in the first place. It's certainly not a great film either, and not even as good a film as Kubrick's, but it didn't have the same high expectations as did a movie with Kubrick and Nabokov's names attached. Lyne wasn't lucky enough to snare Vlad as his writer, the novelist having passed away some twenty years prior, so he mistakenly assumed that if you can't get the guy who wrote Pale Fire, get the guy who wrote The Deep End of the Ocean. He also cast the merely competent Frank Langella in the role previously occupied by the resplendent Peter Sellers, and made the mistake of asking Melanie Griffith to portray a human being, something she has always had trouble with.

DID THEY SUCCEED?: Probably no version of Lolita is ever going to fully succeed; if Vladimir Nabokov himself couldn't pull it off, what chance does Adrian Lyne have? The transcendent value of the novel lies first and foremost in its rich, beautiful use of language, and second in its detailed and subtle crafting of irony; the former comes across on the screen not at all, and the latter, often, quite poorly. Lolita is a book that everyone is always constantly rushing to misinterpret, and looking at the production history of both films, that was clearly the case here; it didn't help much that, in the case of the 1997 version, the foremost misinterpreter of the book was director Adrian Lyne. He not only brought his trashy erotic-thriller sensibilities to a story that didn't need them, but he also seemed to completely miss the point of how funny Lolita is. Whether brought on by his own self-seriousness or a misguided sense of respect for the source material, that's a fatal mistake, and whatever its other flaws, it's not one that Kubrick's 1962 version made. It seems impossible that some future director will gather the courage and resources to take another crack at Lolita and avoid the pitfalls of the previous two versions, but as unlikely as it might be to think that someone will film a third version of the book, who would have ever predicted someone would film it the first time?

No, But I've Read The Movie: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange. The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death.

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment: the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before. Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words." A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.

WHAT IT HAD: A truly visionary director — one of the greatest of all time — who could not have been more perfectly suited to bring to the screen the bleak, cold, stylized dystopian London of Burgess' novel. A script that, while it may have lacked the writerly approach to language and truth that permeated Burgess' source material, at least remained surprisingly faithful to its story and made a largely successful attempt to bring the 'Nadsat' slang used by the droogs in the novel to the big screen. A hypnotically compelling lead performance by a young and terrifyingly believable Malcolm McDowell. A brilliant soundtrack by Wendy Carlos that matched the mood and tone of the film to an uncanny degree. A handful of some of the most memorable scenes ever put to celluloid in a science fiction film.

WHAT IT LACKED: A man at the helm who possessed the same deep and abiding sense of linguistic play as the author of the book. A director whose ability to write a script was as sure-handed as his ability to frame a shot. A strong secondary cast. A sense of political commitment and philosophical heft as deep as its source material. An ability to easily distinguish between violence presented to shock and violence presented to titillate, and a willingness to make the viewer care about the difference. A true satirist's moral center, and a true storyteller's ability to put ambiguity in service of the truth. A reluctance to go out on a sour note that felt exploitative. The final chapter, which did so much to make sense of the book, but which, when left out, leaves behind a somewhat incoherent film.

DID IT SUCCEED?: It succeeded hugely on its own terms, but what terms were those? Kubrick's specialty was subtlety of emotion, not subtlety of intent; he was a visual filmmaker, not a philosophical one, and a story as deeply philosophical as A Clockwork Orange was done something of a disservice by being placed in his hands, no matter how stunning the film is to look at and how long its best-known setpieces stay with you. Kubrick's determination to provoke provides them movie with some of its finest moments and some of its worst; and while the movie is not without its ambiguity, it sacrifices profundity for power, which is not always an acceptable tradeoff. However, it does what it sets out to do so spectacularly that it's almost churlish to note that Burgess' fears about the filmed version of his novel came very precisely true.

Video of the Day: "Lolita" Screen Test

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:45:00 GMT

When Adrian Lyne's 1997 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's notorious novel Lolita hit theaters, most of the press attention it received focused on the fact that Lyne, striving for a certain literary verisimilitude, actually cast the then-fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain in the title role rather than handing it to an actress of legal age pretending to be fifteen. It was such a bold, controversial move that it took a lot of people a good long while to notice that, verisimilitude aside, the movie wasn't actually very good, and the hotly debated love scenes between Swain and a decrepit Jeremy Irons were less noteworthy than was some abominable casting decisions (a bored Frank Langella as Clare Quilty and Melanie Griffith in way over her head as Charlotte Haze) and a muddled script. However, this early read-through of said script is worth a peek, if only because, thanks to its cheap, loose video quality and 'your next-door-neighbor's basement' mise-en-scene, it actually comes across as a lot more provocative than the movie itself. (Side note to Screengrab readers who wish to avoid termination and/or imprisonment: do not, under any circumstance, Google "lolita screen test". I am a professional.)