The Screengrab : monty python

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:45:00 GMT

BILL MURRAY AS JEFF SLATER IN TOOTSIE (1982)

Bill Murray is one of those people with such a long, varied career of starring and supporting roles in so many beloved mainstream and indie films -- from Carl Spackler in Caddyshack to “Bill Murray” in Coffee and Cigarettes -- that he could easily fill up this week’s list almost single-handedly. But of all his roles, his understated, largely improvised performance in Tootsie has always been my favorite: a toned-down version of his cocky '80s persona that hinted at the bemused, melancholy range of his later work, his Jeff Slater is the perfect roommate and wing-man: a wise, mellow pal who gently informs you when you’re "getting into a weird area" with your career or social life, yet who doesn’t scold or judge when he walks in to find you in a dress being groped by a horny old soap opera star. The yin to Dustin Hoffman’s neurotic actor yang, he’s the kind of playwright who’d prefer a half-empty theater filled with people who just came out of the rain to a packed house (and yet somehow doesn’t sound pretentious saying it). And best of all, I actually got to have a roommate very much like him once (hi, Hari!), during a year I still recall as fondly as my memories of Tootsie and the late, great Sydney Pollack. ("You were a tomato!") (AO)

MICHAEL KEATON AS BEETLEJUICE IN BEETLEJUICE (1988)

Keaton made this movie with the director Tim Burton at a time when Burton had more experience working with cartoon characters than live actors. It was a sweet gesture on Keaton's part to meet him more than halfway. At the time, Keaton was six years past his impressive movie debut in Night Shift (as a pimp who operated out of a morgue and preferred to be called a "love broker") and overdue to take his career to another level, but even those who guessed that he had untapped potential couldn't have guessed that maggoty would be such a great look for him. Few actors have turned themselves into a special effect with such happy results. (PN)

KEVIN KLINE AS OTTO WEST IN A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988)

It’s a testament to John Cleese’s generosity as a comic author that he gave the absolute best role in A Fish Called Wanda to someone else. That someone else was Kevin Kline, who, in a performance he’d never again equal, took the ball and ran with it: his grasp on the character of Otto West, a short-tempered, virile, violent, and not altogether bright criminal and Ugly American par excellence is vice-tight. The great thing about Otto is that he’s not a typical dumb goon: he’s a fairly skillful criminal, a stone cold killer, and best of all, he’s very slightly aware of how dumb he is. While most stupid characters milk comedy out of their obliviousness, the genius of Otto’s stupidity (and Kline’s astute assessment of same) is that he knows he’s not the brightest bulb on the marquee, and it drives him crazy. Hence his one great taboo – he can’t stand it when people call him stupid. What’s more, Kline milks gallons of comic frustration out of Otto’s inability to wrap his head around complex problems; he’s never angrier than when he senses someone has the advantage of him, but since he’s not smart enough to fake it, he just gets angrier (and stupider). One of the best throwaway gags in A Fish Called Wanda comes when an elaborate plan starts to go awry and Otto is called upon to help think of a solution; obviously infuriated, he pointlessly fires a couple of rounds from his silenced pistol into a steel safe and bellows “I’m THINKING!”. (LP)

STEVE ZAHN AS GLENN MICHAELS IN OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

Steve Zahn specializes in characters who have a negative genius for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; in That Thing You Do!, things got dramatic while he was off enjoying a rollercoaster ride. Here, he takes it so far that he barely seems to be in the right movie, though you're glad he stopped by. After arriving to help bust George Clooney out of prison -- a favor for which Clooney thanks him by threatening to throw his sunglasses "off the overpass while they're still on your head" -- he hooks up with Don Cheadle's mob just in time to participate in a massacre that soon has him sneaking around in search of the back exit. If all petty criminals were more like Zahn's Glenn, the world would be a much more entertaining place, and practically a crime-free one. (PN)

JEFF BRIDGES AS JEFFREY “THE DUDE” LEBOWSKI IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Although he’s not the most clownish figure in the Coen Brothers’ endlessly quotable cult comedy – that title belongs to gun-toting, dog-sitting Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak, played with gusto by John Goodman – you’d be hard-pressed to find a figure more hilariously suited to the archetype of the Holy Fool than Jeff Bridges’ Dude. Conceived as a stoner upturning of Raymond Chandler’s hard-nosed detective Philip Marlowe, the Dude, a perpetually out-of-it former roadie whose life revolves around bowling, weed, and White Russians, is caught up in a web of mistaken identity, kidnapping and blackmail. While Marlowe stubbornly refused to be warned off a case, doggedly pursuing the truth for its own sake, the Dude barely even seems to be aware that he’s on a case, and yet, in his own shambolic, shaggy-dog way, has the instincts and aptitude of a real detective. Based on film promoter and ex-‘60s radical Jeff Dowd, the Dude is an immortal comic creation, a stumbling bum who outwits people more or less by default and lives in the sunshiney flipside of Los Angeles noir. His mind is never far from his next frame, and his dress sense isn’t quite tailored suits and ties, but let’s see Philip Marlowe disarm a rival simply by saying “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. in IRON MAN & TROPIC THUNDER (2008)

Like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, the seemingly indestructible Robert Downey, Jr. has pretty much been coming back from the dead again and again (sometimes literally) since the beginning of his career...and, frankly, I got tired of rooting for him sometime around the first Bush administration. For one thing, I never really thought he was all that talented: in movies from Less Than Zero to Natural Born Killers, he just seemed to keep recycling the same fast-talking hipster schtick that John Cusack did at least as well, if not better (and with far less off-screen drama). To my way of thinking, if an actor’s extracurricular lunacy eclipses their onscreen work, they either belong on Celebrity Rehab with Gary Busey and Corey Haim, or their performances had better reach Klaus Kinski levels of riveting, can’t-look-away intensity, but Downey seemed to be forever slumming, demanding endless sympathy for his problems and respect for his craft while never bothering to really try all that hard (except for the occasions, like Chaplin, when he tried too hard). And yet, for all that, whenever Downey managed to connect with a well-written part in his range (like the legal clerk in True Believer, the editor in Wonder Boys or the crime reporter in Zodiac), he’d generally knock it out of the park and make me like him again, pretty much against my will. Thus, in spite of everything, I was happy for Downey’s latest one-two punch career revival in a pair of films that knew precisely how to use (and reward) the actor’s self-deprecating, hard-won personal and professional maturity (while gently goosing all those skeletons in his closet): two redemption songs, one about an aging party boy who finally grows up and takes responsibility for his life and another about a talented but pretentious actor who learns the difference between real life and movies. Perfect. Now, seriously, Bob...don’t fuck it up again, ‘cuz you’ve been on borrowed time for way too long already.

MARLENE DIETRICH in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939)

In her seven collaborations with Josef von Sternberg from 1930-35, Marlene Dietrich embodied illicit foreign sexuality, allowing von Sternberg to go crazy visually in ways that probably wouldn't have been popularly acceptable with a less magnetic presence to anchor his increasingly baroque and unpopular ideas. Having gone too far, finally, Paramount fired von Sternberg, and both he and Dietrich went into professional tailspins. 1937's Knight Without Armour flopped, even with the British spelling tweaked for American release. It was 1939's seemingly low-rent Destry Rides Again that rehabilitated Dietrich. Now a small Western town's bar wench, Dietrich still embodies palpable, illicit allure: "You know that he would rather be cheated by me than married to you" she tells a staid biddy in the clip above. Shanghai Lily could've said that and had it taken at face value. The new, earthier Dietrich has to get in a cat-fight over it, though. Her new persona proved liberating, and Dietrich went on to more eclectic (if less iconic) turns in films like 1948's A Foreign Affair.

KATHARINE HEPBURN in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

Katharine Hepburn also got the "box office poison" tag, but she was fighting a harder battle — her no-nonsense, non-traditionally-feminine persona raised hackles from the beginning. A series of (now beloved) flops like Bringing Up Baby led to rehabilitation starting on the stage; conquering Broadway with The Philadelphia Story, she (along with ex-lover Howard Hughes!) purchased the rights and brought them back to MGM. A hit was born, but Hepburn begins the film with an almost painful forced apology, getting shoved in the face onto the ground by Cary Grant in an opening almost unthinkable in a modern comedy.

JOHN HOWARD DAVIES from OLIVER TWIST (1948) to MONTY PYTHON, FAWLTY TOWERS & MR. BEAN (PRODUCER)

One of the legions of children plucked out of obscurity, then promptly plunked back in, Davies appeared in a few more unremarkable films after Oliver Twist (in which, ironically, he had less memorable screen time than anyone else), but later found himself a TV director and producer for some of the most beloved staples of British TV comedy: Monthy Python, Fawlty Towers and (touchier) Mr. Bean all wound up on his resume. (He also fired Benny Hill, which might have earned him some people's eternal gratitude.) No idea if the clip above is one of his episodes, but it's especially timely in light of Frost/Nixon warping people's memories about what, exactly, David Frost has accomplished with his life and exactly how seriously he should (or should not) be taken.

GREGG ARAKI AND JOSEPH-GORDON LEVITT, MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004)

Two recent abortive comebacks can be traced to the exemplary Mysterious Skin. After a decade+ of callow provocations, Araki's series of increasingly-obscurely-distributed landmarks of New Queer Cinema (or whatever they were supposed to be) came to a halt with the freakishly mature Skin. Along for the ride was Joseph-Gordon Levitt, who hardly needed to prove himself (his comic timing on 3rd Rock From The Sun was as exemplary as the show was mediocre and he was well-received in little-seen films like Manic), but nevertheless delivered a knock-out performance as a small-town gay hustler turned big-city witness to AIDS' '90s arrival. In the scene agove, he and his BFFs course through a small town, blasting Araki's favorite alt-rockin' tunes; unlike a similar scene in the dreadful The Doom Generation, though, they don't just sit there and talk about what The Smiths meant to them, but live out the synthesis of memory and music on-screen. And since then? Araki made the underseen Smiley Face; Gordon-Levitt made the excellent Brick and then disappeared into crap like Shadowboxer. And something tells me his turn in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie isn't going to help anything.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The fake trailers from TROPIC THUNDER (2008), GRINDHOUSE (2007) & KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977)

Of course, no tribute to the art of coming attraction trailers would be complete without a nod to the art of FAKE coming attraction trailers. Tropic Thunder recently delighted many and outraged some with its fake preview for Simple Jack, a dead-on parody of the odious, manipulative genre of faux-inspirational retar...I mean, “mentally challenged”-sploitation potboilers like I Am Sam. And last year, the interstitial glimpses of fictional schlock classics like Machete, Thanksgiving, Werewolf Women of the SS and Don’t (by Robert Rodriguez and cameo directors Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright, respectively) were the best reasons to sit through the entire 191-minute cut of Grindhouse in one sitting. But perhaps the granddaddy (or granddaughter?) of all fake trailers is the "teaser" for Catholic High School Girls In Trouble, one of the definite hits in John Landis’ hit-or-miss cult classic, Kentucky Fried Movie (but, uh, you might not wanna watch this one at work).

The trailer for BUFFALO ’66 (1998)

Whether you love him or hate him, you have to agree that Vincent Gallo doesn’t make ordinary movies. Gallo’s taste for the strange extended to his trailer for his first directorial effort, Buffalo ’66. Cut by Gallo himself, the trailer is a montage of still images from the film, set to the opening passages of Yes’ “Heart of the Sunrise.” As a montage it’s pretty irresistible, with the percussive cutting matching the rhythm of the song, down to the way Gallo animates the stills of Anjelica Huston gesticulating at the dinner table. But what makes this trailer even cooler is that it’s one of the few that show more or less everything in the movie without giving it away. We see the characters, the style, the grey and dingy setting, but we’re wondering how it all fits together. And thanks to how well Gallo sells it, we can’t wait to find out.

The trailer for MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

The Python boys never met a phenomenon they couldn’t satirize, so it was only natural that with the trailer for their first feature, they’d hold the art of movie advertising up to scorn. This epic three-minute spot begins with a panoramic shot that’s meant to underline the majesty of the film that’s ostensibly being advertised, accompanied by properly stentorian narration. Naturally, the boys soon pull the rug out from under this seriousness, revealing it to be merely auditions for a voiceover artist. Eventually, we end up with narration in subtitled Chinese (this at a time when studios were avoiding non-English dialogue in trailers), after which the trailer goes to work on the self-important rhetoric of studio marketing. The narrator calls the movie “run-of-the-mill” and says, “compared to something like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, it’s all rather silly.” In addition, the editing of the trailer is reminiscent of the work of fly-by-night distributors who more or less assembled highlights from the film with little regard for coherence. But here, that’s all part of the magic, although it may be difficult to notice while you’re laughing at the trailer’s version of a rave review or the abrupt segue to an advertisement for a nearby Chinese restaurant. So few classic movies have the trailers they deserve, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail definitely does.

The trailer for COMEDIAN (2002)

When it was announced that Don “The Voice” LaFontaine had passed away, many movie lovers flashed back to this trailer, only to discover that its featured talent wasn’t LaFontaine at all, but fellow voiceover titan Hal Douglas. No matter: we’d like to think that LaFontaine would have approved of this “anti-trailer”, still the most succinct and priceless distillation of the deathless voiceover clichés that he spouted so many times over the years. But while on the surface this teaser has nothing but contempt for the inane catchphrases that get recycled by the studios, there’s also a real affection for the men whose job it is to give them authority. By giving a face to the usually faceless voiceover artist, we gain respect for him, and for the way he forges on even when he realizes that the things he’s made to say are completely absurd. As much as lines like “in a world…” have become a joke to trailer watchers, they’re also a kind of comfort, and when Douglas responds to his being fired with, “No, I like it in here,” we can’t help but think that, yes, we like you in there too.

The trailer for SLEEPER (1973)

This trailer for Woody Allen's futuristic "love story about two people who hate each other" parodies the convention by which the great filmmaker is caught by the camera crew and an unseen interviewer while busily working on his next masterpiece. The trailer itself benefits from clips drawn from one of Allen's few films to include both vivid cartoon imagery and an elegant production design. And the scenes in which Allen promises a movie "with very little overt comedy" and scenes "of a cerebral, almost didactic nature" look even funnier now, considering that they could pass as an accurate description of any of a dozen stink bombs he's made since this slapstick classic came out.

The trailer for ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Instead of emphasizing popular stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, early promotions for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind featured supporting player Tom Wilkinson – if you knew to look for him. This teaser trailer mimicks the low-budget aesthetic of commercials for the local dentist’s office, but the service they’re offering – a selective memory erasure – is purely the stuff of Charlie Kaufman’s imagination. The poker-faced buzz campaign for Eternal Sunshine was entirely based around Lacuna, Inc., including a website with coupons.

The trailer for LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

You can keep your big explosions and breathtaking panoramas. This trailer for Todd Field’s Little Children holds everything in, and the mounting tension – symbolized by a child’s toy train chugging through a dozen ordinary suburban moments – is almost unbearable.

The trailer for THE SHINING (1980)

Often the most memorable and effective trailers aren't those that sweat to cram in the movie's every high point and plot point but those that boil a picture down to an especially striking image and sell it in a way that sutures it to the viewer's imagination. Stanley Kubrick provided an especially choice example with this early and mysterious look at his 1980 horror movie. It consists of a single shot that turned up late in the film, tricked up here with electronic music and mechanical-sounding voices chanting "Redrum." (Did Kubrick bring in HAL 9000 to work on the soundtrack?) It appeared several months before the movie itself was released, and played briefly before being pulled in favor of a more conventional and far less disturbing trailer.

Click Here for Part One!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO (1975)

I can't say for certain whether or not I first encountered the work of Sally Cruikshank in general (or Quasi at the Quackadero in particular) on the USA Network's 1980s stoner staple Night Flight, but either way, I'm pretty sure I wasn't entirely in a legal frame of mind at the time. Not that psychedelic substances are required to appreciate Quasi's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness groove: Cruikshank's anarchic style is a mind-altering substance all by itself, a subterranean version of the (relatively) clean, orderly mainstream Disney/Looney Tune style of animation with all the color, personality, wisecracking animals and fairy tale fancy reflected in a funhouse mirror of surrealistic Id.

NEIGHBOURS (1952)

You wouldn’t get very far in a discussion of great animated shorts without mentioning the National Film Board of Canada. Since 1941, the NFB has supported and funded important and groundbreaking works from some of Canada’s most important animators, beginning with the great Norman McLaren. McLaren experimented with a number of animation techniques throughout his career including pixellation and even scratching and painting on the film stock itself. But today, his most famous work is Neighbours, a hybrid of stop motion animation and live action photography. The film -- an allegory for the Cold War -- finds McLaren using his human subjects not as actors, but as mannequins to be literally manipulated in the service of his story (somewhere, Robert Bresson must have swooned). Stylistically playful yet thematically serious, Neighbours became one of the most feted animated shorts of its day, yet it’s a testament to its topicality that it ended up taking home not the Best Animated Short Oscar, but rather the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

MIRACLE OF FLIGHT (1974)

Terry Gilliam made this five minute film after the original Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series had completed its final season but before Python caught on in the United States, a development that, along with the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, made it clear that the troupe would remain a going concern for years to come. Gilliam would later develop his own voice as a live-action filmmaker, but this cartoon is basically a stray Python skit that's developed at greater length than most of the animated bits that Gilliam contributed to the TV shows. Not that there's a goddamn thing wrong with that.

CREATURE COMFORTS (1989)

Nick Park, the co-founder of Aardman Animation (and the creator of Wallace and Gromit) had a weirdly accomplished triumph with this award-winning short, which attaches the thoughts expressed by man-on-the-street interview subjects to animals doing time in a zoo. The success of the film led to a series of TV commercials in a similar style and then, in 2003, to a brilliant TV series that ran for two seasons in Britain. (CBS commissioned an American version for a summer series last year but pulled the plug after broadcasting three of seven completed episodes.)

THE CRITIC (1963)

Pauline Kael once wrote that "the best way" that Mel Brooks "could be employed on any movie" would be for him to "hang around on a cloud" during shooting, "with permission to replace any actor at any point." Nice image, Pauline, but Ernest Pintoff trumped you when he made this parody of an arty animated short, and then put the icing on the gravy by asking Brooks to assume the persona of an old Jewish man -- this was back when Brooks was still a young Jewish man -- and record this worthy's baffled responses to what the hell his eyeballs were being subjected to as punishment for having dared to venture into a movie theater with an expectation of being entertained. It's too bad that Brooks doesn't still have a way of getting in touch with that cranky old guy; we'd love to sit next to him at Young Frankenstein on Broadway.

FRANK FILM (1973)

Frank Mouris wrote, directed, edited, and narrates this autobiographical collage, which aims to sum up the artist's life as best he can through nine minutes of words and images. Mouris talks about his experiences and impressions on the soundtrack while pictures of things important or just pleasing to him crowd onto the frame. The total effect is of an amazingly cool, elegant fever dream.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE GODFATHER (1972)

Perhaps you've heard of it? The epic (and epically popular) metaphorical study of how the American dream was corrupted begins with the words "I believe in America" and then spends six hours and fifteen minutes (counting Part II) making it clear just what that belief entails. Sweet dreams, Papa.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

After skewering the soul-deadening effect of modern cubicle culture in 1999’s Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge created a comedic future dystopia (mirroring that of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons”) where idiots have inherited the Earth (because all you overeducated hipsters out there either didn’t spawn or tried to prevent unsustainable overpopulation by limiting yourselves to one or two kids while the irresponsible, short-sighted and just plain dumb were breeding like rabbits). Idiocracy featured eminently bankable heartthrob Luke Wilson (as well as plenty of good ol’ lowest-common-denominator fart jokes) and received largely positive reviews...yet, mysteriously, the film was withheld from critics and vanished without a trace, receiving virtually zero publicity from its distributor (20th Century Fox) during its shockingly miniscule 125-screen theatrical run, whereupon the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD. So what happened? Well, I’ve never heard an official explanation, but I suspect the Suits either didn’t get Judge’s film or its depiction of our nation’s ever-lowering standards of taste, intelligence and acceptable civilized behavior hit a little too close to home, given the media’s complicity in the closing of the American mind. In Judge’s film (set in 2505, but clearly, even shockingly evocative of the trashiest parts of our modern-day landscape), nothing matters but sex and money, nobody is responsible for their own behavior, everything (including the population’s disposable clothing) is branded with corporate logos and anyone who dares to appear smart, competent, cultured, self-aware or sensitive (y’know, elite) is branded a “fag” and viewed with hostility and suspicion, even if (like Wilson’s time-traveling 20th century everyman) they’re trying to prevent global catastrophe. Judge somehow got product placement from real companies (whose representatives apparently never read the script: one scene, for instance, features an H&R Block that offers tax returns with “happy endings”), and biting the hands of his corporate masters so viciously may be the real reason the Suits buried the film, although (like Office Space) Idiocracy has managed to attract a small cult following (which this entry will hopefully increase), bringing some overdue attention to an unfairly neglected satiric gem of smart dumb comedy.

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969)

Terry Southern was the foremost satirist of American culture of his generation, and The Magic Christian is a jab at American money-lust unrivalled by anything this side of William Gaddis' JR. And while director Joseph McGrath (abetted by two Monty Python's Flying Circus alums, Graham Chapman and John Cleese) transplanted the action to his native England when he adapted the book for the big screen, transforming billionaire prankster Guy Grand from an old line Northeasterner to (im)proper British banker along the way, there was still no mistaking what country the author had in mind when he penned the tale of a man whose sole purpose in life was to prove that everyone has their price. A few of the scenes play nicely into the new but not exactly improved British sensibility of the film, but most of the bizarre schemes Grand comes up with to test the limits of his countrymen's greed – from a ludicrously overpriced luxury car roughly the size of a city block to a championship boxing match calculated to enrage by having the fighters kiss at a vital moment – could only resonate the way they do in America. The change of scenery does give the movie a bit of a schizophrenic feel (as does the addition of a rather purposeless Ringo Starr as Grand's son), but really, if someone tells you he's made a satire of a cash-hungry nation full of venal hacks who will sell out their every principle for money, you know what country he's talking about even if everyone in the movie talks like Alastair Cooke.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

Suppose an alien, a blank slate with no preconceptions about our country, found himself in America. To him it is neither the land of opportunity nor the Great Satan, so with no frame of reference or historical context, what elements of our culture make the greatest impression upon him? Rampant consumerism? Unchecked capitalism? The duplicity of governments and corporations? That's one way of looking at Nicolas Roeg's trippy sci-fi flick (adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis), but like much of Roeg's '70s output, The Man Who Fell to Earth resists easy interpretation. David Bowie, already the man who sold the world, takes on the title role, one Thomas Jerome Newton. A visitor from another planet suffering from extreme drought, Newton has come to our world on a rescue mission. Using alien technology, he secures a number of patents (including one for ultra-futuristic self-developing film) and amasses a fortune, with which he plans to finance a return trip home (presumably with plenty of water, although like everything else, this is never really explained). But Newton loses focus, corrupted by wealth, drink, television and the only people he trusts. By the time he falls into the clutches of a government agency that has discovered his true nature, he has flamed out, never to return to the stars. Roeg keeps us as disoriented as his protagonist with his slippery acid trip visuals and elastic interpretation of time and space, but there's no mistaking the intent behind such images as Bowie stirring his gin with the barrel of a six-shooter, and it ain't God Bless America.

POINT OF ORDER (1964)

Emile de Antonio, the early, smarter, non-self-promoting version of Michael Moore, didn't pretend to be an investigative journalist. In his first film, which is about the Army-McCarthy hearings, he didn't even make any pretense to topicality: Point of Order was released ten years after the hearings themselves, and seven years after Joseph McCarthy's death. De Antonio's eye was on the big picture. He had the insight that, by boiling the 187 televised hours of hearing down to a tight 97 minutes of political vaudeville -- Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch's greatest hits -- and doing without voice-over narration or any other kind of explanatory devices, he could skirt charges of bias by seeming to let the HUAC all-stars hang themselves by their own words and actions. At the same time, by selecting just the right material and emphasizing the ridiculous to such a degree that the movie was immediately praised as a work of nonfiction satire, he seriously affected how the Red-hunters in Congress would be seen for generations. De Antonio would use the same political scrapbook technique in such later films as the Vietnam War doc In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon biography Millhouse: A White Comedy, movies that attracted less mainstream attention in part because their targets hadn't been off the front pages for a decade at the time they were released.

Click here for Part One and Part Three

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

Screengrab Review: "The Incredible Hulk"

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 GMT

As one of the few defenders of Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk – and as someone who picked The Incredible Hulk to be the biggest bomb of this summer – I readily admit to having some preconceived notions about Transporter director Louis Leterrier's take on the latest Marvel comics adaptation. This would be the part where I tell you how pleasantly surprised I was to be proven wrong…but unfortunately, that didn't happen.

The big question all along about The Incredible Hulk has been: What is it? Is it a sequel to the Ang Lee movie? A remake? It's sort of neither, which turns out to be the cleverest aspect of Leterrier's movie. As the opening credits roll, we see a montage of scenes from a previous Hulk movie that never existed. A Hulk origin sequence closer to the 1970s TV show than either the comics or the previous movie plays out as Dr. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) uses himself as a guinea pig in an experiment with high-level gamma radiation. We know what happens, so why dwell on it? Within two minutes, Banner has Hulked out, smashed up the lab, destroyed his relationship with fellow scientist Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and pissed off her father General “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt), who vows to pursue him to the ends of the earth. It’s as if Letterier is saying, “Let’s just pretend we all saw this movie and be done with it.” And really, that’s perfectly in keeping with the Hulk’s Marvel comics universe, where new writers and artists are constantly taking over his story and retroactively tweaking his origins.

As the story proper begins, Banner has been on the run for five years. Now working in a Brazilian bottling plant, Banner has learned to keep the Hulk under wraps with a few simple deep breathing exercises. His serenity doesn’t last, as General Ross and his troops – including British commando Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) – track him down and unleash the beast within Banner. The Hulk escapes but the hunt continues, pretty much for the rest of the movie. In order to boost his chances against the green goliath, Blonsky undergoes a series of injections that promise to transform him into a super-soldier. Banner reunites with Betty, who helps him find Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), a genetic scientist who may be able to cure him. Instead, Sterns ends up transforming Blonksy into the Abomination, an even bigger, uglier mass of roid-rage than the Hulk.

As expected, The Incredible Hulk is louder, faster and more action-packed than the 2003 version. Every twenty minutes or so, Ross and his goons show up and there’s another big battle. (The most entertaining one, in which Ross keeps escalating the level of artillery to no avail, almost plays like a Monty Python sketch.) By the end, when the Hulk and Abomination are going mano-a-mano in the streets of New York, the movie resembles less a Marvel comic than an updated King Kong vs. Godzilla – you’re basically aware you’re just watching one big slab of pixels punching the crap out of another big slab of pixels. The Hulk actually looks pretty good most of the time, especially if it’s dark or raining. The humans don’t come off quite as well. I’m willing to bet this isn’t the cut Edward Norton had in mind, but that’s okay – I didn’t need a lot more Banner torment in my life. Roth doesn’t do much but glower, Tyler’s role is even more thankless than the Jennifer Connelly version of same, and when it comes to mustachioed generals, William Hurt is no Sam Elliott.

Leterrier does try to provide a little something for everyone. There are inside references for the comic book fans, geeky cameos by Stan Lee, Lou Ferrigno, and someone else who is supposed to be a surprise, except that his appearance is all over the TV ads in what smells like a desperate marketing stunt, and jokes about stretchy purple pants. (The best gag involves Norton’s mangling of the signature “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” line.) And we finally get to hear that immortal call to action, “HULK SMASH!” There’s even a brief stab at Ang Lee’s more lyrical, haunting tone as the Hulk broods on a cliff in a rainstorm. But the whole thing plays like it’s been focus-grouped to death, stripped of any real personality of its own. It may not end up being the biggest bomb of the summer – stuff does blow up real good, after all – but despite hints of another sequel, it provides no compelling reason for the Hulk’s big screen career to continue.

Related:
Hulk Smash?
The Summer of Super-Duds

All-Night Mockbuster Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s time for another all-night marathon, so put on a pot of coffee, find the sweet spot on the couch and join me for a nocturnal journey into the shadowy world of the mockbuster. (If you’re not sure what a mockbuster is, here’s a handy primer.)

12 midnight. We begin with the latest mockbuster from the good people at the Asylum, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Lost Skulls. I’ll bet you can guess which blockbuster-in-waiting occasioned the release of this one. Although the character of Allan Quatermain actually predates the creation of Indiana Jones by nearly a century, his reappearance now is a case of history repeating itself. Temple of Skulls is based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, as was the 1985 film starring Richard Chamberlain, a mockbuster before they had a word for it. (Back then, we charitably called it a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff.) This doesn’t stop the producers from claiming that Allan Quatermain inspired Indiana Jones, which is partially true but certainly misleading in this context. In any case, there is no temple of skulls in the movie, so you can bet it was retitled once Lucasfilm announced the name of the latest Indiana Jones flick. Anyway, as Temple of Skulls begins, two rugged prospector types in South Africa find the map to King Solomon’s mines. Not trusting each other, they split it in half to ensure they’ll stick together. Shortly thereafter they are attacked by Zulus and the map pieces blow away. Some time later, rugged great white hunter Quatermain (Sean Michael) gets his hands on one half.

12:20 am. I’m trying to figure out when this movie is set. We’ve got coal-burning trains, ladies in frilly frocks, black dudes in hip-hop hats and Nazi references. So I guess…some time in the last 70 years or so? Anyway, Quatermain has teamed up with Sir Henry and Lady Anna, a wealthy couple with the other half of the map. They are being pursued by Quatermain’s arch-nemesis, a scenery chewer straight out of an old Hammer horror movie.

12:30 am. Here we have a five-mile-an-hour chase between a truck and a locomotive engine. It’s like someone stuck a Monty Python sketch in the middle of the movie.

12:45 am. Our heroes dodge CGI bugs, then encounter a (real) rhino. This scene is edited Survivor-style; we have no idea if the rhino is even in the same hemisphere as Quatermain and the gang.

1:00 am. In fine National Geographic tradition, Quatermain and company are captured by bare-breasted natives. There is a bizarre CGI Zulu head-removal ritual.

1:15 am. I was expecting pretty much constant action and zero plot from Temple of Skulls, but that’s not actually the case. For all I know, it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation. I must give the Asylum credit for scenery at least; the movie is purty to look at.

1:40 am. Let us move on to King of the Lost World, another literary adaptation posing as a recent blockbuster. It’s loosely based on A. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, with the addition of “King” to the title and a picture of a big scary ape on the cover to fool drunk people at Blockbuster into renting it. The box also trumpets an appearance by Bruce Boxleitner – star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King! Well, that’ll bring the kids into the tent. Anyway, King opens with a plane crashing onto an island, announcing its intentions to rip off not only King Kong and Jurassic Park but also Lost. This is confirmed when we see a stewardess trapped up in a tree. Three minutes into the movie, a giant gorilla snatches her. We won’t be seeing him again for a while.

2:00 am. Giant bug attack!

2:10 am. There’s a glitch in the DVD and I have to jump ahead five minutes, at which point maggots are being used to heal a woman’s wound. So glad I didn’t miss that.

2:25 am. Our heroes find a fighter jet with an active nuke. The mysterious Bruce Boxleitner knows how to hot-wire it.

2:40 am. Things are happening now! One dude gets impaled by a giant scorpion. The others are taken hostage by skull-face painted natives. There are boobies! And lesbian natives!

2:50 am. A flurry of terrible CGI: we’ve got pterodactyls, plus the giant ape finally returns, though he looks blurry and pixilated. (Another reason CGI must die: think about how much progress in giant robot ape technology could have been made by now.) Boxleitner reveals he was sent to disarm the nuke, which really makes no sense, especially once he explains that the bomb has a limited range of 300 yards. Anyway, they blow up the ape real good. Okay, I’m lying. It’s not real good.

3:00 am. It’s time for The Da Vinci Treasure. Here’s how you know these folks at the Asylum aren’t completely shameless: the film concerns a forensic archeologist and his search for the Da Vinci codex. See – they could have called this The Da Vinci Codex! Maybe they didn’t quite have the grapes for that (though they did make The Transmorphers, unreviewed here – I’ve got my limits too, junior.)

3:15 am. Anyway, the main players here are a haggard C. Thomas Howell as our hero Michael Archer, an earring-sporting Lance Henriksen as the villainous Dr. John Coven, and Nicole Sherwin as your typically hot linguist/theologian. Throughout the movie, director Peter Mervis (Snakes on a Train) employs an annoying effect that kept making me think there was something wrong with my DVD player. It’s a sort of freeze-frame/flash/jumpcut deal – like someone mentions Jesus, and suddenly there’s a flash of light, a whoosh, quick shots of a crucifix and the Last Supper, and then back to the scene. I guess this pumps up the excitement level, as if looking for hidden clues on the Shroud of Turin weren’t exciting enough!

3:20 am. We have our first mention of the Knights Templar! Also, the Shroud of Turin is apparently kept in the basement of the Alamo.

3:30 am. And Da Vinci invented 3-D glasses, in case you were wondering.

3:45 am. In what must be the most expensive scene in any of these Asylum movies, there is a smash-em-up car chase through the streets of London (or San Diego, whatever) involving a tour bus. Fortunately they didn’t have to pay the guy playing the Casio on the soundtrack too much.

4:15 am. Apparently I nodded off during the big revelation scene in The Da Vinci Treasure. I’m sure it changed the face of Christianity forever, but there’s no time to go back! Let’s wrap this up with an old school mockbuster to cleanse the palate, shall we? Of course I’m talking about 1988’s timeless E.T. ripoff, Mac and Me. We begin on another planet, where a family of aliens is accidentally sucked into the vacuum hose of a rover from Earth. The aliens, I guess, are meant to be cute, but to me they look like giant sea monkeys or very confused burn victims.

4:30 am. After the alien family is brought to Earth, the smallest alien, or Mysterious Alien Creature, or MAC (you see?), hitches a ride with a single mother and her two sons moving to California. They don’t notice him, but he keeps getting into mischief, and the youngest, wheelchair-bound brother Eric keeps getting blamed for it.

4:45 am. Eric plummets off a cliff in his wheelchair and is rescued by Mac. When he tells the doctor what happened, the doc diagnoses him with “schizofreakia” and decides to dope him up. Ah, the 80s.

5:00 am. Breakdancing! At McDonald’s! With Ronald McDonald and football players and – don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

5:15 am. By now everyone believes Mac exists, and they help reunite him with his family members, who are trapped in a mineshaft out by those windmills from Rain Man. The kids nurse the aliens back to life with nourishing sips of Coca-Cola. I tell ya, this movie is Morgan Spurlock’s worst nightmare.

5:30 am. Of course, government agents are in hot pursuit of Mac, and in their attempts to capture him they manage to blow up an entire mall and kill Eric in the process. Fortunately, Mac and his family are able to suck the death right out of him. Apparently the aliens don’t hold their ill treatment by the agents against their government, as the movie concludes with the whole family becoming U.S. citizens. A final ominous title card claims “We’ll Be Back.” We’re still waiting. And by “we,” I mean “not me.” Good night.

Previously: All-Night Bigfoot Movie Marathon

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Sita Sings the Blues"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In her comic book work from some fifteen years ago, Nina Paley spoofed the trend towards "confessional" autobiographical comics such as those done by people like Julie Doucet and Joe Matt. Drawing in a goofy, bigfoot-cartoonist style, Paley complained that she hadn't enjoyed enough unhealthy, grotesquely unstable life experiences to compete with the real trailblazers in that field. Sita Sings the Blues, Paley's first animated feature, shows that time has helped her catch up a little in the miserable-experience department, and it also shows an artist who's blossomed a bit in the face of the possibilities offered by moviemaking. It also shows that Paley has found a way to be confessional without being exhibitionist or soppy.

The center of the movie is taken from part of the Sanskrit epic The Ramayana, dealing with Rama and his wife, the goddess Sita, who maintains her devotion to him even as he repeatedly seeks out reasons to doubt her chastity and cast her away. (In response to this treatment, Sita tends to express her regret over having not killed herself earlier before others had suffered on her behalf.) The film happily juggles a fun-house buffet of styles. Parts of it are narrated by a trio of shadow puppets with Indian voices--provided by Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya--who relate the story in a conversational, sometimes argumentative way that sounds as if they were drawing on their memories of having heard it as children and haven't been allowed to consult Wikipedia. It's also depicted on-screen through brightly colored animation that suggests an Eastern version of Terry Gilliams' cut-out world-classics work with Monty Python. There are even several lively musical numbers, with Sita's singing voice provided by Annette Hanshaw, a 1920s vocalist whose old records are used on the soundtrack. All this is intercut with the bare bones of the story from Paley's own life that got her thinking about this story: how her husband got a job in India; how he persuaded her to sublet their San Francisco apartment, complete with cat, and join him after his contract was extended; and how he waited until she had gone to New York on business to break up with her by e-mail. Sita is funny and eye-popping and never bogs down. It might also double as a great introduction for kids to the Eastern canon, assuming you don't mind your kids asking you to explain the joke about the mile-high club.

The Tribeca Film Festival Tightens Up

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Tribeca Film Festival was founded in 2002 by a crew headed by Robert De Niro producer Jane Rosenthal. The first festival, thrown together after some four months of planning, was conceived in part as a response to the 9/11 attacks, an attempt to help revitalize and repair the economy and culture of lower Manhattan. In the years since, the Tribeca Festival has taken on its own identity as a sort of spring time counterpart to the New York Film Festival, with a more populist attitude towards celebrity glitter and commercial blockbusters. (That year, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was among the premieres.) The festival has continued to develop its own identity, and a certain amount of sprawl has come to seem a part of that. Last year, there may have been a bit too much sprawl; the 160-feature program, which wandered outside the bounds of Manhattan, reminded some observers of the critic David Chute's line about another messy film festival that seemed to have been designed along the lines specified by Monty Python's Mr. Creosote, everything mixed together in a bucket with an egg on top. Jane Rosenthal wants prospective festival-goers to know that they have heard your pleas, and they are responding. She told S. James Snyder that "as a producer, you learn that whoever has a good idea about something, no matter where it comes from, you should listen to it. So this year, we’ve listened to what people had to say last year, and that’s really part of the maturation and curatorial process, as the event grows and learns about its audience...Clearly, a problem for our festivalgoers in the past has been that there’s too many pictures, and they haven’t been able to find the pictures in an easy way. After our first two years, we seemed to lose our hub, and this year we’ve restored that. We’ve made the festival easier to maneuver and slimmed down a slate that is still very large and diverse by any measure.” This year's festival program, which will stick tight to the Tribeca-East Village area, is down to a lean, mean 122 features, and the average ticket price, which rose to $18 last year, is down to a more crowd-pleasing $15, which late night and weekday matinee screenings down to $8. This year's Tribeca Film Festival begins April 23.

Tyler Perry: Representative of Black Womankind, or Minstrel in Panty Hose?

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Salon's James Hannaham grapples with a question that has long vexed the guardians of popular culture, not to mention John Singleton: what is it about black comic actors and ladies' dresses? And is the eagerness of such performers as Tyler Perry and Eddie Murphy (and such predecessors as Flip Wilson, the first black comedian with his own network variety show, which made his character Geraldine a household name) somehow a step back for racial progress? Drag has a long and distinguished show business lineage, if you're in England, where comedians both low (Benny Hill), high (Monty Python), and in between (the Australian Barry Humphries) had treated women's wear as just another weapon in their comic arsenal, but in America it's often been looked down upon; perhaps tellingly, one of the few famous comedians since the dawn of the TV age to regularly appear in drag was Milton Berle, who was legendary for two things: his willingness to put on a dress, and the oversized manly appendage that one writer referred to as "an anaconda", which must have helped protect him from any feelings that he was somehow "emasculating" himself. Some, like Singleton, and Dave Chappelle, who says that he felt "pressured" to perform in drag on his own TV show, think that emasculating black men is what black drag is all about, that it defuses their sexual identity and makes them harmless and easier to laugh at. "The black man in drag," writes Darryl James, "is one of the new coons."

One big problem with this argument is that it seems to presume that black comedians who dress as women are doing so to pander to white audiences, and the principal audience for Tyler Perry's films, and even for a subpar Eddie Murphy vehicle like Norbit, is black. As Hannaham points out, "Perry's core audience began with middle-aged black women, introduced to [Perry's character] Madea by the outrageous traveling theatrical shows that made her name. These faithful admirers, and the millions who have caught on since, still can't get enough of the character" even as others protest that "the surefire laugh-garnering power of slipping a macho Negro into chiffon doesn't represent anything but an effeminizing, racist spectacle." Perry seems to have a surer sense of what he's doing than Singleton or Chappelle, whose comments about the denigration of black men have a subtext, and sometimes just a text, expressing distaste for cross-dressing because they associate it with homosexuality. "What Chappelle and Singleton may miss out on by refusing to pimp those pumps is the dangerous fun of performing outside the constraints of race and gender. The desire to inhabit the lives and bodies of others doesn't necessarily make you a racist any more than sporting a double-D cup makes a man love men. Often it is inspired by a sense of play, and sometimes it is meant to increase understanding." Essentially, Perry means the pistol-packing, no-nonsense Madea as a comic tribute to a certain kind of black woman. Granted, good intentions aren't always enough to counteract lack of talent fortified by cluelessness: that's the message one is liable to get from examining the terrifying career of Chuck Knipp, a white "comedian" (and onetime Libertarian candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives) who dons drag and blackface to pay "tribute" to black women by impersonating a grotesque babbling figure he calls "Shirley Q. Liquor." If his fame (bolstered by performance clips on YouTube) continues to spread, Knipp will be lucky if he doesn't end up delivering his last plea for tolerant understanding to an angry mob with flaming torches. But Tyler Perry's audience — the very people who might be expected to object Madea if the character was truly objectionable — have got his back.

Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In the aftermath of Heath Ledger’s death, we wondered whether the Terry Gilliam Curse had struck again. Ledger had completed only a few weeks of shooting on Gilliam’s latest phantasmagoric epic, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and it looked like the project was headed towards the same dead end as the director’s ill-fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Perhaps inspired by the multiple Dylans of I’m Not There — one of which was played by Ledger — Gilliam has hit on an ingenious solution to his dilemma. According to Variety (which cites Ain’t It Cool News as its only source, so take it with however many grains of salt you feel necessary), Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell have all signed on to fill Ledger’s shoes. How will this work? Apparently "Ledger's character is transported into three separate dimensions in the fantasy pic; these new worlds, which Ledger accesses via a paranormal mirror, will now be inhabited by Depp, Law, and Farrell."

While I’m Not There may have sparked the idea, the above explanation calls to mind another possible inspiration: longtime BBC staple Doctor Who. As you may recall, the Doctor is a Time Lord with the convenient ability to regenerate into a new incarnation. Each time he does this, a new actor is cast in the role. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Gilliam running into one Doctor or another backstage at the BBC back in his Monty Python days. In fact, the late Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams wrote for both shows, so there’s your connection right there. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Oscar Nominations: Is the Egg Showin'?

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

So. . . what was it William Goldman said again? I suppose my predictions weren't too bad under the circumstances, but just like every other year, the Oscar nominations held plenty of surprises.

A full list of nominations can be found right here.

In no particular order:

- The almost total lack of love for Into the Wild. I figured that the acclaim for this true-life story, and the presence of Sean Penn — an actor they clearly love — in the director's chair, would make the film Academy catnip. Clearly, I was mistaken.

- On the other hand, they loved There Will Be Blood even more than I'd anticipated, looking past its darkness to see how flat-out brilliant it is (sorry, haters), giving PTA not only best director and adapted screenplay, but a best picture nomination as well. The Jonny Greenwood thing stung a bit, but the other technical nods — art direction, cinematography, sound design and editing — compensate pretty well. And Daniel Day-Lewis is looking pretty unstoppable for best actor at this point. All in all, Blood received eight nominations, tying it for the most-honored film with widely-acknowledged frontrunner No Country for Old Men.

- Atonement. Wait, this movie's chances for best picture were supposed to be more or less dead. Don't the voters read the prognosticators? Still, despite the film's considerable pedigree and handsome production values, Joe Wright was shut out of best director (in favor of Ivan Reitman's kid, no less), which leads me to believe this barely squeaked in. But you never know.

- Show of hands: who saw the best actor nod for Tommy Lee Jones coming? Certainly not me. I figured that he had a good chance for his supporting work in No Country for Old Men, but I'm surprised any of the voters actually remembered In the Valley of Elah. But I won't complain. As an avowed Crash hater, nobody was more surprised than me that Elah turned out to be pretty darn good, due in large part to Jones' great performance. I'll certainly take him over, say, John Travolta in a fat suit.

- The double dip for Cate Blanchett. Yes, she was a deserving nominee for playing the most fondly-remembered of Todd Haynes' menagerie of Dylans. But honoring Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells me that the voters ran out of suitable nominees. Lord knows I'm no fan of Angelina Jolie, but at least she tried to give a multilayered performance in A Mighty Heart, which is more than I can say about Blanchett in Nobody But Elizabeth Expects the Spanish Inquisition. Just. . . ugh.

- When I floated my best supporting actress theory — that in recent years, the great majority of nominees in this category appear in films opposite performers who also get nominated — I wasn't just blowing smoke. Seriously, look it up. But, probably just to confound me, the nominations bucked the trend this year, with only one of the nominees (Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton) appearing opposite another Oscar nominees. Just as unexpectedly, only Clayton managed more than one acting nomination, wrangling three for Swinton, George Clooney, and Tom Wilkinson.

- Three out of five Best Original Song nominations went to Enchanted. Either they really love Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz or it was a really slow year for original songs. Probably both. At least they were smart enough to nominate "Falling Slowly."

- Hey, did you know that people made documentaries this year that didn't deal with the war in Iraq? I only ask because three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees were Iraq-themed, with only Michael Moore's Sicko and the Uganda-themed War/Dance tackling different subjects. The biggest disappointment is the snubbing of Tony Kaye's exhaustive, empathetic abortion documentary Lake of Fire, by my estimation the year's finest non-fiction film.

- Finally, I leave you with four horrifying words: "Academy Award Nominee Norbit." Sure, it's for best makeup, and considering that the makeup branch loves the hell out of Rick Baker it would've been madness NOT to predict him. But think about it: Norbit, possibly the most reviled film of 2007, received more Oscar nominations than Zodiac, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Knocked Up, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and Control. . . COMBINED. Hard to believe, but the makeup branch has actually managed to outdo last year's Click nomination.