The Screengrab : michael caine

Spring Movie Poster Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:30:00 GMT

It’s time for everyone’s favorite occasional feature, wherein I preview a handful of upcoming movies I know nothing about based solely on their posters. It’s like judging a book by its cover, but in motion picture form!

Dragonball Evolution (April 10)

An ordinary suburban paperboy is infused with superpowers when a meteor from deep space crashes into his crotch, leaving him with one giant glowing testicle he calls Dragonball! They said this controversial graphic novel was unfilmable, but when the new line of Dragonball action figures hits toy stores next week, the streets will be filled with kids hucking rocks at each other’s family jewels.

Is Anybody There? (April 17)

Michael Caine will have Academy voters in the palm of his hand with his warm, autumnal performance as Mortimer Digbottom, a retired mortician in Blandford-on-Stoatswallow who decides to accompany his grandson on a train trip to the spelling bee championship in London. The grandson isn’t participating in the spelling bee; he just wants to watch.

Mutant Chronicles (April 24)

If you’ve already watched Wolverine online and you still want to get your mutant on, here’s some dark, gritty apocalyptic action for you. Gloomy, underlit, over-edited and certain to be beloved by everyone who feels there simply haven’t been enough Underworld movies.

Fighting (April 24)

In Step Up, Channing Tatum was dancing. Now Channing Tatum is…fighting! Probably with his shirt off. I mean, he’s wearing a shirt in this poster, but I’m sure it won’t last. Terrence Howard co-stars as the guy who got written out of Iron Man 2.

Next Day Air (May 8)

Let’s see, we’ve got two guns in the foreground, which means action. But we’ve got comical expressions on the faces of the cast, which means comedy. Folks, I think what we’ve got here is one o’ them action-comedies I’ve heard tell about. I’m guessing some overnight delivery personnel got their hands on the wrong package at the wrong time. Also, the girl with the big boobs has a shirt that says “Protect Your Package.” If it’s a hit, the sequel can only be called Second Day Air.

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Science! Solving the "Italian Job" Cliffhanger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The 1969 British caper movie The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine as the thieving brainiac Charlie Croker, with a supporting cast that included Noel Coward, Raf Vallone, and Benny Hill, is a much-loved classic in England, but its commercial failure in the U.S. at the time of its release doomed plans for a sequel. (The movie did eventually inspire a sleek Hollywood remake in 2003.) Which meant that the movie's ending--a cliffhanger designed as a set-up for a "part two"--has been hanging there for almost forty years. In the movie's last scene, Caine and his gang are heading for Switzerland with their stolen fortune in gold when the vehicle they're in goes into a skid on a winding mountain road; they wind up in a Laurel and Hardy routine, trapped in their getaway bus as it teeters on the edge of a cliff, with the robbers on one end and the gold inching towards the open doors at the other end. Is there any way our heroes can escape with their lives and the swag? "Hang on a minute lads," Caine announces, "I've got a great idea!" And there the matter stands, Or stood, until last fall, when the Royal Society of Chemistry put out a call for proposed solutions to the problem, setting only the stipulations that submissions should have "a plausible basis in science," should not require "more than thirty minutes, and not use a helicopter." (The timing was inspired, it turns out, not by the movie's fortieth anniversary but by the hundredth anniversary of the periodic table. Of the elements comprising that table, gold is Number 117. Don't you tell me this site isn't educational.)

The winning entry came in from a fellow named John Godwin, a self-professed lifelong fan of the movie, so he may have gotten a head start of a few decades on trying to work out the details of his master plan. Here's how USA Today broke it down:

•Break the windows at the back to reduce weight.

•Break two windows at the front, hold one gang member upside down out of the window to deflate the front tires and stabilize the vehicle.

•Drain the rear fuel tank through an access panel at the bottom of the bus.

•Gang members leave one by one from the front, collecting stones to replace their weight.

•Keep adding stones until someone can safely go to the rear to retrieve the gold.

Amusingly, the film's producer, Michael Deeley, who came up with the original ending after rejecting a number of other possibilities, had a vision of how the problem would be solved at the start of that sequel that never got made, and it depended on--yes, a helicopter. The whirlybird would contain Mafia soldiers, who would rescue the bus, reclaim the gold, and set up a plot that would have the robbers chasing them so they could steal it again. (It would of course be plausible that the gangsters wouldn't kill them, because even the Mafia likes Michael Caine.) A few years ago, Caine himself offered a solution, though it's not completely clear whether he was describing something that was considered for filming or even something that had been filmed and discarded, or just recounting a daydream he'd cooked up during a slow day on the set of Hannah and Her Sisters. Caine said that in his own alternate cut, his character would "crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out... The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over" into the ravine, where it is collected by the Mafia, and then the heroes have to run after them to steal it back. Of all these solutions, Godwin's has the virtue of ending with the heroes and the gold in pretty much the same place, with no spoilsport Mafiosi in sight. It remains an open question which of the gang would be deputized to walk down the mountain in search of a gas station so they could refill the fuel tank. But who am I kidding, it'd have to be Benny Hill.

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

Harold Pinter, 1930-2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Harold Pinter, who died at the age of 78 on Christmas Eve, was very likely the only writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, the French Légion d'honneur, and inspire an episode of Seinfeld. He was also a towering enough figure in modern theater to lend his name to a word: "Pinteresque." It was most commonly used in reference to the famous pauses written into his plays, and many a theater lover born during or after Pinter's first period of success knew long before discovering his plays that describing the sight of an actor daring the audience to wonder if he'd just forgotten his lines as Pinteresque was an easy way of seeming smart. More generally, and more and more as Pinter's career went on, it came to stand for the whole mysterious, threatening world he created on stage, a place where everyone seemed to be nursing a secret grudge and perpetually squaring off against and testing each other, and the balance of power kept shifting. Pinter, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948, entered theater as an actor and spent twelve years struggling to get by as a member of various repertory companies; for about half that time, he performed under the name "David Baron." His time as a starving young actor in London overlapped with that of Michael Caine, and Caine has often enjoyed telling interviewers about the time good old "David" stormed out of the pub, saying that he was bloody sick to death of this bloody business and was going home to try to write something.

Speaking to The New York Times' Mel Gussow many years later, Pinter would recall that, as an actor, "My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into." As an actor, he--like his American counterpart, Sam Shepard--brought to his writing an inside understanding of the charge that actors get out of the kind of menacing game-playing and shape-shifting that would go on in his plays, and how easily they can impart their excitement in those kinds of roles to the audience. He joined that kind of showmanship to a modernist sense that the hostility he put onstage might seem all the more haunting for seeming oblique in its motivating force, and to a poetic sense of spoken language that immediately joined him, in the minds of critics and the public, to his friend Samuel Beckett (who, as it happened, also died shortly before Christmas, nineteen years ago).

Interviewers who flat out asked Pinter about his working methods and the meaning of his plays soon found that they'd have better spent their evening wrestling greased eels. The facts, as they say on Pushing Daisies, are these: born in 1930 in the London borough of Hackney, he was to be a Jewish evacuee from during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. That terrifying and confusing experience, coupled to the lonely, brainy boy's entry into school, is widely thought to have forever impacted his view of the world. Writing in Esquire in 1968, Wilfrid Sheed observed that the young Pinter had "had to face the problem of assimilation, by himself, in a series of strange settings, at an age when most boys are concentrating on the best way to keep up their pants. English class apprenticeship is brutal enough if you are born to it. To an outsider like Pinter, it has the extra horror of meaninglessness." In the late fifties and early sixties, Pinter's on-stage chess games seemed very different from the other kinds of English plays that were changing the theater at that time, the "Angry Young Men" plays by such writers as John Osbourne, where hyper-articulate but painfully alienated men expressed their fury at the system, but Pinter was anyone's equal when it came to rage. (Years later, an actor a continent away from a very different kind of working class background--John Malkovich--would tell interviewers that he was drawn into the theater by "the suppressed violence" of Pinter's plays.) Yet so great was his reluctance to be pinned down that he adamantly resisted any political reading of his work.

That changed in the 1980s, when, after a prolonged dust-up in his private life. Pinter had married the actress Vivien Merchant, who would appear in many of his plays and in movies derived both from his plays and original screenplays; they would have a son, Daniel, in 1958. Pinter left Merchant for the best-selling popular historian Antonia Fraser, with whom he lived from 1975 until his death, though it would be another five years before his and Lady Antonia's marriages would be legally dissolved and they could be married. The second marriage was a fairly public and apparently happy one, but the wreckage from Pinter's first marriage would linger. Merchant died of alcoholism in 1982, and in 1993 Pinter's son broke off all contact with him; as a well-regarded writer and musician, he works under the name "Daniel Brand", and for the last fifteen years of his father's life, they never spoke again. The time surrounding Merchant's death coincided with a three-year break Pinter took from playwriting, and when he returned in the mid-1980s, with such plays as One for the Road and Mountain Language, he showed a new willingness to make direct political statements in both his work and his interviews, and even allowed that his earlier plays may well have included "metaphorical" statements on the kind of issues he now addressed head-on. At the same time, he maintained a chilly distance from any autobiographical interpretation of his work, declining, for example, to allow that there might be any connection between his characters' obsessions with lost children and family ties and his son's refusal to reconcile with him.

Many of Pinter's best-known, early plays have been filmed, but, perhaps because they depend so much on the heat and dazzle of live performance, getting the transition from stage to screen to take has often proven problematic. Neither Clive Donner's 1963 The Caretaker nor William Friedkin's 1968 The Birthday Party was a success, though the films are very faithful to the texts. Robert Altman filmed the one-acts The Dumb Waiter and The Room for American network TV in the late 1980s without setting the world on fire; the British TV versions of The Collection (1976), with Laurence Olivier, Helen Mirren, Malcolm MacDowell, and Alan Bates, and No Man's Land (1978), starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, record the not inconsiderable spectacle of phenomenal casts having a go at Pinter's dialogue, but in the context of lesser plays. The 1973 American Film Theater production of The Homecoming, which includes performances by many members of the original cast (including Vivien Merchant as Ruth) and the 1983 Betrayal, with Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons, are better thought of.

But Pinter's strongest impact in movies came through screenplay adaptations of others' work--and he did a surprisingly large number of them, especially as his standard of living improved. Among the ones that stand out are his adaptation of Penelope Mortimer's novel The Pumpkin Eater for Jack Clayton's 1964 film, and the first of his many collaborations with the director Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), both starring Dirk Bogarde. He also wrote Losey's 1970 The Go-Between and prepared a script for a film based on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past for which Losey was never able to obtain funding; it was published in book form as The Proust Screenplay, and eventually adapted to the stage. His other screenplay credits include The Quiller Memorandum, The Last Tycoon, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Turtle Diary, Reunion, The Handmaid's Tale, The Comfort of Strangers, the 1993 version of Kafka's The Trial, and his final credit, the 2007 remake of Sleuth. He also directed Alan Bates in the 1973 movie of Simon Gray's play Butley.

In the last several years, Pinter seemed to be returning to his old profession, acting. He had always been in the habit of taking bit parts and cameos in movies he's worked on, sometimes taking slightly larger roles under his old alias, "David Baron." Then, in 1996, he took on the substantial role of Goldberg in a TV production of The Birthday Party, and he followed that up with such roles as Emma Thompson's father in the HBO film Wit and the spectral "Uncle Bennie" in John Boorman's The Tailor of Panama, sagely advising his nephew, Geoffrey Rush, to be sincere rather than tell the truth: "Sincerity's a virtue! The truth's an affliction!" In 2005, the same year that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter announced that he was effectively "retired" from playwriting. The next year, he capped his life in the theater with a triumphantly received run of nine performances, playing Beckett's one-man play Krapp's Last Tape at London's Royal Court Theatre. The performance, which was subsequently released on DVD, was given from a motorized wheelchair; Pinter, who was already ill with the cancer that would kill him, was forced to dispense with Beckett's stage direction that his character should stuff himself with bananas during the play.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Muppet Christmas Carol"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Alert readers may recall that, while I'm posting the reviews of the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon movies in dribs and drabs over the days leading up to Christmas, I actually watched them all in sequence over the space of two days in a bleary haze of rum-soaked egg nog and seasonal affective disorder. I had a highly formalized plan for which movie to watch in which particular order, but I drunkenly knocked over my stack of DVDs after the fifth movie, and then I just watched them in the order in which they fell on the living room floor. I was hoping that it would be late in the day by the time I had to get around to watching some variation of A Christmas Carol -- I find the irascible-old-bastard Scrooge largely preferable to the lover-of-all-humanity Scrooge -- but here's where it turned up, so you're going to have to read about it.

My own misanthropy aside, it's not surprising that Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas has become one of the most beloved holiday stories of all time. It's got a little bit of something for everyone: a sincere, adorable crippled boy, for treacle fans; a handful of truly memorable characters; abundant humor, some of it rather more mordant than one might expect; a creepy ghost story; and, best of all, a central plot that appeals to lovers of Christmas everywhere: a cranky old jerk who hates Christmas has, after a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, a legendary change of heart and embraces the holiday in full, becoming the very embodiment of the spirit of giving and showering those poor souls he previously spurned with largesse.

Dickens write A Christmas Carol for the same reason he wrote a lot of his most famous work: for a paycheck. But it ended up having a much more vast impact on our entire culture than its author possibly imagined. One of the most widely-read stories of the English canon, its familiar story and infinitely flexible formal structure have led it to become one of the most widely-adapted stories as well. The number of stage plays, movies and very-special-episode television series based on the story are probably uncountable; as long as there is economic injustice, as long as there are lazy scriptwriters in love with the flashback gimmick; as long as there are cranky old jerks who, justfiably or not, aren't as into the holidays as the rest of us, there will continue to be new movie and TV versions of A Christmas Carol.

Just to mix things up a bit, I chose as my preferred adaptation this time around the 1992 felt-puppet version of Dickens' classic. Made just after Muppet maven Jim Henson died, it didn't do that well on its initial release, but gained something of a cult following on home video. There's plenty of inside jokes and a clever framing device of the story being narrated by Dickens himself (played by the Great Gonzo) and a comic foil in the form of Rizzo the Rat; the story is surprisingly faithful to the original; the casting of balcony naysayers Statler and Waldorf as Jacob Marley and -- ho, ho -- his brother Robert is inspired and leads to the movie's best musical number; and best of all, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge proves that, just as he can turn in a great performance in a bad movie, he can be intensely human and affecting while acting opposite a stuffed bag of felt.

You'd be forgiven, naturally, if you chose a different movie version of A Christmas Carol as your favorite; there's enough good ones to make a 12 days of Christmas marathon of nothing but this particular story. The 'canonical' version is probably the 1951 British adaptation Scrooge, carried on the strength of an unforgettable lead performance by the wonderful Alastair Sim, but there's also the 1970 Albert Finney version, a 1935 adptation starring Leo G. Carroll, the George C. Scott-as-Scrooge TV movie from 1984, a 1999 television adaptation with slices of thick British ham from Patrick Stewart, Joel Grey and Richard E. Grant, Henry Winkler's An American Christmas Carol, Bill Murray's post-ironic 1988 adaptation Scrooged, and animated versions starring Mr. Magoo, the Flintstones, and a bunch of talking dogs that all have their fans.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An enjoyable 9 Muppet ladies dancing. This isn't the best Muppet movie, but it isn't the worst, and its relentless charm is hard to resist. Henson's son Brian and Steve Whitmore do a solid if uninspired job of carrying on the Muppet tradition, and there's the usual blend of kid-friendly shenanigans and clever jokes and references for the grown-ups. Caine's performance as Scrooge, though, is what really steals the show.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Star Wars Holiday Special

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

DEATHTRAP (1982)

One set, five characters, a couple of twists and a few good, juicy murders: that’s the formula for success in Ira Levin’s puzzle box of a murder mystery about a struggling veteran playwright desperate for a hit. Add a nervous spouse with a weak heart, a gay lover, a weird psychic, a cagey agent and a wall full of handcuffs, pistols and crossbows and you’ve got one of the few stage plays with the power to make audiences scream and jump like a creature double-feature. The movie version wisely sticks to the basics, letting the cat-and-mouse triple-double-cross plotting speak for itself while sticking mostly to the confined but never claustrophobic Long Island home of the plotting protagonist (Michael Caine at his very Michael Caine-iest, having a helluva time). And though certain naysayers here at the Screengrab may say nay, I also give kudos to Christopher Reeve’s performance in the film, which tweaks his goody-two-shoes Superman image while letting him exercise the underutilized mischievous side of his (admittedly limited) range. Meanwhile, Dyan Cannon gives good scream as the wife, and if all that doesn’t win you over, the movie has at least one immortal line, delivered by a snarky critic (Joel Siegel) after Caine’s playwright Sidney Bruhl premieres a hackneyed whodunit nowhere near as clever as Deathtrap: “I'll tell you who done it. Sidney Bruhl done it. And he done it in public."

THE RULING CLASS (1972)

Adapted for the screen by Peter Barnes from his own deeply subversive play, The Ruling Class was sort of a last gasp for the British “Angry Young Man” movement. But its demise was also its salvation: the play – and the subsequent and very successful film – kept in place the elements of class warfare, generational conflict and family drama and turned them on their heads. It replaced rage with whimsy, a tone of rebellion with a sense of absurdity, and an overall tone of Pythonesque lunacy that proved the movement wasn’t entirely devoid of humor. The story of an upper-class family of British aristocrats forced by fortune into restoring as its head a deranged son who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ (played with delightfully silky craziness by Peter O’Toole, in one of his greatest roles), The Ruling Class is, even today, as vicious as it is hilarious. It expands on the play by adding a few memorable characters and trading up in the players (most especially Nigel Green as McKyle, “the Electric Christ”, and the unforgettable Alastair Sim as the bewildered Bishop Bertie Lampton) as well as taking the sets out-of-doors, but what made the stage version so great was its devastatingly funny and fiendish dialogue. Barnes and director Peter Medak are wise enough not to change a bit of that.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

Tim Burton’s first full-blown attempt at a musical is so successful, it’s a wonder that he never tried it before. Without sacrificing the elements that have made him famous – the gloomy atmospherics, the high gothic sensibilities, the manic pace, the deft blend of dark humor and absurd violence – his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s notorious musical gives him the perfect format. Why? Because musicals are infinitely forgiving of the qualities that, in many of Burton’s other films, can rightly be considered weaknesses: his overblown dialogue, his clumsy grasp of the dynamics of storytelling, his slight characterization, and his love of style over emotional substance. Everything really comes together for him here, and the result is one of the most enjoyable musicals in decades. Dismissals of the lead actors (Johnny Depp as the vengeance-addled Victorian hairstylist and Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as the vendor of unhygienic meat pies) as unable to sing at the level expected from a big-screen musical somewhat miss the point: Sweeney Todd is a fiendishly difficult production, its songs and structure much more akin to an opera than a musical comedy, and it contains precious few toe-tappers, so putting the words in the mouths of those not well-suited to the old school of musicals doesn’t sink it one bit.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Almost fifty years down the road, there are a lot of problems with the Stanley Kramer adaptation of the then-controversial play (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, no relation) about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s excessively stagey; Kramer doesn’t bother to open up the set very much, and too many scenes are given no chance to work in the very different medium of film. The casting is problematic; Spencer Tracy and Frederic March are terrific in the lead roles (as stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively), and there are some good supporting jobs, especially by Elliott Reed as the county prosecutor, but Dick York and Donna Anderson as the romantic leads are flat as pancakes, and Gene Kelly playing a thinly-veiled H.L. Mencken is one of the biggest botch-jobs in casting history. It’s unfair, imbalanced, and historically inaccurate. And in a certain sense, it’s simply not as relevant as it once was; Inherit the Wind isn’t about what it’s about, but rather a Cold War narrative about the long-faded dangers of McCarthyism. But there are still some gorgeous speeches in this moldy oldie, and since America is, astonishingly, still debating the rightness of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools some eighty-odd years after the Scopes Trial, it maintains a relevance its authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

While many directors attempt to open up adaptations of stage plays for the big screen by taking the action up and out, Mike Nichols helps make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a masterpiece by doing the opposite. Although he does take us outside once or twice, what makes the film so visually arresting is his camera’s perfect pace with the legendary dialogue: instead of going out, it circles endlessly in and around, like a shark. It darts in and out of scenes, whirls around like the heads of the characters after a stinging rejoinder, and creeps in for powerful closeups that reveal faces as ugly as the words they’re speaking. Who exactly gets credit for the screenplay has been the subject of endless disputes, arguments and lawsuits, but really, it’s as simple as going to the source; almost all of the hypnotic dialogue that takes place between timid, repressed college professor Richard Burton and his domineering, disapproving wife Elizabeth Taylor is present in Edward Albee’s original stage play. Not for nothing is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a sort of literary shorthand for viciously feuding married couples: as Burton and Taylor go for each other’s throats, the camera matches them slash for slash, portraying a couple so sick of each other – but so used to each other – that the object of their hatred fills their eyes and becomes all that they can see.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Mike Hodges Remembers: The "Get Carter" Director Writes About Making the Movies That Nobody Sees

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The British writer-director Mike Holdges scored a big hit right out of the box with his first film, Get Carter (1971), which starred Michael Caine as a vengeful hit man and which just about single-handedly created a new kind of gritty British gangster movie. A couple of decades later, he helped make Clive Owen a movie star with another neo-noir, Croupier, a small film that narrowly escaped going to straight to video but managed to become a genuine sleeper. In between, he worked on probably his biggest-budgeted movie, the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production Flash Gordon, a somewhat underrated entertainment that is one of the few comics-based movies to achieve true camp--the real, gilded thing itself, mind you, not that sniggery TV-Batman stuff. Aside from these high points, Modges has enjoyed the kind of career you might expect from a smart, talented guy who basically works within the industry but whose instincts aren't strictly, safely commercial: he's made some films, such as the 1987 A Prayer for the Dying, that were reportedly mangled by the distributors, and some, such as the 1985 Morons from Outer Space, where it's tempting to think that some mangling could have only helped. He's also made some movies that, as he writes in an article in The Guardian, never had much of a chance to find an audience. Such as his first film after Get Carter, the tantalizingly bizarre comedy Pulp, which also starred Michael Caine. He played a sleazy writer hired to ghost write the memoirs of a movie star (Mickey Rooney) with actual gangland connections.

Hodges writes that the movie bewildered studio executives and so was banished to the vaults, where it "languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York." Pulp had been selected as the first film shown at a boutique theater in Manhattan that was designed to specialize in noteworthy films that the big chains had no interest in showing at all; in order to emphasize the collectors-item nature of the enterprise, the films were booked for one-week runs only. "Now, at last, the critics would get to see it. Much to the distributor's surprise, it received rave reviews. Time magazine got a little overheated and even mentioned the word 'masterpiece'. While I'm of the opinion that film critics spend too much time in the dark, I'm always grateful when, in the case of my own work, they come to the right conclusions." The only downside was that this was in the pre-Internet days when people had to actually wait a few days for such precious information to get out. By the time those rave reviews in the print magazines had hit the newsstands, the one-week run had ended and Pulp was back in the vault.

Hodges followed that one up with the sci-fi slasher movie The Terminal Man, based on a Michael Crichton novel. In this case, the results are harder to defend, but it does sound as if Hodges put a lot of thought into the choices that make the movie so cold and repellent. (It stars George Segal as a brain-damaged fellow who has part of his brain hooked to a computer to help him get over his bad habit of stabbing people. Guess what happens.) Clearly he responded on a surprisingly personal level to its "message" about the "obvious insanity at the very heart of what drives us," which "also drove me to make the film." For the score, Hodges went austere, using only Glenn Gould's recordings of The Goldberg Variations. The pianist was famously reclusive and paranoid, and the movie had to be sent to Toronto to be screened for him to get his approval for the use of the music. "His own solitary existence and extreme hypochondria," Hodges noted dryly, "must have made for a weird screening."

A "director's cut" of The Terminal Man is showing in London in December. On November 30, there will be a screening of what may be Hodges's most obscure obscurity, the fascinatingly moody thriller Black Rainbow (1989), starring Rosanna Arquette and Jason Robards. The movie was kicked under the sofa by distributors, and Hodges writes that "From then on I consoled myself by calling my work "films in bottles". They would wash up somewhere, some time, and maybe surprise somebody watching some remote cable channel in the early hours. This theory was proven correct one morning when I was working with composer Simon Fisher Turner on the music for Croupier... The doorbell rang. It was a Japanese musician friend of Simon's, who was built like a sumo wrestler. They did their business, and he was on his way out. He suddenly turned back and approached me. My name had rung a bell. 'You make Black Rainbow?' 'I did.' 'I see six times.' I was so astonished I assumed he'd seen it on video. 'No. In cinema. Black Rainbow very big in Japan.'"

Insufficiently Forgotten Films: "Seizure" (1974)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This scare picture is set at the country home of a horror novelist, played by Jonathan Frid, the Barnabas Collins of TV's Dark Shadows. The novelist is having a bunch of friends he despises come over for the weekend so they can all get drunk and recoil from each other in disgust, but this fun time is spoiled by the appearance of three malevolent figures who appear to have sprung from the darkest resources of his own fevered brain: Herve Villechaize as a bossy dwarf named Spider, British screen queen Martine Beswick in silky dominatrix gear (playing a character billed as "Queen of Evil"), and a giant hooded bodybuilder who brought along his enormous ax in case the generator breaks down and some firewood needs a-cuttin'. These worthies proceed to organize the weekend activities, which turn into a series of truth games and tests that result in the steady thinning out of the cast (which includes Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Christina Pickles, and Troy Donahue). At the end, Frid makes the welcome disovery that this has all been a dream. Then the remaining members of the audience, which has also thinned out somewhat since the opening credits, finds out that, oh, no it wasn't.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: Seizure was the first feature directed by the then-twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Stone, from an original screenplay credited to Stone and Edward Mann, the writer-director of Hallucination Generation, Hot Pants Holiday, and Who Says I Can't Ride a Raindbow!, the only film I know of whose cast includes both Morgan Freeman and Skitch Henderson. Even allowing for its director's youth and inexperience, Seizure reeks of technical incompetence and is very hard to remain focused on. More turgid than scary, it isolates you in a poorly shot dark of night someplace and leaves you stranded there with a bunch of people who are pretty unpleasant in some pretty uninteresting ways. Then it leans on you to feel bad when they're picked off, if only because it serves as a memento mori. It has a gruesome, amateurish sort of integrity: a more cynical hack who cared more about entertainment value than his vision would have gotten a sense of how the characters were coming across and tilted things so that at least the audience could get a chuckle out of seeing the snarling bastards bite the dust.

WHY IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: A lot of major directors have a Seizure, or a Dementia 13 or a Boxcar Bertha, near the beginning of their resumes. Working on a piece of shlock is probably a good way for an untested new talent to learn the basic moves he'll need to master to make the movies he really cares about. What's embarrassing about Seizure is that it gives you the feeling that Stone really cared about it, or at least that he thought he could use it impress people not just with his (then non-existent, from the look of it) abilities as a filmmaker but with his creativity and the quality of his mind. The movie is not fun in a way that screams out "misguided artistic aspirations." The sub-Twilight Zone "Is it all a dream?" stuff seems meant to pass for the kind of illusion vs. reality gamesmanship then all the rage in bad student films, and the character dynamics suggest the work of someone who'd seen a bunch of Antonioni flicks in college and had concluded that what was supposed to be so great about them was that they were full of rich bores treating each other badly. In any case, Seizure was too little seen to do Stone's career much damage, but then it may not have been produced with the intention that it would ever be seen at all. Rumors persist that the production was actually funded by organized crime figures as part of a money laundering operation, something that neither Tony Montana nor Gordon Gekko ever stooped to.

Part of a becoming an artist is learning what you're not good at, which is why the existence of Seizure became a thousand times more embarrassing seven years later, when Stone, now a Hollywood player after winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978), attempted for the second time to launch himself as a writer-director, and once again chose to do so in the ill-fitting garb of a Master of Horror. The Hand (1981), Stone's first big studio job as a director, stars Michael Caine as a cartoonist who loses his drawing hand in a grisly car accident, with his nagging soon-to-be-ex-wife (Andrea Marcovicci) at the wheel. His marriage disintegrating, his career over, Caine takes a teaching gig and settles into his bachelor life at a house in the woods, where he is plagued by dreams of his diembodied hand committing a string of murders--murders that actually take place, though the film teases you about whether this is actually the work of a monster hand possessed by the revenging fury of its former owner, or if Caine has simply gone batshit. Once again, Stone seems to be taken with the horror genre mainly because of the excuse it gives him to fuck around with what's "real" and what's "unreal", this time in the form of a psychological thriller that may be taking place partly inside the head of a madman.

Maladroit though it is, The Hand much more clearly anticipates the movies that Stone would go on to make when--third time's a charm!--he reinvented himself yet again as a political filmmaker with 1986's Salvador and Platoon. You can see Stone in its overwrought hysteria and also its ugly misogyny, which Stone tries to pass off as the governing personality trait of the hateful, one-pawed protagonist, who starts out as an unpleasant bloke and steadily becomes so repellant that not even Caine can get us to identify with him or feel for him much. (There's also a nod to Stone's mystical macho side and his next project--the screenplay for John Milius's Conan thr Barbarian (1982)--in the glimpses we see of the cartoonist's work, which is a sinewy swords-and-sorcery adventure strip about a muscular fellow called Mandro. In the original novel that Stone adapted for the screenplay--Marc Brendel's The Lizard's Tail, a much better and more subtle piece of work than the movie--the cartoonist was a Jules Feiffer-style satirist.) And even though he got to work with a professional crew this time and turned out a much more polished piece of goods than Seizure, Stone found out the hard way that the technology for showing disembodied hands strangling pop-eyed actors was still very much as the MST3K stage. (One of those strangled is none other than Oliver Stone himself, making a cameo appearance as a drunken bum who falls prey to the monster, and in the process paying homage to Larry Hagman, who made a similar cameo in the 1972 film he directed, Son of Blob.) Tha Hand, which actually earned a few kind reviews, did just well enough at the box office to send Stone back to writing screenplays until it was time for him to find himself yet again, this time as a righteous auteur with a camera in one hand and a copy of Mother Jones in the other. That was the incarnation that stuck, but in the many years since, he hasn't attempted another horror movie, unless W. counts.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

20. GENE HACKMAN (1930 - )

Hackman was 33 when he made his movie debut in Robert Rossen's Lilith; he got to play a scene with Warren Beatty, who, admiring his colleague's mastery of his craft and maybe also thinking that his potato-faced plainness provided a splendid contrast on-screen to his own Colgate smile and dashing looks, cast him as his brother in Bonnie and Clyde. By that time, Hackman, voted Least Likely to Succeed by the good folks at the Pasadena Playhouse (a title he shared with his roommate Dustin Hoffman), had begun to build a steady career on the basis of his hard-won dependability as an actor. The impression he made as Buck Barrow lit a fire under his career, one that fanned out four years later when he starred in The French Connection and won the Academy Award for his performance as the obsessive cop Popeye Doyle, a job that he has often cited as something less than his favorite. Hackman's admiring notices in this period are full of tributes to his "anonymity" and lack of sex appeal; it was as if everyone was glad that he was getting treated by the casting office as if he were a star but wanted to get their personal disavowals of responsibility on the record in anticipation of the day when the world realized that a terrible mistake had been made. But Hackman remained a genuine movie star, a testament to the surprising fact that every once in a while, exceptional ability and hard work just seem to pay off. Maybe because he never really had any youthful bloom to lose, his stardom only grew more secure as he got older and grew into authority figure parts, some benevolent (such as the many father figures he played in movies like Twice in a Lifetime and Hoosiers), some malignant (like the sadistic Western sheriff in Unforgiven). Let the record show that he even, by God, developed sex appeal: in that department, he had an especially trumphant year in 1988, when he stirred many hearts playing the FBI agent who seduces Frances McDormand in Mississippi Burning and the smaller but indelible role of The Good Man Who Got Away Because You Told Him to Leave, You Stupid Cow in Woody Allen's Another Woman. He has given many noteworthy performances since then, the standout perhaps being his lovingly cracked variation on the father figure role in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. He has not appeared onscreen since 2004's Welcome to Mooseport, perhaps because he's waiting for someone to explain to him what the hell he was doing in Welcome to Mooseport.

19. MICHAEL CAINE (1933 - )

When Caine became a big star in the mid-1960s, be brought back something that had been lost in American films -- the kind of actor's energy born of naked desperation. In the Depression years, people like James Cagney went into acting as an alternative to starvation, but by the '60s, American stars from comfortable middle-class backgrounds entered acting because, as Paul Newman put it, they were escaping a life spent working in the family sporting goods store. But the Cockney Caine was trying to break away from an early life informed by class consciousness and poverty. The fact that he'd been hungry at one point in his life may help to account for his eagerness to keep working, even in poor films, a decision that actually got him teased by that guardian of lofty cultural values, People magazine. It might also account for the fact that he owns so many restaurants. (Regarding Jaws: The Revenge, the movie that caused People so much consternation, Caine has said, "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.") As Harry Palmer, the entertainingly grubby spy in eyeglasses in The Ipcress File and the serial seducer in Alfie, Caine magnetized the camera with his working man's anger and ambition, which he was skillful enough to channel into the characters' own drives and delusions. One critic analyzed the secret of Alfie's success with women and concluded that it was that he didn't know his own limitations, but it may have been that Caine himself was too frightened of failure to dare consider that any limitations might not be overcome. One might have expected Caine to lose his edge when he became rich and famous and the chip on his shoulder started to fray, but he just keeping getter better and better as an actor. The official notice that he had become something like acting royalty probably came in 1975, when John Huston asked him to co-star in the film version of The Man Who Would Be King (which Huston had longed to make for decades, in the role once intended for Humphrey Bogart); for the movie-loving Caine, that must have been a little like getting a call from John the Baptist asking if he could do a chore that Jesus just wasn't up to. Other especially notable roles from his sprawling filmography include his gangster antihero in Get Carter (1971) and, fifteen years later, his supporting role as the criminal kingpin Mortwell in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, a crook who would have scared the shit out of Frank Booth. He won his first Oscar that same year, for his supporting role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters; he won another one for his surpassingly beautiful performance in 1999's The Cider House Rules, after which he played wintry roles in Last Orders and The Quiet American. After making that last one, and campaigning like hell to get it seen when Miramax threatened to dump it, Caine announced that he was, as far as he was concerned, "retired", which for Caine means that he now shows up in only a couple of pictures a year and doesn't take leading roles unless, as was the case with last year's Sleuth, they give him the chance to remake one of his older pictures so that he can play the role that he wasn't old enough to play the first time around. Some day he will die. When that happens, it would probably be a good idea to leave any messages for me with the doorman for a few weeks.

18. TOSHIRO MIFUNE (1920-1997)

Just try to look away when Toshiro Mifune's on screen. It's almost impossible. With his odd charisma and brooding intensity, he completely dominates any scene he's in. You can tell that he's trying to be generous with the other actors, but nature made him a cinematic powerhouse. Credited on IMDB with 181 movies between 1947 and 1995, Mifune is the Western face of Japanese cinema. Movies like Midway, 1941, and the miniseries Shogun brought him to the American masses, but it was his earlier work that made his career. He was the John Wayne to Akira Kurosawa's John Ford, casting as huge a mythic shadow across the face of cinema. Consider: Kurosawa made 32 movies during his life, and Mifune starred in 15 of them. Seven of those are five-star, drop-everything, must-see-immediately movies: Stray Dog, The Seven Samurai, I Live In Fear, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and High and Low. Mifune also made four other movies that rank among the best movies ever made: Samurai 1 - 3 and The Sword of Doom. But enough about his importance to the canon! Let's talk about the man's signature moments, such as the mirthless laughter that rips out of his head like a bird from a cage, driving home just how close to the edge of sanity this character really is. Or the impassive-yet-sad dignity, when Mifune seems to be made of stone while the other actors flow around him like river water. Or, best of all, the way he could turn either of those on a dime into fear, horror, and pain, letting viewers in on an unspoken backstory that needs no further explanation. Even if you speak not a word of Japanese, you always know everything you need to know about Mifune's characters.

17. WILLIAM HOLDEN (1918-1981)

William Holden made a lot of movies, but the movies that made William Holden were few and far between. Don't get me wrong; Holden was a great actor, but his standout roles were so much brighter than his getalong roles that it's hard to believe they could coexist. That's probably true of most leading men, but it seems especially true of Holden. With Billy Wilder, he made Sunset Blvd, Stalag 17, and Sabrina. He made a bunch of war movies other than Stalag 17 (his face always seems to be hinting at the horrors he's seen and is trying to forget, thank you very much), but the best was The Bridge On The River Kwai with David Lean. He made a whole bunch of Westerns, even working with the great John Ford, but the really memorable one was Sam Peckinpah's stunning The Wild Bunch, which might be the best Western ever made. And he also made overrated Oscar bait like Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing and Network, for which the Academy duly rewarded him. I don't know whether Holden was a handsome man, but he was definitely a commanding and intriguing actor, and that's all that counts.

16. CLINT EASTWOOD (1930 - )

I’m not a hippie, a swinger or a Mormon, but I nevertheless live a polygamist lifestyle, sharing my wife on a regular basis with a septuagenarian jazz enthusiast whose talent, machismo and flinty good looks still, apparently, inspire lust in at least one small Polish woman decades after inspiring much wider lust during the tight pantsed, bare-chested, absurdly large biceped days of his youth. Despite my wife’s leftist political philosophy, she’s willing to forgive Eastwood’s right-wing libertarian political leanings and starring roles in all those reactionary Dirty Harry movies and violent spaghetti westerns, partly because those early films were so damn entertaining, but mostly because Clint has mellowed since then, producing, directing and/or starring in deeply human films like Unforgiven and Letters From Iwo Jima which explore the root cause and grisly aftermath of the human fascination with violence that helped to make him a star in the first place. Yet even though Eastwood would have qualified for this list based merely on his collaborations with Sergio Leone (let alone his cop movies, let alone his Oscar-caliber directing chops), that’s still only half the story. Unlike largely one-trick action stars of the Bronson/Stallone/Seagal variety, the erstwhile “man with no name” ain’t afraid to let his freak flag fly or get down with his sensitive feminine side, headlining everything from weepy “women’s” films (The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby) to weird experiments (The Beguiled, White Hunter Black Heart) and inexplicable monkey comedies (Every Which Way But Loose), proving there’s a whole lot more to my wife’s beloved fake husband than just his big, big guns.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Sept. 6-12, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In a world where Aronofsky’s Wrestler Bodyslams Venice Competition…where Paris Hilton Pulls the Bullshit Train to Toronto…where Good Directors Go Bad and Charlie Kaufman Gets Wired...a world we will call, for lack of a better term, a Lebowski World…

In a time when Harry Potter Fans Revolt….when Johnny Depp is a household pet and Michael Caine is a Batspoiler…when Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains is rediscovered and a Classless Man gets in a Voiceless Brawl…

One blog dares to bring you the Arab Movie Hall of Shame. One blog looks back at City Slickers and Kazaam and lives to tell the tale. One blog celebrates the Local Hero soundtrack and the dinosaurs of the Wheel Inn . And one blog stands alone to bring you Coming Attractions: A Screengrab Salute to Movie Trailers, Parts One and Two!

The Screengrab! Now playing on a computer near you.

Michael Caine, Batspoiler

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So you're in a high-stress profession. You work all day and all night to try to make the world a better place, but to protect some very important people, you have to keep certain things about your job secret. But the strain of such a massive secret, a thing that some people would kill to know, can't be borne forever by just one man. So you turn to the one person you think you can trust, the one man you believe will keep your secret: your faithful butler. And then he goes and blabs it to the whole world.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, made its first trillion dollars, speculation has been rampant about who's going to play the villain role in the next installment. Heath Ledger's untimely death makes it an unlikely, albeit intriguing, possibility that he'll return as the Joker; the two hottest rumors are that Angelina Jolie will be the draw, slipping into a Catwoman costume, and that Johnny Depp and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will tag team as the Riddler and the Penguin. Both have generally dismissed as fan-driven wishful thinking until yesterday, when Michael Caine -- currenty paying his club fees as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred -- took a moment at the Toronto International Film Festival to cite an unnamed Warner Brothers exec and insist that the latter rumor is true.

Of course, just to keep us baying, Hoffman had to come out and insist he's never heard any such thing. But who are you gonna trust, the Penguin, or Batman's loyal batman? The rat!

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That Guy!: Bob Hoskins

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:45:00 GMT

It's been a long time since we've seen a new entry for That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous. So who better to mark our return than one of the most enjoyable contemporary character actors? Robert William Hoskins, the short, broad Cockney from Bury St. Edmonds, is one of England's most beloved actors -- quite unusual given that he's never had an acting lesson and his first role came purely by accident. At the time, Hoskins was seeking a career as a writer, and supported himself, like most failed artists, by working odd jobs -- in this case, as a warehouse worker. Showing up drunk and a theater to collect a friend who was auditioning for the lead, he was clowning around in the audience and, mistaken for one of the hopefuls by the casting director, he acquitted himself marvelously in the audition and got the part. It cost him a friend, but it launched one of the richest careers in modern British cinema. At 5'6", stout, and with an unmistakable working-class accent and demeanor, Hoskins is rarely the best-looking man in the room, even when he's alone; but he's parlayed his unusual appearance and forceful personality into some electrifying roles. At first known for his ability to play intense and sometimes brutal criminals and assorted villains, he later convinced his agents that he was more diverse than his resume indicated and soon showed an exceptional gift for comedy as well, both verbal and physical. His big break came in 1980, when, after a number of high-profile television appearances, he netted the lead role in The Long Good Friday (about which see below); it proved to be a turning point in his career, and he's worked steadily ever since, rarely in a lead role but always worth watching (well, maybe with the exception of Super Mario Brothers). With both blockbuster films and small independent movies to his credit, Hoskins has proven his diversity, and even now, at age 65, he gets offers that men half his age would envy. Curiously, he has played a number of political leaders from the 1940s and 1950s in his storied career: Churchhill, Mussolini, Krushchev, and Soviet secret police killer Lavrent Beria. Of this phenomenon, Hoskins has said, with typical self-deprecation, "Most dictators were short, fat, middle-aged and hairless. Besides Danny DeVito, there's only me to play them."

Where to see Bob Hoskins at his best:

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980)

Hoskins' breakout film role came in this gripping, suspenseful gangster movie, which he earned by a stellar performance in Dennis Potter's fantastic television mini-series Pennies from Heaven. Playing Harold Shand, a short-tempered and violent British gangster, Hoskins is endlessly fascinating to watch: his character, used to being in complete control, is a textbook case of slow, angry boil as his world begins to completely unravel on what should be the occasion of his greatest triumph. Watching Shand fall to pieces as he thrashes about helplessly, trying to find out who is out to destroy him and why, is one the greatest treats the gangster genre has to offer.

MONA LISA (1986)

Once again returning to the well of British gangster films, Bob Hoskins chose wisely in taking the role of George, a down-on-his-luck ex-convict who, shunned by his former colleagues, can only secure employment as the driver for a high-priced call girl. In a role rife with sexual tension, danger, and class conflict, Hoskins shines as the shy but confident George, whose initial disdain for Cathy Tyson's Simone grows into respect and finally affection. Considering that he shared the screen with some genuinely great actors -- including Robbie Coltrane, The Wire's Clarke Peters, and Michael Caine as a sinister mob boss -- it's even more impressive how good Hoskins is in this; he secured an Oscar nomination as well as a BAFTA nod for the performance.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)

In the role that ensured he'd have success in the United States as well as his native England, Hoskins got a chance to stick to the rough-edged hard men he was accustomed to playing while still having ample opportunities to show off his gift for physical comedy. In this Bob Zemeckis blockbuster (profiled recently in our look at the greatest animated features of all time), he plays Eddie Valiant, a hardboiled noir detective in a 1940s version of Los Angeles where cartoons are as alive as anyone else -- though Valiant wishes otherwise when he's called upon to defend the notorious Roger Rabbit, who's been framed for murder. His Golden Globe-nominated performance is still a delight to see; it's the rare actor who doesn't come across as a complete tool acting opposite a drawing, which is why we can always forgive him for Super Mario Brothers.

Take Five: Woody

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Boy, what's up with all the Woody Allen posts this week? I mean, sure, he's got a new movie opening today (Vicki Cristina Barcelona), and sure, a lot of critics are claiming it's his best work in a decade. But someone says that every decade, and have been doing so for approximately four decades. So who is this jerk who's so obsessed with the Wood-man, that he keeps forcing Screengrab readers to share his mania? Oh, right -- it's me. It may surprise you to learn that, given my fascination with the former Mssr. Konigsberg, I am not especially a huge fan of his work, and I'm certainly not one of his more vociferous defenders. I think he's mistaken about being a Serious Artist, which gets in the way of his being one of the funniest men of his generation; he's got a major Mary Sue complex; he's somewhat technically limited as a director and receives a lot of credit for work that is properly given to his cinematographers; and I agree with Joe Queenan that his work is literally sophomoric -- the intellectual, moral and emotional themes in his movies rarely get past the level of someone who, like Woody himself, dropped out of college his sophomore year. But in Annie Hall and Manhattan, he made two of the best movies of the 1970s; he's one of the finest comic minds on the planet; and he's managed to make a career for himself so robust that he's made an average of a movie a year for 30 years, which, no matter how similar the themes in said movies, is something like a miracle. So, after you've watched Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out in the Wood-man's latest masterpiece, why not rent five more of my favorites, and make it a festival?

WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? (1966)

The fact that the directorial debut of a man many people consider the greatest moviemaker of his generation was little more than a cheap Chinese action-thriler with jokey dialogue dubbed in over it is shocking to some people. It's as if someone told you that thumbocentric auteur/Kung Pow! Enter the Fist director Steve Oedekerk grew up to be Jean-Luc Godard. But it's true: for his very first film in 1966, Woody Allen got the rights to a junk chop-socky called Key of Keys from American International Pictures, who had judged its plot too elaborate. Woody and his cast simply chucked the damn plot out the window and turned the entire thing into a goofball James Bond parody, which the studio padded out with some extraneous nonsense and a couple of pop songs by the Lovin' Spoonful (the biggest brush that Woody would ever again have with modern popular culture), released, and went on to make a fortune off of. What's even more surprising than the fact that What's Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen's first movie as a 'director' is that it works so well -- it's tightly paced, contains tons of funny gags (many of which seemed a lot fresher than when bad comedians and internet wags recycled them 40 years later on the internet and in movie theatres). A fun, funny piece of detournment , no matter how you view Allen's later career.

ZELIG (1983)

Woody Allen's 12th feature film as director may be his most daring, in terms of visual style, formalist invention, and pure idea. Although technology, and the application of the basic notion in other, lesser films, has somewhat blunted Zelig's impact, at the time of its release, it couldn't have seemed more daring: an experimental psychologist is brought in to study the case of one Leonard Zelig, an insecure nebbish who has made his way through life -- and even entered the orbits of some of the 20th century's most famous and infamous figures -- without having a personality of his own. So much of a non-entity is Zelig that he takes on the characteristics -- psychological, moral, intellectual, and even physical -- of the people around him. It's an interesting treatise, in its own way, of the nature of celebrity and the way some peoples' whole lives are malleable thanks to their eagerness to please. But one of the problems with Allen's movies is that it's easy to get carried away with that kind of talk, and forget about whata funny, detailed, and sophisticated movie it is; and, beyond that, Woody did a good bit of stretching (uncharacteristic for him) in order to carry off the film's technical requirements and insert his nebbishy nuance in all of modern history. An outstanding film, one of his best.

HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986)

I've never been much of a fan of Woody Allen's 'serious' work. While I appreciate the effort to stretch, and the desire of a talented man to be thought of as something more than a clown, they've always come across as somewhat joyless and flat to me. To abandon what you're best at in favor of something a dozen people do better is an odd thing for an artist to do, and until Allen becomes a much better technical director and stops writing dialogue that means to sound impressive and instead sounds pretentious, I'll continue to be one of those cranky jerks who prefers his funny stuff, thank you very much. That said, Hannah and Her Sisters is a pretty terrific film, if for no other reason than the astonishingly good performances he coaxes out of his cast. It's not without typical Woody Allen drama flaws: the characters are generally unlikable, the dialogue veers into hootiness more than once, and it's yet another example of why the Wood-man shouldn't ever be allowed to comment on any American popular culture after 1965 or so. But it's got a strong script, a more steady than normal technical sensibility, great music, a handful of genuinely powerful emotional scenes, and some of the most stunning performances he's ever gotten out of his cast, especially from Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest.

RADIO DAYS (1987)

Right in between the excellent but heavy Hannah and Her Sisters and the rambling, disappointing bummer of September, Woody Allen decided to give us moviegoers a big, delicious, tasty candy treat in the form of Radio Days, an absolutely delightful little movie that doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves as one of his best films. A combination childhood memoir and loving tribute to the Golden Age of radio, it's one of his sweetest and most good-natured films, and possibly the funniest one he's done in the last 20 years. While his focus, as always, is on interpersonal dynamics, he doesn't get lost in it, as is his unfortunate tendency to do; instead, he opens up the stage just enough to let us see his neighbors, his teachers, and most importantly, the cast and crew of the radio shows that helped shape him, who come across as alternately admirable, chummy, and utterly absurd. Best of all, these winning characters are played by one of the best ensemble casts Allen ever assembled, and, for the first time, he gets out of the way and lets the script and the story do the heavy lifting. Radio Days is simply a charming, utterly likable movie, a gem in Woody Allen's catalog -- it's a genuine feel-good movie, not because it's full of sentimental treacle, but because you feel good after watching it, and when you aren't, you wish you were.

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY (1997)

It was the late 1990s when Woody Allen's reputation as a filmmaker started to take a lot of serious hits, and there aren't many critics -- myself included -- who are willing to step up and defend many of the films he's made in the last ten years. Sometimes he went to the same well a bit too often; other times, he accepted less-than-stellar performances out of his cast, or stretched a little further than his talent was willing to let him go. Other times, he just seemed tired and cranky and unsure of what he wanted to do. While Deconstructing Harry was guilty of all of these to a greater or lesser degree, for some reason, it resonated with me a lot more than did most of his work from the last decade. Perhaps it's the unexpectedly nasty edge to the film that suggests that Allen could be one of the great cynics if he wasn't already one of the great neurotics; perhaps it's the gleeful piss-take at his own public persona, which, although he ultimately lets himself off the hook, shows that he's a lot more self-aware than he might let on in his latter-day work; or maybe it's just that, while they don't always succeed, the metafictional conceits, surrealistic elements and extremely un-Allenish use of camera effects, quick-cut editing and other film trickery illustrate that he isn't entirely moribund. Whatever the case, while it's by no means a great film, Deconstructing Harry at least shows the old pro's still got some life in him.

Summer of ’78: “The Swarm”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer (or Monday, if the disc is late from Netflix) we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Swarm

Release Date: July 14, 1978

Cast: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda

The Buzz: Bees! Get it? The “buzz” is “bees”! I wasn’t even trying to do that! The funny just slipped out of me!

Keywords: Killer Bee, Disaster Film, Mass Child Killing, Child Driving Car, Flamethrower, Science Runs Amok

The Plot: Mysterious doings at a military facility outside the small town of Marysville, Texas have left hundreds of soldiers dead. General Slater (Richard Widmark) arrives on the scene to find a British civilian, entomologist Dr. Brad Crane (Michael Caine) already there. He claims the base has been attacked by a swarm of deadly African bees, but Slater would prefer to believe it’s some sort of commie plot. Slater is further disgruntled when the White House checks in and puts Crane in charge of the entire anti-bee operation. In Marysville, a young boy’s parents are killed by the swarm while picnicking and he narrowly escapes. Later he returns to the scene with some friends, who have the incredibly dumb plan of heaving Molotov cocktails at the swarm. This only angers the bees, who descend on Marysville and kill a bunch of young children in the schoolyard, always a good time at the movies. Proving itself resistant to even the strongest pesticides, the swarm then makes its way toward Houston.

The Test of Time: One of the things I spent way too much time worrying about as a young lad in the ’70s was the swarm of killer bees that we were always being told was making its way up from Africa or South America. It was always about a year or two away – somewhere in Mexico, maybe – and since I had suffered a couple of allergic reactions to bee-stings, resulting in my feet swelling up into purple blobs, I figured this would be the end of me. These fears were fueled by the book The Swarm (not a novelization in this case), but I didn’t see the movie until now. It is, of course, an Irwin Allen production from the tail end of the disaster movie cycle Allen spearheaded. You know, the kind of movie where the poster has a row of boxes with photos of its big name cast running along the bottom, and you expect the last one to say “And Henry Fonda as The President.” (Close; it actually ends with “And Henry Fonda as Dr. Krim.”) Even by Allen’s lax standards, this is one incredibly boneheaded botch – a disaster movie in every sense of the term. The bloated running time extends past the two-and-a-half hour mark, technical incompetence runs rampant – The Swarm features some of the worst day-for-night shots in the history of cinema – and plotlines (courtesy of Oscar-winning screenwriting Stirling Silliphant) tend to vanish without a trace. Although there are hints at some sinister connection between Crane and the bee attack, we never find out how he made his way into the military base. A hokey love triangle subplot involving Fred MacMurray, Ben Johnson and Olivia de Havilland comes to a rather abrupt conclusion when they are all killed in a train derailment. It appears that Allen had some fire-suits left over from The Towering Inferno, which is basically recreated in a battle between flamethrower-wielding soldiers and killer bees. Crane’s solution to the bee crisis is to lure them over the Gulf with the amplified sound of a simulated mating call, then have a bunch of oil tankers dump their loads and set them aflame. I think this could qualify as one of those cures worse than the disease. The Swarm is recommended to all who enjoy laughing at tremendous wastes of time and resources, particularly the DVD version with the deadly serious making-of documentary in which we are informed that “all Irwin Allen movies are rooted in reality” and that, yes, the killer bees will be here any day now.

Quotable Quote: It’s too hard to choose between Caine’s “I never dreamed it would be the bees. They’ve always been our friend!” and Widmark’s “Houston on fire. Will history blame me or the bees?”

2008 Equivalent: This is too easy. Disaster movie + eco-terror + unintentionally hilarious dialogue can only mean The Happening.

Previously on Summer of '78: The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we’re not philosophically opposed to a “re-imagining” of Sherlock Holmes. After all, the ace detective has been through a lot in his century-long career on the silver screen. He’s been played by Peter Cook, Peter Cushing, Peter Lawford and Peter O’Toole. He’s even been portrayed by actors not named Peter, including Christopher Lee, Christopher Plummer, John Cleese, Michael Caine and someone named Hugo Flink. But we’re pretty sure even the great Basil Rathbone would turn in his pipe and deerstalker hat at the news out of Hollywood this morning.

Guy Ritchie, the man behind such meticulously crafted mysteries as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, will spearhead the Holmes revival. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Ritchie has signed on to write and direct a reimagining of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes for Warner Bros. Lionel Wigram and Dan Lin are producing the movie, which takes its cues from a forthcoming comic that Wigram wrote as a selling tool for a new take on the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle character. The concept sees the character be more adventuresome and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations and mines on more obscure character traits.”

The phrases “selling tool” and “less stuffy” certainly have me salivating at the prospect of a hip new Sherlock for the 21st century, how about you? Can I get an “Elementary, my dear Watson”? No?

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Madonna Ruins Casablanca
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DVD Digest for June 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With Father’s Day coming in less than two weeks, the studios begin to unveil their snazzy new editions of what TNT used to call “movies for guys who like movies.” We’ve got all the manly movies you need to keep dad happy while mom and her friends are out seeing the Sex and the City movie (seriously, how did we not see that coming?).

Before Clint Eastwood became known as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (or a guy who co-starred with an orangutan) he was first and foremost a grimacing badass. And while some- including yours truly- have a soft spot for his Man With No Name trilogy- the most enduring character from this period would also certainly be “Dirty” Harry Callahan. This week, Warner unveils new DVD and Blu-Ray editions of all five of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, featuring all of the features from previous DVD editions plus a number of new ones. Most notably, Warner Brothers’ box set (the films are also sold separately) includes a new feature-length documentary, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows. In addition, the memorabilia included in the box set includes a 40-page hardcover book and a map of San Francisco detailing Harry’s hunt for Scorpio.

But if dad’s looking for wartime heroism (Blu-Ray only), MGM and Fox both have something that’ll fit the bill. MGM will unveil Blu-Ray editions of A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain this week, although these new discs will contain no special features. So if it’s tricked out Blu-Rays (and better movies) you want, go with Fox’s war DVDs. The studio will be releasing three of its classics- Patton, The Longest Day and The Sand Pebbles- exclusively on Blu-Ray, packed with special features and all the bells and whistles he could ever hope for.

But that’s not all, folks. If dad wants some laughs with his testosterone, buy him the new City Slickers: Collector’s Edition (MGM), which gives him some Western action, male bonding humor courtesy of Crystal, Kirby and Stern, and of course Jack Palance, who even in death can still crap bigger than you. Other, more recent dudely comedies releasing this week include Semi-Pro (New Line, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (Lionsgate), and for the father whose enjoyment of movies far outweighs his taste, Meet the Spartans (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And what’s a list of guy movies with James Bond? Sony will release a new three-disc edition of Casino Royale, Bond’s best big-screen adventure since the sixties (there, I said it).

Other new releases this week include: Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Weinstein Company); the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Michael Caine and Demi Moore in Flawless (Magnolia); the long-delayed The Onion Movie (Fox); and Asia Argento just the way we like her (i.e. mostly naked and toting a gun) in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (Magnolia). The week’s most notable non-guy-movie old-school release is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal Cinema du look classic Diva (Lionsgate). Finally, releasing on Blu-Ray only: Cloverfield (Paramount), Signs (Buena Vista), The Recruit (Buena Vista), There Will Be Blood (Paramount).

Reviews By Request: Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Paul Clark — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

This review was requested by reader James Frazier. For details on how you can request a review of a film of your choice, see the footnote that follows this review.

For many people, the age of British colonialism has become a controversial period. In our modern ideological climate, imperialism has practically become a dirty word among many historians, who object to the way the United Kingdom and other colonizing countries steamrolled less developed cultures in order to further their own. There are a number of interesting movies that explore this idea, but Cy Endfield’s Zulu is not one of them, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a rousing war picture in the classic tradition, made before the unpopularity of the Vietnam War made it almost impossible to make a war movie that wasn’t in some way or other about ideology.

Zulu is, first and foremost, a painstaking recreation of the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift, a skirmish that pitted roughly 100 British soldiers against over 4,000 Zulu warriors. The first few reels of Zulu are devoted to introducing the characters and establishing the context for the battle, but the remainder of the film focuses solely on the progress of the battle itself. Not being a student of military history, I can’t speak to how accurate the film is. I only know that it’s completely convincing and satisfying in a dramatic sense, showing in great detail the way the outnumbered and overmatched British repelled the attacks by the Zulus and held their ground.

Rorke’s Drift was in the African colony of Natal, situated in the middle of what was traditionally Zulu territory. In the film, three men hold some measure of power over the outpost: young Lt. Gonnville Bromhead (played by Michael Caine in his first major role), engineering officer Lt. John Chard (Stanley Baker), and Rev. Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins), a missionary who along with his daughter presides over the church. But rather than simply focusing on these three men and allowing the others to fade into the background, Endfield takes the time to introduce us to many of their subordinates at the outpost: the medical corps, the quartermasters and cooks, and the various regiments, which hail from all over the United Kingdom.

On first glance, the first third of the film feels bogged down with character introductions, but Endfield’s efforts pay off once the battle itself begins. If the pre-battle scenes are leisurely, the battle is a model of efficiency. Having established the characters and their relationships, Zulu is now able to concentrate on the military aspects of the battle without being slowed by the demands of plot resolution. If there film provides any conventional setup-and-payoff, it’s in the small character touches that come as each major character behaves according to his nature. Consider the way Lt. Chard and Lt. Bromhead decide who is in command- Bromhead, who is of noble birth, resents an engineering officer trying to take command, but once Chard informs him of his greater experience (a matter of months, as it turns out), Bromhead backs down and the issue is never raised again.

As the battle continues, the theme that comes through most clearly is the idea of honor through duty. By most people’s standards, it was crazy for the British not to retreat from Rorke’s Drift when faced with an army of Zulu warriors, especially when a much larger contingent of British soldiers had just been massacred by the Zulus earlier that day. But for Lt. Chard and Lt. Bromhead, there’s never a question of whether they’ll stay and fight. They’ve sworn their allegiance to the Crown, and if the Crown wants to keep a presence at Rorke’s Drift, then their honor, and that of Britain, rests on them standing their ground. That’s what most of the civilians in the film don’t understand- a band of Boer mercenaries on horseback retreats when they discover what they’re up against, and Rev. Witt is eventually sent away by Chard, both for railing against the battle and simply because his presence isn’t doing any damn good.

Meanwhile, the soldiers have no choice but to fight. As Tennyson wrote, “theirs was not to reason why/ theirs was but to do and die.” Yet in the face of almost certain death, they stand their ground and repel the Zulu attacks again and again. Some of the most fascinating scenes in the film deal with the strategies employed by the British to defend their post, most of which appear to be improvised. I especially liked the way Chard set a trap for the Zulus by pulling soldiers away from the walls to lure them in, only to spring a trap on them once they’re inside. Little wonder than Zulu is one of Ridley Scott’s favorite movies, or that both Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven owe a great deal to Endfield’s film.

After the battle is over, the Zulus appear once more on the hills around Rorke’s Drift, but not for the reason the British think. Rather than attacking again, they chant for their worthy opponents, in celebration for their skill on the battlefield. Yet in the aftermath of their victory, Lt. Chard and Lt. Bromhead are more conflicted. Bromhead, still young and inexperienced, turns to his elder officer and says, “I feel afraid and there's something more- I feel ashamed.” Chard, ever the pragmatist, can only respond, “I came here to build a bridge.”

Previous Reviews by Request:

Baxter (1989, Jérôme Boivin)

Now, it’s your turn. What movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game (except for Fair Game which, alas, I’ve already seen). First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

DVD Digest for March 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week finds the recently-anointed Best Picture Oscar winner coming to DVD, as well as some long-overlooked genre offerings, adrift of sea of junk both old and new. In other words, sort of like every week here at DVD Digest.

DVD of the week: What else could it be but No Country for Old Men (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray)? The film's DVD contains some interesting-looking featurette, including a making-of with the Coens, but the primary reason I'm including it here is because when a legitimately great film is honored with the Best Picture Oscar, it's a cause for celebration. Say what you will about the falling fortunes of the Academy Awards, but the Oscar name still means something to people, and the award should bring No Country a bigger home-viewing audience than it would have had otherwise. Yes, I realize there will almost certainly be a super-deluxe edition of the film in six months or so, one which will hopefully include an Easter egg of Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go. But especially in a relatively slow week for DVD (no major box sets, no Criterions), I'd say the arrival of No Country in home-viewing form constitutes an event.

In other new releases, this week brings Paramount's tiresomely overhyped Bee Movie; Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche in Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); the John Woo-wannabe Hitman (Fox, also Blu-Ray); August Rush (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the misbegotten Caine/Law/Branagh remake of Sleuth; last summer's largely forgotten updating of Nancy Drew (Warner); and the anime DVD Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

On the classics front, the week's big news is the three new titles in Fox's ever-growing selection of film noir on DVD: Ginger Rogers in Black Widow, Jeanne Crain in Dangerous Passage, and Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda in Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon. Daisy Kenyon in particular has enjoyed a critical resurgence during the past year, and I'm eager to check it out now that it's finally available again. Other titles of note include the Al Pacino double feature of ...And Justice For All and Bobby Deerfield (both Sony), and a new special edition of Gattaca (Sony, also Blu-Ray). The week's Blu-Ray-only releases include Dogma (Sony), I, Robot (Fox), and Independence Day (Fox).

Finally, David Huddleston offers his condolences to the following HD-DVD releases:

Bee Movie (Paramount)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner)
Michael Clayton (Warner)
Fletch (Universal)

I don't know about you, but $20 seems a lot to pay for what will likely be used as a Fletch drink coaster in a few months' time. Although if you use it to hold your Bloody Mary while you eat a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich, perhaps it'll be worth it to you.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 4

Paul Clark — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Kenneth Branagh's disastrous re-imagining still fresh (if that's the word) in the minds of the few who bothered to see it, I suppose now is as good a time as any to remember when the title Sleuth wasn't synonymous with suckitude. Branagh's film shares with Joseph L. Mankiewicz's awesome 1972 original — the source of last week's quote — little more than a star (Michael Caine) and the basic plot as laid down by author Anthony Shaffer. The surrounding junk is all Branagh's and screenwriter Harold Pinter's. At least we can comfort ourselves with the idea that, ten years from now, if movie-watchers want to check out Caine in Sleuth, they'll mostly likely be seeing him opposite Sir Lawrence Olivier, in perhaps his most entertaining performance. Congrats to those who guessed correctly.

This week's quote contains multiple lines of dialogue, but don't let that throw you:

"What’s your name?"
"Davis."
"Mine’s McCardle. . . well, so long."
"So long."

Submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For a list of rules, click right here. And remember, all guesses for this week's quiz are due in by next Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

This week's top ten comes to us from guest writer Gabriel Mckee, friend of Nerve and author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction. Read his fantastic blog here.

Recent years may well be remembered for bringing back the over-the-top action hero. New sequels to Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo have revived long-dead franchises, and the trend is continuing. Indiana Jones 4 has started filming, and a fourth Mad Max film would have wrapped by now had scheduling conflicts not led director George Miller to make Happy Feet instead. Though it's an easy trend to mock, it opens the door for other action heroes to be resurrected — here are some top candidates.

10. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), The Delta Force

Before he was a meme, before he was Walker, Texas Ranger, even before he was a Karate Kommando, Chuck Norris was Maj. Scott McCoy of the Delta Force. This elite antiterrorist strike force, led by Lee Marvin, consists of some thirty soldiers who are highly trained in standing around in the back of a cargo plane while Chuck Norris rides around on a motorcycle killing terrorists. Delta Force came out in the pre-Die Hard world, before we expected our action heroes to have pathos, depth or family troubles. There's not much character to this character, but when it comes to straightforward ass-kicking, Norris is the undisputed master. Norris is ripe for a Stallone-style comeback, and in the and in the age of the War on Terror, a new entry in the Delta Force saga is the perfect vehicle for his revival.

9. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), Beverly Hills Cop

Remember when Eddie Murphy made movies that people enjoyed? Barring Dreamgirls, his film career has been on a losing streak for over a decade, putting him just below Robin Williams on the list of actors who need to be rescued from their own careers. A return to the role of Axel Foley, the detective/con man of Beverly Hills Cop, might be the best way to ensure that Norbit never happens again.

8. Jack Carter (Michael Caine), Get Carter

Michael Caine has made a major comeback in recent years, but in most of his recent roles — in Batman Begins, Children of Men,and The Prestige, for instance — he's played the Kindly Old British Guy. It's easy to forget that he made his name playing jerks — first a heartless cad in Alfie, then a brutal-but-suave thug in Get Carter. This story of a London gangster who travels to Newcastle (Britain's equivalent of South Jersey) to investigate his brother's murder isn't as flashy as more recent tales of the U.K. underworld. But Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham nevertheless owe everything to Get Carter's blueprint and Caine's cynical performance. A return to the character of Carter would give Caine a chance to recapture both the grim violence and the effortless sexiness of one of his greatest roles.

7. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman), The French Connection

The most successful action film of the '70s didn't star Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee or any other established veteran of the genre. The French Connection owes much of its success to Gene Hackman's performance as hot-headed bad cop Popeye Doyle (which earned him his first Academy Award). More than just a tough guy, Doyle is a contemptible bully, and instead of an invincible supercop, his temper makes him a bit of a screw-up. Hackman is still more than capable of this kind of complexity (as proven by The Royal Tenenbaums), and it would be thrilling to see what he could do with this character after thirty-five years.

6. Foxy Brown (Pam Grier)

The 1973 film Coffy established Pam Grier as the undisputed queen of '70s blaxploitation. Foxy Brown (originally intended as a sequel entitled Burn, Coffy, Burn!) justified her ascension — whether infiltrating a high-end call-girl ring, shooting her drug-dealing brother in the ear, or hijacking a drug runner's crop duster, Foxy is "a whole lotta woman." At turns smiling and sneering, she violently opposes an oppressive society symbolized by a white-operated heroin syndicate. Grier has had a slightly higher profile since Quentin Tarantino reintroduced audiences to her charms, but it's been far too long since she's kicked ass like she did in Foxy Brown.

Read PART 2.

SXSW Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

As you read here yesterday, kicking off the 2008 fest on March 7th will be 21, based on the self-explanatory Ben Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It’s probably long past time to keep hoping for Kevin Spacey to return to form, but his role as the professor who masterminds the ring of blackjack geniuses would seem to be his most promising in years. Kate Bosworth co-stars as the world’s sexiest math student.

Other intriguing entries include Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary retrospective on the always prickly and entertaining sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, and Wild Blue Yonder, in which Celia Maysles turns the tables on her famous documentarian father and uncle, Albert and David Maysles.

On the back burner, there’s Michael Radford’s Flawless, in which Demi Moore and Michael Caine team up for a diamond heist, and Run, Fatboy, Run, in which Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg attempts to win a marathon and the respect of his family. It’s directed by David Schwimmer, if you want to start curbing your enthusiasm now.

SXSW runs from March 7th through the 15th, all over Austin, TX.

Dark Knight News

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

In a desperate attempt to write about a comic book adaptation other than Watchmen, we’ve been combing the web for news about Dark Knight (which, despite the title, is merely the next Batman sequel and not an filmed version of the legendary Frank Miller mini-series). Luckily, the geeks of the nation have not let us down. The Library Journal reports that Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, a lifelong Batman fan who has a cameo in the film, will be donating all his earnings to the Montpelier public library. (Leahy is a Democrat. We’re just sayin'.) Variety reports on a new Hollywood trend to source visual effects to a handful of maverick French design companies, who are valued for their blend of technology and aesthetics; one of the companies profiled is Buf, which did the VFX for Spider-Man 3 and will also be handling Dark Knight. And Empire magazine interviews Michael Caine, who praises Heath Ledger’s Joker as "stunning" and says he's the only actor who could follow Jack Nicholson into anything but a nightclub. — Leonard Pierce

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

There was a bit of brouhaha recently over Ryan Gosling's getting fired from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones for having packed on too much weight. The story has since been denied, so we don't know whom to believe in that dispute. It may have been apocryphal, but the incident did get us thinking about some of the more notable bodily transformations we've seen on film. And we're talking real transformations here. (Sorry, Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours and John Hurt's fake face in Elephant Man and Eddie Murphy's whole body in like every other movie.) We're talking De Niro eating his way through Italy to plump up for Raging Bull. We're talking Christian Bale starving himself silly for The Machinist. We're talking about actors so devoted to their craft (and, in at least one case, so utterly stupid) as to commit their bodies to real, physical changes for a part. Here are the Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film.

ROBERT DENIRO in RAGING BULL (1980)

When Robert DeNiro won an Academy Award for Best Actor in his role as tortured prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, he found that after the ceremony, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody was far more interested in discussing his role as would-be political assassin Travis Bickle in 1976's Taxi Driver — a role which allegedly inspired the actual assassination attempt of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley only days before. Now that things have lightened up a bit, and DeNiro isn't distracting everybody by making good movies anymore, his role as LaMotta has become the textbook case for total character immersion. To play the young, lean LaMotta, DeNiro worked his then-slender physique into even better condition, going through the actual workout regimen of a prizefighter (he even entered, and won, a handful of amateur bouts) and honing his body into a whipcord-thin, muscle-rippled wonder. Then, to play the older, decaying LaMotta, he put back all the weight and more, gaining a stunning sixty pounds and utterly transforming himself into a doughy blob of a man whose muscle had all collapsed into fat. There were many more sacrifices, mental and physical, made for Raging Bull: DeNiro really did bash his head into that concrete wall, and Joe Pesci broke a rib during an unsupervised fistfight. But it's the lightning-fast loss and gain of weight that's still remembered today, and which rang out like a challenge to other actors — one that would soon be answered.

VINCENT D'ONOFRIO in FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam-War epic still has a very mixed reputation. While it's no longer widely considered a failure, most critics still maintain that it's a mushy, aimless middle held together by an incredibly strong beginning and end. The anchor of the opening sequence, a brutal story of Marine Corps basic training, is the conflict between the relentless, abusive Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) and the slow, heavy recruit Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio). Both actors were appearing in their first major roles, but while Ermey had the distinct advantage of essentially playing himself, D'Onofrio transformed himself both psychologically and physically, from an urbane, gentle Brooklynite to a dull-witted, marginally psychotic southerner who needed only the right stimulus to be pushed over the edge. The fact that D'Onofrio broke Robert DeNiro's Raging Bull record by gaining seventy pounds to play Pyle sounds more impressive than it actually is — seventy pounds on his hulking, six-foot-four-inch frame wears a lot less visibly than does sixty pounds on DeNiro's much smaller 5'9" physique. Indeed, it's a testament to DeNiro's then-superhuman abilities that he managed to go through the entire cycle of transformation in half the time it took D'Onofrio, who needed a year and a half to gain, and then lose, the seventy pounds. But it's still an amazing accomplishment, one that helped yield the perfect body for one of the most memorable characters in the annals of war films.

LINDA HAMILTON in TERMINATOR 2 (1991)

To really appreciate Linda Hamilton's transformation from Sarah Connor in T1 to Sarah Connor in T2, you have to step back and remember the '80s. Sure, these days, when G. Stef has a one year old and a six-pack, muscles are practically de rigeur. But the '80s were the era of the twenty-minute workout: aerobics, jogging and jazzercize were the norm. Jane Fonda was the model of female fitness, and bouncing was a way of life. In T1, Linda Hamilton played a normal looking waitress with nice big eighties hair. Flash forward seven years to T2. To play Sarah Connor, the institutionalized warrior with Cassandra-like prophecies, Hamilton strength-trained till she sculpted her body into peak form. This was a new shape for a female movie star — muscles and sinews and veins, oh my! She was strong, agile, fast and fearless. And hot. She quickly re-set the standard for the female physique; magazine articles told women how to get a Sarah Connor-like body for summer. Did she pave the way for a rash of muscled heroines in leading roles on the big screen? Not quite — but she did her part. And her transformation was iconic enough to give Sarah Connor (the character) her own show in January '08 — sixteen years after Linda Hamilton shocked Hollywood with her abs and buns and everything else of steel.

MARIEL HEMINGWAY in STAR 80 (1983)

After her acclaimed performances in Manhattan and Personal Best, Mariel Hemingway was one of Hollywood's hottest young actresses. But the slender, girlish Hemingway would've been few people's ideal choice for the role of Dorothy Stratten, the ill-fated 1980 Playmate of the Year, in Bob Fosse's final directorial effort. All that changed when she received breast implants, which increased her cup size from an A to a C, the same size as Stratten's all-natural assets. Hemingway has insisted that her enlargement surgery has nothing to do with the role, but whether she did or not, it certainly made her more believable in the role. Hemingway gave one of her best performances as Stratten, but the film was largely reviled by critics and ignored by audiences, and her once-promising career faltered. Oh, Mariel — don't you know that you need to make yourself LESS alluring if you want Hollywood to love you? Star 80 has experienced a small critical resuscitation in recent years, but Hemingway, despite working steadily in the intervening decades, never managed to live up to the potential many had forecast for her. Nowadays, she's arguably as well-known for her yoga and self-help books as she is for her acting. A strange footnote in this story is the fate of her implants themselves. Following FDA warnings about silicone implants, Hemingway had hers replaced by noticeably smaller saline ones in 1993. In 2001, after one of the saline bags ruptured, they were removed altogether.

MICHAEL CAINE in EDUCATING RITA (1983)

Promoting this movie, in which he plays a middle-aged-going-on-elderly literary professor, Caine went on The Tonight Show and lamented that he had been forced to pack on the extra pounds and grow a beard for the role because it demanded that he look "unattractive." It says something about Caine's standing as an authoritative embodiment of manly cool that this remark was enough to inspire a national newspaper columnist to publish a crestfallen demand that he apologize to all bearded males. By De Niro standards, Caine's weight gain may not qualify as a jaw-dropping transformation, but because of the way Caine uses his physical equipment as an actor, it's actually one of the most effective ever caught on film. The professor is a drunk and a burnout who uses his education to keep the world at bay, and Caine uses his own flesh and hair as a metaphor for how emotionally armored he is against letting in anyone who might ultimately cause him pain. You may not realize just how effective a device it is until the final scene, after Rita (Julie Walters), the ambitious Liverpool hairdresser with whom he's bonded and who's now about to disappear from his life, forces him to let her give him a haircut and tame his unruly face fuzz. When she's done, the professor no longer looks the same, but because of the actor's deep immersion inside the character, he doesn't look quite like Michael Caine, either.

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