The Screengrab : melanie griffith

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

RAY & AUDREY, SOMETHING WILD (1986)

“I HATE YOU!” Melanie Griffith’s Audrey (a.k.a. Lulu) screams at her ex-con husband Ray (Ray Liotta) towards the end of Jonathan Demme’s indie cult fave. “I HATE YOU, TOO!” Ray screams back. Ah, romance. Sure, Audrey may toy with an occasional square like Jeff Bridges’ yuppie rebel Charlie Driggs, but only if they’re married (or at least seem to be married) so she won’t be tempted by a genuine connection outside the established dysfunction of her abusive relationship with Ray. A fizzy pop fantasia for every nice guy who ever wished he could steal the girl of his dreams away from the jerk she seems to prefer, as well as a dark reminder of the inexplicable bonds that sometimes bond even the worst couples together like Super Glue.

JOHN McCABE & CONSTANCE MILLER, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)

He’s got poetry in him. If only she could see it. But, of course, she can’t. Or won’t. Or maybe it’s not there in the first place. I think it is, though. Only a hopeless romantic could look at a town as hardscrabble and bitter as Presbyterian Church and see a promising future. Only a hopeless romantic could entertain thoughts of love with the shrewd and removed (and, yes, beautiful) Constance Miller. She loves only two things: money and opium. And those will have her full attention at his time of greatest need. But there’s moments well before that time where you can see the nascent feelings between them, and you can believe in those feelings. When you see the way the camera captures them, you know that it, at least, believes in their love, even when they can’t even accept the possibility. Unfortunately, the Wild West was no place for love, despite what the movies have told you. Without laws, community, or the sure knowledge that you would live until tomorrow, the frontier was not a place to put your trust or life in the hands of a fellow human being. It was certainly not a place to put stock in the poetry in your soul.

DIX & LAUREL, IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

He was born when she kissed him. He died when she left him. He lived a few weeks while she loved him. No, let’s go back. Let’s say you’re a washed-up movie writer (are there any cinematic depictions of movie writers who aren’t all washed-up?). This girl you were seen with has turned up dead, see? And you don’t care, because inside you’re all cold and twisted. But you meet a girl. She inspires you to write. But you can’t control your anger. Being accused of murder makes you angry enough to kill! Someone! Anyone! You think a lot about the dead girl -- enough to convincingly describe the murder scene to your agent and his wife. And now you love the girl, see? You want to marry her. But she’s frightened of you, too. Here’s the question: can you stop yourself from killing her? He loves her. He might be an amoral killer. It’s a hardhearted romance. It’s a flowery film noir. They were made for each other. They were completely wrong for each other.

DAVID & AMY, STRAW DOGS (1971)

Several years ago, my friend and colleague Dana Knowles wrote the best damn article on Straw Dogs I’ve ever had the fortune to read. She argues that David is the real monster of Straw Dogs and Amy is the real victim. And she’s right. David treats Amy with little but contempt, and Amy’s only crime is being beautiful and light-hearted. Knowles points out that Sam Peckinpah was not some Neanderthal or fascist or any of those other words that various critics have leveled at him after seeing this movie. He was a man with a keen grasp on the real-world consequences of violence for the sake of violence (see The Wild Bunch) and macho pissing matches (see, heck, pretty much all of his films). Peckinpah made films designed to provoke a response, but he didn’t necessarily condone that response. Here’s Knowles on David and Amy’s marriage:

Theirs is a horrible, hurtful marriage, though it’s not technically “violent” until quite late in the movie. David seems to have married a beautiful, flirtatious, girlish woman only to hate her for being exactly what he thought he wanted. There’s a revealing moment during his contretemps with the pastor that cuts to the heart of his mixed feelings about having a trophy wife. David is attempting further one-upsmanship by describing his academic objective to Rev. Hood, but the holy man is so distracted by the sight of Amy mixing a drink that he’s obviously not even listening. The look on David’s face is priceless, as if Amy is a weapon so thoroughly unsuited to this exchange that she’s morphed into a liability and wrecked his shot at the intellectual knockout punch he was winding up to deliver. Immediately after they say their goodbyes, Peckinpah cuts to the Sumners preparing for bed, and Amy complains about how awful he’d been to the reverend. David responds with, “No … I like him. And his wife is very attractive.” It’s practically a non sequitur, except that it betrays the moment upon which David is still most focused: when Amy’s allure got the attention that he’d wanted for himself. Even when she’s doing nothing but being, she’s a bit of a thorn in his side. Again and again, Peckinpah shows David incapable of being happy with her as is. In fact, the one and only time that David is entirely loose and playful with Amy comes directly after he’s probed her for information about her past relationship with Charlie and she’s claimed that nothing sexual ever happened between them; a revelation that makes him positively giddy. He never comes close to that state again until the final shot of the movie, and Amy’s nowhere in the frame.

Of course, it’s hard to talk about Straw Dogs without mentioning the rape scene, which cuts between David sitting quietly in a field on a snipe hunt while Charlie assaults Amy. No less a critic than Pauline Kael claimed bluntly that Amy enjoyed being raped, and indeed this is one of the received stories about this movie. Knowles punctures that argument by simply describing what Amy is doing on-screen: looking at the fireplace, the only exit in her line of sight, and then trying to remind her rapist that she is a human being that he nominally cares about, trying to regain some control. But it happens, and it’s ugly and horrible, and her husband David doesn’t even notice that she’s different afterwards. And all that the future holds for them is violence and murder, none of it in service of avenging her honor. And at the very end, she doesn’t even rate a lift into town from David. And that’s just plain cold.

HARRY & WILLA HARPER, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1953)

The clip above is only a snippet, but it captures some of the rotten delusion in Willa Harper’s marriage to Harry Powell. Her prior husband, the father of those adorable/creepy children, killed a couple of men while stealing a bunch of money, and she can’t live with the guilt. Her boss at Spoon’s Ice Cream (the wonderfully named Icey Spoon) is a horrible manipulative wretch of a person who has pushed her into courtship with Powell, a self-styled man of the cloth. There’s a couple of little snags in their marriage. One is that Powell has a thoroughly misogynist view of women, and he will never touch Willa in their union. Well, ok, once, but it’s not for sex. See, the other little problem is that Powell is a serial murderer of widows. When he finally puts his hands on Willa, he’s not so much thinking of le petit mort as the big sleep. Willa’s quivering all right, but for exactly the wrong reason.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

4. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Straddling the line between the revolutionary filmmaking of the 1970s and the tail end of classic Hollywood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of those movies that isn’t legendary because it’s important, or because it’s meaningful, or because it broke some rich new ground in the language of filmmaking. It’s legendary because it’s funny, fun, and incredibly entertaining. It’s also one of those films where everyone seems to be firing on all cylinders; the sly buddy-western could easily be counted as a career high for Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill and his cameraman Connie Hall, screenwriter William Goldman, and even composer Burt Bacharach. But Paul Newman is the glue that holds everything together: taking on Goldman’s witty dialogue, he gives it just enough of a human, weary edge that it doesn’t seem as over-the-top as it might coming from some actors. Some performers go their whole lives without snaring a part like Butch Cassidy, and others get one, but handle it all wrong. You sometimes hear actors referred to as intelligent, but rarely movie stars; it’s a testament to how bright Paul Newman was that he was handed a role as rich as this one and figured it out immediately, playing it on screen as perfectly as it could be played. This is a real movie star role, and Newman handles it like a real movie star.

3. NOBODY’S FOOL (1994) & THE VERDICT (1982)

I’ll admit I'm cheating here, attempting to squeeze an eleventh film into this Top Ten list, but I simply couldn’t decide which late-period Newman film I liked best, so I figured I’d call it a tie. Two sides of the same rumpled coin, The Verdict’s beaten-down Boston lawyer Frank Galvin, fighting an impossible battle against the Catholic Church, and Sully, the beaten-down small town ne’er-do-well Newman plays in Nobody’s Fool are both men with no expectations of success or happiness in their lonely lives who nevertheless find redemption despite and because of their own stubborn tenacity. One of the hallmarks of Newman’s career was the Mercedes caliber acting, writing and directing he seemed to attract to most of his star vehicles, and these two films more than hold their own with regard to above-the-line talent. Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason and helmer Sidney Lumet provide typically stellar support in The Verdict, but one of the pleasures of Nobody’s Fool is watching Newman (and acclaimed co-stars like Jessica Tandy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) bring out the best in frequently wasted and underestimated actors like Bruce Willis (in a supporting role as a big fish businessman in a small upstate New York pond) and Melanie Griffith (happily erasing memories of their previous on-screen pairing in Bonfire of the Vanities as Willis’ dissatisfied trophy wife). Yet despite all the impressive talent surrounding him, Newman is the heart and soul of both films, dominating them with master class, world-weary performances that just make you want to punch the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences right in the face for awarding him his only Best Actor Oscar for The Color of freakin’ Money.

2. HUD (1963)

Newman never took his anti-hero routine farther into "anti-" territory than in this family drama, set in a dusty, unromantic modern Texas. He plays the title role, which turns out not to be that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development but rather a selfish but dashing heel who, in the context of a small rural town situated on the wrong end of the 1960s, qualifies as about as hot as hot shit gets. Hud roughly fits the mold but finally breaks the tradition of such earlier Hollywood characters as the Bogart heroes, who were always talking about how they stuck their neck out for nobody and only cared about keeping their own hides safe and comfortable because Hud really means it; he remains defiantly unredeemed to the movie's end. Seen as daring in its day, the movie actually risks being too morally clear-cut. What keeps it alive and spiky after all these years is that, thanks to Newman, it's hard not to feel closer to this bastard than to his pure and upright antagonists, the boringly earnest young man (Brandon De Wilde) who has to learn to see through him, and the crotchety father (Melvyn Douglas) who seems to have been judging him as harshly as possible for every minute of their shared lives, and who finally seems to die of impacted self-righteousness...especially since Newman and the director, Martin Ritt, seemed to understand something real about the sensual attractiveness of evil: in this, the least sympathetic role of the first half of his career, Newman was probably sexier than he'd ever been before, which is saying something.

1. THE HUSTLER (1961)

Newman entered his second decade as a movie star, and established himself as a man with staying power, as Fast Eddie Felsen, the cocky pool shark who's set on proving himself a winner -- which he does, though at the loss of his innocence, a girl (Piper Laurie), and the game that's the only thing he's ever been able to claim to be the best at. In addition to the tart dialogue and the opportunity to go head-to-head with George C. Scott (at the peak of his powers as a sly stealer of scenes) and Jackie Gleason (in the most pleasingly assured dramatic performance of his life), the role gave Newman the chance to grow up on camera. In the final battle of the billiard balls, he trades in the self-infatuated, head-jiggling grins and showy flare-ups of the early scenes for a quiet gravity, with suggestions of violent emotions kept under powerful control beneath the surface. It was a good indicator of just how well the actor himself would be able to weather the aging process in the years to come, steadily improving with time while the careers of so many of his contemporaries receded to the background or turned brown at the edges.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)

The title of Tom Wolfe's book refers to the ineffable, super-American quality that Wolfe attributed to the anonymous test pilots who paved the way for the NASA space program -- whose stars, the Apollo astronauts, Wolfe depicted as media puppets by comparison. Phil Kaufman's movie version hangs onto the romantic mythology of the test pilots and treats the astronauts' public packaging as comedy, but it also honors the astronauts as real heroes who, by learning to play the media and sticking together to face down the bureaucrats and the scientists with the Dr. Strangelove accents, proved their mettle and created a new kind of savvy icon for the TV age. Amazingly, this satiric yet stirring popcorn epic wasn't much of a hit in theaters but has since achieved classic status as a home video perennial. It has so many high points that it's practically made for the rewind button.

SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's road movie/screwball romance crams every getaway fantasy destination you can think of into one wild weekend: shanghaied from his lunch hour by Lulu, the boho funk priestess (Melanie Griffith) in the thrift shop accouterments and Louise Brooks 'do, Charlie the office drone (Jeff Daniels) stops by the liquor store, gets screwed to within an inch of his life in the roadside motel, meets his new flame's mom, hits the dance floor during the high school reunion, and barely makes it home Monday morning with the small town sociopath (Ray Liotta) in hot pursuit. Demme keeps things fresh with the jumping soundtrack and the crowded supporting cast, which includes fellow directors (among them John Waters, perfectly cast as a used car salesman) and faces from other Demme movies (such as Steve Scales, from Stop Making Sense, as a tourist-shop cashier who offers Daniels the sage advice, "Charlie, attempt to be cool."). They don't just liven up the screen; the way Demme uses them, the many bit players passing through suggest the variety of life that you pass by and rub up against in just a couple of days spent on the American road. The movie seems to be hinting at a hundred other stories that are out there, ready to be told; the camera just happened to latch onto Charlie and Lulu first.

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Just your typical Depression-era musical comedy based on Homer's Odyssey, O Brother Where Art Thou is often dismissed as one of the Coen Brothers' sillier efforts. Well, sure, it is pretty silly at times, but it's also the Coens' richest, most satisfying serving of pure Americana to date. While Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Fargo had drilled into very specific subcultures, regionalisms and genres, O Brother is as expansive as the American South itself – a melting pot of prison flicks, road movies, musicals, social issue pictures and screwball comedies. From the golden-hued landscapes beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins (and later computer-enhanced) to corny-but-right images like a pie cooling on a windowsill to the Ku Klux Klan/Wizard of Oz mash-up that might have been disastrously offensive in the hands of less skilled filmmakers, the movie is a technical marvel. But more than that, it's a love letter to the pure American music forms of folk, country and blues – the Harry Smith Anthology come to life. And in moments as when the casually integrated Soggy Bottom Boys take the stage to a raucous ovation from an audience that literally runs a racist politician out of town on a rail, it's a celebration of community, holding a cracked mirror up to the best aspects of our national character.

DAVE (1993)

Like all nations, the U.S. has its share of assholes, but even our critics generally concede that Americans, by and large, are basically decent people: optimistic, can-do types, generally willing to help out and do the right thing, especially when our leaders quit pandering to our fear and greed and inspire us to roll up our sleeves and achieve worthy goals. Of course, for all the talk of elites, political insiders, change and the American mainstream in the current election, no president, congressman or media pundit is ever really an average citizen, living as they do in a bubble of power and privilege the nation’s true average Joes (and Daves) can only dream about...which is part of what makes Ivan Reitman’s good-natured political comedy so appealing. Released during the honeymoon period of the Clinton administration, when Bubba was still viewed as a charming, sax-playing, fast-food noshing everyman, Dave tells the story of part-time presidential impersonator Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) who winds up in the Oval Office after the real president (Kline again) suffers a stroke while cheating on his imperious wife (Sigourney Weaver). Oily, Cheney-esque chief-of-staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) arranges the charade, intending to use Kovic as a puppet mouthpiece for his own agenda, but the plan goes awry when the impersonator starts acting more presidential than the corrupt president he started off imitating, using his newfound power to actually, y’know, help and support the American people rather than fleecing them like a vast herd of sheep. After outsmarting Alexander, romancing the First Lady and ensuring that a conveniently upstanding deus ex machina of a vice president (Ben Kingsley) will take his place, Kovic leaves the White House behind and returns to his regular life, where he decides to run for his local city council, echoing the film’s underlying message that our government functions best when our best people are in government.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

He's often cited as America's most patriotic filmmaker, and there's no doubt that to a certain degree, Frank Capra – born in Sicily, and the very image of an immigrant boy made good – deserves the title. But most of his films aren't simply pro-American jingoism: they're patriotic in the truest sense, in that they recognize the flaws of Capra's adopted country and seek to address them, never pretending that this isn't a nation with profound problems, but likewise never succumbing to cynicism and always holding out the hope that even one individual can make a difference. Nowhere is this more evident than in the wonderful Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Although today, the film – buoyed by a tremendously charismatic performance by Jimmy Stewart as the naïve but determined junior senator Jefferson Smith – is considered a classic depiction of grass-roots democracy and the way the little guy can succeed in his struggle against entrenched forces, it wasn't quite so warmly received at the time. Since Capra didn't flinch from portraying Washington as a deeply corrupt place full of crooked politicians and smear merchants, both Democrats and Republicans denounced it as a vicious attack on our noble democracy; some even pegged Capra as a communist agitator determined to stir up trouble. But in the end, the image of Sen. Smith's desperate filibuster has stayed with us as a lasting reminder of Capra's philosophy that one man, no matter how many forces are arrayed against him, can triumph against evil – and what could be more American than that?

Click here for Part One & Part Three

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

No, But I've Read the Movie: LOLITA

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Five: Days of the Week

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Opening wide this Friday is David E. Talbert's First Sunday, which should represent the final nail in a coffin which contains the mouldering remains of Ice Cube's reputation as an American nightmare. Younger Screengrab readers may not realize this, but Cube was once a rapper who so terrified white America that they put him on the cover of national news magazines, where he sneered and scowled his way right into your scaredy-bones. Now he just makes comedies that Steve Martin is too busy to bother with. Anyway, Talbert is being claimed as the new Tyler Perry, which, depending on your inclinations, is either a refreshing change or a dire threat. We were sort of hoping that First Sunday would function as a pseudo-sequel to the Friday films and would, at the very least, treat us to the spectacle of Cube and Katt Williams having to sit through a really long, dull sermon while stoned out of their gourds, which is an experience we've all had at one time or another. Unfortunately, it's no such thing, so here's some other movies you can look forward to after this endless Sunday is over.

STORMY MONDAY (1988)

Back before Mike Figgis hit it big, he directed this quirky little neo-noir thriller. It hasn't proven to be one of his lasting legacies as a filmmaker; for everything it does right, it goofs up in some profound way that nearly sinks it — its plot is pretty thin even by the standards of such potboilers, and two fine lead performances by British actors (Sting and a young Sean Bean) are clumsily countered by two dopey ones by American actors (an ultra-hammy Tommy Lee Jones and Melanie Griffith, clearly letting the clock run down on her fifteen minutes of fame). That said, it's worth watching for two reasons: first, it gives you an important stepping point in the development of Figgis' career, should you be interested in pursuing such a thing; and second, it's crazily gorgeous to look at. It features some nearly perfect cinematography by the estimable Roger Deakins, all rain-slicked streets and cheap neon and hazes of cigarette smoke and shadows that people fall into and never emerge. It's all surface; you'll find no depth here no matter how hard you look. But if surface is all you're looking for, you could do a lot worse than Stormy Monday.

IF IT'S TUESDAY THIS MUST BE BELGIUM (1969)

Movies like this must have seemed like such a good idea in the Sixties. Get an all-star cast, or at least as much of an all-star cast as you can afford. Have them rampage around a picturesque collection of back-lot set pieces mixed with stock footage. Stick Norman Fell in there looking pasty and irritated, then stick an unwieldy, ridiculous title on the thing and watch the money roll in. It's not quite clear exactly when Americans lost their patience for this particular brand of witless comedy, but I think it was right around the time this movie came out, which just so happened to coincide with the time at which it became acceptable to talk about smoking marijuana. Still, it's not entirely without its charm; Suzanne Pleshette makes a vivacious lead, Sandy Baron has some amusing scenes, Murray Hamilton reminds us that he once existed, and you get a fun look at what Hollywood thought of Ian McShane before it discovered how good he was at cussing like a sailor who's just had an anchor drop on his foot. It plays even better if you pretend that it was made in 1959 instead of 1969.

BIG WEDNESDAY (1978)

Highly influenced by The Endless Summer and a rash of other surfing documentaries that had hit the screens in the 1960s, Big Wednesday takes a similar visual approach and a comparable 'surfing as metaphor for nascent mystics communing with nature ' storyline, but wraps it all up in a big mushy box of coming-of-age drama by writer/director John Milius, who had not yet discovered that the one thing he loved even more than surfing was killing communists. Based loosely on his own southern California teenhood, Big Wednesday is actually a pretty accomplished film for what it is, but it really soars on the strength of what today seems like an incredibly goofball cast: shirtless, bronzed, toned young beachcombers portrayed by...future acid casualty Gary Busey, future heroin junkie Jan-Michael Vincent, and future Greatest American Hero William Katt. Patti D'Arbanville wanders through there as well, as does a woefully out-of-place Joe Spinnell as Busey's shrink. All in all, not a bad little movie, but one that's highly improved if you're in a Gary Busey state of mind when you watch it.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON (1984)

Right around the time that MTV was robbing us all of our ability to process visual information that didn't come with cuts every fifteen seconds, avant-garde composer, musician, and filmmaker Brian Eno offered a refreshing, if highly unusual, tonic in the form of Thursday Afternoon. Essentially a series of eight nearly motionless "video paintings", Thursday Afternoon was meant to be viewed in a vertical format; the video packaging actually instructed viewers to upend their television sets. Whether anyone actually did that or not, the video was an interesting exercise in changing the video shorthand that accompanies music on screen. Accompanied by music that is highly suggestive of his 'ambient' period circa Music for Airports, the videos bring us nearly static images (of nature scenes, shifting electronic displays, and fashion model Christine Alicino, also the film's cinematographer), and manage to accomplish visually precisely the effect that Eno was going after musically with that ambient work. It may not be the most compelling thing ever set to video, but it's a lot better conversation-starter than your iTunes Visualizer at a party.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)

So iconic is John Badham's 1977 disco document that it's easy to overlook what a colossal impact it made at the time it was released. John Travolta became such a huge star following its box-office-busting run that his fall from grace seemed inevitable and his comeback seemed incredible; with the benefit of hindsight, one might be forgiven for thinking he was the only person in the movie as none of the other actors went on to even remotely the same level of fame. Badham, likewise, never made a film as good as this, or as successful. Endlessly parodied, riffed on and exploited, it's the kind of movie that even if you've never seen it, you feel like you've seen it. It really went off the rails early on; it's impossible to guess from the final product, but it was actually based on an edgy, almost scholarly piece of cultural studies by the brilliant English polymath Nik Cohn called "Tribal Rituals of the New Saturday Night". Still, a few of its dance scenes, its relentless energy, and Tony Manero's slow, arrogant strut through Brooklyn have lost none of their power, and make it clear why this movie meant to its time and place what it did.

Video of the Day: "Lolita" Screen Test

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

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

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw