The Screengrab : matt stone

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It’s a little risky looking forward at an entire upcoming year’s worth of releases and cherry-picking the promising-looking ones. It’s not just that many of the movies that are currently slated to come out within the next 12 months might get pushed back or shuttered altogether. It’s also the fact that as good as some movies might look on paper with their high-profile casts and extravagant budgets, they could very well end up awful. Just ask the makers of Town and Country.

That said, here (using the ever-popular “3 Up, 3 Down” format) are a handful of my most anticipated movies of 2009, along with three I’m dreading, and one wild card:

3 Up:

The Tree of Life

Marking the filmmaker’s quickest turnaround to date, Terrence Malick latest film comes a scant four years after his 2005 masterpiece The New World. That Malick has apparently decided to keep making movies is worth celebrating by itself, but that he’s finally getting around to his supposed “dream project” (which he’s allegedly been tinkering with for three decades now) is the stuff of Malick-fanboy fantasies.

Inglourious Basterds

Speaking of fanboy fantasies, it looks like Quentin Tarantino’s long-discussed World War II actioner is for real. Word from those who’ve read the script is that Basterds (Tarantino’s spelling) is all kinds of wanky, but don’t forget that people said the same about Kill Bill and Thunder Bolt Death Proof, and those turned out just fine. Not even Eli Roth’s acting could scare me away from this.

Avatar

I toyed with several choices in this spot- including Pixar’s Up and Von Trier’s Antichrist- but in the end, I kept coming back to Jim Cameron’s state-of-the-arts space opera. It’s been twelve years since Cameron made his last fiction feature (nothing you’d have heard of), and I’m plenty curious to see the project that convinced him to come back. Say what you will about his movies- there’s no denying Cameron’s technical mastery and knack for cinematic grandeur, and I’m eager to see how he pushes the envelope again this time around.

3 Down:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Two summers ago, I hated Michael Bay’s Transformers, the movie that disproved my seemingly ironclad hypothesis that no movie that contains giant robot fights could ever be boring. After that movie’s massive box-office success, Hollywood has responded with a wave of big-screen toy/cartoon adaptations pitched to adults who really ought to know better (coming in 2012: The Jonas Brothers are Voltron!). Is there any chance this will actually be good? Don’t bet on it.

G-Force

You folks already know how I feel about this one. The only way this could’ve possibly been good would be if Robert Smigel or Trey Parker and Matt Stone were behind it, making it as bizarre as possible, but that’s not going to happen. Sorry, G-Force, but my flesh’n’fur cavies could take you all on without breaking a squeak, sassy celebrity voices or no.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Yet another sub-Sandler product from the Happy Madison crap factory. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, except that the title character’s name is too close to mine to ignore. I’m hoping this falls out of the public consciousness quickly so that I don’t have to worry about "Mall Cop" jokes for the next few years. Why couldn’t the character be “Paul Blart: Nuclear Physicist” or “Paul Blart: Vascular Surgeon?” How about “Paul Blart: World’s Greatest Film Critic?” Okay, maybe that’s pure fantasy, but I can dream, right?

Wild Card:

Sherlock Holmes

I was a fan of the Holmes series in my youth, so part of me is excited for this, not only for the cast (Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are inspired choices to play the newfangled Holmes and Watson), but also because the filmmakers are using the classic A Scandal in Bohemia story as their inspiration. So why isn’t this one of my most anticipated movies of 2009? Two words, folks- Guy Ritchie. Maybe he’ll be able to keep his tendencies toward visual noise and narrative incoherence in check this time, but if Ritchie screws the pooch on this seemingly foolproof project, I’m going to be seriously pissed.

Dead-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed: Dubya in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Slate offers a timely rundown, in the form of a video slide show by Elbert Ventura, on the ways in which George W. Bush has been represented in movies and TV lo these last eight eventful years. I'll admit that I needed reminded that the decision to cast Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W. probably hit Timothy Bottoms pretty hard. For a brief moment there in the early 1970s, his roles in such pictures as Johnny Got His Gun, The Last Picture Show, The Paper Chase, and The White Dawn made it seem as if Bottoms was Hollywood's favorite sweet, slightly boring hippie lead, but when the wave of counterculture films rolled back into the oceans of time, Bottoms's career began to resemble a beached whale that had been out in the sun for a few days. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker cast him in That's My Bush!, their short-lived parody sitcom that treated life at the White House as a string of broadly played shenanigans accompanied by a shrieking laugh track. The show, which had already begun development under the provisional title Everybody Loves Al before the Supreme Court announced that it was recasting the lead role, wasn't exactly long on precisely targeted political satire: in one memorable episode, wacky high jinks ensued after Laura overheard George talking about his desire to have the family cat put to sleep because of the animal's foul, unhealthy odor and assumed he was talking about the pungent aroma of her gynecological region. (Odd to think that in the course of more than 190 episodes, I Love Lucy never went there.) But Bottoms managed to spin his Bush impression off into a cameo in the Crocodile Hunter movie and then a dramatic starring role in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime cable TV movie that was produced and written by professional "Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd. It was a stroke of casting both obvious and very weird, sort of as if Tina Fey were to star in a celebratory feature-length biopic about Sarah Palin. Of course, the difference between Bottoms in 2003 and Tina Fey now is that Fey has other career options.

DC 9/11 was first broadcast four days short of the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In other words, at a point (four months after the "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln) when many Americans felt that the Iraq War was won and concluded, and just as the actual Bush was warming up his re-election campaign. It's a very pure propaganda movie, with Bottoms playing a resolute, on-top-of-things commander in chief who explicitly connects the case against Saddam Hussein to the need to protect the nation from terrorism and to avenge the lives lost on 9/11. It's a measure of the national mood at that time that the film didn't arouse much in the way of head-shaking or tongue-clucking in the mainstream media. But as it became clear that the war wasn't going to be one of those little problems that can be wrapped up in the course of one man's eight years in offices--not this man, anyway--and support for it began to plummet, it became less common to see Bush depicted onscreen as a one-man Mount Rushmore. But the funny thing is that, even as Bush began to be portrayed as stupid and inept and gutless, he continued to be portrayed as, well, kind of sympathetic. The original media cartoon of Bush, as captured in the campaign-diary documentary Journeys with George (co-directed by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra), was that he was a dopey but lovable regular guy, who might as well be given the country to run, since everyone knew it wasn't that hard. Then, after a brief interlude in which Bush was portrayed in the media as a down-home cross between George Washington and Nick Fury, the earlier stereotype was reinstated, with the new fillip that being lovably dumb didn't qualify run to be leader of the free world--but how can you blame such a nice guy for that?

When the nice but dumb Bush made his comeback, it was in such movies as the global-warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which the sweetly dense president (Perry King), looking lost and frightened, politely asks his Cheneyesque vice president if there's anything he should do in response to the end of the world. The scene is a stand-in for the Bush administration's original answer to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, a scene that Oliver Stone declined to stage: what the hell happened between the time Bush set down that copy of The Pet Goat and the time he next showed his face on TV. (The Day After Tomorrow actually kills the Bush stand-in off quick, the better to shift the blame for everything that's gone wrong to the Cheney figure, played by Kenneth Welsh--to you Twin Peaks, the actor who played Windom Earle, the serial psychopath who tied Major Briggs to an archery target and failed to closely examine the fine print on his contract regarding his capacity to ask visitors to the Black Lodge for their souls.) For even softer treatment of Bush, you can turn to such "satires" as American Dreamz and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which portray Dubya as a friendly middle-aged frat boy who is either ignorant of the effects of his own policies or too cowed by his own advisers to take a stand--at least until some righteous weed and male bonding has had its effect.

In W., Stone, too, treats him as basically a nice, well-meaning guy hobbled by his inability to overcome his daddy issues. (And for good measure, he has James Cromwell playing the dithering, unfeeling Bush, Senior as a noble, aristocratic Rudy Vallee type whose greatest crime is to tear up when Bill Clinton hands him his ass at the polls.) It will irritate many Bush haters to see him continue to evade responsibility like this. On the other hand, it may be a sign that however lingering the effects of his presidency will be, Bush's personal mark on history may be slight and transient. After all, the modern president who still looms largest in the national imagination may be Richard Nixon, who is also the one who has turned up in the most movies behaving like a cross between Dracula and a James Bond villain. For that matter, movies of the last eight years have done less to hold Bush responsible for the effects of his presidency than '90s movies like Primary Colors, Wag the Dog, and Absolute Power did to hold Bill Clinton to task just for his inability to keep it in his pants. As Elbert Ventura points out, the meanest version of Bush to turn up onscreen is probably the American president played by Billy Bob Thornton in Love, Actually, who bullies the British prime minister--Hugh Grant playing a fantasy of Tony Blair as a likable lonely guy--until the P.M. catches him hitting on his own object of romantic desire, at which point he hitches up his britches and marches to the nearest bank of microphones to stand up to the little toad. In other words, to get an unsympathetic version of George W. Bush into a movie, you have to jump to another continent and give him Bill Clinton's zipper problem.

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "W."

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS (1992 & 1995)

Even now, The Spirit of Christmas is funny as hell (and, uh, REALLY dirty...so if you haven’t been fired already, you might want to think twice before clicking the above clip at your workstation, unless of course you work in a Tourette’s ward). But way back in 1995, before Trey Parker and Matt Stone were famous, before South Park was a basic cable staple and before Stan, Kyle and Cartman were allowed to curse like cardboard cut-out sailors in their R-rated big-screen debut, this short (commissioned as a video Christmas card by a Fox TV exec who’d seen Parker and Stone’s college short “Jesus Vs. Frosty”) was a jaw-dropping revelation, a blend of comic provocation, pop culture geekery and relatable humanity that became the animators’ signature style when the cult popularity of their seemingly primitive debut catapulted them to infamy.

THE WRONG TROUSERS (1993)

One of the risks with animation is that the work it takes to create a finished film will bog down the story the film tells. But this has never been a problem for the films of Nick Park. With his beloved characters Wallace and Gromit, Park created some of animation’s most enduring films, which use a veddy British sense of humor to leaven some truly awe-inspiring flights of fancy. Nowhere is this more the case than in the second Wallace and Gromit adventure, The Wrong Trousers, which finds the dotty Wallace taking in a new boarder, with disastrous results. Armed with plenty of sound effects but only a single speaking role, Park tells his story almost completely through his images with a visual flair and storytelling efficiency that puts most features (animated or otherwise) to shame. The film even builds to an action-filled climax so assured that it reportedly inspired David O. Russell at one point when he was editing Three Kings. The Wrong Trousers demands multiple viewings -- not only because you might miss something the first time around, but also it’s hard to pay attention to Park’s bravura technique when you’re being so thoroughly entertained.

LUXO JR. (1986)

Other animation studios might make as much money as the geniuses at Pixar, but no American animation outlet can boast their critical cachet, a testament to the care with which they make their films and their ongoing quest to pursue new horizons. Even in their early days, Pixar was always experimenting, something that was in evidence as early as their second short film, Luxo Jr. Partly out of necessity, director John Lasseter and his team of animators didn’t use any of the cute animals that dominated the Disney model of animation, but rather a pair of everyday desk lamps. But while this decision was no doubt due to the fact that living creatures are much more difficult to animate via computer (a problem Pixar has long since resolved), Luxo Jr. nonetheless finds life in its inanimate protagonists. By finding possibilities for personality in the handful of possibilities presented by the lamps -- little more than a bulb, a swiveling head, a hinged arm and a base that hops around (complete with a power cord tail) -- Pixar established a knack for animating seemingly limited characters, something that would serve them well later on with such creations as Toy Story’s Mr. Potato Head, Monsters, Inc.’s Mike Wazowski, and even WALL*E and EVE. Pixar still cranks out a new animated short in conjunction with their features, but none they’ve made since has had the same level of charm as Luxo Jr.

NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN (1940)

Alas, not all old-school animation techniques have managed to survive. When husband-and-wife Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker created pin-screen animation- which involved manipulating a screen holding hundreds of thousands of pins and photographing the images a frame at a time- they couldn’t have known that their painstaking process would only end up being used on roughly half a dozen projects. But while pin-screen ended up requiring more work than most filmmakers were willing to give, it’s hard to argue with the results. In Alexeieff and Parker’s very first completed pin-screen short, Night on Bald Mountain, there’s a kind of expressiveness that can’t be found in any other form of animation, a smooth yet eerie sort of shadow play that, in the cast of this particular short, suits the material perfectly. It takes some searching to find Alexeieff and Parker’s other works (their best-known effort can be found at the opening of Orson Welles’ The Trial), but for fans of animation, it’s well worth the effort.

FAST FILM (2003)

Given the time required to make an animated film today, it’s understandable when animators use computers to aid them in their work. Still, it’s bracing to see an animator who attempts something impossibly ambitious without resorting to digital assistance. Perhaps the best recent example of this is Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film, a thirteen-minute piece from 2003 which integrated images from classic movies into an animated framework. Watching moments such as the one in which various movie-themed boxcars race down a track, it’s easy to think Widrich accomplished them with CGI. But think again- Widrich printed over 65,000 frames of film onto sheets of paper, folded the sheets into various three-dimensional objects to be placed into the image, and shot them in the proper frame order. Granted, after a while all the virtuosity on display here becomes a little overwhelming. But that seems a small price to pay for a work of such jaw-dropping ambition.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999)

Oh, sure, The Simpsons Movie was funny...but it wasn't South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny. It wasn't even "Marge vs. the Monorail"-era Simpsons funny. After ten years of writing, The Simpsons Movie seemed no better or worse than an above-average episode of the show drawn out to feature length. (And, aside from the "Spider-Pig" theme, where were the musical numbers?!?!) By way of comparison, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a chance to bring their consistently hilarious and subversive Comedy Central cartoon to the big screen, they pulled out all the stops: a full, Broadway/Guitar Hero-quality, Oscar-nominated musical score by future Tony-winner Marc Shaiman and Metallica frontman James Hetfield (!!!), a typically topical, economy-size blockbuster of a plot, some unobtrusively awesome voice cameos, impressively stepped-up animation and, most importantly, the swearing...oh, the wonderful, wonderful swearing, some of the most (literally) musical cursing in cinema history...and “Uncle Fucker” wasn’t even the funniest part. Or the most shocking: that came later, when I actually felt a rare burst of affection for Robin Williams during his good-natured, who’d-a-thunk-it performance of “Blame Canada” at the 72 Annual Academy Awards ceremony.

WAKING LIFE (2001)

In some ways, Richard Linklater's sixth feature played like a sequel to his first, Slacker. Like that seminal low-budget indie, Waking Life is largely plotless as it prowls the streets of Austin, Texas, encountering one talkative oddball or dime-store philosopher after another. It sure doesn't look anything like Slacker, though; while the former film aimed for street-level realism, Waking Life takes place in a dream state realized through an animation process developed by Bob Sabiston (and ripped off many times since). Using computer software, animators were able to draw on top of edited video footage. With each new scene, a different artist takes the reigns, resulting in a fluid, continually evolving picture. The images ebb and flow like ocean waves, which may be problematic for viewers susceptible to sea sickness, but will prove entrancing to those on Linklater's wavelength. (Honorable mention goes to Linklater's second foray into animation, A Scanner Darkly, which uses a similar process to very different effect in its depiction of a paranoid world just on the edge of our own reality.)

THE IRON GIANT (1999)

For a film that seems so completely seamless on screen, The Iron Giant has one of the most Frankensteinian origin stories of any of the movies on this list. It’s based on a children’s story by Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath, former poet laureate of England, and author of some of the most bloody, visceral poems of the 20th century. When it was first optioned as a film, it was meant to be a live-action musical, with music by no less than the Who’s Pete Townshend; although that never worked out, Townshend did produce a soundtrack for a stage show based on the story. Disney Studios engaged Warner Bros. in a bidding war, with Warner, on the winning side, finally handing the project off to Brad Bird – who, just a few years later, would be working with Disney anyway, on Pixar’s The Incredibles. On top of all that, it was originally envisioned as a completely traditional cel animation project, then reconceived as a film done in 3D computer animation – only to eventually arrive on screen as an amalgam of both, with the bulk of the film done in standard animation and the main character – a colossal alien machine who befriends a young boy while being sought by a paranoid government – done in CGI. The Iron Giant took years to make, and went through innumerable reconceptions, personnel changes, and battles between the filmmakers and the studio – which makes it all the more remarkable that it’s such a terrific piece of work. Charming, funny, and moving by turns, and featuring all of what would become known as director Brad Bird’s hallmarks, it’s a movie that couldn’t have been any better if it had come out of Pixar – which we mean as the highest possible compliment.
FANTASIA (1940)

With all the praise that’s been heaped on it over the last six decades, it’s easy to forget that Disney’s Fantasia could have been a disaster. Indeed, many critics predicted such a fate for it, and a few (including the notorious Irish author Flann O’Brien) held that opinion even after it was released and began piling up the accolades. Animation, then as now, was taken less than seriously as a film medium, and when Walt Disney announced that he would be releasing a film combining his studio’s unique, whimsical style of animation with some of the greatest works in the Western classical music canon, trepidation was widespread: those who loved the music feared it would be bastardized by the presence of cartoon characters, and those who loved the cartoons feared that Disney was overreaching by putting his work in the service of such highbrow affairs. And, to be truthful, the movie isn’t pure perfection; at times, it does come across as pretentious, and at other times, hopelessly middlebrow. But when it works – and the great wonder of Fantasia is that it works more than it doesn’t – it’s because the music is so perfectly matched with the material. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment is simply the finest Mickey Mouse cartoon ever made, and Leopold Stokowski’s interpretation of the musical accompaniment does it its proper service. The “Rite of Spring” passage is simply an inspiration, a clever conceit carried off without a single hitch, and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment, which could have become an overblown gasbag of a passage, instead plays perfectly well. Coming down to earth with playful humor whenever it threatens to become too self-impressed, Fantasia overcomes the culture clash at its heart to become one of the finest animated features of all time.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Isaac Hayes, 1942--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Isaac Hayes has died, at 65, at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. Hayes first came to prominence through his work at Memphis's legendary Stax studios, where, still in his early twenties, he became a keyboard player with the house band, worked as part of the production team, and developed a fruitful songwriting partnership with David Porter. The Porter-Hayes credit appeared on some two hundred compositions, including a raft of hits by the magnificent duo Sam and Dave, including "Soul Man", "I Thank You", "You Don't Know Like I Know", "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby", and "Hold On, I'm Comin'", whose title phrase is said to have been born when the hard-working Hayes was importuning Porter to return from the men's room. No ego as endearingly supersized as Hayes's could have been completely satisfied with working behind the scenes, and in 1967 he released his first solo album, the jazz-flavored Presenting Isaac Hayes. That was followed in 1969 by the unexpected blockbuster success of Hot Buttered Soul, which established Hayes's gruff bass voice, his habit of interjecting spoken-word interludes into his songs, his flamboyantly extended performances of such numbers as "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", and, through its cover art, the iconic impact of his big bald head and taste for gold necklaces. The album made him Stax's biggest star at a precarious time in the label's history.

Hayes would first branch out into movies with his soundtrack for the black-private eye movie Shaft in 1971. The jarringly funky "Theme from Shaft" became a significant radio hit, and would earn Hayes (who had an on-screen cameo as a bartender) an Academy Award for Best Original Song, thus making him the first African-American to be given an Oscar for a non-acting contribution to a movie. (Shaft would also earn Hayes Grammy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Original Motion Picture Score.) When Stax staged a one-day concert in Los Angeles, featuring all its biggest acts, to commemorate the anniversary of the Watts riots, the resulting performance documentary, Wattstax (1973), featured Hayes in the concert-closing role of conquering hero, taking the stage in bare chest and chains. (He proceeded to perform "Theme from Shaft" and "Soulsville", but because MGM owned the rights to those songs and refused to give them up for the soundtrack, Hayes wound up recording another song, "Rollin' Down a Mountain", just so that there'd be something the movie could show after his grand entrance. The original footage was finally restored a few years ago when a buffed-up version of Wattstax was shown on the PBS series P.O.V. and released to DVD.)

By 1975, Stax was reduced ro filing for bankruptcy, but by then Hayes seemed more interested in his movie career anyway. He co-starred with Fred Williamson in the self-explanatory Tough Guys (1974) and then played the title role in Truck Turner. He had a recurring guest role as the ex-con Gandy Finch on The Rockford Files and ruled a post-apocalyptic Big Apple in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981). But through the 1980s and early '90s, most of the steam had escaped from his career. Salvation came in the unlikely form of the role of Chef on South Park, which didn't just give him a semi-regular paycheck and establish him as a beloved talisman of the 1970s; it gave him his most conspicuous music success in decades when the novelty song "Chocolate Salty Balls" (which he performed on the show and which was included in Chef Aid: The South Park Album) went to number one on the UK charts. After ten years, Hayes and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker went their separate ways over a nasty dispute over Hayes's reported indignation over the show's satirical treatment of Scientology. In the meantime, Hayes also put out some fresh music while appearing onscreen in Flipper, Illtown, Six Ways to Sunday, Blues Brothers 2000, Reindeer Games, Hustle & Flow, while lending his voice to Dr. Dolittle 2 and, of course South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. In 2002, he and other soul legends were paid tribute in the documentary Only the Strong Survive, and that same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A cause of death has not yet been determined.

OST: "South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Most critics expected, when the anarchic, devotedly vulgar Comedy Central cartoon hit the big screen, that it would be pretty funny and remarkably foul-mouthed. They were right on both counts, but what few people expected is that it would also be unexpectedly profound (or, well, as profound as a movie featuring Satan and Saddam Hussein as feuding gay lovers could be), with a message about censorship that was more practical than self-righteous, and that its parodic sensibilities would be so remarkable spot-on. In fact, given the direction that the series took -- becoming increasingly more dogmatic and quite a bit more obvious in its political point-making -- it's easy to see the 1999 film as the pinnacle of the South Park experience, where everyone involved really hit their stride.

This is especially true with the movie's exceptionally enjoyable soundtrack. Rather than going for a more contemporary feel, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in conjunction with Hollywood music vet Marc Shaiman -- decided to go whole hog with a big-screen musical parody, tossing everything from Disneyesque ballads of longing to amped-up schoolyard jingles that play like something out of a Busby Berkeley musical to battle hymns juiced with triumphal orchestral swells to big-screen Oscar bait weepers made of 100% processed cheese. The remarkable thing about them was how perfectly the parodies worked: so well, in fact, that the obnoxious bigot's anthem "Blame Canada" actually got itself nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song, leaving the show's producers with the difficult question of how to stage a musical number featuring language that wasn't allowed to be heard on television. (They came up with the elegant solution of having Robin Williams sing the live version of "Blame Canada" during the Oscar ceremony, and he's capable of draining the funny out of anything, so nobody complained.) The songs on the soundtrack are pitch-perfect parodies; if you strip away the relentlessly filthy language and the subversive bits of the lyrics, there's almost nothing whatever to set them apart from the cheeseball Elton John melodies in a first-tier animated Disney "modern" classic. It's the pouring on of tons of formal sincerity -- and then the total upending with gobs and gobs of adolescent toilet irony -- that makes the whole soundtrack work so remarkably well.

(One caveat: the praise we heap on the South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut soundtrack applies only to the original songs featured in the main story of the movie. The "bonus tracks" on the album, mostly rap and metal reworkings of songs in the film, are largely reprehensible, bottom-drawer, 100% filler. There's some fun to be had with a Violent Femmes cover of "I Can Change", and it's amusing for exactly one listen to hear Rush's Geddy Lee sing "O Canada", but other than that, everything after track 12 can be safely deleted from your hard drive.)

BEST TRACKS: The wildly jolly, almost Vaudevillian show tune that is "Uncle Fucka" -- a horribly profane ditty sung by the Canadian cartoon duo Terrance & Phillip that goes several light-years beyond gratuitous -- gets things rolling early on. Eric Cartman's rendition of a song previously rendered on the small screen as an extemporaraneous schoolyard taunt, "Kyle's Mom is a Big Fat Bitch", is served up with all the gusto of a Broadway show-stopper, complete with novelty international choruses. "Eyes of a Child" is such a thick, fragrant slice of bogus emotional cheesiness, it's easy to see Michael McDonald crooning it on a lite-rock FM station in your dentist's office, which makes it all the more amazing that they actually got Michael McDonald to sing it here; and if nothing else, "I Can Change" is the only time in cinematic history in which we see former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein crooning a jaunty ditty in order to seduce the Prince of Darkness into going to bed with him. So far, at least.

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The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part I

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

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

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

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

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

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

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

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

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

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

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

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

MIAMI VICE (2006)

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

- Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

READ PART II