The Screengrab : moulin rouge

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. K-PAX (2001)

K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it dares to teach us that all mentally ill people can be Magical Negroes if they try. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it makes one pine for the relatively wise and somber tones of Patch Adams. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because its twinkly-winky score underlines every single emotion onscreen, which are themselves shaded in primary colors and writ large enough for a pre-schooler to grasp. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because Kevin Spacey approaches his mentally ill/spaceman character as if the ideal mentally ill spaceman is part-Jack Nicholson and part-Bono, basically a smirk in shades. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because supporting characters are constantly telling the audience how awesome Keven Spacey’s mentally ill spaceman is. In truth, any one of these reasons is enough to make K-Pax a bad movie, but the real problem with K-Pax is that it insists that the audience swallow all of this Hallmark-lite hokum when it knows that it’s heading towards a broad Christ metaphor that even Kirk Cameron would shy away from. This movie is the strongest cinematic argument ever made for involuntary lobotomies.

2. FORREST GUMP (1994)

I never intended to see this movie. But I was staying with a friend who insisted that I had to see it now now now because it would change my life. Maybe it did. I swore that as God was my witness, I would never sit through Forrest Gump again. And I’ve kept that promise. Like the title character, I grew up in Alabama. Being from there means that I tend to detest movies set in Alabama, which are all about the oh-so-colorful hicks who live there with their strange okra-eating ways, and usually star people who seem to have learned everything they know about Southern accents by watching Hee Haw reruns (as Hal Crowther once wrote, can you imagine seeing the tables turned with a movie set in New York where the cast was full of genuine rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi mimicking Howard Cosell?). But the setting is just the surface gloss of this movie's bone-deep stupidity. From what I understand, Winston Groom’s novel is a rather clever satire of the late 20th century, but I have never read it. The movie is the opposite of satire, a picaresque story designed to tug and strain at heartstrings, to make grown men weep and ladies quiver with its story of the extraordinary man-child Forrest Gump. But underneath all that gooey Lifetime Movie stuff, the message is that idiots deserve your respect. Idiots make history happen. Idiots stick to their core principles and blindly charge forward, damn the facts, and are blessed by the god of their choice. Did the makers of this film never read Of Mice And Men? Idiots destroy the things they are supposed to protect. Forrest Gump negates that story, and dares to tell the audience that idiots are born leaders. Perhaps it's needless to say, but this movie is directly responsible for the eight long years of the Bush Administration. Whenever you hear the words "mission accomplished" from an official source, you should know that they're really saying "stupid is as stupid does." The success of Bill Kristol makes a lot more sense if you imagine him droning on about how life is like a box of chocolates.

3. MOULIN ROUGE (2001)

Combining all the fun of epilepsy with all the subtlety of musical theater, Moulin Rouge was like a romance novel written by high-fructose corn syrup. I'm pretty sure that this movie gave me inoperable cancer. Of the soul. I know that there's people out there who like it, but I cannot imagine why. Among its sins are bad editing, terrible acting, actors singing the ubiquitous hits of any generic Clear Channel radio station, an eyescaldingly hideous color scheme, and a plot that would embarrass Danielle Steele. The only redeeming thing about it is that it should make it clear to all the homophobes out there that homosexuality cannot be passed around like a virus, because if it were, this movie would be Patient Zero for the Campy Queer Flu.

4. SIGNS (2002)

Are there words in the English language more terrifying than “Written, Produced and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan”? Signs is about aliens who come to Earth to help Mel Gibson recover his faith in God. Signs is also about helping Mel to understand his wife’s dying words, in which she somehow predicted that hostile aliens would invade a planet which is more than 70 percent covered in liquid death and presciently knew that Mel's baseball-loving brother could save her child with a well-swung bat. Signs is also about how brilliant alien invaders who can build spaceships and disrupt electrical signals and stuff like that might decide that the best way to begin their invasion is by invading a child’s birthday party in Brazil, irritating a farmer's dog, or hiding in a pantry. Hoo boy. Too bad these aliens couldn't take the obvious route of replacing everyone around Mel with pod people. Or bursting out of his stomach at a family dinner. That would have been quite the twist!

5. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)

Oh, it’s sooooo deep. Those people will do anything for fame! I realize Oliver Stone thinks he’s being all clever about the MTV generation, but this is a movie devoid of ideas desperately trying to pass itself off as a smart film. It's like The Honeymoon Killers remade by MTV Cribs, only less so. I think that the makers of this movie would say that overexposure to the media makes people crazy and amoral, but that doesn't explain why they fought lawsuits blaming this movie for copycat murders by overexposed fans. They're trying to have it both ways: trying to say that the movie is against the violence it portrays, even as the whole point of the movie is the glorification of that violence. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original script, has allegedly disowned the movie, and it's clear why. Tarantino may not be the deepest filmmaker - a lot of his clever flourishes don't have a whole lot of thought behind them - but he has a great eye and a working brain and he understands that satire has a point. All of Tarantino's films have cold-blooded killers in them, and all of them ask for you to sympathize with a killer, one way or another. Tarantino doesn't feel a need to explain how these killers got to be that way, nor does he bludgeon the viewer with faux-irony about how society views these killers, especially not while producing his trademark extremely-stylized violence. But Stone, on the other hand, doesn't know how he feels about his killers. His movie seems to be saying over and over again that they are awesome, and what's more, everyone in his movie (other than the victims, presumably) is a cold-blooded, amoral murderer. That's not satire. It's nihilism. Say what you will about the tenets of Quentin Tarantino, but at least he has an ethos.

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

CHICAGO (2002)

Hot chicks behind bars? Check. A large, in-charge corrupt female warden? Check. Mean girl sparring between the new fish and the reigning cell block queen? Check. Nude lesbian shower orgies and bloody riot scenes? Sorry...Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the toe-tappingly cynical 1975 Kander/Webb/Fosse musical adaptation of crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play about celebrity criminals ain’t that kind of Women-In-Prison film. Helping to restore America’s faith in the potential entertainment value of movie musicals a year after Baz Luhrmann did his level best to destroy the genre with the Excedrin-headache known as Moulin Rouge, Chicago served up catchy tunes and light satire grounded by (relatively) gritty scenes of the “real-world” Murderess Row underpinning the fantasized production numbers. For all the literal and figurative song-and-dance surrounding the press and public’s fascination with lethal jazz babies Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie (Reneé Zellweger), there’s also the other side of the coin: the grim fate of a Hungarian inmate who, unlike her media-savvy cellmates, is probably innocent but gets the noose rather than justice because she can’t speak English and doesn’t know how to game the system for her own benefit. But that’s about as serious as things get: those who prefer more harrowing musical depictions of doomed immigrant ladies destroyed by American xenophobia are welcome to seek out Dancer In The Dark, the entertainment equivalent of a swift hard kick in the crotch you’re not entirely sure you deserved. The rest of Chicago, meanwhile, is a feel-good romp about getting away with murder featuring Zeta-Jones at the top of her game, an unusually tolerable performances by Zellweger (in a role Divine would have really knocked out of the park) and a surprisingly unembarrassing performance by Richard Gere (although as fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak correctly noted at the time, Christopher Walken in the razzle-dazzle role would have been godhead).

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Look, we’re not going lie to you: a lot of what’s awesome about John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell’s one-eyed bank-robber antihero is badass enough to have earned the guy a generation of goodwill despite a subsequent decade filled with Captain Rons and Tango & Cashes. A lot more of what’s awesome about it is the dynamite supporting cast, which includes Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, a tasty Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance as a Fightin’ President, Screengrab fave/That Guy! emeritus Tom Atkins, and Isaac Hayes in a role so tough he almost out-bad-dudes Snake Plissken. But leaving all that aside, Escape from New York twists conventions all over the place: the bad boy reprobate is trying to break into prison, not get out of it, and New York, rather than being the destination everyone’s trying to reach and the place people only leave because they’re about to hit 40 and they can’t stand living with a roommate in Crown Heights anymore, is a maximum security prison where futuristic America dumps its biggest scumbags. (Insert predictable ‘Oh, the wacky world of science fiction, where New York is filled with criminal scum! Ha ha!’ joke here). Much as he did in Escape from Precinct 13, Carpenter takes genre conventions and flips them on their ears, with highly entertaining results.

STALAG 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder’s films are so essential and influential and beloved that it’s hard to pull back and talk about how weird and unsettling and even unpleasant they are. But they are indeed weird, unsettling, and often unpleasant. For one thing, there’s so much fakery that it’s up for grabs what Wilder was trying to elicit from his audience. In Billy Wilder’s eyes, life is about deception. Many -- if not most -- of his main characters are phonies. The cynics are all romantics. The romantics are all cynics. Sometimes they’re deluding themselves, sometimes the rest of the world. His movies also lather on a thick corn hash. That’s not too unusual for a Hollywood director of his era. John Ford and Howard Hawks were both certainly guilty of overcooking the corn. In Wilder’s movies, sometimes the corn is funny and sometimes it seems pointless. It’s all part of the artifice of his movies, the occasionally clumsy sleight-of-hand that he works with to try to distract you from the horror and mess his characters are making of their lives with all their deception. This artifice is occasionally too much for Wilder’s movies, and a few stories that should work (like Ace In The Hole, for instance, or The Apartment) try to hang too much suffering on a premise too phony and characters too empty. However, Stalag 17 goes the other way. It's a good Wilder movie. It did, however, open the door for Hogan’s Heroes, a bad tv show (don’t try to justify your nostalgia to me; it may be iconic but that doesn’t mean it’s good). It also laid the groundwork for the Roberto Benigni atrocity Life Is Beautiful, and a handful of other movies leaping to your mind about the goofy fun time people had in Nazi prison camps. Not that movies about Nazi prisons have to be grim, but c’mon, those flicks have no goddamn perspective. Anyway, the comic relief is far too broad for the movie, the story is pitched somewhere between too cynical and too maudlin, the characters are a little slow on the uptake, and damn if I know how it all works, but Stalag 17 somehow makes sense.

A MAN ESCAPED (1957)

The title suggests a conclusion foregone, but Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is unconcerned with the conclusion. What’s important is the suffocating tight focus on Lt. Fontaine, our captured protagonist, his wide eyes full of twitchy wildness like cornered game, as he goes about the nuts-and-bolts of dismantling the prison about him. The movie opens with a close-up on his hand, testing a car door lever. In a minute, he will leap from the car and be immediately recaptured. But for the first couple of minutes, Bresson’s camera watches him as he holds his breath, waiting for just the right moment. Some men may give up when caught, but this one was built for escape. You will learn soon enough that he is a member of the French Resistance who is headed for detainment in a Nazi jail. He tells his story mostly in short, clipped voiceovers, as few people speak to him or give him a reason to speak during his confinement. But speech is unimportant. His mind is constantly at work planning his escape. Bresson’s taut and economical film lays bare the mechanics of a prison break, provided, of course, that the prison is built and staffed exactly like the one in the movie.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994)

The only prison in Roman Polanski’s film of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden is in the past. Sigourney Weaver plays Paulina, a former political prisoner scarred by her rape and torture while imprisoned. Her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) owes her everything. One night -- the only night in this movie, really -- his car breaks down and he catches a ride from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), who leaves and later returns when he realizes that he accidentally kept Gerardo’s spare tire. The two men have a drink. Meanwhile, Paulina has apparently flipped. She steals Miranda’s car and destroys it, then returns home and begins to torture the man, claiming he did terrible things to her in the past. Her husband is understandably confused. Miranda seemed okay to him. And he knows that Paulina never saw her tormenter while in prison. How can she be sure? Three characters, one night, and a lifetime of human suffering.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "White Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical. Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse. However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong. White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.

White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical". This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.

There was no better acid test for the notion that jukebox musicals were more likely to meet with success thanks to the audience already being familiar with, and well-disposed to, the songs featured in them than White Christmas. Every song in the movie was by the incredibly successful and well-liked Irving Berlin, and the title track is one of the most popular songs in the history of the English language. (There's an old joke on The Simpsons where Mr. Burns laments that he once lost the chance to buy Picasso's "Guernica" for a song. "Luckily," he says, "that song was 'White Christmas', and by hanging on to it, I made billions.") It had been a massive hit all throughout the Second World War, and White Christmas used it as its can't-miss finale.

Paramount wasn't done stacking the deck, though. Besides hiring Bing Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" was the best-selling song of the 1940s (and subsequently became the best-selling single of all time), to play the lead, they crammed the cast with appealing superstars: Danny Kaye plays Crosby's war buddy and singing partner, and the two work with -- and fall for -- a dancing duet played by the gorgeous Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney at the peak of her singing skills. Directing chores were handed to the beloved and prolific Michael Curtiz, the script -- flimsy as it was -- was written by comedic pro Norman Panama, and the filming was done in VistaVision, Paramount's version of CinemaScope, and rich Technicolor that makes it one of the most gorgeous movies of its day. All this scheming paid off in spades, as White Christmas was far and away the top-grossing movie of 1954.

As for the plot...well, don't ask. It's as paltry as the plot of any other musical: Bing and Danny, war buddies under the command of a hideously toupeed Dean Jagger, visit a failing country inn their old CO operates in peacetime. Hoping to help him out, the two decide to put on a show, with the aid of the lovely and talented Mmes. Ellen and Clooney and an all-star assortment of background players, including a scene-stealing Barrie Chase in her first movie role. It's not really any more complicated than that, but with killer songs like "It's Cold Outside", "Heat Wave", "Blue Skies", and the song that its author called "the best song that anybody's ever written", who cares how slender the story is? If you can't be happy with some incredible songs sung by some purely brilliant entertainers, you should watch A Christmas Carol again and figure out which character is you.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A wild ten Lords a-leaping, one of which is the indefatigable Danny Kaye, brought in to replace first Fred Astaire and then Donald O'Connor. Rarely has a third choice been so inspired -- and inspiring. This is a great one to watch while you're not really paying attention, like when you're cooking or eating dinner or opening presents: it allows you to ignore the hokey plot and just let the tremendous music wash over you.

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

Thursday Poll for December 4, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week saw the release of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, a surprisingly sedate epic starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. In conjunction with the film’s release, we polled our readership about Luhrmann’s short but attention-grabbing career thusfar. However, it appears that a great many of you aren’t fans of his work. When asked their favorite Luhrmann film, 46% of our readers chose “Make It Stop Already!” rather than going to bat for one of his movies. As expected, the highest-placing of his films was 2001’s Oscar nominee Moulin Rouge!, which garnered 31% of the vote, followed by Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. In keeping with the overall critical reception so far, Australia received no votes whatsoever.

This week, we look at the recent films of Gus Van Sant. Since his latest Hollywood release, 2000’s Finding Forrester, Van Sant has reinvented himself as an art filmmaker, making five consecutive films that in some way or another explore the subject of death. So, to commemorate the recent release of Milk, we ask you- what is your favorite of Gus Van Sant’s recent films?

What is your favorite of Gus Van Sant's recent films? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. Good luck!

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

SHIA LABEOUF

Like Sarah Palin (but far less scary and secessionist), “The Boof” was plucked from relative obscurity and forced down America’s collective throat despite a staggering lack of qualifications for a job that any number of people could do better. Unlike Palin, whose ascendancy was engineered for cynical political advantage, I have no idea why Hollywood in general (and Steven Spielberg in particular) picked LaBeouf as their Gen-Y A-List representative...but for now I guess we’re stuck with him (and since I already posted a longer rant on the subject back in April, I’ll leave it at that...at least until Stockholm decides he’s ready for his Nobel Peace Prize for, y’know, bein’all peaceful an’ shit).

ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'll grant you that this one is like shooting fish in a barrel – but if you're going to set a barrel of fish in front of me and hand me a gun, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's not as if I'm a lifelong Williams hater. I was there when he debuted as Mork from Ork on a 1978 episode of Happy Days; I even remember taping the show (on audio cassette – this was pre-VCR) and listening to it over and over. (This was perhaps the 374th dorkiest thing I did in 1978. Number 212 was dressing up as Mork for Halloween, although my mother did a fabulous job with the costume.) I had his comedy album, Reality, What a Concept, some of which I even understood. He was a fine Popeye, and although it's been many years since I've seen either The Survivors or Moscow on the Hudson, I remember liking them at the time. So when did it all go awry? Some would point to Dead Poets Society, and certainly the seeds of sentiment and sanctimony were planted there, but I would argue in favor of Awakenings, in which those seeds sprouted into the Sensitive Man Beard. Into the early '90s, Williams could still garner critical acclaim by hacking through the same eight voices he always uses in Aladdin, but after a sickly stretch including Jumanji, Jack, Father's Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man, defenders were harder to come by. (Somewhere in there he won an Oscar by breaking out the SMB again for Good Will Hunting, but I'd like to think a re-vote today would send it to Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights instead.) After a brief but failed flirtation with a "dark phase" (including One Hour Photo and Insomnia), Williams has returned to serving up his patented cocktail of shtick and schmaltz. By 2007's License to Wed, even he seemed to be tired of his own act.

EWAN McGREGOR

McGregor first attracted attention for his work in the films of director Danny Boyle, with whom he was supposed to have some Scottish, post-MTV Scorsese-and-De Niro thing going on. In Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, McGregor had the most prominent and sympathetic of the three main roles, alongside Kerry Fox, who made him her bitch, and Christopher Eccleston, who out-acted him into the next county. They followed that up with the much bigger hit Trainspotting, where Robert Carlyle swabbed the screen with him. The Boyle-McGregor partnership finally came to an acrimonious end when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, thus sparing McGregor the chance to have his clock cleaned by Tilda Swinton. (They also worked together on A Life Less Ordinary, another movie full of actors who might have easily stolen it from Ewan, except who would have wanted it?) On his own, McGregor has provided evidence of an adventurous spirit by agreeing to star in several of the most unpleasantly misconceived big projects of the last dozen years, including Peter Greenaway's pervy art exhibit The Pillow Book, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, and David Mackenzie's lyrical ode to post-coital depression, Young Adam. McGregor also acted and sang in Todd Haynes' glitter rock movie Velvet Goldmine, where his famous and often-exposed physique, while certainly hunky enough as the physiques of pampered, hard-drinking young Scottish actors go, looked a little marshmallowy for someone who was meant to be Iggy Pop; however, we like the suggestion brunted by some admiring reviewers that this made it easier to accept that he was really meant to be Iggy and Lou Reed. His most high-profile role since Trainspotting was, of course, that of the young Ob-wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Better actors than Ewan had trouble making their presence felt in those pictures, so it would be wrong to be too hard on him for that chapter of his career, though it does seem amazing that anyone could picture this guy someday turning into Alec Guinness. One hates to be too hard on McGregor for anything, really: unlike some names on this list, not to mention a whole lot of more talented people, he seems like a nice guy, and he's generally not painful to watch. It's just that, seeing him acting in a movie, you often find yourself staring at him and wondering where the rest of the donut went.

CLINT EASTWOOD

Sergio Leone, the director who made Eastwood a star with the Italian Western A Fistful of Dollars, once told an interviewer that, "When Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses," adding that he cast Clint after experiencing the same epiphany, except in reverse: watching Eastwood in action, "What I saw, simply, was a block of marble." The canny Leone would make some terrific pictures with that block of marble, and once the marble was established as the biggest international movie star in the world, he would go on to make a lot of other, shittier movies with a lot of lesser directors, a roll call that includes himself. During his peak years as a movie star, Eastwood established himself as the king of his thing: monolithic, inexpressive, yet implicitly self-righteous in his need to dish out retributive (and pre-emptive) violence to anyone who had it coming to him, which in most of those movies is anyone who's on-screen who he isn't fucking or who isn't played by an orangutan. Back in those days, the conventional wisdom on Eastwood was that it might be fun to watch him pistol whip people on screen, but that you wouldn't want to admit to being a fan if you were applying for a government job. But whatever you think of his earlier action hits, for the last couple of decades we've been sharing the planet with Clint the Auteur, the increasingly hard-to-listen-to, sinewy old guy with the glare of an Old Testament prophet and the voice of a rattlesnake's death rasp who keeps sliding behind the camera to direct a long string of ever more obvious movies with creaking joints that are invariably hailed as masterpieces by people who must need to get their eyeballs oiled. It's easy to think of other cases where it took the critics a while to catch up with an American original, but sometimes they do get it right the first time. John Huston -- who Clint impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart, something he had as much business attempting as Huston himself would have had playing Shirley Temple -- said in Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough, and there's a little of all three in Eastwood.

NICOLE KIDMAN

Between Dead Calm, the 1989 Australian thriller that was her first film released in the U.S., and her Hollywood debut the next year in Days of Thunder, Kidman's onscreen image seemed to lose ten years and at least that many brain cells. Her '90s screen partnership with her then-husband Tom Cruise, which also resulted in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut, was like some post-modern parody of the public marriage and tie-in movie career of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, itself no great moment in the history of human dignity. By the time it was over, any personality or expressive qualities that Kidman ever had were smothered in "glamour." If she's really a star, then she's a star of a very strange kind, with an odd, limited sort of appeal: she's had her greatest successes playing characters who the audience is meant to want to strangle (as in To Die For and Malice) or in movies where somebody already beat us to it: her best performance, by miles, was in the ghost story The Others, where she was completely convincing as a woman so tightly buttoned up and horribly repressed that she didn't even know she was dead. Since the divorce from Tom Cruise, in which she seemed to win official custody of the media and the industry's solicitous respect, she's picked her roles like a politician with a desire to cover as much ground as possible without offending anyone, and they've been a testament to the awfulness of her taste: jumping at the chance to miscast herself in Oscar-bait literary adaptations like The Hours, The Human Stain, and Cold Mountain while courting the groundlings in terribly misconceived remakes of The Stepford Wives, Invasion (as in "of the Body Snatchers"), and the TV series Bewitched. Having some arch, boring glamourpuss making movies for them seems to give studio heads a kick, at least for a while: in 2006, Kidman was the most highly paid actress in movies, even though a look at the returns on her films made it seem that she couldn't draw crows to a cornfield at sundown.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

In Other Blogs: Defending the New Classics

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, our own Paul Clark took a few well-deserved shots at Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 New Classics. At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny offers up a (weak) defense. “Let's begin with a fundamental fact: lists are bullshit. Lists are such blatant bullshit that any magazine person will admit to you that they're bullshit. Some might need to have had a couple of drinks first, others might be more effectively cajoled by having you complain for the millionth time in the course of a conversation about how your own favorite cultural artifact was left off some list or another, but they'll admit it… ‘Glenn,’ I hear you asking, ‘if lists are such bullshit, why do magazines and websites do them almost all the frickin' time?’ Well, because lists are putatively ‘fun.’ People notice them, argue about them. They take them fairly seriously, pretty much regardless of what their sources are...oddly enough. For a magazine in particular, a list is a potential goldmine of publicity. It gets your product noticed. TV news, radio outlets, they LOVE lists.” As list-lovers ourselves, we can’t argue with this – our weekly top 10 (or 15 or 20) offerings are inevitably our most popular posts, and just as inevitably attract the most “Hey bozos, you forgot Ernest Scared Stupid!” type comments. Heck, that’s why we do ’em! Try as we might, though, we can’t actually find the part where Kenny defends the EW list. Maybe it’s in code.

At Scanners, Jim Emerson offers his own take on the list. “From the last quarter century, EW chose Pulp Fiction as its #1 classic, calling it ‘a time-warping, mind-bending work of movie-mad genius.... Its revolutionary structure (John Travolta dies... then lives!) opened a new universe of mainstream storytelling, but the eternal joy of Pulp Fiction is that it recast the future of movies by living, so thrillingly, in the moment." I can't really argue with that, though it doesn't take into consideration what I see as the movie's flaws (I hate all the chewy, self-consciously pop-aware dialog), its negative influences (we're still suffering the ‘Tarantinian’ fallout from wannabes far less talented than QT), and its overemphasized novelty (the structure wasn't really revolutionary -- it just didn't tell you the order in which its chapters were arranged, so you could be surprised to recounter characters in an unforseen context). But I'm not going to begrudge Pulp Fiction the top slot…No, the bizarre choices on the list for me (in addition to several of the ones cited in the third paragraph above) include Moulin Rouge (#10), Pretty Woman (#37), Gladiator (#43), Rain Man (#45), Dirty Dancing (#65), All About My Mother (#69), Thelma & Louise (#72)... but I detect my own gender bias in the selection. Some of these were hits, some of them won Oscars, some had star-making performances (Julia Roberts, Patrick Swayze, Brad Pitt)... but, even if you liked 'em at the time, do you feel like watching them anymore?”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir warns that the indie film is dying – unless it isn’t. “Even as the potential moviegoing public has become distracted by an explosion of electronic options and devices unimagined a generation ago, the marketplace has been swamped by a poisonous glut of new movies. As Gill explains, in 1993, the Sundance Film Festival received roughly 500 submissions. For 2008, that number had swollen to more than 5,000. The reasons for that are various: The cost of producing a small-budget motion picture has fallen sharply in the digital age, and the success of a handful of indies in the late '90s and early 2000s drew investors large and small to pour countless billions of dollars into filmmaking. It hasn't turned out to be a sensible investment. Gill calculates the odds of losing all your money on an independent film at 99.95 percent. Most of those 5,000 movies, in his words, are ‘pre-ordained flops,’ made by people ‘who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-night party bus to Vegas’… Then there's the fact that while enthusiasm, access to technology and an eagerness to become famous may be widespread, talent and craftsmanship are not. As anybody who's ever served on a film-festival selection committee learns the hard way, most of those movies should never have been made in the first place and definitely should not be inflicted upon the public. There has indeed been an explosion of ultra-low-budget filmmaking -- just try to wade through the self-produced movies available on YouTube -- but so far it has not revealed a nation full of unheralded Orson Welleses in embryo.”

And finally, speaking of “lists are bullshit,” this week’s List-o-Mania entry comes from the MuchMusic blog: it’s allegedly the Top 10 Music Moments in Movies. I know it’s hard to argue with a list containing both Adventures in Babysitting and Napoleon Dynamite, but really – the Wayne’s World "Bohemian Rhapsody" sing-along is the greatest music moment in movie history? Not.

Related:
EW Makes Great Movies List, Screengrab Points, Laughs
EW Makes List of Vile Villains, Isn't as Cool as Screengrab Lists