The Screengrab : m. night shyamalan

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

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

Bruce Willis in THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

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

Johnny Depp in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

Slim Pickens in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. K-PAX (2001)

K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it dares to teach us that all mentally ill people can be Magical Negroes if they try. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it makes one pine for the relatively wise and somber tones of Patch Adams. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because its twinkly-winky score underlines every single emotion onscreen, which are themselves shaded in primary colors and writ large enough for a pre-schooler to grasp. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because Kevin Spacey approaches his mentally ill/spaceman character as if the ideal mentally ill spaceman is part-Jack Nicholson and part-Bono, basically a smirk in shades. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because supporting characters are constantly telling the audience how awesome Keven Spacey’s mentally ill spaceman is. In truth, any one of these reasons is enough to make K-Pax a bad movie, but the real problem with K-Pax is that it insists that the audience swallow all of this Hallmark-lite hokum when it knows that it’s heading towards a broad Christ metaphor that even Kirk Cameron would shy away from. This movie is the strongest cinematic argument ever made for involuntary lobotomies.

2. FORREST GUMP (1994)

I never intended to see this movie. But I was staying with a friend who insisted that I had to see it now now now because it would change my life. Maybe it did. I swore that as God was my witness, I would never sit through Forrest Gump again. And I’ve kept that promise. Like the title character, I grew up in Alabama. Being from there means that I tend to detest movies set in Alabama, which are all about the oh-so-colorful hicks who live there with their strange okra-eating ways, and usually star people who seem to have learned everything they know about Southern accents by watching Hee Haw reruns (as Hal Crowther once wrote, can you imagine seeing the tables turned with a movie set in New York where the cast was full of genuine rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi mimicking Howard Cosell?). But the setting is just the surface gloss of this movie's bone-deep stupidity. From what I understand, Winston Groom’s novel is a rather clever satire of the late 20th century, but I have never read it. The movie is the opposite of satire, a picaresque story designed to tug and strain at heartstrings, to make grown men weep and ladies quiver with its story of the extraordinary man-child Forrest Gump. But underneath all that gooey Lifetime Movie stuff, the message is that idiots deserve your respect. Idiots make history happen. Idiots stick to their core principles and blindly charge forward, damn the facts, and are blessed by the god of their choice. Did the makers of this film never read Of Mice And Men? Idiots destroy the things they are supposed to protect. Forrest Gump negates that story, and dares to tell the audience that idiots are born leaders. Perhaps it's needless to say, but this movie is directly responsible for the eight long years of the Bush Administration. Whenever you hear the words "mission accomplished" from an official source, you should know that they're really saying "stupid is as stupid does." The success of Bill Kristol makes a lot more sense if you imagine him droning on about how life is like a box of chocolates.

3. MOULIN ROUGE (2001)

Combining all the fun of epilepsy with all the subtlety of musical theater, Moulin Rouge was like a romance novel written by high-fructose corn syrup. I'm pretty sure that this movie gave me inoperable cancer. Of the soul. I know that there's people out there who like it, but I cannot imagine why. Among its sins are bad editing, terrible acting, actors singing the ubiquitous hits of any generic Clear Channel radio station, an eyescaldingly hideous color scheme, and a plot that would embarrass Danielle Steele. The only redeeming thing about it is that it should make it clear to all the homophobes out there that homosexuality cannot be passed around like a virus, because if it were, this movie would be Patient Zero for the Campy Queer Flu.

4. SIGNS (2002)

Are there words in the English language more terrifying than “Written, Produced and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan”? Signs is about aliens who come to Earth to help Mel Gibson recover his faith in God. Signs is also about helping Mel to understand his wife’s dying words, in which she somehow predicted that hostile aliens would invade a planet which is more than 70 percent covered in liquid death and presciently knew that Mel's baseball-loving brother could save her child with a well-swung bat. Signs is also about how brilliant alien invaders who can build spaceships and disrupt electrical signals and stuff like that might decide that the best way to begin their invasion is by invading a child’s birthday party in Brazil, irritating a farmer's dog, or hiding in a pantry. Hoo boy. Too bad these aliens couldn't take the obvious route of replacing everyone around Mel with pod people. Or bursting out of his stomach at a family dinner. That would have been quite the twist!

5. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)

Oh, it’s sooooo deep. Those people will do anything for fame! I realize Oliver Stone thinks he’s being all clever about the MTV generation, but this is a movie devoid of ideas desperately trying to pass itself off as a smart film. It's like The Honeymoon Killers remade by MTV Cribs, only less so. I think that the makers of this movie would say that overexposure to the media makes people crazy and amoral, but that doesn't explain why they fought lawsuits blaming this movie for copycat murders by overexposed fans. They're trying to have it both ways: trying to say that the movie is against the violence it portrays, even as the whole point of the movie is the glorification of that violence. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original script, has allegedly disowned the movie, and it's clear why. Tarantino may not be the deepest filmmaker - a lot of his clever flourishes don't have a whole lot of thought behind them - but he has a great eye and a working brain and he understands that satire has a point. All of Tarantino's films have cold-blooded killers in them, and all of them ask for you to sympathize with a killer, one way or another. Tarantino doesn't feel a need to explain how these killers got to be that way, nor does he bludgeon the viewer with faux-irony about how society views these killers, especially not while producing his trademark extremely-stylized violence. But Stone, on the other hand, doesn't know how he feels about his killers. His movie seems to be saying over and over again that they are awesome, and what's more, everyone in his movie (other than the victims, presumably) is a cold-blooded, amoral murderer. That's not satire. It's nihilism. Say what you will about the tenets of Quentin Tarantino, but at least he has an ethos.

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs

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

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The fact that Roger Ebert gave the latest Nicolas Cage vehicle Knowing a four-star review is not all that surprising. It’s not like he’s ever held his top rating in reserve for the Chinatowns and Godfathers of cinema; recent four-star reviews include Watchmen, Lakewood Terrace and Oliver Stone’s W. In addition, Ebert has always been a big fan of a previous effort from Knowing director Alex Proyas, Dark City. What’s a little more surprising and unusual is Ebert’s follow-up, published two days after his initial review, in which he expresses astonishment at the overwhelmingly negative critical reception the movie has received.

“Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.” That’s the first sentence of Ebert’s review. Those of us who have not been overly impressed by Nicolas Cage’s career choices of the past decade or so already have reason to be skeptical. “With expert and confident storytelling, Proyas strings together events that keep tension at a high pitch all through the film,” Ebert continues. “Even a few quiet, human moments have something coiling beneath. Pluck this movie, and it vibrates. Even something we've seen countless times, like a car pursuit, works here because of the meaning of the pursuit, and the high stakes.”

It didn’t take long for Ebert to discover that his enthusiasm was not universally shared amongst his critical brethren. “Either I'm wrong or most of the movie critics in America are mistaken,” Ebert writes in his follow-up article. “This is astonishing. Let's suppose I was completely wrong. Even if I was how bad could the possibly movie be? Half as good as the slasher film Shuttle? A third as good as Last House on the Left?” Ebert does understand how many of us feel about Cage these days. “Some readers said they avoid his movies on principle. Many found him guilty of over-acting. A critic was quoted who referred to his ‘fright wig,’ which is just mean-spirited snark.”

Ebert also says critics had problems with the Biblical parallels in this end-of-the-world thriller. I have to confess I haven’t found the time in my schedule to squeeze in a viewing of Knowing myself, but let’s see what a few of our leading luminaries had to say. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly calls the movie “so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times notes: “If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it’s probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles.” Says Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, “It's a Nicolas Cage movie, so, admit it, you're expecting crazy. You have no idea.”

Ebert isn’t completely alone, though. Todd McCarthy of Variety calls Knowing a “not-bad supernatural-tinged sci-fier that has more on its mind than the run-of-the-mill effects-driven extravaganza.” What say you, Screengrab readers? The movie topped the box office this weekend, so surely somebody has seen it. Let us know what you thought in the comments.

Related:
Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down
Abel Ferrera Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Film Threat Unveils Frigid 50 of 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

As we enter the final weeks of 2008, there can be no doubt that the season of listing is upon us. Exhibit A is today’s unveiling of the 2008 edition of Film Threat’s annual hatchet job, The Frigid 50: The Coldest People in Hollywood. (As a former Threat-er myself, I mean “hatchet job” in the most loving way, of course.) “Unlike those other lists that brown-nose their way into some pampered celebrity's good graces, the Frigid 50 is a written declaration of who or what in Hollywood needs a reality check, detailing the least-powerful, least-inspiring, least-intriguing people in all of Tinseltown. Before a career is over (or in some cases, immediately after), it finds itself sitting in Frigid 50 territory.”

So who made the cut this year? Hit the jump for a few choice selections.

Some of FT’s calls are fairly obvious. For instance, M. Night Shyamalan earns a berth for continuing “to burn audiences with arty, overly indulgent films that fail to entertain, let alone intrigue or frighten. The Happening was supposed to be his artistic comeback, but it was his worst movie to date (and no one thought it could get worse than The Village)." No one can be surprised to see perennial punching bags like Mike Meyers or Nicholas Cage on the list.

There are a few surprises, however. For instance, number ten is “You.” “You made Beverly Hills Chihuahua #1 for two weeks. You’re the reason we have to be frisked when we go to a movie to make sure we're not smuggling in cameras. You bring toddlers to a 10pm screening of The Hills Have Eyes. You show up late to the movie, then loudly ask questions about shit you missed because you couldn’t be bothered to leave the house five minutes early.” Wait, that was you? I have to agree, you are a real pain in the ass.

The real surprise to me – given that Film Threat founder Chris Gore has always been such a huge Star Wars fan, he found a way to write about it in the introduction to my book Hick Flicks – is number two. “We remember when it was actually ‘cool’ to wear a Star Wars t-shirt and ‘uncool’ to glue on Vulcan ears. How the times have changed. Let’s face it, Star Wars is dead. The reasons for the demise of Star Wars may be numerous, but it really comes down to three prequel films that are not only awful in retrospect, they make the original three look worse knowing the full back story. It doesn’t help that George Lucas and company continue to deliver things the fans never really asked for or don’t care about.” I for one welcome this new age of Star Wars hate.

As for the number one selection…well, it’s bound to be controversial. Check it out for yourself.

Related:
M. Night Shyamalan Straight Up, Hold the Twist
Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip the Clone Wars

Screengrab 2008 Summer Movie Season Prediction Results!

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Way back on May 1, yours truly and fellow Screengrabbers Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce and Scott Von Doviak made our predictions about the Top 5 Hits and the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2008. Now, with Labor Day Weekend in our rear-view mirror, I’ve compared our predictions with the box office results and industry perceptions of the past summer season to see how we did (and which one of us has the brightest future as a Hollywood Suit in charge of picking the production slate for Summer ’09)!

But before I get to the results, I should mention that I didn’t calculate based on grosses alone, since industry expectations and the initial (estimated) cost of a film’s production and marketing factor into whether any individual project is generally considered to be a success or a stinker.

That said, our overall batting average was pretty good when it came to picking hits. Four of our consensus picks for the successes of Summer ‘09 turned out to be unqualified hits: The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda. However, our fifth consensus pick, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is a bit of a sticky wicket. On the one hand, the fantasy flick is the 7th most successful flick of 2008 thus far (according to Wikipedia, anyway), with a theatrical gross of nearly half a billion dollars. On the other hand, it “only” grossed $141-ish million in its domestic run, and generally fell below expectations raised by the Red State driven success of its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.

So, giving half points to Caspian, Screengrab went 4.5 out of 5 on hit prediction, which ain’t so stanky.

On the other hand, our bomb predictions more or less blew up in our collective face. Oh, sure...most of us could smell The Love Guru and Speed Racer stinkin' up the cineplexes from a mile away, and both films were, in fact, Hindenburgian box office disasters. (Oh, the humanity!)

But our third prediction, The Incredible Hulk, somehow rode the summer superhero wave to a respectable (if not sensational) gross, and our fourth pick, The Happening, while yet another disappointment for M. Night Shyamalan, at least managed to improve on the box office of the writer/director’s previous effort (Lady In The Water) and, thanks to a (relatively) low budget, failed to produce quite as big a crater as expected.

And, like most of Hollywood’s own testosterone-fueled prognosticators, we got caught with our pants down on our fifth pick: Sex and The City, which (like Mama Mia!) flooded America’s theaters with a tidal wave of estrogen, reminding the Suits that if you build good projects for women, they will come.

Thus, we essentially got three out of five of our bomb predictions right, for an overall batting average at LEAST as respectable as any four studio execs making double (triple? quadruple?) our salaries at Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, etc.

As for our individual scores, I’ve included our original predictions below, annotated to indicate whether the films in question turned out to be unqualified hits (H) or bombs (B). Films that had respectable box office without quite qualifying as full-scale hits (for one reason or another) are identified with an (R), while disappointments that didn’t leave full-scale bomb craters are marked with a (D). And Hellboy II: the Golden Army is a push, since it didn’t exactly light up the box office, but still did better than 2004’s Hellboy.

HIT PREDICTIONS:

Leonard Pierce

1. The Dark Knight (H)

2. Kung Fu Panda (H)

3. Speed Racer (B)

4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (R)

5. What Happens In Vegas (R)

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Dark Knight (H)

2. Iron Man (H)

3. Hancock (R)

4. Prince Caspian (R)

5. Indiana Jones (H)

Paul Clark

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (H)

2. Hancock (R)

3. The Dark Knight (H)

4. Wall*E (H)

5. Iron Man (H)

Andrew Osborne

1. Indiana Jones (H)

2. The Dark Knight (H)

3. Prince Caspian (R)

4. Pineapple Express (R)

5. American Teen (D)

BOMB PREDICTIONS:

Leonard Pierce

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (H)

2. The Incredible Hulk (R)

3. Hancock (R)

4. Get Smart (R)

5. Sex and the City (H)

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Happening (D)

2. Sex and the City (H)

3. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (R)

4. The Love Guru (B)

5. The Incredible Hulk (R)

Paul Clark

1. Speed Racer (B)

2. The Incredible Hulk (R)

3. The Love Guru (B)

4. Get Smart (R)

5. Wanted (R)/Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Push)

Andrew Osborne

1. The Love Guru

2. The Incredible Hulk (R)

3. Speed Racer (B)

4. Wall*E (H)

5. Hancock (R)

Thus, after totaling our individual scores (with a secret Price-Waterhousian formula too arcane to explain at length), it seems PAUL CLARK is Screengrab’s reigning Chief Prognosticator, with the most accurate Hit AND Miss predictions for Summer ’08.

(Please send any and all cushy studio job offers to Mr. Clark, care of Screengrab@Nerve.com.)

Video of the Day: Hitchcock in Hitchcock

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Strange as it may seem, Brian De Palma is not the most slavish imitator of Alfred Hitchcock in the movie business today. That title now belongs to M. Night Shyamalan, who has long since proved that anything Hitchcock could do, he could do bigger -- and worse. His twist endings are more predictable and disappointing; his plots are more pulpish and implausible; his thrills are sparser and fewer between; and even his cameos are more pompous and alienating than Hitch could ever have dreamed. Of course, where Hitchcock could never hope to equal Shyamalan's groundbreaking work in his own movies of annoying and distracting the viewer, what he lacked in chutzpah, he compensated for in sheer volume. Hitch appeared in some two dozen of his own films, including these 14 from the Hitchcock Collection DVD set.

Too bad this one doesn't contain Hitchcock's cleverly carried off cameo in Lifeboat. M. Night Shyamalan may be an egomaniac, but even he's not ballsy enough to give himself a cameo in a movie entirely set in a damaged life raft floating aimlessly around the Atlantic Ocean.

Unwatchable #75: “The Last Sign”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:00:00 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.

We are now one-quarter of the way through our mind-and-butt-numbing journey up the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list, a quest every bit as fraught with peril as the one Martin Sheen endured in Apocalypse Now. (It remains to be seen whether Marlon Brando is waiting at the end.) According to my rough calculations, this means we still have three quarters of the list to get through – a prospect that would bring many a cinephile to his knees, sobbing and begging for mercy. As always, I must simply remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I can only play the game on the schedule in front of me. In this case, that game is The Last Sign, a 2005 supernatural thriller starring Andie MacDowell.

I’m immediately suspicious of any movie that opens with a shitload of logos for companies I’ve never heard of. This makes me think what I’m about to watch is more of a tax shelter than a motion picture. The Last Sign is evidently some sort of international co-production; in any case, there are a bunch of guys named Claude in the opening credits. Perhaps it’s irrational to develop a bad impression on such flimsy evidence, but there are no rules to Unwatchable. For instance, I could also point out that the title The Last Sign is as meaningless as it is forgettable. Or I could mention that Andie MacDowell plays some sort of scientist in this film, a scenario that requires more suspension of disbelief than I am usually willing to suspend. Still, a good movie could overcome these objections. This one does not.

MacDowell is Kathy Macfarlane, a widow and single parent struggling to remain financially solvent after the death of her abusive husband Jeremy (Tim Roth), a doctor who developed a drinking problem while on a mission in Africa. To that end, she reluctantly takes in a guest house tenant, ze zhexy Frenchman Marc (Samuel Le Bihan). But is there more to this boarder than his wooden personality and tendency to walk around shirtless? MacDowell is receiving mysterious phone calls every night at 12:15 a.m. At first she suspects Marc, but then she encounters a former patient of Jeremy’s who insists that her late husband is trying to get in touch with her. A creepy co-worker of McDowell’s, Endora (an expertly cast Margot Kidder), agrees. And when MacDowell starts seeing ghostly visions of Jeremy all around town, it appears we’re in for an M. Night Shyamalan knockoff – particular given the stilted dialogue and delivery that has become as much a Night signature as the big plot twist. (It’s not clear whether director Douglas Law has instructed his actors to speak in a lobotomized monotone for a purpose, or if it’s just because English isn’t his first language.)

Just as I was preparing myself for a dopey twist, it became apparent that The Last Sign had more in common with a Lifetime movie of the week than The Sixth Sense. It seems that Jeremy is only seeking forgiveness for his drunken crapulence from beyond the grave, and once he’s received that, McDowell is free to boff the hunky Frenchman in the guest house. At this point, I realized I was actually disappointed that The Last Sign had deprived me of the preposterous and insulting twist ending that would have propelled it into the ranks of the truly rank. The movie certainly earns its status as forgettable straight-to-video fodder, but it falls well short of a deserving spot on the Bottom 100.

Previously on Unwatchable:
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead
79. Anus Magillicutty
80. The Smokers

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 14-20, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

It’s time to hit the ol’ fishin’ hole (wink-wink), but before we go, let’s bask in the glory that was the week in Screengrab.

We’ve outdone ourselves with this week’s Top Ten list. To be specific, we’ve outdone ourselves by ten with the Gay Pride Top Twenty.

We may go back to Summer School, but First Sunday will be our last.

Don’t mess with the Norton. He’ll Hulk you! He’ll Hulk the shit out of you!

So was that Shyamalan guy ever any good? A look back at The Sixth Sense.

Stan Winston and Cyd Charisse are still dead.

We’re about ready to let Roman Polanski back in the country, how about you?

If you’re offended by the South Park soundtrack, we suggest you blame Canada.

Hey, Mike Myers! People sure don’t like your new movie much – aside from Deepak Chopra, of course. Perhaps you should have read Take Five: Gotta Get a Guru first.

We didn’t read the alleged Frank Darabont draft of Indiana Jones, but we posted about it anyway.

And finally, those two words that strike fear into the hearts of all right-thinking Americans: It’s Pat.

Raiders of the Leaked Frank Darabont Screenplay

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Somewhere in the crush of publicity for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you might have heard that an early version of Indy 4 was scripted by that master of the Stephen King prison movie, Frank Darabont. Among the people who spoke highly of the Darabont script was…Frank Darabont, who made it clear while doing publicity for The Mist over a year ago that he wouldn’t be sending George Lucas any congratulatory bouquets. “I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn't like the script,” Darabont told MTV. “I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You have a fantastic script. I think you're insane, George.’ You can say things like that to George, and he doesn't even blink. He's one of the most stubborn men I know.” When asked if he’d like to share his version of Indy with the world, Darabont replied, “I would love it, but it's not my material to disseminate.”

Apparently, someone disseminated it, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Last week a PDF document purporting to be Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods by Frank Darabont surfaced online. Lawyers torpedoed it before we could get our hands on it, and although it’s probably still easy enough to track down, we’re slow readers anyway. So we thought we’d take a spin around the Indysphere and see if there’s any consensus about this alleged artifact.

The first thing that’s apparent: No LaBeouf. That’s right, the character of “Mutt” is entirely absent from City of the Gods. Again, per MTV: “No Mutt Williams; no Mac; a tougher, more Raiders-esque Marion; and a climax that not only gives Indy something to do (how in the world did David Koepp think to give Indy nothing?) but forces him to make a decision that rivals the end of Crusade (the cup or a father's love?), crystallizing the character and his history into one momentous singularity.” And here we thought One Momentous Singularity was the new James Bond movie.

According to the Feed, “the script is largely the same, storywise, focusing on the discovery of the crystal skull, as well as the lost city in Peru where the Gods were thought to live, only to discover that these "gods" were aliens with a culture advanced thousands of years beyond our own. Also, Marion Ravenwood is in the script…and, to my surprise, the ‘nuking the fridge’ sequence and the giant ants are there, as well. However, also in this script are Dr. Henry Jones, Sr. and Sallah, making awesome cameo appearances that really help cement the whole history of Indiana Jones, and tie the whole saga together.”

Of course, Darabont was not the only big name scribe to take a whack at Indy. Again we turn to MTV, where M. Night Shyamalan was queried about his involvement in shaping the story of the fourth installment. “I was just gathering information at that point from all the deities,” Shyamalan said, referring to Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, [Frank] Marshall, and George Lucas. “I haven’t seen the new one yet. I can’t wait… I understand there are a few things we all talked about that are there.” I’m going to be generous and assume Night came up with the quicksand.

Related:
Screengrab Rant: Indiana Jones in 2008
Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Hollywood Accountants

What’s “Happening,” Zooey Deschanel?

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Even as a Zooey Deschanel enthusiast – that is, someone who not only owns her delightful album She & Him but also sat through her lame SciFi Channel miniseries Tin Man, in which she was kind of terrible – I’m having trouble working up any interest in seeing her in The Happening. But I’m happy to read any interviews with her on the subject, just in case she has any goofy observations about M. Night Shyamalan to offer.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t have much dirt to dish in this chat with Premiere. “I love his movies,” she says of the man called Night. “I think he's really, really talented… I think he just keeps it close, you know. And for good reason, because I think people are too curious sometimes, like they want to read the script before the movie comes out… I'm sure that feels like someone's trying to take something away from you when you're trying to entertain people and everyone's just trying to undermine the entertainment.”

As for accusations that her Happening character is ditzy – which, to be fair, is a word that comes to mind to describe more than one of her roles – Deschanel says, “If it came off that way, I think there was some subconscious way I was nudging the character, obviously, that brought it to that. I wouldn't describe her as ditzy; I think she is extremely neurotic, which maybe can come off [as ditzy] — you know, some people might describe it as ditzy, but she's neurotic and she's nervous and she's dealing with a situation that's beyond her understanding. Because even well-informed people wouldn't know how to respond to the situation.”

Of course, she has to be purposefully vague about what that situation is, as is the Shyamalan way. The Happening may be Deschanel’s first true blockbuster role, but don’t look for her to become an action hero any time soon. “It was tiring. It was a lot of running. I hurt my leg towards the end, which I didn't want to tell anybody about. I was sort of like, pretending like it didn't happen. But then the last day I was limping and Night was like, ‘What's wrong with you?!’ and I was like, ‘I can't walk!’ He was like, ‘Stop limping! What's wrong with you?’ I'm like, ‘I pulled a muscle!’ But yeah, it was a lot of running.”

Related:
And Now a Little Something for the Zooey Deschanel Enthusiasts
M. Night Shyamalan Straight Up, Hold the Twist

M. Night Shyamalan Straight Up, Hold the Twist

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

We’ve already gone on record with our Screengrab prediction that M. Night Shyamalan’s latest opus The Happening will be one of the five biggest bombs of the summer, even going so far as to suggest that the next Hitchcock has instead become the new Ed Wood. But in an interview with the New York Times, Shyamalan tries to make the case that’s he misunderstood – he’s not just “the guy who makes the scary movies with a twist.”

Some experts feel it doesn’t matter who he is – that unless the name above the title is Steven Spielberg, audiences don’t really care who directed the movie. “It never really worked,” argues David Weitzner, the former head of worldwide marketing for Universal and an adjunct professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. “It’s pomposity on the part of studios to think that the public is going to respond to an advertising message that says to see the film because it’s from the director of another film. It’s stupid and to some degree, it’s fueled by ego.”

Ego is something that has gotten in Shyamalan’s way lately, particularly in the case of his last big screen effort The Lady in the Water. According to the Times, the director “committed the greatest sin of all — he criticized a meeting with Disney studio executives, Nina Jacobson, Dick Cook and Oren Aviv, in a book by Michael Bamberger, The Man Who Heard Voices. In the book, which received a huge amount of press, Mr. Shyamalan accused Ms. Jacobson of not giving his Lady in the Water script ‘a truthful reading” and said that he thought that it had been rejected because Disney 'no longer valued individualism.’…The Hollywood establishment was outraged by the book and Mr. Shyamalan’s public recitation of what are considered very private matters.”

Lady in the Water didn’t make much of a splash (sorry), maybe because it was a departure from Shyamalan’s string of “scary movies with a twist,” or maybe just because it was so damn silly. Whatever the case, he’s back in creepy thriller territory with The Happening, his first R-rated picture, and he still thinks his name is a viable brand. “The problem is the assumption that if I am selling the movie — because I’m selling me — that I’m being egotistical. If Will Smith did the same thing, it would be perceived very differently,” he said. “You’re supposed to be hidden if you’re a director. That’s a rule that who said in the movie business?” If The Happening flops, maybe he'll find out.

Related:
Trailer Review: The Happening
The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Turning the Anime of the Past into the Bad Movies of Tomorrow

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Scott Bowles reports that the opening of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer may herald an exciting new wave in rehashed entertainment: already, Hollywood is snatching up the rights to anime properties, just in case that Iron Man opening weekend was a fluke and the bottom is about to fall out of the superhero market. On the horizon: Hollywoodized versions of Akira and Ghost in the Shell (that last one to be directed by Steven Spielberg) and M. Night Shyamalan's movie adaptation of the anime-style Nickelodeon series The Last Airbender. Anime itself has been a cult object in the U.S. going back some fifteen to twenty years (back when we used to call it "Japanimation" around the college dorm, on the occasions when we'd been away from out bongs long enough to approach words of more than three syllables), but unless you count the Pokemon films, it's never really crossed into the major markets. As Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network puts it, "Generation X is very familiar with anime. But if you're not in that age group, there may be a learning curve."

That which Hollywood cannot make a buck on in its pure form, it will attempt to absorb and recreate in its own image. The Wachowskis may well placed to wield the hammer in forging a live-action/CGI anime hybrid because they're already understood to speak the fans' language. Based on the influences shown in The Matrix, they're recognized as fellow "fanboys" who have an investment in the genres they play around with rather than vultures trying to cash in. ("You know they still play Dungeons and Dragons?" says Speed Racer star Cristina Ricci, with what I hope is a touch of awe in her voice. "You'll be sitting around on set, listening to them go on and on about why they hate the concept of time travel.") In the words of their erstwhile producer Joel Silver, "They aren't smirking when they made this." That might not be the best news in the world; it wasn't exactly a lack of self-seriousness that brought the Matrix sequels crashing down to Earth. One hopes that the brothers have regained a sense of playfulness along with their way-cool "computer world" of this film. ("It was a little like living in the Matrix." says star Emile Hirsch. For some of us old farts, reading lines like these is a little like re-living the publicity campaign for TRON.) If Speed Racer crashes badly enough to chill Hollywood's interest in anime, where will the suits turn instead? Movies based on breakfast cereal box tops? Mentos commercials? Maybe I shouldn't have taken the blue pill...

Tina Fey is My Baby Mama

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Your Entertainment Weekly cover gal is Tina Fey, and why not? Not only is she riding high on television with 30 Rock, for which she won a Golden Globe, but she has some new movie product to promote. It’s Baby Mama, of course, and it’s about as high concept as it gets: upscale but infertile Fey hires white trash Amy Poehler to have her baby for her. ''I liked the topicality of the fertility issues that affect so many people,'' says Fey. ''There's so much weirdness and emotion about it. If you start with something juicy, you end up with a better [movie] than if you just start with some jokes. And Amy liked that it did not have anything to do with a goddamn wedding.'' Well, there is that to be thankful for.

Not that Fey is entirely comfortable on the A-list yet, as we learn when “she recounts her near run-in with director M. Night Shyamalan at the studio; Fey chose not to introduce herself, because she wasn't sure it was him until after he left (‘I thought it'd be racist to go up to the wrong Indian guy and ask if he was M. Night Shyamalan'’).”

There’s a lot of talk in the EW piece about how much heart the movie has and how that might translate to box office success, but we don’t care about any of that. We’re more interested in the time she called one-time SNL host Paris Hilton a “piece of shit” on The Howard Stern Show. ''I should really strive to have better manners about those things,'' says Fey. ''Pretty soon my kid's going to understand what I'm saying and be able to access it on the computer. I screwed up something a few months ago and I was like, 'You know who wouldn't do that? Tom Hanks. You know who would keep his mouth shut? Tom Hanks. I should try to be like Tom Hanks.'''

The Baby Mama website offers a clever little gimmick, if little else: it’s the Baby Mama Maker! Upload photos of any two faces and the software will reveal what your offspring will look like. I tried it using photos of myself and Tina Fey, and here, as a Screengrab exclusive, is our baby, Apple! Isn’t she adorable?