The Screengrab : morgan freeman

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)

When it comes to second-guessing the Oscars, few Best Pictures raise Hollywood’s hackles like Shakespeare in Love. The legend goes something like this: way back in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant war movie Saving Private Ryan was a cinch to win the top slot, but sometime between the announcement of nominations and the opening of envelopes, Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the evil geniuses behind Shakespeare’s Oscar campaign) flew the invisible Miramax blimp over Hollywood and fired their diabolical Hypno-Ray at the helpless population, thus forcing all the innocent Who’s Who down in Whoville to vote for the wrong movie. As John Foote posts at InContention.com (reflecting an apparently common consensus), “Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that Shakespeare in Love, a lovely film, was actually better than Saving Private Ryan?” Well...uh, yes, actually. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Shakespeare in Love was MUCH better. Ryan, for all the slam-pow-gasp shock & awe chaos of its opening battle scene devolves shortly thereafter into a standard-issue World War II potboiler, circa 1952, complete with “Brooklyn,” “Redneck” and all the rest of the colorfully standard-issue Hollywood band of brothers fussin’ and fightin’ their way across Europe under the command of a tough but secretly tender-hearted father figure (played by a wildly miscast and completely unbelievable Tom Hanks). Shakespeare In Love, meanwhile, presented an Elizabethan world more fully-imagined than fellow Best Picture competitor Elizabeth, thanks to a remarkably literate and inventive screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And, while it’s easy to mock the GOOP-tastic Gwyneth of today, Paltrow generated palpable chemistry with co-star Joseph Fiennes in a well told, old-school love story, surrounded by a flawless supporting cast, all of them at or near the top of their games. True, movies this smart don’t usually win Oscars...which is probably why so many Academy voters are still baffled by Shakespeare’s victory.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)

So many of Oscar's pronouncements amount to a string of missed calls and concessions to sentimentality that when they get one right square on the nose -- when someone is rewarded for the best work of their career at that point in time as opposed to what they did a few years ago or what they might do if they can be induced not to chuck it all and go back to night school or even, as in the case of something like Ben Kingsley's performance in Gandhi, what the person they're playing did -- it stands out. The Academy has had plenty of opportunities to give Jack Nicholson a thumb's-up these past several years, and plenty of times they've jumped at the chance, even when, as in 1997's As Good As It Gets, the performance in question called to mind Picasso's boast that "I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody!" But they got it just right with Nicholson's first Oscar, for his Randall Patrick McMurphy, a performance that he gave a year after Chinatown set his movie star status in stone, and one that goes farther than he'd ever gone before, with fewer ingratiating winks and nods to the audience than he'd ever include in a full-length performance again. And since the movie, for all its virtues, rises and falls on the strength of its star, it deserved its Best Picture Oscar...a painful thing for this lifelong Jaws partisan to concede.

THE WORST:

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937)

Today Paul Muni is best remembered for his starring role in Howard Hawks' gangster classic Scarface. It turned out to be a rare occasion when Muni provided movie audiences with entertainment value for their money. After winning an Oscar nomination for his next film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Muni lost to Charles Laughton for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII and must have vowed to never be out-biopic'ed again. In short order, he established himself as the leading advocate of pompous, overbearing movies, winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Life of Louis Pasteur, in which he cured anthrax over the outraged objections of the small-minded, and then starred in Zola, in which he "J'accused" up one side of France and down the other. He also starred in Juarez, as Juarez, and The Good Earth, in which he must have disappointed his diehard fans by not actually portraying the planet. It all made him the Mister Oscar Bait of the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, audiences were sick of the self-righteous sight of him. He tried to get back to where he once belonged, but too much time spent reciting gaseous speeches while buried in historically conscientious makeup jobs had blunted his instincts, and some of his later movie roles, such as his lovable gangster in Angel on My Shoulder (1946), are actually even worse than the Oscar-bait stuff. He died in 1967, the bulk of his filmography fit only to serve as a cautionary example that Meryl Streep failed to heed.

DRIVING MISS DAISY (1989)

It’s not often that a movie dealing with racial issues is so totally (if well-meaningly) clueless that it gets an entire rap song dedicated to its utter boneheadedness, but Driving Miss Daisy is that movie, and Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn” is that song. After years of racism, stereotyping, and opportunities denied, Chuck D and his cohorts seemed to be saying, this is what constitutes progress? A movie about a cranky old southern Jewish woman whose black chauffer learns to live and love with her irascible, patronizing demeanor? Not only was it offensive on a number of levels – intentionally and otherwise – but it simply wasn’t a great movie by any reckoning. Its adaptation from a stage play was realized hamhandedly, Bruce Beresford’s direction is perfunctory, and the acting ranges from good but uninspiring to ambitious but dull (Dan Aykroyd ineptly takes the kind of risks that would later rejuvenate Bill Murray’s career). It’s easy to say that its victory came about because of a weak competitive field – other candidates ranged from poor (Dead Poets Society) to good-but-not-great (My Left Foot) – but the thing to remember is that 1989 was also the year that Spike Lee’s wonderful Do the Right Thing, a superior movie in every respect, and one that said far more about racial relations than Driving Miss Daisy could dream, was released. And it didn’t even get a nomination.

DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990)

Hot on the heels of Driving Miss Daisy, you wouldn’t think Oscar would be so quick to embrace another well-meaning racial drama, especially one helmed by someone who’s an even worse director than he is an actor. But sure enough, the voters’ tendency to absurdly overvalue any directorial effort by an actor that rises above total incompetence won out, and Kevin Costner’s bloated, plodding quasi-Western Dances with Wolves took home the Best Picture trophy in 1990. Continuing their history of giving Martin Scorsese the finger, they passed over his tremendous gangster tale GoodFellas in deference to this ridiculously overlong, condescending story of a white man who becomes beloved of the Indians by virtue of his sublime spirituality (heaven forfend the hero of the movie be an actual Indian, because then there wouldn’t be a starring role for director Kevin Costner’s favorite star, actor Kevin Costner). Dances with Wolves isn’t quite horrible enough to be the modern-day equivalent of The Greatest Show On Earth; it does contain some thrilling scenes, some decent acting, and direction that’s proficient if never outstanding. But its grossly overweight running time and heavy-handed message are easily the equal of anything in DeMille’s hokey circus epic. Still, things could have been worse; though no one remembers this anymore, The Godfather Part III was a Best Picture nominee in ’90, too.

BRAVEHEART (1995)

Oh, Oscar, when will you learn? By 1995, a clear theme was emerging: if you’re a well-known actor, and you manage to direct a movie without crushing yourself to death with a SteadiCam or making the entire movie with the lens caps on, you’ve got a pretty strong chance at winning a Best Picture or Best Director award even if your movie is an obvious mediocrity facing competition from much better movies by actual directors. You’d think the Academy would have figured it out: Warren Beatty did nothing worthwhile after Reds. Robert Redford never made a great movie after his Ordinary People win. Kevin Costner’s post-Dances with Wolves work is an utter embarrassment. Clint Eastwood is the most reliable acting director in Hollywood, and even he’s not that great by the standards of legitimate, non-acting directors. And yet, they fell for the exact same trick with Mel Gibson’s second directorial feature, the overheated, self-important William Wallace biopic Braveheart. A few well-staged battle scenes and some fancy speechifying don’t save the sluggish pace of the movie or the overwhelming sensation that Wallace is a bit of a sociopathic bully, and the movie doesn’t bear up to even one repeat viewing. It’s not awful, and Gibson has shown he’s capable of good work as a director since then, but Braveheart didn’t even remotely deserve to win Best Picture, even in a relatively weak year for movies.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

Given its date of release – my senior year of high school – you might think that my unrepentant love of this middling John Carpenter action flick is just geek hangover from my formative years. But really, it’s all down to Buckaroo Banzai. I have a lifelong adoration of pulp fiction, the sort of trashy mass-market literary and cinematic entertainments popular from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, which would occasionally yield surprisingly resonant characters like the Shadow or shockingly talented writers like Raymond Chandler. For the same reason, I’m a fan of modern attempts to conjure that rare era, and one of my all-time favorites is the charming, funny, and utterly inimitable 1982 flick The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. At the very end of the movie, a sequel was promised, but it never materialized; however, its director, W.D. Richter, was hired by John Carpenter to punch up a screenplay called Big Trouble in Little China – a B movie he wanted to turn into an A picture. It wasn’t quite that; in fact, a lot of Big Trouble in Little China can’t even aspire to B quality and settles down somewhere around Z. But it occasionally shows flashes of that demented Buckaroo Banzai genius, and while I normally can’t stand Kurt Russell, his insane John-Wayniac performance as two-fisted trucker Jack Burton (who Russell correctly points out is a hero who never does anything remotely heroic) adds an enjoyably louche element to the whole affair. Big Trouble in Little China is a perfect example of a movie that’s better than it has any right to be.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

As my esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak can testify, Stephen King is responsible for a lot of movies. And many of them are very, very bad. (He doesn’t even seem to like the ones that are good; this is a man who’s on record as liking Maximum Overdrive more than Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.) His collaboration with zombie auteur George Romero – and one of the few major adaptations of his work where he actually wrote the screenplay himself – isn’t a very, very bad movie, but it isn’t a very, very good one either. Like the EC horror comics that serve as its inspiration, it’s unapologetic camp, with all that this implies: when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s worse. With an extremely iffy cast, no particular structure or emotional stakes, and Romero directing like a man who’s looking to buy a summer home, Creepshow has a lot going against it; add to the mix the fact that it features an infamous segment involving a man whose home is overrun by cockroaches, and you’d think I’d hate it more than I hate traffic jams. But, as it happens, Creepshow is one of my all-time guilty pleasures; I can’t say that it’s a good movie, exactly, but I watch it again and again, with some of its flattest, lamest scenes – including King’s own extraterrestrially over-the-top acting debut – being numbered among my favorites. Plus, it has an unbilled cameo by my all-time favorite That Guy!, B-movie king Tom Atkins! How could I not love it?

NURSE BETTY (2000)

There’s plenty of people who don’t even like the good movies that Neil LaBute makes; his early work, like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, has plenty of detractors. But while it’s no Wicker Man, his third full-length feature, Nurse Betty, is widely considered a low point in his career. And, to be honest, I can see why. He didn’t write the script (a meandering thing about a small-town nurse who, stricken with a sort of traumatic amnesia, goes to Hollywood to hook up with the soap opera surgeon she has come to believe is real), which is often flat and more than a few times carries suspension of belief beyond the breaking point. The role of a damaged naïf is suitable to Rene Zellweger, but she’s still a bad actress even when she’s in her comfort zone. And Greg Kinnear and Aaron Eckhart, two actors who have never done much for me, continue to not do much for me here. And yet, and yet…I return to the movie a lot more than I ever thought I would on the first viewing. Most of it has to do with the film’s villains: Morgan Freeman, taking a break from his normal Magical Negro gig to play a veteran hit man, is terrific as a consummate professional who can’t see his own fatal weakness, and Chris Rock is downright astonishing as Freeman’s hotheaded protégé – it’s the only thing Rock has ever done that suggests to me that he might have a pretty goddamn great dramatic actor buried in him somewhere. Thematically, the movie promises a lot more than it can deliver, but for some reason Nurse Betty has always been one of those movies where I forgive the wasted potential, because there seems like so much of it to waste.

SPICE WORLD (1997)

Why all the hate for the Spice Girls? They only wanted to zigga zigga, after all. The massive outpouring of hate directed at them smacked of bad faith, and the claim that they represented the death of music clearly came from people who weren’t paying much attention to the rest of the dross on top 40 radio in 1997. And while I’ll be the first to admit that Spice World is no A Hard Day’s Night, it’s not from lack of trying: if the band, the cast, and the crew lacked the genius and charm of the Beatles, they certainly didn’t lack good intentions, and at heart, they were making the exact same kind of movie. The biggest band in the world bond with each other, drop wisecracks, engage in wacky hi-jinks, and avoid their rabid fans while having a good time doing it. If the Spice Girls weren’t a patch on the Fab Four musically, they did have a similar cultural cachet (albeit for only about five seconds), and who can begrudge them trying to have fun with the movie that was inevitably going to get made about them? And if they lacked the pure charisma of the lads from Liverpool, Mel B and Mel C looked better in skimpy outfits than Ringo Starr looked in anything. The girls came up with the idea for the movie themselves, which makes them more praiseworthy or more blameworthy depending on your perspective, and the producers, knowing that they didn’t have a John Lennon or a Paul McCartney on their hands, at least stuffed Spice World with ringers like Mark McKinney, Stephen Fry, Bob Hoskins and Richard E. Grant. Like the band, Spice World is a fun, ultimately irrelevant little pop gumdrop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, damn it.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We're used to seeing actors endorse political candidates, but not like this: in an interview with that distinguished cultural journal Parade, Daniel Craig sizes up the American candidates for president and decides which of them is best-suited to take his job. After asking Craig about which Hollywood "tough guy" he would most like to emulate (“The obvious choice for me would be Bogart. Not only because of that ease he had with his unique take on masculinity, but also—and this is much more important—because he got to sleep with Lauren Bacall.”), interviewer Kevin Sessums hits him with the big one: “Who do you think would be the better James Bond—Barack Obama or John McCain?” As Sessums reports, "Craig doesn’t hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because—if he’s true to his word—he’d be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond’s boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'”

In other election season movie news, Reuters is reporting that a majority of people who responded to a Moviephone.com poll voted Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One as their favorite movie president, coming in ahead of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. Trying to explain this, Moviefone's Scott Robson says, "It seems everybody is looking for a commander-in-chief who can come in and take command. Our readers voted with their hearts at a time when you have the economy going down the tubes, but in an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass." It will be remembered that presidents Ford and Freeman stood up to Gary Oldman in a Satanic goatee and a big fucking rock from space, respectively. Others who made it onto the top ten include Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!, and Jeff Bridges in The Contender, who, respectively and with varying results, stood up to alien attackers, more alien attackers, and Gary Oldman in an Antonin Scalia haircut. E. G. Marshall in Superman II finished out of the money entirely, proving that if you balance the budget but also kneel before invading Kryptonian supermen, one guess which act is the one that everyone remembers.

Yesterday's Hits: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Reynolds)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a hit?: As with other oft-filmed tales like Dracula and The Three Musketeers, every era seems to get the Robin Hood it deserves. The silent era got Douglas Fairbanks, in a role that highlighted his formidable athleticism. In the 1930s came The Adventures of Robin Hood (still the version to beat), in which Errol Flynn turned the classic hero into a dashing rogue. The elegiac seventies brought Robin and Marian, which starred Sean Connery as an older and somewhat sadder version of the character. And by the early 1990s, Robin had morphed into the sensitive-hunk archetype that was in vogue at the time, played by one of its biggest stars, Kevin Costner.

In addition to making adjustments to the title character to suit the era, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves also added some politically correct touches, including making Marian more fierce and less of a damsel, as well as keeping with the recent tendency to include a Moorish character in Robin’s Merry Men. Likewise, director Kevin Reynolds was able to juice up the action scenes using then-advanced special effects, including the famous shot in which the camera mimics the point of view of an arrow shot from Robin’s bow. And a full-out marketing blitz ensured that the film appealed to a wide audience, from kids who might be experiencing the story onscreen for the first time to adults who grew up on the older versions but were curious to see a new take on the tale. The strategy worked, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves became the second-highest-grossing blockbuster of 1991, bringing in $160 million in the United States alone and another $225 million internationally.

What happened?: Audiences flocked to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but even on its original release, the movie was plagued by a good amount of negative buzz. For one thing, there was the issue of Kevin Costner’s accent- he begins the film attempting a British accent, but within the first reel it disappears altogether, and neither of these solutions proved especially pleasing to audiences. But a bigger problem was that the film was more violent than its advertising had led audiences to believe. Warner Bros. had pre-sold the film to the family audience with such promotions as children’s toys and a breakfast cereal that was heavily advertised during Saturday morning cartoons. But when parents took their kids to the film, they were faced by such scenes as a man’s hand being severed, a number of people getting burned alive, the possible hanging of a young boy, and the attempted rape of Marian by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Both of these factors, combined with the film’s middling critical reception, helped the keep the film from enduring in the public’s esteem.

Does Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves still work?: Not very well. There’s a popular adage that a blockbuster is only as good as its villain, but Prince of Thieves put that wisdom to the test. This isn’t to say that Alan Rickman isn’t a blast as the Sheriff of Nottingham. But while Rickman- who was given more or less full creative control of the character as a condition of taking the part- makes a sneering, perfectly odious bad guy, he’s so committed to making Nottingham evil that he ends up overwhelming the story. A little of Rickman’s Nottingham goes a long way, but Reynolds structures the story like a cross-cutting tennis match, volleying scenes back and forth between Robin Hood’s antics and Nottingham’s over-the-top reactions to them.

Not helping matters is Costner’s performance, in which his accent issues were the least of his troubles. More damaging is Costner’s laid-back persona, which makes Robin Hood feel something less than heroic despite his good lucks and gift with a bow. In his salad days, Costner’s appeal was that he felt like a working-class everyguy, like a character from a Bruce Springsteen song personified. But when called upon to play a leader of men, Costner doesn’t have what it takes. This quality also makes it difficult to buy Robin’s past as a spoiled rich kid, which is mentioned at several occasions in the film. Perhaps Mel Gibson, who turned down the role before Costner signed on, could have pulled off the character as written, while making him more charismatic and entertaining besides.

But then, entertainment value is in relatively short supply in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The high spirits one normally associates with Robin Hood is largely absent from this telling of the story, replaced by- well, not much of anything. The Merry Men aren’t merry enough, Will Scarlet (Christian Slater) is too bogged down with a secret resentment for Robin Hood to function as a full-fledged character, and Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) has no chemistry whatsoever with Robin, thereby making their romantic subplot less inevitable than obligatory. Practically the only good guy who makes much of an impression is Azeem (Morgan Freeman), the Moor who bound himself to Robin after Robin saved his life. And the battle sequences, ambitious and violent as they are, are neither exciting nor especially clever. In short, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves isn’t much fun. And really, shouldn’t a Robin Hood movie at least be fun?

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

WAR!!!!! (Huh! Good God!) What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

...unless, of course, you’re a Halliburton stockholder...and, well, I guess World War II was helpful in pulling the U.S. out of the Great Depression and ridding Europe of fascism...and, y’know, we’d still be a British colony if not for the Revolutionary War.

And certainly the world of cinema, in particular, would suffer without the violence, spectacle and grand drama of humanity’s battles through the ages, since war has generated some of our greatest works of art (as well as our most cynical, manipulative, xenophobic hunks of exploding propaganda).

In his classic monologue, Swimming to Cambodia (about his participation in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields), the late, great Spalding Gray suggested a potentially beneficial marriage of the human impulses towards creation and destruction: “WAR THERAPY! Every country should make a major war movie every year. It would put a lot of people to work, help them get their rocks off” (and, of course, reduce the psychic and physical devastation of the real thing).

This week, Spike Lee does his part by releasing Miracle at St. Anna, a World War II drama featuring all the black actors Clint Eastwood didn’t cast in Flags of Our Fathers, and so in tribute to both films (and all the real life soldiers, civilians and politicians who inspired them), we here at the Screengrab present our picks for the Top 25 War Movies of All Time!

25. FORBIDDEN GAMES (1951)

Rene Clement's film opens with a crowd of people trying to march out of Paris as the Germans invade the city at the start of World War II. A couple are strafed, and their five-year-old daughter (Brigitte Fossey) wanders off in shock, holding onto her dead dog. She winds up in the countryside where she's befriended by a ten-year-old boy (Georges Poujouly) with whom she establishes a private cemetery for the dead animals they begin to collect, which they decorate by stealing crosses from a nearby (human) cemetery. One of the strangest and most haunting commentaries on war ever filmed, and the talented Clement never made anything remotely like it again. But then it's not as if anybody else has ever made anything quite like it either.

24. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Kon Ichikawa's masterpiece is set on an island in the Philippines in the dying days of World War II. Japanese soldiers have begun resorting to cannibalism to stay alive; the hero, Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), has been turned out of his platoon after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Stumbling along in search of a field hospital, Tamura refuses to sink to the level of eating human flesh. The one thing he has going for him is that, because of his medical condition, nobody he meets wants to eat him, either. This is one of the rare great movies that might be called honestly nihilistic. It's a vision of pure hopelessness, but it's emotionally moving because of the depth of the hero's desire to believe that human beings might be better than the behavior that he's seeing.

23. SALVADOR (1986)

This wasn't the first movie written and directed by Oliver Stone, but it did represent the official arrival of the Stone we've all come to know, love, and roll out eyes at, the outspoken topical "political" melodramatist. He's never had a better combination, for his talents and temperament, of subject, actor, and lead character than he did in this excitingly overblown, impassioned attack on Central American politics, which came out at the start of the year that ended with the release of his Oscar-winning Platoon. James Woods plays Richard Boyle, an actual reporter whose stories about trying to get close enough to the political violence in El Salvador in the early 1980s (and come out alive) inspired the screenplay. (It's co-credited to Boyle and Stone, and for a while Stone even flirted with the idea of having Boyle play himself.) Even though the movie was seen by almost no one when it was in theaters, a late-year push by the Los Angeles cable station the Z Channel helped get Woods an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and it's easy to see why: his hyperactive fast rap gives the movie almost as high a kinetic charge as the bullets and explosions do.

22. COME AND SEE (1985)

It’s been reported that the late Francois Truffaut once said that it was impossible to make a film that was truly anti-war because they tend to make war look like fun. However, the ultimate rebuke to Truffaut’s statement came a year after his death, in the final and greatest film by Soviet filmmaker Elem Klimov. Telling the story of the Nazi invasion of Belarus through the eyes of a young boy, Klimov’s unflinching camera depicts the atrocities vested upon the Soviet people during World War II. As the boy journeys through the countryside following the killing of his family, he is less protagonist than witness, always propelled forward by his terror at what he’s seen only to discover something even more horrifying once he’s arrived at his destination. The film culminates in the extended siege of a small town, where the boy is held at gunpoint while other soldiers herd the townspeople into a church and set the building ablaze. Throughout the film, Klimov’s dominant image is the face of his young leading man, Alexei Kravchenko, frozen in a mask of abject horror -- so committed was Klimov to eliciting this response from the young man that he attempted to hypnotize him, as well as using live rounds in some of the battle scenes, some of which (according to Kravchenko) reportedly came only inches from his head. Yet while Klimov’s methods might have been suspect, the results are undeniable -- a war movie that’s harrowing and despairing, but nowhere even close to entertaining.

21. GLORY (1989)

This Civil War movie tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-black regiment of the U.S. military, formed on the novel idea that the people whose freedom was contingent on the war's outcome might actually be of some use in fighting it. (Some objected to the idea on the basis that the abolitionists' cause might be undermined if it turned out that black men couldn't figure out how to operate shoes or march in formation.) The director, Edward Zwick, shows a sure hand in the amazing combat scenes but is shaky on some of the dramatic scenes and lets the composer, James Horner, pour too much syrup into the gears. But the movie's flaws don't count as much as its great subject and the performances of Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Andre Braugher (in his movie debut).

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

The Rep Report: September 5--10

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives commences its salute to Jerry Schatzberg tonight with screenings of the director's firat features, the 1970 alienation-fest Puzzle of a Downfall Child (starring Faye Dunway) and the 1971 The Panic in Needle Park, costarring Al Pacino, in his first starring role, and Kitty Winn as a young couple of heroin addicts. Schatzberg, who seems to be more or less retired, had an erratic career, and to his other problems, he'll probably have at least one chance during his personal appearance at this retrospective to patiently explain that, no, he isn't Joel Schumacher. But as a filmmaker he had a broad curiosity about different milieus and kinds of characters, and his pictures have generally had texture and weight. Needle Park retains interest as a deep quaff of '70s New York at its most confoundingly ungovernable, and Schatzberg can boast of having directed Pacino in both his last performance before The Godfather made him a star and the first picture he made afterwards, the 1973 road movie Scarecrow co-starring Gene Hackman. When Schatzberg made the New York-set Street Smart fifteen years after Needle Park, he had to shoot it in Toronto, but once again he helped launch the movie career of a major star, this time someone who'd been working for decades and would turn fifty the year the picture was released: just a couple of years earlier, Morgan Freeman had been reduced to holding down a job on Another World, but his terrifying performance as a pimp who emerges like a monster from the id to turn pampered reporter Christopher Reeve's life into a pretzel earned him his first Academy Award nomination and a long-belated measure of the industry stature he'd long deserved. Also showing: Honeysuckle Rose, a 1980 country music remake of Intermezzo starring Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon, which introduced Willie's theme song "On the Road Again," and "Reunion," a sadly overlooked 1989 film starring Jason Robards, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Raindance, the British company responsible for the Raindance Film Festival (which opens October 7, by the way), is bringing its educational program to the New York Film Academy. Aspiring filmmakers looking to drop a few bucks towards their futures might want to check out Elliot Grove's "99 MInute Film School" on Tuesday, September 9 and the "Lo to No Budget Filmmaking" seminar on the weekend of September 13 and 14, which bears a recommendation blurb from director Christopher Nolan, whose most recent film, The Dark Knight, has been well-received. This marks the first time the Raindance people's first venture into America, and it might be nice if it wasn't their last, so for God's sake, behave yourselves.

LOS ANGELES: Every Thursday in September, the Silent Movie Theater hosts "Word Is Born: Hip Hop at the Movies, 1979-1984". Included are Hollywood exploitation jobs such as Breakin' and Beat Street, the solid period documentary Style Wars, and on September 25, Beat This! Hip Hop Rarities, winner of this month's Rep Report Award for Promotional Copy That We Have No Intention of Trying to Re-Word: " We've dug even deeper for our closeout night, and we're bringing you some of the rarest cuts in a fantastic mix of rarities from the old-school hip-hop era. Watch them one after the other, obscure odds and ends from the Golden Age, ending with Beat This! A Hip-Hop History! Yup! It’s the history of hip-hop! And it was made in 1984! And it’s all in rhyme! And it’s vocoderized by Afrika Bambaataa! And it’s sci-fi! And it stars BS-ing punk-impresario-turned-double-dutch-promoter Malcolm McLaren in all his patronizing glory! And it was made for Granada TV! And they forced director Dick Fontaine to slip in McLaren against his will, but he couldn’t do anything about it!"

SAN FRANCISCO: Sean McCourt of the Bay Guardian has the dirt on this weekend's Lebowski Fest.

NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth Hi Mom! Film Festival, festuring an international, family-friendly selection of fifty-one animated and live-action shorts, runs this weekend starting tonight, at the Art Center in Carborro. Please note that the outdoor screenings planned for Chapel Hill have been moved indoors due to a "strong threat of rain."

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 2-8, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First of all, I should mention that we here at the Screengrab are sensitive to your complaints that the place has become something of a boy’s club, strewn with boxer shorts, empty beer cans, baseball cards and “adult reading material.” To that end, we’ve tidied up a bit, sprayed some lilac-scented Febreeze around, and are now prepared to welcome the newest member of the Screengrab team, Sarah Clyne Sundberg. Sarah made her debut earlier today with Olympic Games Past, so please extend your warmest greetings. As for the betesticled among us, we’ve been busy this week:

You ever think “Hey, that movie could have been directed by that other guy!” Well, so have we! Here are 15 Movies That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed by Someone Else (Parts One, Two, Three and Four).

The Midnight Meat Train probably won’t be coming anywhere near you, but maybe you can catch Elegy or In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

How about a triple feature from the Summer of ’78: Revenge of the Pink Panther, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Hooper were all clogging the drive-ins 30 years ago. None of them really summed up the season like The Endless Summer, though.

Best wishes to Morgan Freeman for a speedy recovery and a painless divorce!

Scarlett Johnasson and Penelope Cruz did their best to lower our expectations of their lesbian makeout session in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

While cleaning out Screengrab headquarters, we found these Boxes of Kubrick.

Jason Statham as Daredevil? Britney Spears in Faster, Pussycat…Kill! Kill!? Maybe in the Parallel Universe Film Guide.

Rejoice in my misery as I resume my Unwatchable quest to view every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list, including College Road Trip and Kickboxer 3: The Art of War.

That’s it. Get your motor running, head out on the highway!

Video of the Day: Morgan Freeman as DJ Mel Mounds

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:45:00 GMT

As long as we've got Morgan Freeman on the brain, we decided to treat you to a Video of the Day starring the man himself -- and a truly monstrous 1970s 'fro -- as severely funky DJ Mel Mounds, introducing "The Jelly Belly", that hot new dance number by the Short Circus.

Morgan Freeman's appearances on Sesame Street are among my fondest, and wierdest, childhood memories, and few are wierder than this one. Check out young Irene Cara getting down as a member of the Short Circus, and Rita Moreno -- herself an Oscar winner -- boogying her culo off to the heavy sounds of DJ Mel. Myself, I'm just waiting for DJ Shadow or some other enterprising hip-hop producer to come out with a dope remix of "My Mellow Fellow Turned Out Yellow"...

Related Posts:

Video of the Day: Marvel -- the Crummy Years

Video of the Day: When Woody Met Billy

Morgan Freeman: There But For the Grace of the Batmobile Go We

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:45:00 GMT

As our own Scott Von Doviak tipped you yesterday, beloved character actor, Oscar winner, and voice of God Morgan Freeman was involved in a somewhat serious car accident on Monday, having flipped his car while driving down a rural road in Mississippi. After reports that the 71-year-old actor fell asleep at the wheel and had to be removed from the car via the jaws of life (and subsequent, albeit incorrect, information that he was in critical condition), there was much trepidation in film blogger circles that we'd be having to write his obituary today. Happily, the Seasame Street vet/Metatron proved more resilient than we thought; he's reported today to be in good spirits, joking with doctors and reporters, with not much more than a broken arm and elbow and hopes to get released from the hospital within a few days. So relax, office wags -- your "Driving Miss Daisy" jokes will now seem merely lame and not completely tasteless.

The prognosis good news for fans of the man currently cleaning up as Lucious Fox in Dark Knight. Freeman has a well-earned reputation as one of Hollywood's genuine good guys -- a friendly, decent, charitable, and honest man. (Hell, he wasn't even drunk or stoned when he flipped his car, and how rare is that in today's Hollywood?) Everyone who's worked with him has only positive things to say about him, and the worst criticism leveled at him as an actor is that he has a strong prediliction towards playing "Magical Negro" roles, which is really more Hollywood's fault than his own. (It also ignores the fact that his c.v. is crammed with more interesting, if less seen, roles, such as his turn as a noble, if obsessive hitman in the underrated Neal LaBute comedy Nurse Betty.) Here's wishing a speedy recovery and hopes that he's in good condition to see the world premiere of The Human Factor, in which he appears as Nelson Mandela -- very likely the role he was born to play.

How about you, Screengrabbers? What's your favorite non-Sesame Street Morgan Freeman role?

Ten Movies for a Snow Day

Morning Deal Report: Please, No "Bucket List" Jokes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Production on the indie The Confessions of Charlotte Doyle was scheduled to start next month, but that may not happen for a reason you’ve probably heard about by now. Morgan Freeman, who was set to co-star in the film with Pierce Brosnan and Danny De Vito, is scheduled to undergo surgery for injuries suffered in a car accident late Sunday night in Mississippi. Freeman was reported to be in serious condition yesterday, but the latest reports suggest it’s not quite time for the actor to start making out his bucket list. (I know I promised I wouldn’t make that joke, but as it turns out, I’m completely shameless.) According to his publicist, Freeman “has a broken arm, broken elbow and minor shoulder damage, but is in good spirits.” Variety reports, “None of his other projects are expected to be affected. Freeman will star in The Human Factor, the Nelson Mandela bio that Clint Eastwood is directing for Warners, but that shoot isn’t skedded to begin until early next year.”

When selecting news items for the Morning Deal Report, sometimes a title alone is enough to catch my attention. For instance, Drink, Play, F@#k. Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to the book of that title, described by the Hollywood Reporter as “the provocatively titled comedic male retort to the femme-centric best-seller Eat, Pray, Love. The soon-to-be-published Play, by comedy writer Andrew Gottlieb tells the fictional story of Bob Sullivan, a man who, seeking solace after his wife leaves him, goes on a bender in Ireland, takes a gambling jaunt to Las Vegas and a embarks on a sex-tourism trip to Thailand.” This should create some challenges for the marketing department. How exactly do you pronounce that last word anyway?

Finally, Mark Ruffalo will make his directorial debut with Sympathy for Delicious. I’m thinking it’s either about a dog or a drag queen, but I’m wrong on both counts. Per Variety, it’s the story of “‘Delicious’ Dean O'Dwyer, a paralyzed DJ struggling to survive in his wheelchair on the streets of L.A. He turns to faith-healing and mysteriously acquires the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself.”

Related:
Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face
Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Don’t worry, Batfans, this isn’t another post picking on The Best Movie Ever – we’ve got that covered elsewhere. No, this is a post picking on dipshits who view anything that goes thermonuclear in the pop culture as validation of their political leanings. You’ve probably seen them by now – the “Batman is Bush” editorials, the most notable (and laughable) of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week under the byline of right-wing thriller author Andrew Klaven.

“There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war,” Klaven gasses. “Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”

Klaven has plenty of evidence to support this seemingly dubious proposition. For instance, if you squint a little, the bat-signal looks a bit like a “W.” And…well, that’s about it, but then we have Andrew Bolt in the Australian Herald Sun, claiming that Christopher Nolan made a film proving Bush right, though he had to “disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn't freak and the film's more fashionable stars wouldn't walk.” Boy, I betcha Christian Bale feels silly now! Bolt has also noticed the bat-signal’s similarity to a W, and goes on to equate Batman beating the crap out of the Joker with waterboarding, claiming “Batman has resorted to the last hope to make this terrorist squeal, because only the Joker has the information the police need to save two goodies who have just minutes left to live.” This sort of ignores the fact that the Joker intended to reveal this information all along and that the police didn’t save those two “goodies” at all, but let’s bear with him. Bolt goes on to cite Batman’s surveillance of Gotham City’s cell phones as another telling similarity to Bush. Except, well, nobody ever elected Batman to any office, nor did he ever swear to defend the Constitution or uphold civil liberties. That’s sort of what makes him a vigilante, no? The movie knows what he’s doing is wrong because Morgan Freeman says so, and everybody knows Morgan Freeman is the voice of God (or the Magical Negro, if you must go there).

These theories really fall apart when the editorial writers equate the Joker to Osama bin Laden. Think about it – if The Dark Knight was really an allegory for the Bush administration, Batman would half-heartedly pursue the Joker for the first few minutes of the movie and then let him escape and spend the rest of his time dicking around in Metropolis looking for Mr. Mxyzptlk and his weapons of mass destruction. Yet I do think these numbnuts are onto something with the Batman/Bush parallel – just not in the way they think. See, Batman doesn’t particularly remind me of George W. Bush, but Bruce Wayne sure does. That is, the public Bruce Wayne – the drunk party boy, the son of privilege, the out-to-lunch executive falling asleep during important meetings. (And this is not even the first time Bale has reminded me of Bush – his accent in I’m Not There sounded like Dubya’s worst Dylan impression.) You could conceivably make the case that the movie is actually a mockery of ol’ 43…or you could just accept that all the “war on terror” overtones are intended to lend the movie some contemporary resonance – to make it a Batman for the 21st century – and not much more than that.

Related:
Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't as Good as You Think It Is
Screengrab Review: "The Dark Knight"

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:44:00 GMT

Yes, the first hour is great: a non-stop thrill ride, a tour de force. And Heath Ledger gives a mesmerizing performance, and we’re all very sad that he’s dead. I’m not even being sarcastic: his recent films indicated a phenomenal range, and he seemed like a nice enough guy, and I’m always very sorry when smart, decent, talented people die far too young (while Cheney continues relentlessly on).

And I understand how and why The Dark Knight made so much money. After all, we’re all stuck at home this summer, since God knows we can’t afford to drive or fly anywhere, and movie theaters are air-conditioned. Even my lovely Polish bride (who friggin’ HATES all the usual summer superhero blockbuster crap) ponied up the bucks to go see Christian Bale, et. al. on the big screen.

But people...get a grip. It’s not the best movie ever. It’s not even as good as Iron Man, ferchrissakes.

And I’ll give you ten reasons why...but DON’T keep reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet, ‘cuz the following post is spoiler-tastic to the max. Okay...you’ve been warned. Spoilers ahead.

1. It is, at the very least, half an hour too long. Probably more. Long movies are fine...movies where you feel every second of the too-long length? Not so much.

2. It is WAY overpraised by critics because it features the last complete (and potentially Oscar-worthy?) performance by Heath Ledger. Need proof? Okay, which of the following awesome, iconic comic book movie performances were mentioned as potential Oscar contenders?

(a) Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns, (b) Jack Nicholson as The Joker in Batman, (c) Danny De Vito as The Penguin in Batman Returns, (d) Christopher Reeve as Superman in Superman, (e) Any other performance in a comic book movie ever.

(Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow doesn’t count...that was a movie based on a theme park ride. Not the same thing at all.)

3. It’s a comic book movie that addresses topical themes like America's response to terrorism. And has nothing particularly interesting to say.

4. So...the evil genius who outwits the cops at every turn, terrorizes the city and kills a judge and the police commissioner is finally captured and then...left un-handcuffed in an interrogation room with a cop (in a department riddled with corruption)? The cop in question turns out to be dumb rather than crooked but...uh...Hannibal Lecter got strapped to a stretcher with a hockey mask just for eating a few people. I’m just saying.

5. Speaking of that scene where the Joker gets caught and then gets away (you know the one I mean?)...so they don’t have metal detectors in Gotham City police headquarters? That might, for instance, detect a bomb in someone’s abdomen?

6. And, okay, I know the Joker is an evil genius and all...but considering he tells Batman exactly where to find Rachel and Harvey Dent and the Caped Crusader and Gordon leave on their rescue missions at exactly the same time...how exactly does the Jokester arrange it for Gordon to arrive at Rachel’s location just a few seconds too late? (Pay attention...this question will be on your SAT.)

7. The whole "bombs on the ferries sequence" (with the cameo appearance by everyone’s favorite, The Magical Negro, i.e., the token appearance by the wise black character who shows whitey how to be a better whitey)? Lame. Oh, so lame. (Oh, wait a minute...I forgot Morgan Freeman also has a major role in the film as, uh...a wise black character who shows whitey how to be a better whitey.)

8. Did I miss something, or is this just sloppy screenwriting? Eric Roberts tells Gordon he’s had enough of all the Joker agita. As such, he tells Gordon exactly where to find the Joker. Cut to the Joker on a boat with all the surviving mobsters (except Eric Roberts). The Joker makes a speech, then burns a pile of money and a Chinaman. Then....leaves. Did Gordon have a senior moment, or was that just sloppy screenwriting that NOBODY INVOLVED WITH THE PRODUCTION SEEMED TO NOTICE?

9. Let me get this straight: the Joker kills a bunch of people, lays waste to the city and burns off half of Harvey Dent’s face...but the plan is that Batman will take the blame for Harvey Dent’s death in order to keep the good people of Gotham from getting bummed out. Because, of course, nobody in Gotham City would believe that the Joker killed Harvey Dent...even though the Joker tied him up in a room with a bomb and burned off half his face, then blew up the hospital he was in. No, much better plan to blame Batman. Good thinking, guys.

10. And Batman doesn’t kill the insane, indestructible, unstoppably evil Joker...why? Oh, right. Principles. Like when he didn’t kill Harvey Dent and resisted violating the civil rights of everyone in Gotham City...oh...wait...

Yeesh.

Related stories: How Batman Is The New Beatles, Fitting Farewells - The Top Ten Great Final Films, Screengrab Review - The Dark Knight

DVD Digest for June 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The run-up to Father’s Day continues with more dad-friendly DVDs, including a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008 to date.

DVD of the Week: After last week’s wide selection of testosterone-heavy actioners, this week finally brings a DVD for the thinking dad- HBO’s critically-feted seven-part miniseries John Adams. Based on the book by David McCullough and starring Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, John Adams is a prestige project through and through. But the big surprise is how exhaustive and complex a portrait of the man and his time this really is. Some highly unpleasant events take place on the way to revolution, and the film doesn’t shy away from this reality. Likewise, in addition to Giamatti and Linney’s accomplished turns as John and Abigail, the film also boasts some note-perfect supporting work from the likes of David Morse as George Washington and Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin. As far as founding fathers go, Adams has long taken a backseat in popularity to these two men as well as Thomas Jefferson, but if nothing else, John Adams is invaluable in helping to pin down his importance in the history of this nation.

Other new releases this week include: Doug Liman’s Jumper (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in Meathead’s The Bucket List (Warner, also Blu-Ray); 2007’s Funny Games (Warner), the film so nice Michael Haneke made it twice; Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in the historical bodice-ripper The Other Boleyn Girl (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days (IFC Films); the Exquisite Corpse-styled indie thriller The Signal (Magnolia); and of course, the best-reviewed theatrical release of 2008, Larry the Cable Guy in Witless Protection (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray).

In classics on DVD, this week’s big news is Lionsgate’s High Noon Two-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which brings the guy-movie favorite back to DVD with a number of new features. Included among these are a number of documentaries and featurettes, along with a video of Tex Ritter performing his Oscar-winning song from the film. But if dad’s tastes run more to looking at babelicious European actresses of yore, Lionsgate’s got that covered too, with the Catherine Deneuve 5-Film Collection (including Le Sauvage, Hôtel des Amériques, Manon 70, Le Choc and Fort Saganne) and the Sophia Loren 4-Film Collection (which includes I Girasoli, Carosello Napoletano, Attila, and Madame Sans-Gene).

Finally, being released this week exclusively in Blu-Ray: Broken Trail (Sony), Natural Born Killers (Warner), and The Professionals (Sony).

Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You know how there’s usually nothing good on TV, and then finally there are TWO shows you want to watch and they’re both on at the same time? That’s what this election has been like for me. After a a lifetime of troubled Democratic administrations and doomed Democratic candidates from McGovern to Kerry (and don’t even get me started on the disastrous Gore/Lieberman campaign, Nader haters), we finally get two really strong contenders...IN THE SAME FREAKIN’ ELECTION YEAR. And they just spent the past few months beating the shit out of each other.

But that's all behind us now: according to media scuttlebutt, Hillary will officially concede the Democratic nomination on Saturday and become America’s #1 Obama Girl, while Barack moves one step closer to becoming our nation’s first real black president, after many years of fake black presidents on TV and the big screen.

And so, in honor of Senator Barack Obama’s historic achievement, Screengrab decided to look back at some of the African Americans who occupied the Oval Office in fiction before reality finally caught up:

Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact (1998)

After playing God in Bruce & Evan Almighty, President of the United States was actually a step down for Morgan Freeman...but America was lucky to have his wisdom, authority and soothing, inspirational baritone during a crisis involving a potential Extinction Level Event, a.k.a. a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. Rather than farming out the whole thing to Haliburton, President Beck freezes wages and prices to prevent an economic disaster and dispatches Robert Duvall’s Capt. Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner and a multinational crew of astronauts, who sacrifice themselves to destroy the big rock, thus saving (most of) humanity. Heckuva job, Fishie.

Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer on 24 (2002-2004)

After surviving assassins in a truly harrowing California primary, Haysbert’s resilient, basso profundo commander-in-chief is faced with nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as attempts by corrupt American businessmen to manufacture war in the Middle East in order to drive up oil prices and...uh...hey, isn’t this a Fox show with a big conservative fan base? Must be all the torture...so much torture, in fact, that West Point Academy worried cadets were starting to view such behavior as acceptable interrogation procedure, and I’ve personally heard talk radio guys condone extreme neo-con interrogation policies because, heck, they always work for Jack Bauer. Yet isn’t it also possible, given the show’s impact, that Haysbert’s performance as the indomitable President Palmer in some way helped Middle America get used to the idea of a handsome young African American Democrat in the White House?

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

While not technically African American, Bill Clinton received an honorary designation as the nation’s first black president (until the real thing comes along) from a plurality of U.S. comedians. And while not technically a cast member of Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s tale of Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Clinton nevertheless received more screen time than Rob Lowe or Angela Bassett thanks to a presidential speech about rocks found on Mars that was repurposed (controversially) as a fictional proclamation about alien transmissions received by astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Ironically, the only reason Clinton got to portray the president in the movie was because Sidney Poitier passed on the role.

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Idiocracy (2006)

Of course, some presidents are better than others, though given the average IQ of the dumbed-down populace of Mike Judge’s little-seen, depressingly spot-on social satire, Idiocracy, Crews’ President Camacho doesn’t really do that bad a job. Sure, he almost executes the smartest man in the world (Luke Wilson’s cryogenically-preserved average Joe, whose 21st century common sense reads as genius in 2505 America). But he does have leadership skills, and when Joe’s brilliant plan to water crops with, y’know, water instead of corporate sports beverages helps to end a crippling food shortage, Camacho has the wisdom to actually listen to expert opinion rather than (ahem) stubbornly staying the course.

Tommy “Tiny” Lister as President Lindberg in The Fifth Element (1997)

Forget the Axis of Evil...Lister’s science-fictional administration has to deal with The Great Evil, a sentient flaming asteroid intent on, yes, wiping out all life on Earth. While Bruce Willis’ cab driver and Milla Jovovich’s supernatural supermodel do most of the heavy lifting in the fight against Evil (and its chief henchman Zorg, played by Gary Oldman in a peculiar plastic hat), President Lindberg nevertheless doesn’t ask and Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod doesn’t tell when his ultra-flamboyant radio host joins the mission, and the intergalactic commander-in-chief even supports his troops by preventing a naggy mother from cock-blocking Willis’ eventual clone chamber tryst with Jovovich...talk about advocating stem cell research!

Trailer Review: Wanted (Second Trailer)

Paul Clark — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Let me get this on the table — I don't read comic books, I didn't care for director Timur Bekmambetov's previous films (Night Watch, Day Watch et al), and my imperviousness to the charms of Angelina Jolie has been well documented. So if I say I'm not in the target audience for Wanted, you'll agree. Yet I'm sort of intrigued by this trailer. For one thing, it looks like the comic book source material has given Bekmambetov an honest-to-goodness framework on which to hang his outlandish visuals, rather than just throwing a bunch of random effects at the audience and expecting them to stick a la Night Watch. Who knows — the film may turn out to be almost coherent, at least by the director's standards. In addition, the Jolie factor is balanced out in part by the casting of James McAvoy, who is quickly becoming Hollywood's go-to guy for flawed, rakish heroes. In fact, Jolie's presence annoys me less here than the umpteenth incarnation of Morgan Freeman, Voice of Wisdom — come on people, can't we cast someone else for a change? Wanted is hardly at the top of my must-see list for summer, but this trailer has gotten me interested, and that's a start.

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Academy Award Winners Edition

Matthew Dessem — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:15:00 GMT

Via Neal Pollack, one of the strangest pieces of film you're likely to see this year. Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno performing a Tom Lehrer song, from a time when children's television was noticeably more surreal. Not to mention more verbally acute and more alcoholic: when's the last time Dora the Explorer was offered manzanilla?

Morning Deal Report: Objectif Ecran

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Andy Serkis has joined the cast of the Spielberg/Jackson Tintin. Looks like this thing is really happening. As a Tintin diehard from days past, I have mixed feelings about that, but we'll just have to see.

The Golden Compass is performing a lot better in those godless "other countries" you've heard so much about; go figure.

Paramount is charging extra for theaters to run Sweeney Todd, and at least one chain is boycotting in protest. Folks, I've seen Sweeney Todd, and it has way too much arterial spray to capture that precious family-holiday mammon. Woe to the family that walks in there by accident.

Morgan Freeman draws nearer to his long-standing goal of adapting Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. That's a very oblique, mysterious book, without a huge amount of action. The only director I can imagine honoring it is (well, duh) Stanley Kubrick. The rumored director — David Fincher — not so much.

— Peter Smith