The Screengrab : meryl streep

Trailer Review: Julie & Julia

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The “food movie” has been around for years, but it seems like Hollywood has been making more and more of them ever since the Food Network’s popularity went through the roof. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that we can’t all be gourmet chefs, but the great majority of us have put in time in the kitchen, and we all know the feeling that comes from cooking and/or eating a good meal. Food is a kind of common cultural currency, and that seems to be the central theme of Julie and Julia, which despite my general lack of interest in Nora Ephron films has me intrigued. Sure, there’s plenty of Ephron-style girl talk, but the central idea of the film- that struggling career woman Julie Powell (Amy Adams) forms a bond with the late, great Julia Child (Meryl Streep, staking her claim for nomination #16) by cooking her way through her famous cookbook- is a fairly unconventional idea for a film, especially since it’s impossible that the two will meet. I’m not exactly expecting this to be Big Night or Babette’s Feast in the food movie department, but as long as it’s better than No Reservations that’ll be good enough for me.

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: Honorable Mention (Part Five)

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

In Parts One & Two of this list, we presented The Screengrab’s consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009.

Herewith, our individual picks and honorable mentions...

Andrew:

Top 5

1. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince
2. Star Trek
3. Angels & Demons
4. ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS (July 1)

C’mon, now...who don’t like Scrat? You’re telling me that, given the choice between a tried and true animated franchise and Ed Asner, kids aren’t going to choose dinosaurs?

5. JULIE & JULIA (August 7)

I can’t think of a better film to fill this summer’s Meryl Streep niche than an actual Meryl Streep film...especially one that fulfills that other great summer blockbuster counter-programming niche: foodie films. All that plus Amy Adams, and I’m about 1000 times more likely to see this than Transformers...and I’m a dude. Add my wife, her mother, my mother, my Dad getting dragged along and all the other wives, mothers, mothers-in-law, dudes getting dragged along and PBS geeks out there, and we’re talking serious sleeper hit potential.

Scott:
1. Star Trek
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
4. Up
5. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (May 1)

Oddly enough, that leaked online release and the accompanying early reviews may have been the best thing that could have happened to Ol’ Razor Fingers. (That’s what the kids are calling him these days, right?) All the hubbub generated by that kerfuffle qualifies as what we in the business call “free publicity.”

Nick:

1. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Star Trek
4. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN (May 22)

Audiences loved the 2006 original, and this sequel retains the core conceit while adding Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart. As the first family film of the summer, and one that – unlike the following week’s Up – comes with a built-in audience, it should be huge.

5. (500) DAYS OF SUMMER (July 17)

A buzzed-about festival hit, this indie rom-com starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel will likely garner glowing reviews on its way to becoming the Little Date Film That Could for the under-30 crowd.

Paul:

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
3. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (May 1)

Sure, there’s the incomplete pirated version that’s floating around on the Web as we speak, but how many people have actually watched it? Wolverine should be one of the summer’s biggest hits for two reasons. For one thing, there’s the enduring popularity of the X-Men films (each has become one of the top five grossers of its respective summer), and the fact that if any X-Men character could open his own adventure, it’s Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. But don’t overlook the film’s release date either -- by opening on May 1, Wolverine is the first blockbuster of the summer, which virtually guarantees it a monster opening weekend, with solid weekends to follow if it catches on like Iron Man did last year. Add in the fact that this weekend has been especially kind to comic book movies, and how can it possibly lose?
4. Angels & Demons
5. Up

Bubbling under:

Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian and Ice Age- in an attempt to add a few tentpole releases to their slate, Fox has moved two of their more bankable franchises to the summer. It’s a risky move for them considering the greater competition during the summer season, but both movies (particularly Ice Age) should do good business in the often lucrative family market before getting shoved aside by higher-profile youth-oriented blockbusters (Up and Harry Potter, respectively).

The Hangover- summer comedies have a hit-and-miss record, but the ones that tend to do the most business are guy-friendly movies like Wedding Crashers and Talladega Nights. Based on the crowd reaction to the trailer that played before my screening of Observe and Report, The Hangover should play well with this crowd, and could prove to be the summer’s biggest sleeper.

The Ugly Truth- last year’s Sex and the City movie took the wind out of the wisdom that “chick flicks” can’t compete in the male-centric summer movie market. With only a handful of female-friendly releases in the pipeline, look for this Katharine Heigl/Gerard Butler romantic comedy to stand the best chance of becoming a hit.

G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra- two years ago, Transformers, another toy/cartoon franchise from the eighties, became a blockbuster. G.I. Joe may not scare up Transformers business, but it should do well with that same crowd.

Julie and Julia- after a summer full of movies that skew younger, older audiences should eat up Nora Ephron’s latest, with Meryl Streep as the late, great Julia Child.

Inglourious Basterds- if Brad Pitt can bring in a $130 million gross for a three-hour movie in which he ages backwards, he should be able to do at least that much business for a WWII action movie, especially one from Quentin Tarantino.

The Limits of Control- I don’t honestly believe that Jim Jarmusch’s latest will do much business. I’m just stoked that he’s got a new movie coming out, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be awesome.

Click Here For The Hits (Part One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Part Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: The Toss-Ups (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

So, now that you’ve seen our consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits & the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009, here are the films that we didn’t know quite what to do with...

Andrew:

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (August 21)

This one hits theaters closer to Labor Day (and the start of the “quality” awards-bait season) than Memorial Day -- assuming QT actually finishes his grindhouse WW2 epic on time -- and the theaters it hits will probably be art houses rather than multiplexes, where nobody will be expecting the confusingly titled Basterds to rack up Pulp Fiction-esque "national sensation" numbers...but Tarantino’s latest seems like quite the odd duck nonetheless, with a promised ultra-violence sensibility that may have trouble finding its artsy splatter audience even WITH all the ass-kicking Jews and Brad Pitt’s funny southern accent.

BRÜNO (June 10)

Oh, sure...Borat was a national sensation, and the annoying guy in your office still says, “Niiice!” on a daily basis. But I’m guessing it was a lot easier for most Americans to feel “in” on the joke when Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of them funny furriners than it will be to laugh at their own homophobic prejudices or their own knee-jerk PC responses to the heterosexual Cohen’s flouncing, mincing gay character. But then again, you know what they say about that whole “no such thing as bad publicity” thing...

Nick:

1) Public Enemies, because Michael Mann has yet to make an out-and-out summer blockbuster.

2) UP, because eagerness for Pixar’s latest has been especially muted.

3) Angels & Demons, because The Da Vinci Code craze seems to have subsided.

4) Julie & Julia, because its August release date implies that the studio thinks it has more limited appeal than Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada or Mamma Mia!

5) The Ugly Truth, because even though it’s the summer’s chief rom-com, it’s hard to imagine Katherine Heigl continuing to be a serious box-office draw.

Paul:

Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi fans are pumped for his return to horror, but will anyone else care? Will this be the film that finally lifts the box-office curse on summer horror movies?

Terminator Salvation- is there life for Terminator after Arnold? Will people pay to see the movie when they can just as easily watch the Terminator TV series at home? And can Christian Bale still reel in audiences now that his profanity-filled tirade has been heard by millions?

The Taking of Pelham 123- in a summer full of epic effects-driven movies, can audiences be bothered with an old-school hostage-negotiation thriller? And will MGM release a super-sweet new DVD edition of the original film just in time for the remake? Because they really should.

Year One- will a high-concept caveman comedy, even one starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, play in this age of improvisational laffers? And will there be zug-zug like in Caveman?

Public Enemies- is Johnny Depp really the box office draw Hollywood thinks he is after the Pirates trilogy? Can Michael Mann become bankable again after the subpar returns for Miami Vice? And in this era of Grand Theft Auto, will ticket buyers get excited for a fedoras-and-tommy-guns gangster shoot’em’up?

Bruno- can the least funny character from Da Ali G Show actually carry a film? Will people flock to laugh at the strange misadventures of a flamingly gay Austrian, or will they be scared off by the homosexuality factor?

Bandslam- is Vanessa Anne Hudgens still a draw even when she isn’t starring in High School Musicals? Will tween-friendly fare still do solid box office even during the summer movie season?

Taking Woodstock- is the August 14 release date occasioned by the 40th anniversary of Woodstock simply a symbolic gesture, or will nostalgia for the Summer of Love turn this into an unexpected late-summer hit?

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

DVD Digest for April 7, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a recent Oscar winner finally gets the DVD treatment it deserves, and Warner digs deep into their vaults for a slew of new Blu-Ray titles.

This week’s selection of recent movies is headed by a handful of high-profile December releases, including Jim Carrey in Yes Man (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the Adam Sandler family vehicle Bedtime Stories (Disney, also Blu-Ray), Keanu Reeves in the remake The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the animated The Tale of Despereaux (Universal, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson in Not Easily Broken (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and the controversial British horror movie Donkey Punch (Magnolia).

Last year, many DVD fans expressed displeasure over the shabby treatment given to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, released in a bare-bones edition to capitalize on the movie’s recent Oscar success. This week, Disney hopes to remedy this with the release of a new “Collector’s Edition” in both standard DVD and Blu-Ray. This new upgrade boasts more than five hours of new features, including documentaries, and interviews with the filmmakers, cast and crew. Also this week: a 75th Anniversary Edition of Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (Universal); Warner’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, which includes The Cheat, Merrily We Go to Hell, Hot Saturday, Torch Singer, Murder at the Vanities, and Search for Beauty; the TCM Spotlight: Doris Day Collection (Warner)- includes April in Paris, It’s a Great Feeling, Starlift, Tea for Two, and The Tunnel of Love; and the controversial-in-its-day La Grande Bouffe (E1 Entertainment).

The big Blu-Ray news this week is Warner’s release of nine (mostly dodgy, I must say) new titles in the format. The Warner Blu-Ray releases are: Peter Hyams’ 2010, Steven Seagal in Above the Law, Edward Norton in American History X, The Governator in Collateral Damage; the Rube Goldberg-esque thriller Final Destination; Denzel Washington standing up to the American health care system in John Q, an extended cut of Angelina Jolie in Taking Lives, and the 80s-set Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore rom-com The Wedding Singer. Also this week, a double feature of avian-themed Sony releases: Fly Away Home and Winged Migration.

Finally, the selection was pretty thin for plot synopses, so I wasn’t able to find a suitable Synopsis of the Week. The best I can do is a pretty unbeatable title: Britney Spears: The Return of An Angel. Doesn’t that sound like just about the cheesiest thing ever? Too bad the White Elephant Blogathon is over, because that could’ve made for a fun submission. Oh well- there’s always next year…

DVD Digest for February 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the midwinter doldrums hit the DVD market, with only a handful of notable DVD and Blu-Ray releases hitting shelves today.

The big news this week is the controversial Blu-Ray release of William Friedkin’s classic police procedural, The French Connection. Much ink has been spilled over William Friedkin’s tinkering with the look of his Oscar-winner for the Blu-Ray release, and while I can’t say for sure (not having bought into the Blu-Ray scene as yet) the images I’ve seen from the new release haven’t been encouraging. With their almost oppressive graininess and a color shift that appears to put the blue in “Blu-Ray”, nothing I’ve seen speaks very well to the suitability of the new technology Friedkin ran on the film when preparing the disc. But then, I’ve always been of the mind that DVD and Blu-Ray was meant to be not only a means of watching a film in the comfort of your living room, but also of film preservation, of keeping a record of the films they contain as close as possible to the way they were originally seen. Anyway, that’s enough of my editorializing. The French Connection is one of three Blu-Ray only releases getting released today by Fox, the other two being John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection II and Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, a prime future candidate for a Reviews By Request column.

Another ideal Reviews By Request topic would be Eagle Pennell’s early proto-indie, The Whole Shootin’ Match (Watchmaker Films). Considered by many a keystone of the independent film movement, Pennell’s film went unseen for years before turning up again in theatres last year. Other classics coming to DVD today include Hector Babenco’s Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD is a pretty meager lot, highlighted by a pair of arthouse offerings: the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (Zeitgeist), about the author Christopher Isherwood and his decades-long love affair with much-younger artist Don Bachardy, and the Irish marital drama Eden (Ryko Distribution).

Finally, this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Bender and friends in their newest feature-length adventure Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad Season 1 (Sony); nineties “Must See TV” staple Just Shoot Me Season 3 (Sony); and family-friendly Indiana Jones-lite adventure in The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (Sony).

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, we here at the Screengrab gave our predictions for this year’s Academy Award nominees in the six major categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress, and yours truly won the bragging rights as Top Prognosticator (with 24 correct guesses) with Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark tying for the steak knives in second place with 22 correct guesses apiece.

But now the play-offs are done and it’s time for the Super Bowl as we make our predictions about the winners in every category (except those weird technical ones Jessica Alba presents in a Denny’s on Sunset before the official ABC-televised Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, February 22nd (8:00 PM Eastern/5:00 PM Pacific)).

If you’d like to play along at home, just submit your own winner predictions in the Comments section below!

And now, without further ado, THE OFFICIAL 2009 SCREENGRAB OSCAR PREDICTIONS!

BEST ACTRESS

And the nominees are...

Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie – Changeling
Melissa Leo – Frozen River
Meryl Streep – Doubt
Kate Winslet – The Reader

Paul Clark Predicts: Kate Winslet

With six nominations under her belt already, you can’t say she’s not due to win one. Shame that sentiment wasn’t in the air for a better performance.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Kate Winslet

Sorry, Anne and Melissa, you’ll have to wait your turn. (And quit scowling, Angelina.) SAG-winning Meryl’s the spoiler, but I think this is finally Kate’s year.

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Angelina Jolie

This has been Kate Winslet’s year in a lot of ways; she laid down two terrific performances in 2008. Unfortunately, the great job she did in The Reader was in service of a truly mediocre and vastly overhyped film. Meryl Streep’s nomination is more or less a formality at this point. Anne Hathaway deserves the gold for her compelling performance in Rachel Getting Married, but it’s likely to go to Angelina Jolie in a role that presses the Academy’s buttons.

Should Win: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Will Win: Angelina Jolie, Changeling

Nick Schager Predicts: Kate Winslet

The Reader is almost a parody of an awards-season prestige pic, but since the Academy usually eats up such faux-serious drivel – and because none of the other actresses seem to have much heat going into the race’s final stretch – count on Winslet to win. And then, if we’re lucky, to accept the statue in her awful Reader old-age make-up.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Melissa Leo

Melissa Leo will be this year's surprise win in a major category. Meryl Streep is nominated mostly for being Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet winning for playing a Nazi prison camp guard would be too predictable.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Kate Winslet

Voters who didn't actually see The Reader but did see Revolutionary Road will vote for her anyway, so it's like she's nominated for two movies in one.

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS PREDICTION: KATE WINSLET!

Stay tuned for a very special tribute to Heath Ledger and appearances by Amy Adams, Josh Brolin, Peter Gabriel and Alexandre Desplat as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

SAG Awards Announced

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Fifteen years ago, members of the Screen Actor's Guild -- tired of their work only being acknowledged by 24/7 news coverage, 7000 entertainment magazines and the paltry 938 awards shows available at the time -- established the SAG Awards, to more conveniently bestow awards directly upon one another.

And so, last night, the glitterati convened once again to honor the following actors with the coveted "Saggy":

Film

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
SEAN PENN - Milk

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
MERYL STREEP - Doubt

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
HEATH LEDGER - The Dark Knight

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in (an allegedly) Supporting Role
KATE WINSLET - The Reader

Outstanding Performance by a Cast
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble
THE DARK KNIGHT

Television

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries
PAUL GIAMATTI - John Adams

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries
LAURA LINNEY - John Adams

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series
HUGH LAURIE - House

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series
SALLY FIELD - Brothers & Sisters

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series
ALEC BALDWIN - 30 Rock

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series
TINA FEY - 30 Rock

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
MAD MEN (Woo-hoo!!!)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series
30 ROCK

Outstanding Performance by an Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series
HEROES

Life Achievement Award
JAMES EARL JONES

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Nominations (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEST ACTRESS

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

Meryl Streep and her peculiar Livia Soprano accent in Doubt will be a shoe-in, and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road is nearly as automatic. Anne Hathaway, as one of our commenters put it, acted the shit out of Rachel Getting Married. Cate Blanchett put on old lady makeup for Benjamin Button. That leaves one wild card slot for Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky.

WINNER
Kate Winslet

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Nicole Kidman (Australia)
Keira Knightley (The Duchess)
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (The Reader)

Like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kate Winslet has managed to be in two likely movies this year. She will be nominated for The Reader since it's a Holocaust movie in which she plays a morally dubious character, which easily trumps nineteen-fifties repression. That, and the fact that she wears a sagging old lady suit and appears naked (though not at the same time, thankfully). The unwritten law of the Oscars states that there must be at least one costume drama in one of the more important nominations, so why not Keira Knightley? Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman seems due for a nomination, and the Academy will want to work Australia in there somewhere. If memory serves, frail white women on that continent tend to do well with the Academy. Anne Hathaway will get a nomination for slumming it in Rachel Getting Married when she might have starred in something far glossier. Meryl Streep will be in the mix due to the need to throw Doubt a bone and because her showing up on the carpet every year in crazy cat lady garb makes everybody happy.

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Angelina Jolie (Changeling)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

One might as well send out ballots with Streep’s name pre-printed on them every year, and this year is no exception, with her turn as Doubt’s Sister Aloysius getting lots of attention. Hathaway’s revelatory performance in Jonathan Demme’s family drama should carry its awards-season momentum to an easy nomination and, I predict, a win, in keeping with the long tradition of hot starlets de-glamming in scruffy movies to win Oscar gold (also, she’s pretty great in it). And Winslet, between Revolutionary Road and her so-called “supporting” performance in The Reader, could be the year’s only serious contender for a double nomination. Beyond there, things get fuzzy. Jolie seems like a shoo-in, considering her baity grieving-mom performance, but we said that about last year’s A Mighty Heart too. Still, don’t count out a Clint Eastwood movie. The final spot will likely be a battle between critical darlings Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), Melissa Leo (Frozen River), Kristin Scott Thomas (I’ve Loved You So Long) and longshot Michelle Williams (Wendy and Lucy). I predict that Hawkins takes this one, but Leo’s a strong possibility as well. Finally, if Cate Blanchett in Benjamin Button makes it here, it probably means the voters are over the moon for the film, so if her name is called on nomination day, look for the movie itself to take Best Picture.

WINNER
Anne Hathaway

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Angelina Jolie (Changeling)
Melissa Leo (Frozen River)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

Despite mixed reviews for Doubt, Changeling and Revolutionary Road, industry vet + scenery chewing + SAG Award nominations (squared by Golden Globe nominations) = Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie and Kate Winslet. Meanwhile, on the indie side of the street, much as I would love to see the delightful Sally Hawkins snag a place for Happy-Go-Lucky, it may be a bad sign that (a) she didn’t score a SAG nomination, (b) some people found her character annoying and (c) others may suspect she was only playing herself. Instead, SAG and the Spirit Awards like Melissa Leo for the token “performance in a movie hardly anyone saw” nomination slot, and thus I’ll go with her (even though I'm one of those people who still hasn't seen Frozen River). And in the five-spot, I’m guessing this is the year Anne Hathaway gets invited to the grown-up table (Bride Wars notwithstanding). She’ll definitely get a nomination, and I bet even Meryl Streep votes for her to win.

WINNER
Anne Hathaway

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS
Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

Streep gets picked because it’s in the Constitution that she gets nominated once a year. Winslet, one of my very favorite human beings in all the world, is about ten times the talent that Leo DiCaprio is, but they’ll both get named for Revolutionary Road. The wildly overrated Happy-Go-Lucky won’t get anything but this nomination, but Hawkins’ performance is so talked about there’s no way it’ll miss. Hathaway is absolutely riveting in Rachel Getting Married, but I’m predicting Blanchett will take it, despite having zero charisma with Brad Pitt, as an ‘overdue’ award for Benjamin Button. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: The Academy will be confused by Kristin Scott Thomas’ Frenchitude in I’ve Loved You So Long, and she won’t get nominated despite turning in the performance of the year.

WINNER
Cate Blanchett

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
CATE BLANCHETT (TIE), ANNE HATHAWAY, SALLY HAWKINS, ANGELINA JOLIE (TIE), MERYL STREEP, KATE WINSLET

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
ANNE HATHAWAY

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

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

Morning Deal Report: Golden Globe Nominees Announced, NY Critics Sound Off

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lead the way with five nominations each, as the Golden Globe nominees were announced this morning. Both were nominated for Best Drama, along with The Reader, Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire. Meryl Streep is nominated for both Doubt and Mamma Mia, matched by Kate Winslet for The Reader and Revolutionary Road. Other acting nominees include Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight – the sole Bat-nomination. Check out the full roster here.

The New York Film Critics Circle drank up Milk, naming it the best movie of the year and honoring Penn and Josh Brolin for their performances. Happy-Go-Lucky earned kudos for director Mike Leigh and star Sally Hawkins. Penelope Cruz took Supporting Actress honors for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Here's the full list.

“Ben Stiller is set to replace Mark Ruffalo in Greenburg, a comedy-drama Noah Baumbach is writing and directing,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Ruffalo dropped out after the shooting death of his brother last week. Greenburg “is expected to center on the intimacies of relationships in the manner of Baumbach's other films,” if that helps.

Related:
Globes Without Glitter
Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

10. ISABELLA ROSSELLINI (1952 - )

Rossellini made her movie debut in 1976, playing a nun in Vincente Minnelli's A Matter of Time, which starred her mother, Ingrid Bergman -- but that was basically just a family outing. Her movie career didn't really take root until after her mother's death, when she appeared in 1985's White Nights. The next year, equipped with a tacky wig, a tackier apartment, and a kitchen knife, she achieved neo-noir immortality as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. She and Lynch became a couple, acting together in Zelly and Me and collaborating on his Wild at Heart. Around the time that picture hit theaters, he reportedly broke up with her over the phone, inspiring millions of film geeks across the globe to murmur in unison, "Jesus Christ, maybe he is nuts!" More recently, she has formed a productive working partnership with Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, who directed her in his feature The Saddest Music in the World and also in the short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, which she wrote. (She also seized the opportunity to cast herself as Alfred Hitchcock, David Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin.) More recently, she wrote, directed and starred in the "Green Porno" short film series.

9. CATHERINE DENEUVE (1943 - )

With her cool elegance and breathtaking beauty, it would have been all too easy for Catherine Deneuve to become yet another in a long line of Euro-babes who were emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. That she dated notorious starlet-“groomer” Roger Vadim for a time would seem to indicate this. Yet from the early stages of her career, it was clear that Deneuve was in it for the long haul. For most rising performers, starring in a film by a relative neophyte in which every line of dialogue was not merely sung but dubbed by a professional singer would have seemed risky. But Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg became a sensation largely on the basis of Deneuve’s charisma, and she quickly became an international star. But rather than simply playing girlish characters again and again in a series of Umbrellas clones, Deneuve began seeking out roles that tweaked this archetype, notably as the tightly wound virgin of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the bourgeois wife with the vivid fantasy life in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. In the decades that followed, Deneuve became an icon in France -- literally, having served as the face of the French national symbol “Marianne” during the 1980s. Hollywood came calling on several occasions throughout her career, and Deneuve answered, most memorably as the 200-year-old bisexual vampire in The Hunger. But more often, Deneuve has leveraged her stardom -- and her still-formidable beauty -- to work with directors of international renown. In addition to Demy, Polanski, and Buñuel, Deneuve’s roll-call of world-class collaborators has also included François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Andre Téchiné, Robert Aldrich, Raul Ruiz, Agnès Varda, Manoel de Oliveira, Léos Carax, and Arnaud Desplechin. Heck, she even petitioned to play a punch-press operator in Dancer in the Dark just to work with Lars Von Trier. Perhaps most happily for her fans, François Ozon’s 8 Women finally allowed Deneuve to unveil the singing voice that Jacques Demy had dubbed over decades before- which, as it turned out, was just fine after all.

8. MARILYN MONROE (1926-1962)

There are a lot of bad things you can say about Marilyn Monroe. A depressive, self-pitying pillhead, she had the biggest career anyone could ever hope for, and she threw it away; she was too ambitious, she fell in love too easily (and always with the wrong men), she was talented enough to go just so far and no farther. She never realized her potential (or never had any real potential to begin with); she helped to introduce a poisonous dumb-blonde stereotype for actresses – and, for that matter, for women – that persists to this day; and, if you believe some people (including, reportedly, Richard Nixon), she’s one of the reasons John F. Kennedy died. That’s pretty bad stuff. So what can you say in her defense? How about this: she was the biggest movie star of all time, and she will be for the rest of time. She was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, and if the platinum-tressed knockout look has gotten out of control since her heyday, she had the pleasure of inventing it. She took a limited acting range and worked it to razor-sharpness, and if she never stepped out of a very specific spectrum of characters, she played each and every one of them to the hilt, and what’s more, she seemed to have a great time doing it. She was so universally beloved that every man wanted her and every woman wanted to be her, and she was the most mourned figure in America until JFK bought a bullet a year later. She is – more than James Dean, more than Humphrey Bogart, maybe even more than the Hollywood sign – a visual symbol of the movie business. She’s an icon’s icon, rivaled in our entire culture by only Elvis Presley. That’s what you can say about Marilyn Monroe.

7. BETTE DAVIS (1908-1989)

If you can judge even a superstar by the company they keep, how are we to judge Bette Davis? It’s beyond question that she’s one of the biggest stars who ever lived, but what kind of star was she? The name she’s most often linked with, by both fate (their most productive periods coincided) and judgment (they ran neck and neck for Oscar nominations much of their careers), is Katharine Hepburn. But Hepburn always seemed to be in Hollywood, but never of it: you could easily get the idea she was just a well-meaning, patrician East Coast gal who happened to be really good at acting in movies. Davis, on the other hand, was a self-constructed creature of Hollywood who was nearly as influential off screen as she was on. A ruthless manager of her own career, she forced more than one studio into court when she felt she was being mishandled by the system, and so influential was she in backstage wrangling that she became known as “the fourth Warner Brother”. Of course, her other famous nickname was “Mother Goddamn”; her only rival in sheer ballsy spite, and the only person who could assess an enemy and go right for their jugular, was Joan Crawford. With their cut-throat business acumen, their penetrating eyes, their disastrous personal lives, and their ability to exploit a studio system built to exploit them, Crawford would be the real actress Davis most resembled if it weren’t for one thing: Davis was ten times the actress Crawford was. With her dramatic intensity, her cynical humor, and her ease in any kind of genre, Bette Davis wasn’t just a superstar, she was also a legitimately great actress – and that’s why she’s on this list.

6. MERYL STREEP (1949 - )

If there is one thing that can be considered a transcendental aspect of Meryl Streep’s career, it is that she proved that you don’t have to be inhumanly attractive to become an actress of superstar caliber. (Obligatorily, we will mention that it also says a lot about Hollywood that Ms. Streep – who, in fact, has always been a perfectly lovely-looking woman – is not considered particularly attractive by its standards.) Simultaneously, if there is one thing that can be considered an abject failure about Meryl Streep’s career, it is that it set no particular precedent; since her stunning early work in movies like Sophie’s Choice and Silkwood to her amazing latter-day roles in Adaptation and The Hours, she has been widely feted as the greatest actress alive, while elsewhere, starring roles keep on going to the sort of women who look like she doesn’t. Pity poor Streep: she’ll have to go to her grave content to be merely the most spellbinding actress of the last half-century, with nothing but an unprecedented 14 Oscar nominations to show for it. If it were anyone else getting that many nods for Academy gold, you’d have to suspect the fix was in – no one can be that good. But Meryl Streep is, astonishingly, that good. At times, in fact, she seems to be some sort of highly sophisticated android that has been programmed by omniscient aliens to be good at acting: every one of her fourteen nominations was well-earned, and you could make a solid argument she should have won at least half a dozen more than the two she owns. She has no particular schtick, tic, or gimmick; she’s seemingly not drawn to a particular type of role, nor does she seek out scripts that play to one strength or another. Instead, she acts the way Michael Jordan plays basketball: whatever is required of her in the moment, she finds some unexpected yet utterly effective way of doing it, and there is no way to stop her.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

Trailer Review: Doubt

Paul Clark — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Now that the Toronto Film Festival is over, it’s safe to say that Oscar-bait season has begun in earnest. And make no mistake, John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his celebrated stage play Doubt has Oscars in its sights, its acclaimed source material populated with an impressive, Academy-friendly cast (Streep! Hoffman! Adams!). But the film doesn’t look remotely like a slog, at least not judging by this trailer. I’ve been a longtime defender of Shanley’s previous directorial effort, 1990’s Joe Versus the Volcano, a highly original film that finally seems to have found its deserved cult. So I’m glad that Miramax has allowed Shanley to direct this film himself, trusting in his knowledge of the material and its possibilities. I especially like the way the story has been kept in the 1960s, when racism was still prevalent in our society and the sweeping reforms of Vatican II were still recent and controversial. Without these two elements, the story just wouldn't work in the same way, and I can imagine a filmmaker less attuned to the material disastrously making these changes. For a while, I wasn’t sure how Doubt would turn out, but this trailer has gotten me pretty excited.

Yesterday's Hits: Kramer vs. Kramer

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Kramer vs. Kramer a hit?: In the 1970s, divorce rates were higher than they’d ever been. A downturn in the economy meant that working people had to work harder to make ends meet, while the women’s liberation movement opened up the eyes of women nationwide to opportunities that existed for them outside the home. But while a number of films had dealt with the subject of divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer was one of the first high-profile Hollywood releases on the subject. Due to its subject matter and the prestigious nature of the project, the film received a great deal of attention from the media, which aided the public’s awareness of it immensely.

Also, the presence of Dustin Hoffman in the lead role was intriguing to moviegoers. At the time, Hoffman was best known for putting his Method acting skills to work at playing quirky outsiders. By contrast, the character of Ted Kramer was very much a “regular guy”- an ad man working his way up the ranks of his company until his wife leaves him, forcing him to raise their child more or less alone. Whereas a more conventional star might have been less than convincing as a struggling father, Hoffman made the character vulnerable and down-to-Earth, which in turn made him sympathetic even when he gets frustrated with his son and the hand that life has dealt him. Combined, these two factors helped to make Kramer vs. Kramer not only the toast of the 1979 Academy Awards, but also the year’s biggest box-office draw.

What happened?: Coming at the tail end of the 1970s- the “last hurrah” of the heyday of Hollywood’s maverick filmmakers- the relatively modest Kramer vs. Kramer hasn’t sustained its initial critical love when compared to more ambitious and director-driven films of the era like Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz. That Kramer vs. Kramer bested those films for the Best Picture Oscar only added to the sentiment that the end of the seventies brought a golden age of Hollywood filmmaking to a screeching halt.

But Kramer vs. Kramer hasn’t fallen from grace so much as it’s lost much of its visibility. When a movie’s success is predicated on the hot-button issues it raises, it can often look dated once those issues have become commonplace. So it was with Kramer vs. Kramer, especially when it came to its single-father storyline. At the time of the film’s release, the idea of a man who puts his career on the back burner to raise a child on his own was new territory for Hollywood. But whereas the philosophy behind Ted Kramer’s lifestyle change once came off as a bold statement on parenthood, it now seems like only the proper thing to do under the circumstances. Good, but hardly groundbreaking.

Does Kramer vs. Kramer still work?: Yes, although not always in the ways director Robert Benton and novelist Avery Corman originally intended. The title of the film refers to the custody proceedings between Ted and his ex-wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) that comprise much of the film’s final third. Unfortunately, the case and the fallout from the decision is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the movie, mostly because it’s the most bound to plot conventions. This extends to the film’s final scenes, which set up a bittersweet ending until the need for a happy ending rears its ugly head. When Joanna shows up at Ted’s on the date she was scheduled to take her son Billy (Justin Henry) home with her only to announce that she thinks he should stay with his dad, it feels more like plot contrivance than a decision made by the character.

However, the film works nicely as a time capsule of the way gender roles were shifting in the late 1970s. As a college-educated woman who came of age during the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, Joanna holds no small amount of resentment for being relegated to the role of housewife while Ted furthers his career. It’s telling that once she’s returned to New York to be a mother again, she explains herself primarily in the language of self-help and psychoanalysis that was gaining traction in popular culture at the time. Meanwhile, Ted’s metamorphosis into a capable single parent prefigures the more gender-neutral parenting roles that have become the norm today.

However, Kramer vs. Kramer is at its best when it’s deals in a straightforward manner with its central relationship, between Ted and Billy. Ted is hardly a saint- he has something of a temper, which causes him to lose his patience. But Benton takes the time to show him making a new life for himself and his son. Much of the credit should go to Hoffman, who not only gives one of his least mannered performances, but also is able to create a completely believable relationship with then-seven-year-old Justin Henry. It’s because we buy the two of them as father and son that we care when it looks like the two may be separated. There’s a lovely moment that comes when Billy sees his mother for the first time when over a year. In his excitement, he sprints toward Joanna and doesn’t look back. Rather than showing a closeup of Hoffman’s reaction, Benton holds camera on him in long shot, and the surroundings dwarf Ted in a way that mirrors the insignificance he’s feeling.

Whereas in 1979 the big story of Kramer vs. Kramer was its portrayal of a man raising a child alone, today it’s more noteworthy as a cinematic portrayal of what it means to be a single parent, regardless of gender. From my experience dating a single mother, I’ve learned rearing a child by oneself requires a lot of sacrifice, and the scenes in which Ted’s work performance suffers as a result of his parental demands rang absolutely true for me. But I also appreciated the more low-key moments in which we see Ted and Billy forging a loving father-son relationship. I especially liked two scenes that involve Ted making French toast for Billy- the first taking place the day after Joanna has left, the second on the morning Billy’s scheduled to leave with her. The difference between these two scenes- one frantic, the other routine- says it all about how far they’ve come together.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

Introducing Shigeo Tokuda, the Godzilla of Geriatric Porn

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

On the P.R. circuit to promote Mamma Mia!, Meryl Streep has been enjoying herself by telling interviewers how "mortified" her kids are at the thought of the 59-year-old actress prancing around the surf while crooning such deathless ABBA confections as "The Winner Takes It All." If Streep really wants to drive her offspring to scuttle around wearing Groucho noseglasses and fake foreign accents, she might consider a co-starring gig with Shigeo Tokuda, Japan's 73-year-old adult film star. Tokuda--that's his porn name--turned to on-camera balling after he retired from his gig as a travel agent and found that he "didn't have anything to do." (In a similar situation, my grandmother took up crocheting.) Now he takes on all comers, appearing with women from all across the age spectrum in the course of a career that has already racked up more than 200 titles.

According to CNN's Kyung Lah, the genre of filth for the old folks is one that Tokuda's production house "helped pioneer by accident. Ryuichi Kadowaki, president of Ruby Productions, says they started producing adult videos with people in their 30's to good sales. They creeped up to 40 year old actors and they sold even better. Kadowaki says they went up to actors in their 50's, then 60's, and now they're producing an entire line of adult videos with actors in their 70's." Kadowski theorizes that "our older customers must feel a sense of security by watching videos with an actor who is in the same generation." In the select group of septuagenarian adult film stars, Tokuda is the undisputed king. Tokuda, touting himself as a role model--and, believe me, he's preaching to the converted on that one-- notes that "Seniors get depressed because they don't have anything to do. They go crazy." Ruby Productions has just completed a deal to begin making Tokuda's films available in the U.S., so it won't be long before Americans have the chance to see Japan's sanest man hard at work in his second career. This is one Christmas where shopping for Grandma is going to be a breeze.

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s Gay Pride Month, the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival kicks off this weekend and George “Mr. Sulu” Takei and Ellen DeGeneres are getting married (though not to each other, of course) in California (hooray California! And what’s taking you so long, New York and Vermont and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and...y’know, all the rest of the country?)...

...so, anyway, to help celebrate, we here at the Screengrab thought it would be a good time to salute some of the highpoints in gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender) cinema with our very own rainbow collection of Queer Nation classics (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003)

"Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!" the purists among you may cry. “I thought this was a list of Gay Pride films, not TV shows!” Well, for starters, Mike Nichols’ all-star, six-hour, multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winning adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning rumination on homosexuality, homophobia and the better angels of human nature wasn’t TV...it was HBO. But more importantly, in a media landscape of generally low ambitions, lowered expectations and lowest common denominator multiplex landfill, it’s hard to ignore a six-hour celluloid phantasmagoria of staggering audacity, master class filmmaking, sharp dialogue, potent visuals, timely thematic resonance and knockout performances (including a multi-tasking Meryl Streep, future Weeds costars Justin Kirk and Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Patrick Wilson, Emma Thompson, James Cromwell, Ben Shenkman and Al Pacino, using his late-career bluster to good effect as prototypical self-hating conservative closet case Roy Cohn). Sure, it gets a little silly sometimes, but who would've thought a movie about the AIDS pandemic (as depicted through intertwining tales of two infected men haunted by ghosts and other celestial messengers) would find time for so much humor, imagination and hope...and, as opposed to, say, a certain lengthy, operatic, sometimes silly (but Oscar-winning) big-screen multi-part epic about heroic bravery in the face of faceless evil, lethal apathy and looming death, the cultural and political battles depicted in Angels in America are no fantasy, and continue to rage on and on and on...

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

The most original film musical of the decade began as a drag act at Squeezebox!, a weekly gay performance event in mid-90s New York City. Performer and creator John Cameron Mitchell based his iconic character Hedwig on details from his own life: his childhood in East Berlin, his idenitification with queer rock stars, his struggles with being the gay son of a military general. The crux of Hedwig's character is both a fiction and a metaphorical truth: she is the victim of a botched sex change operation, leaving her a little bit male and a little bit female. Fueled by the anti-showtunes of Stephen Trask and Mitchell's gender-bending charisma, the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a glam-rock spirit quest: Hedwig begins as a self-loathing wannabe rock star looking to complete herself through sex, and by the end of the story, she is walking naked into the world, stripped of makeup and bitterness, finally learning to love herself. If that's not pride, then what is?

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002)

Though he’d established himself since Poison, his first major feature, as the most talented director to come out of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the 1990s, it wasn’t until Far From Heaven that Todd Haynes' talents were recognized by the mainstream media. His previous films had been too controversial, too oblique, too postmodern; but with this 1950s period piece, Haynes finally gained widespread acceptance and, with it, four Oscar nominations. Ironically for one of the most original filmmakers in Hollywood, the movie that gained him this recognition was a pure throwback. With its high melodrama, ginger treatment of interracial relations, and gorgeous color palette, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the films of the melodrama king of the fifties, Douglas Sirk; and with its highly stylized acting, uncomfortable emotional weight and unapologetic addressing of gay sexual desire, it likewise conjured the films of Sirk’s most famous devotee, Ranier Werner Fassbinder. In a way that blends the fantastic, romantic sensibilities of Sirk and the gritty, rich realism of Fassbinder – and with a freedom to frankly address issues of racism and homosexuality that were denied to them both – Haynes manages to make a film that’s both moving and incredibly frustrating. Always able to coax winning performances out of his actors, he also gets Dennis Quaid to deliver an exceptionally sensitive performance in a role where both understatement and overreaching could have been a disaster.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

For obvious reasons, European cinema was several decades ahead of the curve when it came to addressing homosexuality (or, for that matter, any sexuality) on screen. It’s impossible to even conceive of an American film in 1985 – let alone one with the relative high profile of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette – being as frank, and as frankly erotic, about a gay couple. Like Far From Heaven, it succeeded largely by not making its focus too narrow; the story of young Pakistani Omar and his white lover, a former skinhead played with verve by a young Daniel Day Lewis, is made especially lively and vital by placing it within the context of a broader story of the British immigrant experience at the peak of Thatcherism. Deftly blending issues of race, class, culture and economics with a star-crossed romance, My Beautiful Laundrette owes much to a top-shelf script by Hanif Kureishi; but what shouldn’t be overlooked is its intensely erotic scenes, which were among the first in mainstream film to illustrate that gay sex on the big screen could pack as much power as its heterosexual counterpart. Gordon Warnecke as Omar is a real find in his big screen debut, and Daniel Day Lewis, in only his third film, already shows signs of being the titanic actor he would eventually become.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus van Sant has always specialized, at least in his personal films (that he finances with tripe like the Psycho remake and Good Will Hunting), in convincingly portraying the sad, proud lives of lowlifes, drifters and people with no real home to go to, whether by choice or by circumstance. He also has a particular talent for showing us characters who desperately need the love of someone, but who are none too wise in selecting who that someone should be. Those two themes come together with audacity and depth in My Own Private Idaho, the story of two hustlers – the poverty-stricken, vulnerable, narcoleptic Mike Waters (played by the late River Phoenix) and the slumming, proud, arrogant Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves who, God bless him, at least seems to be trying). For a movie so charged with homosexual love, it’s strangely lacking in sex, and not in the self-denying, passionless way that’s required from most gay characters on the big screen: rather, sex for the two of them is a largely joyless professional operation reserved for the making of money or the killing of time. This doesn’t mean they don’t need love, though, and therein lies the movie’s great tragedy: Mike wants the love of only Steve, and Steve wants the love of only his estranged, wealthy father. All of this plays out with an aesthetic derived not from Warhol’s cool surface gayness, or Fassbinder’s melodramatic near-camp: it’s given a thick sheen of the classics, drawing directly from Shakespeare. This can be both its damnation (several of the openly Shakespearian scenes come across as contrived and hokey) and its salvation (framing the entire struggle in the trappings of real tragedy gives it dramatic depth and resonance it might otherwise lack), but it’s a movie that certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition, and whatever its flaws, it’s a worthy step forward in the mainstreaming of gay characters in American cinema.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Gwynne Watkins, Leonard Pierce

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Plastic surgery is a good metaphor for CGI (a.k.a. "computer-generated imagery"): it works best when you’re least aware of it, adding value without calling attention to its glaring, unnatural fakery. A little and you’re marveling at the natural, age-appropriate sexiness of Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep, wondering “did she or didn’t she?” with regard to nips, tucks and nose jobs. Too much, and you’re recoiling in horror at that freakish Cat Lady lady, gasping in shock over missing noses and airbag lips, or wondering why Nicole Kidman keeps wearing that creepy Nicole Kidman mask.

Hollywood has developed an unhealthy addiction to both plastic surgery and CGI, preferring the obviously fake to the convincingly real, whether in the form of grotesquely disproportionate rock-hard breasticles or pixilated atrocities like Speed Racer, the cinematic equivalent of watching other people's birthday brats play video games at Chuck E. Cheese for an endless 135 minutes.

Did Jar-Jar Binks teach us nothing? Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer a little special in my special effects: cinematic images that make me go, “Oh my God, how’d they do that?” rather than, “Dude, that reminds me of this awesome World of Warcraft battle I just posted on YouTube!”

If you’re one of the CGI addicted who think all non-pixelated movie effects are inherently “cheesy,” consider the following clips an intervention as we here at the Screengrab present five examples of amazing movie moments that had (almost) nothing to do with computer-generated imagery.

Just about any Buster Keaton movie

See that car falling apart while Buster Keaton is driving it? See the front of that house falling and nearly crushing him? See that bridge collapsing with the train on it? All that shit actually happened in real life, not in post-production!

The Road Warrior

Why are high speed car chases with actual cars (and trucks and motorcycles and gyrocopters) better than computerized car action? Gee, I don’t know...maybe the same reason sex with an actual human being is better than internet porn?

The Thing (1982)

Sure, the shape-shifting alien action in John Carpenter’s The Thing may look as fake and unbelievable as CGI...but the viscous, tactile ooze has an icky, organic quality that's very hard to duplicate in the shiny world of greenscreen ones and zeroes.

Altered States

CGI scenes all tend to have a similar look, not unlike the legions of aging Hollywood starlets sporting “trout pout” and Spitting Image puppet faces after one too many visits to the neighborhood Botox dispensary. Directors and special effects coordinators forced to get a little more creative, however, may come up with distinctive, fucked-up and memorable images like those found in this one-of-a-kind Ken Russell phantasmagoria.

Star Wars

And speaking of tactile...one word: models. The star destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars (along with all the nooks and crannies of all the ships in 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien) were and remain more iconic and dramatic than all the CGI pod-racers, Naboo royal cruisers or Trade Federation frigates the computers at Skywalker Ranch have ever rendered.

Don’t get me wrong. CGI has achieved some amazing things: the bullet-time sequences in The Matrix, Gollum and that buck naked Angelina Jolie in Beowulf. But enough is enough, people. It’s time for Hollywood to go cold turkey.

For the betterment of all humanity...CGI Must Die.

Long-Lasting Gum Does Its Part to Chew Uwe Boll Out of the Business

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It has come to our attention--mainly because they sent us a press release about it--that Stride Gum, the ridiculously long-lasting gum, has jumped on board the anti-Uwe Boll bandwagon. To do its part, the company has pledged to dole out a million packs of gum if the petition urging Boll to shred his Directors' Guild card reaches the required one million signatures. (Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of the underground lair he sublets from the Monarch, Paul Clark shakes his black-gloved fist.) Who knew the CEO of Stride Gum was such a movie geek? Actually, it appears that this is the company's way of declaring its allegiance to the video-gamers it sees as an important part of its demographic. “Since gamers are one of our most supportive groups, we’ve been looking for ways to return the favor,” said Gary Osifchin, Stride North American Marketing Director. “And what better way is there to get gamers’ backs than by helping them rescue their cherished videogames from the clutches of Uwe Boll?” Osifchin added, "Look, it's nothing personal against the guy. Maybe his non videogame-based films are unbelievable!" (Uwe Boll has made non-videogame-based films? I guess it's possible--Wes Craven once made a music appreciation movie starring Maryl Streep, and then there's that Bill Murray remake of The Razor's Edge--but it still seems wrong.) If the petition racks up its millionth signature between May 7 and May 14, 5 P.M. EST, each signer will receive "a digital coupon for a pack of gum, downloadable on May 23, 2008," which is the day that Boll's Postal, featuring Verne Troyer in the challenging dual role of "Himself" and "Voice of Krotchy", is set to hit theaters. I don't know if there's anyone out there who regards the two most important things in life as chewing free gum and someday getting to see BloodRayne 3, but if there is, I'd imagine there's some internal conflict going on right now.

Before we get in trouble here, let us stress that our reporting this news does not in any way represent a paid or unpaid testimonial for Stride Gum. We ourselves have never tried Stride Gum, but not because we have any particular reason for avoiding it. We just haven't used chewing gum since we were eight years old and somebody told us you weren't supposed to swallow it. (But we used to get so hungry sometimes, waiting for Mama to come back from the bar where she'd go to visit Uncle Fred, and Uncle Jerry, and Uncle Marshall, and Uncle Zeke...) This guy we know who spends his days sitting in front of the entrance to the Columbus Circle subway station did once tell us that it's like chewing a dead rat soaked in battery acid, but he also has an ornate theory about how Princess Diana was killed because she knew about a sex tape featuring the Pope and Bela Lugosi, so any consumer advisories from him should probably be taken with a grain of salt. The important thing is that Uwe Boll is really bringing people together, in ways that bad directors never dreamed might be possible in Ed Wood's or Phil Tucker's day. Big blue marble!

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Playing" and "Theater of War"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's Playing is an experimental documentary that sounds like a dumb stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and storytelling. The movie opens with the text of an ad Coutinho placed in the newspaper that amounted to an open call for any women in Rio de Janeiro over eighteen "with stories to tell." He filmed them talking about their lives and then brought in a succession of actresses, who studied these monologues and then, using their own words, delivered their own versions of the stories. The trick is that in the finished film, Coutinho cut together the best of both material-- the original speakers and the actresses doing their "interpretations" of them-- without clearly identifying for the audience which is which. Sometimes a scene will end with a woman revealing herself to be an actress by commenting on what she's just done; sometimes, as in the case of a woman who talks about how she sees her relationship with her grown daughter reflected in Finding Nemo, we get to see the original speaker's words alongside those of the actress who "plays" them; sometimes we never find out. At its simplest, the movie reveals a lot about "real life" and theater and how they complement and comment on each other. (A number of the women who seem to be describing their own experiences tear up very easily. However, an actress shows the director the tool she would have used if he'd insisted that she cry during her performance and explains that though she was prepared to use it, she preferred not to because it's her observation that when people really feel like crying, that's when they hold back their tears.) It also shows how thin the line between the two can be. Coutinho has taken a device that could have been used to cook up one more dopey illusion vs. reality game and made something substantial with it.

Another documentary in the festival, Theater of War, is also meant to be about theater and its application to the real world, which is here defined as torn-from-the-headlines big issues. Thinking about how the movie defines theater sort of makes my head hurt. The director, John Walter, made How to Draw a Bunny, an ugly-looking but endlessly fascinating video documentary about the prankster pop artist Ray Johnson. Theater, a behind-the-scenes look at a 2006 Public Theater production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, is much slicker-looking and about half as interesting. The material about Brecht's life and the writing and original production of the play is enough to make you think it would be great to see a real documentary about that sometime, preferably one that's less slavish in its worship of the playwright and that manages to get by without the contributions of this film's resident Brecht scholar, Jay Cantor, a man who has the rare distinction of having written bad novels about both Che Guevara and Krazy Kat. But the film's prime attraction is supposed to be the chance to see the Public Theater production coming together and to see a glimpse of the "process" of its star, Meryl Streep.

Streep comes across as a very nice woman, and she gets points for allowing herself to be filmed at rehearsals wearing a T-shirt that says "DIVA" across the front, but the big unanswered question raised by Theater of War is why this production was made. When the Public Theater's artistic director tells the camera that the Iraq war is an all-encompassing issue like the Vietnam war, and that he just knew he had to put on "an adaptation" of Mother Courage by Tony Kushner starring Meryl Streep, it just sounds as if he's saying that, in order to appear to be saying something about an important contemporary subject, he just had to have the biggest New York playwright to whom he had access custom-design a big classic play that could seem to be commenting on the subject, with the Official Big New York Stage Actress in the lead. Nothing that comes after that really dispels this impression, whether it's seeing the composer who's been hired to compose new songs in a sort of Brecht-Weill tailor them to the singing abilities of the stars, or the costume designer explain that she's throwing together styles of dress from many different periods and cultures so as not to appear to be commenting on any specific time or place, or watching the prop guys deliver on the director George C. Wolfe's passionate desire to have a jeep that can be driven onstage. (The Public Theater Mother Courage finally opened to loud hype and mixed reviews, with a "translation" by Kushner that included sitcom snappers and lines directed at the Bush administration.) The biggest shocker in the movie comes very early, when Tony Kushner, talking about his early years in New York in the mid-seventies as a theater student from Lousiana, and how he was able to feed his culture jones seeing things like the celebrated Public Theater production of The Threepenny Opera with Raul Julia and Ellen Greene and the whole of Wagner's Ring cycle "for no money." (There were gasps in the audience.) The subtext of Theater of War is the story of how some gifted people who were able to learn their craft and make their names in the last years when New York was affordable for young artists now collaborate, probably with the best of intentions, in the work of maintaining the illusion that this rich man's playground of a city is still a vital culture center by staging effects-heavy, glitzy shows whose point seems to be that Bertolt Brecht had George W. Bush's number. The punchline is that the Tony Kushner of 1975 might not be able to get into these shows, and to his credit, he might not want to.

Harmony Korine Settles Down

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

There comes a time when all of us have to put our skateboarding, glue-sniffing, bum-fighting, Meryl Streep-pushing, smoking-in-bed-and-burning-down-the-house days behind us, and if the New York Times is to be believed, that time has come for Harmony Korine. Perhaps the only man on earth who counts Werner Herzog and magician David Blaine among his close friends, Korine no longer wanders the mean streets of New York asking strangers to punch him in the face. He’s now married and living in Nashville, and as Dennis Lim reports, “this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.”

The old days were interesting, though – some would say more interesting than the movies he made then. (After Janet Maslin declared his 1997 white-trashterpiece Gummo the worst movie of the year, Korine recalls, “I got a call from Herzog, who was like, ‘This movie is now destined to live forever.’ ”) He managed to burn down not one house, but two. (“The first one I don’t know what happened,” he said. “The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking.”) He made a series of Crispin Glover-esque appearances on the David Letterman show, and embarked on a video project called Fight Harm, perhaps the single stupidest movie ever attempted by a name director. This is how Korine explained it at the time: “I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see.”

After trips to the hospital and jail, the project was abandoned. “I thought I was making the greatest comedy,” he said. “At the time I really felt like that’s what I was on earth to do — get beaten up.” Some of his critics agree, but Lim cites Mister Lonely as “apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine.” We trust this means Korine won’t be going the Uwe Boll route and challenging his critics to meet him in the ring.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 11-13, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Move over, Juliette Binoche, Jude Law and Natalie Portman. There's a new arthouse star in town- Richard Jenkins. The character actor extraordinaire, known to many as the deceased father on Six Feet Under, parlayed a rare leading role in Tom McCarthy's new film The Visitor (Overture Films) into the weekend's top per-screen box office take. The film took in a mighty $22,622 per screen average on four screens this past weekend, which promises a healthy overall gross once the film expands wider in two weeks.

Finishing in second place was Fox Searchlight's crowd-pleasing documentary Young@Heart, raking in a sturdy $12,734 average on four screens. The film, about a chorus of retirees who perform rock'n'roll songs, has received mostly ecstatic reviews thusfar, which leads me to think the awful trailer may simply have been a botch by Fox's marketing department.

Making strong showings in the their second weeks of release were last week's top two, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (IFC Films) and Wong Kar-wai's English-language debut My Blueberry Nights (The Weinstein Company). Rounding on the top five was the Vietnam drama Holly (Slowhand Cinema).

Also of note were: First Independent's release Dark Matter, whose sturdy grosses can be mostly attributed to the presence of Meryl Streep in a supporting role; Body of War (The Film Sales Company), an Iraq documentary co-directed by Phil Donahue (last seen puking in the trombone); and the weekend's top-performing wide-ish release, Miramax's Smart People. Less successful was Sony Pictures Classics' new English dub of Persepolis, taking in a mere $561 per screen- little more than the already-on-DVD There Will Be Blood.

Top 10: Weekend of April 11-13:
1. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($22,622 per screen)
2. Young@Heart [Fox Searchlight] ($12,734)
3. The Flight Of The Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($11,959)
4. My Blueberry Nights [The Weinstein Company] ($7,292)
5. Holly [Slowhand Cinema Releasing] ($5,994)
6. Dark Matter [First Independent Pictures] ($4,351)
7. Body of War [The Film Sales Company] ($3,850)
8. The Dhamma Brothers [Balcony Releasing] ($3,710)
9. Smart People [Miramax] ($3,700)
10. Priceless [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($3,604)

Source: IndieWire.

Robert De Niro in “The Return of Rupert Pupkin”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Via Defamer, we have our first glimpse of footage from the upcoming sequel to The King of Comedy. At least, we assume that’s what this clip of Robert De Niro cracking wise at the expense of Meryl Streep must be. Surely this couldn’t be anything other than De Niro reprising the role of Rupert Pupkin, the painfully unfunny stand-up comedian whose kidnapping of talk show host Jerry Langford propelled him to stardom. It’s eerie how accurately De Niro is able to recapture the squirm-inducing mannerisms and spectacularly awful timing some 26 years after originating the Pupkin character. Take a look for yourself after the jump:

Defamer’s version is here, but we’ve found an extended version on the YouTubes:

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

Trailer Review: Mamma Mia!

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Broadway smash Mamma Mia! is an example of the phenomenon of "jukebox musicals" — stage productions whose song score is comprised primarily of pre-existing music (in this case, ABBA) — which aren't to be confused with stage musicals based on non-musical movies. Personally, I'm not a fan of the phenomenon, as it feels primarily like a way of attracting tourists to spend hundreds of dollars on a Broadway show by giving them the impression of attending honest-to-goodness theatre while wrapping them in a musical comfort blanket. But while I'm not exactly excited for Mamma Mia!, I must admit that the cast intrigues me. After A Prairie Home Companion, I'm curious to see what Meryl Streep can do in an honest-to-goodness musical, especially now that she's gotten to the stage of her career where she's loosened up and is free to do whatever the hell she wants. Likewise, the rest of the ensemble, from the actors playing the would-be dads (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård) on down — is classier than one would expect from a movie like this. My enthusiasm for this project remains guarded, but I'm certainly more curious about than I'd anticipated.

Meryl Streep IS "Mamma Mia!" Deal with It!

Phil Nugent — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Mamma Mia!, the Broadway hit that is half-jukebox musical devoted to the hits of ABBA, half-unauthorized remake of the 1968 movie Buena Sera, Mrs. Campbell, is coming to movie screens thus year. Granted, it could be that some of you have only a limited interest in the circa-'76 Swedish singing sensations or the comedy stylings of Telly Savalas. But even if that's the case, a couple of things make this project kind of interesting. First, while you might assume that the creation of "the most successful musical on the planet" had its genesis in some producer feeding some Billboard charts, a couple of obscure IMDB pages, and the estimated cost of his new beach house into a computer and hitting "Puree", but it turns out that it's really a labor of love by a team of three women: producer Judy Craymer, writer Catherine Johnson, and director Phyllida Lloyd. Having worked together to create the stage show, they've since collaborated on the movie--with pretty much total creative control, since Craymer had the foresight to hang onto the film rights. Though Lloyd has extensive credits in the theater and directed a TV version of the opera Gloriana for the BBC in 2000, this will mark her feature film directing debut.

The other notable thing about the movie is that it stars Meryl Streep, who will make her movie musical debut tackling a part that was originated (in Buena Sera, Mrs. Campbell) by Gina Lollobrigida and performing the songs made famous by Benny, Bjorn, Anni-Frid, and Agnetha. Streep, who's done enough heavy lifting in her film career to build the pyramids, has been mixing it up with comedies (Defending Your Life, Adaptation) and even the occasional action flick (The River Wild) for a long time now, but she's still probably the classiest thing to happen to Abba since Lasse Hallstrom directed Abba: The Movie. Being very bad people, our first reaction to the news was to assume that Streep probably wanted to buy a small Caribbean country or maybe had a gambling problem. (Incidentally, I personally first learned that she was in Mamma Mia! when I went to the movies and saw her skipping about happily in the trailer. I can testify that this was definitely the best way to find out about it, assuming that you think the proper way to celebrate such news is to choke on a Milk Dud while spilling your Coke in your lap.)

But it turns out that Streep, too, is in this one for the love. According to Judy Craymer, "Our passion for Meryl and Meryl's passion for the show made it work. She saw the show on Broadway and wrote us a fan letter saying what a great time she'd had. And it all happened rather fast. We spoke to her agent, her agent spoke to her, and apparently she said: 'Mamma Mia!?? I AM Mamma Mia!?' " Streep's participation made it easier for the filmmakers to go after big game in fleshing out the supporting cast, which includes Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård. Praising Streep's work in the film, Lloyd says, "She finds a line into a character and the way she should be like nothing I've ever seen before, and everyone else just raises their game as a result." So however badly the rest of the movies this summer might stink, at least we can look forward to the prospect of seeing what Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard look like singing when they're Abba songs with their games raised.

What a Character

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Can you handle another year-end top ten list? Can you handle it? We don't think we can, but the L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor is determined to try our patience. At the very least, she takes a fresh approach to it: in her run-down of 2007's most interesting on-screen characters, she rejects the conventional wisdom that this year's prime crop of good films reeked to an unseemly degree of masculinity and cites an unusually high number of strong woman characters haunting our cineplexes, from Catherine Keener to Lili Taylor. She particularly bigs up Meryl Streep, who, rather than dominating Oscar fare as usual, turns the trick of having "redeemed two bad movies"; Amy Ryan's "hard but not cold" single mother in Gone Baby Gone, and, in an interesting defection from a number of critics who found the female characters in Knocked Up to be half-formed caricatures, Leslie Mann, who "brings to the controlling-bitch-wife role that makes women squirm a kind of cathartic, rhythmic lyricism" that's "full of hilarious menace". The piece isn't exactly a vital chapter in the history of cinema circa 2007, but it does serve as a refreshing tonic to an increasing number or critics who praise this year's movies because of their unrelenting and unapologetic masculinity.

Elsewhere in the Weekly, there's plenty more end-of-year stuff, as J. Hoberman introduces the 2007 critic's poll; Luke Thompson argues that torture-porn and the new wave of shock-horror has captured the attention of critics but failed to capture moviegoer dollars at the box office; Nikki Finke provides a postmortem recap of the star-crossed temper tantrums and I-dare-yous that lead up to the WGA strike; and Scott Foundas argues that, at a time when America isn't exactly making friends in the rest of the world, Hollywood is the best diplomatic organization we have to offer this year.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov