The Screengrab : nicolas cage

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Yes, it’s that magical time of year once more...as my late lamented Grampa Joe would say, quoting his favorite Brooklyn poet: “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the flowers iz? All the boids is the on the wing...isn’t that absoid? I thought the wing was on the boid!”

All of which is neither here nor there...but the real point is we’re just days away from the start of the Summer Blockbuster Season (which, like the Christmas season, keeps starting earlier and earlier each year, what with the upcoming May 1 release of Wolverine, the May 8 release of Star Trek...heck, even Vin Diesel’s already had a summer blockbuster, and we’re barely into baseball season!

And, since Hollywood now refuses to wait until Memorial Day Weekend to start firing off its big guns, your pals here at the Screengrab have no choice but to launch into the fray with our second annual attempt to prognosticate the Top 5 Biggest Hits & Bombs of 2009!

Now, for those of you playing along at home, the rules are simple: the following “HIT” and “BOMB” predictions aren’t necessarily based on the sheer volume of money we think the following films will amass, but rather how their performance will ultimately be perceived by the Suits in Hollywood and the public at large. So, for example, last year we predicted Prince Caspian would be a hit...but it cost more and took in less than The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, so it was ultimately considered a disappointment. Meanwhile, Sex & The City, which...ahem...some Screengrabbers thought would bomb took in about the same amount of money as Caspian and was ultimately considered a hit because all the wimmenfolk liked it so much (and also because it didn’t cost a zillion dollars to produce, despite all the CGI required to bring the eerie Kim Cattrall character to life).

And so, without further ado...our picks for THE TOP FIVE HITS OF SUMMER 2009!

5. UP (May 29)

Paul:
There were several strong possibilities for the #5 spot, but in the end I kept coming back to Pixar, who has managed to balance high-quality output with great box office better than just about anyone else in Hollywood. Consider that all but one of their summer releases has finished among that summer’s top five, and that the one that didn’t -- 2007’s Ratatouille, probably the least kid-friendly Pixar production to date -- landed at #6. So yeah, they’re a pretty good bet, and this family-oriented film should continue their hot streak. The opening weekend for Up could be tight, considering that it’s competing with the second weekend of Night at the Museum 2, but it ought to prevail in the long run given the thin June slate and the expected strong reviews.

Andrew:
This one didn’t make my list because it's got a meh title, I can’t figure out what the movie’s supposed to be about, and I don’t sense a lot of Up excitement in the ether...but then again, I thought Wall-E would tank, too, so what the hell do I know?

Scott:
The pundits are fretting that the new Pixar movie will turn off the kiddies because it’s about an old person. (shudder) How are they going to sell Old Guy action figures? Well, I seem to recall these same pundits wringing their hands over the nearly-silent first half of Wall-E, too, so I’m sticking with the assumption that Pixar knows what they’re doing.

4. ANGELS & DEMONS (May 15)

Paul:
Here’s where things get a little more iffy. A big-budget, star-studded adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller would seem to be a can’t-lose proposition, especially given the blockbuster grosses of The Da Vinci Code in 2006. Yet so far, the buzz on this one has been surprisingly muted, perhaps because it’s hard to imagine too many people getting worked up over a follow-up to its ponderous predecessor. Nonetheless, expect advertising for this to ramp up over the next month, leading to a big opening weekend followed by strong grosses over Memorial Day, as people line up for this almost out of obligation.

Andrew:
Considering people keep going to see those fake Nicolas Cage Da Vinci Code knock-offs, I expect there’s gonna be an audience for the genuine article. Plus, I’m told everyone and their mother (especially their mother) digs Tom Hanks, and devout filmgoers and atheists alike can all get behind a conspiracy thriller about all the creepy, weird stuff going on behind closed doors at the Vatican, right?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Werner Herzog Remembers the Good Old Days in Peru, the Bad New Days in New Orleans

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Fitzcarraldo, the 1982 epic that Werner Herzog shot in the jungles of Peru, using a team of locals to pull a 320-ton steamboat up a mountain, may have been the most troubled production of the director's long and adventurous career, though the competition for that title is fierce. (Herzog had shot an estimated forty percent of the film when his star, Jason Robards, was sidelined by amoebic dysentery, after which his co-star, Mick Jagger, had to abandon the project to fulfill a commitment to tour with his day job, the Rolling Stones. Herzog wrote Jagger's role out of the script and replaced Robards with Klaus Kinski, the only known instance in movie history of someone bringing Klaus Kinksi in to stabilize a situation.) It's probably the most well-documented production in Herzog's career, though. The director Les Blank recorded it all in his won 1982 feature documentary Burden of Dreams, and now it's reported that, in June, Ecco Press is bringing out Herzog's journals written during the production, under the title Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. For those of you who can't wait, The Paris Review has a selection in their Spring 2009 issue. ("These texts are not reports on the filming --of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate--I am not sure." Coming from anyone else but Werner, this sort of thing would count as discouraging.) The excerpt isn't available online, but hey, it's a good magazine, so throw them twelve bucks if you're so inclined.

Herzog also just checked in with John Patterson, giving him a quick rundown of the current busy state of his movie career at his Laurel Canyon home, because he still considers himself to be a filmmaker and all this "man of letters" business is making him nervous. Herzog, who credits his global viewpoint to the fact that he "had seen much of the world before I was 20, and I had experienced it in a very fundamental way - being on foot, in Africa, in danger," actually had to take his age into account--he's now 66--when deciding not to imperil his life by shooting some icy underwater footage himself on his Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. However, he braved New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, and the wrath of Abel Ferrara on the movie he recently finished, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Werner insists that, previous reports to the contrary, this is not a remake or a reboot of or a sequel to Ferrara's 1992 scuzzball classic, which came complete with rape on a church altar, visions of Jesus, and full-frontal Keitel. It seems that producer Ed Pressman owns the rights to the title and just wanted to use it on a new project. "I was assured," says Herzog, "that this was not related to another film of a similar name. I told them, 'If you swear on the heads of your children.' I also had hints from Nicolas Cage that he wouldn't sign unless he knew I was directing, which is a good way to start a film." Herzog was keen to shoot in New Orleans "because, after Katrina, you were in a situation where civil life came to a breakdown. Not merely because the hurricane caused a lot of material destruction, but it also created a collapse of civility - looting and, by the way, the police were heavily involved in that, too." And the producers were hot to shoot there too, because of "the tax incentives."

Herzog is "also in the process of wrapping up another film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, produced by David Lynch and loosely based on a gruesome matricide in San Diego in the 1980s, starring Michael Shannon...This being a Herzog movie, the suburban footage is interspersed with scenes - visions, perhaps - captured in Central Asia and Peru. He calls it 'sort of a horror movie'." This all amounts to the most time Herzog has spent working with actors and scripts for quite some time, now; most of his filmography for the last several years has been devoted to nonfiction filmmaking. (The biggest and most recent exception, 1996's Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale, was based on the same story that Herzog had already used a decade earlier for his documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.) Not that he sees much difference, of course; this is a guy who, in 1991's Lessons of Darkness, presented footage of the smoking, apocalyptic aftermath of the Gulf War as a science fiction film, and who later, in 2005's The Wild Blue Yonder, intercut NASA footage with film of the actor Brad Dourif improvising a monologue recounting his life as an extraterrestrial immgirant. "The distinction between fiction and documentary," says Herzog, "is the last thing I would spend a sleepless night over."

Related stories: Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea

Strangers in a Strange Land: Special All-Herzog Edition

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

NICOLAS CAGE AS H.I. MCDUNNOUGH IN RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

The Coen brothers have turned out some truly amazing fools over time (Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Are Thou? is a standout), but their first full-fisted idiot, H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona, was their best. As the above chase sequence shows, H.I. lives in a world of blasé, gun-happy morons who easily compartmentalize the absurdity of their lives. It's cartoonish in the best way, like a live-action Merrie Melody that features lots and lots of guns and ammo and bizarre double-crossing and for some reason all the men resemble Elmer Fudd. One of the nicest touches is that the baby Nathan Jr. generally has a pacifying effect on the idiotic adults around him: H.I.'s prison buddies Gale and Evelle Snoats, the nightmarish Leonard Smalls, and even Nathan Arizona, Sr., who shows no propensity towards compassion until his baby boy comes back to him. It's ultimately a sweet movie about fools who can make a better world for themselves. Because if there's one thing that is true in every movie directed by the Coen brothers, it's that everyone in the world fools themselves and plays the idiot, and somehow, by the grace of luck and sheer numbers, the human race keeps creeping forward for better or for worse. We're all the punchlines in an elaborate joke, so we have to find some way of enjoying it. That's a very particular type of existential gallows humor, but it's my favorite type. (HC)

PETER O'TOOLE AS ALAN SWAN IN MY FAVORITE YEAR (1982)

Flipping out and in the throes of an attack of stage fright, Alan Swan declares, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" Both terms seem inadequate for whatever the hell he really is. Broken down, bankrupt, and alcoholic, Swan is both a coward who plays heroes and a universal object of adoration who despises himself; he works as hard as he does to live up to people's romantic image of him because he's always disappointed in himself, and he'd hate to have other people feel as bad about how pathetic he is as he does himself. The paradox is that the effort to conceal what a wreck he is really does make him a romantic hero. To see this performance when you're young is to be filled with the desire to be middle-aged and dissolute as quickly as possible, so that you can be worth a damn. (PN)

ANTONIO FARGAS AS THE ARAB IN PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)

Robert Downey, Sr.'s feature-length put-on about a subversively "honest" advertising agency is all over the place, but it has one strong center of focus in Fargas, playing a character so far-out that nobody had the guts to name him: ranting at top speed and top volume in a burnoose, he's just called "the Arab." Everybody in the movie is out for himself, but Fargas is the one who manages to make this seem not just hip but enlightened. Brandishing his cane and alternating haranguing people and reaching out to them by telling them how impressed he is that they have the sense to see things his way, he's funny, threatening, insane, philosophical, and irresistible, all at the same time. If you've ever wondered just what the hell it is that Flavor Flav thinks he's doing, here's what it looks like when somebody actually pulls it off. (PN)

PETER SELLERS AS HRUNDI V. BAKSHI IN THE PARTY (1968)

Of all the subtly anti-establishment movies to come out of Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s, The Party may be one of the best. Why wouldn't you want to watch film extra Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers — in brown-face no less *ahem*) methodically fuck up the glitzy party of a Bizniz hot shot. (With nothing but the best of intentions, of course.) Hrundi ensures that the party becomes infinitely better than it ever would have uninterrupted. By the end of it all, the face-lifted fat-deprived Hollywood wives are dancing with abandon amidst soap suds gone amok while the maid who demurely opened the door in the first scene gets down to the band. Let the revolution begin. (SCS)

ZERO MOSTEL AS MAX BIALYSTOCK IN THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Generally speaking, the best comic performances have at least some element of subtlety to them. When all you have is shouting and playing to the balcony, like as not, you come off as obnoxious instead of funny. Zero Mostel’s gargantuan overacting as failing show producer Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ debut feature puts that generality to its most severe test. From the first moment we see him, putting on outrageous airs to seduce the rich widows who finance his rapidly decaying lifestyle, he’s so far over the top that he’s coming back at it from beneath. When he hatches a scheme to make millions by luring investors to a play (Springtime for Hitler) that he knows will be a flop, he essentially terrorizes nervous accountant Leo Bloom (played by a fragile Gene Wilder) into going along with it – and when Leo isn’t being intimidated by Max’s bellicose bellowing, he’s being seduced by his insanely unrealistic lust for life. Mostel and Brooks apparently didn’t get along well during filming (possibly because they shared a similarly vulgar and explosive sense of showmanship, and there wasn’t room enough on the set for two such rampaging egos), but Brooks didn’t dare fire him – he knew he’d caught pure comedic lightning when he saw what Mostel was capable of. Brooks’ script has such great one-liners that almost anyone could make them funny, but Mostel’s Hindenburg-going-down style lent genius even to shouted throwaway lines like “I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” (LP)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The fact that Roger Ebert gave the latest Nicolas Cage vehicle Knowing a four-star review is not all that surprising. It’s not like he’s ever held his top rating in reserve for the Chinatowns and Godfathers of cinema; recent four-star reviews include Watchmen, Lakewood Terrace and Oliver Stone’s W. In addition, Ebert has always been a big fan of a previous effort from Knowing director Alex Proyas, Dark City. What’s a little more surprising and unusual is Ebert’s follow-up, published two days after his initial review, in which he expresses astonishment at the overwhelmingly negative critical reception the movie has received.

“Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.” That’s the first sentence of Ebert’s review. Those of us who have not been overly impressed by Nicolas Cage’s career choices of the past decade or so already have reason to be skeptical. “With expert and confident storytelling, Proyas strings together events that keep tension at a high pitch all through the film,” Ebert continues. “Even a few quiet, human moments have something coiling beneath. Pluck this movie, and it vibrates. Even something we've seen countless times, like a car pursuit, works here because of the meaning of the pursuit, and the high stakes.”

It didn’t take long for Ebert to discover that his enthusiasm was not universally shared amongst his critical brethren. “Either I'm wrong or most of the movie critics in America are mistaken,” Ebert writes in his follow-up article. “This is astonishing. Let's suppose I was completely wrong. Even if I was how bad could the possibly movie be? Half as good as the slasher film Shuttle? A third as good as Last House on the Left?” Ebert does understand how many of us feel about Cage these days. “Some readers said they avoid his movies on principle. Many found him guilty of over-acting. A critic was quoted who referred to his ‘fright wig,’ which is just mean-spirited snark.”

Ebert also says critics had problems with the Biblical parallels in this end-of-the-world thriller. I have to confess I haven’t found the time in my schedule to squeeze in a viewing of Knowing myself, but let’s see what a few of our leading luminaries had to say. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly calls the movie “so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times notes: “If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it’s probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles.” Says Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, “It's a Nicolas Cage movie, so, admit it, you're expecting crazy. You have no idea.”

Ebert isn’t completely alone, though. Todd McCarthy of Variety calls Knowing a “not-bad supernatural-tinged sci-fier that has more on its mind than the run-of-the-mill effects-driven extravaganza.” What say you, Screengrab readers? The movie topped the box office this weekend, so surely somebody has seen it. Let us know what you thought in the comments.

Related:
Roger Ebert Gives Himself Thumbs Down
Abel Ferrera Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Precursors: Next (2007)

Nick Schager — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Nicolas Cage learns that a piece of paper buried for years in a time capsule holds clues to impending catastrophes in this Friday’s Knowing, but it’s not the first time the Academy Award-winning thespian has had insight into forthcoming events. Just two years ago, Cage headlined Next, a loopy sci-fi saga in which his Cris can see two minutes into the future, a superpower that the government (here in the form of an out-of-place Julianne Moore) seeks to utilize in their efforts to locate a nuclear device hidden somewhere in downtown L.A. It didn’t take great prescience to see that this Lee Tamahori-helmed saga wouldn’t resuscitate Cage’s reputation as an overacting ham, as one look at his Da Vinci Code-long hair in the trailer made clear the film’s general lack of quality control. Yet anyone interested in an unpretentious B-movie could do far worse than this genre flick, despite the fact that the CG effects are so subpar they suggest that Paramount tightened the purse strings after watching dailies of Cage and love interest Jessica Biel attempt to generate (non-existent) romantic chemistry. Tamahori is reasonably adept at orchestrating action and his set pieces, especially one of Cris evading giant logs as he races down a hillside, are equal parts cheesy and thrilling. Cage, meanwhile, is his typically mannered, overwrought self whether in tense or quiet moments, which is another way of saying he’s consistently awesome-bad.

Screengrab Presents The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:30:00 GMT

The Best:

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Forget best comic book movies...Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Dan Clowes’ cool blue-black graphic novel (distilled from the bizarre alt-comic Eightball) is one of the best movies of ANY genre to emerge in the past decade. While most of the films on this list are super-powered adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, Ghost World is a dead-on portrayal of life as it really is for many American teens (as well as the aging misfits some of them...okay, some of us...grow into). Recent high school grads Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, peaking early in her best role ever) slouch through a dystopic Los Angeles, floating on attitude to keep from drowning in a world of suck...add cranky Steve Buscemi as a hapless, lonely object of affection and you've got a near-perfect black comedy about alienation and the slow death of individualism in America, from the blissful escapism of Enid's private "Jaan Pehechan Ho" Bollywood dance party curtain raiser to her bitter, existential fade-out on a literal road to nowhere.

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

By the time the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies came around, no one was seriously questioning the idea that a movie based on a comic book could actually be good. But nobody suspected how good until they’d managed to live through The Dark Knight. Nolan and his brother Jonathan tried to cram a huge amount of story into the movie’s heavy running time, but while it didn’t always work out – the Two-Face plot sagged a bit at the end, and there were moments that would have been better placed in a lesser movie – it justified its length and left you wishing there was even more. A great deal of attention is heaped on Heath Ledger’s terrifying, hypnotic (and Oscar-winning) performance as the Joker, and rightly so; but there’s so much more to the movie than that. The Nolans are always willing to sidestep the traditional conflicts of superhero stories and introduce powerful shades of moral ambiguity, which comes across in spades in The Dark Knight; and while Batman himself is left alone and lost at the edge of right and wrong, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon provides the movie’s true moral center. And, given the numerous ways it manages to transcend simplistic blockbuster-movie tropes, it’s also an amazing-looking movie, with brutal fights, set pieces, and that rarest of things, an exciting and interesting chase scene, all of which helped make it one of the most successful motion pictures in the history of the world.

The Worst:

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I understand why Nic Cage took the lead role in Ghost Rider. It’s because Nic Cage is a hack who will pretty much do anything for money, as evidenced by, oh, let’s say Bangkok Dangerous or any other movie he’s made in the last half-decade. He’s also a major comic book geek (his son’s name is Kal-El, for Christ’s sake), and he probably sized up the script, counted the number of zeroes after the initial digit, realized he’d be performing most of the movie under layers of CGI anyway, and went shopping for a new boat. What’s less easy to understand is why anyone bothered to make Ghost Rider in the first place. The character was always pretty absurd, even by the bong-rattled standards of the 1970s Marvel Bullpen that produced him: a motorcycle stunt rider who gets possessed by the Devil and fights crime for some reason. He was never really that popular, even by the standards of juveniles who find that description totally bad-ass, and was mostly remembered until this movie came out as the only character based on a tattoo to star in his own title. Still, in the right hands, a decent movie could have been made of Ghost Rider, but the right hands are not those of the disgraceful Mark Steven Johnson. The biggest mystery of all is why anyone in Hollywood would give this guy a job doing anything after he made the horrible Daredevil and wrote the even more horrible Elektra, and yet, here he is again, screwing up another comic book character. The sole consolation of Ghost Rider is that nobody appears to have seen it, so maybe my bad memories of it are just a nightmare.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

This big-budget belly flop marked a true historic moment in the twinned histories of both movies and comics; never before had a major studio release been widely criticized for having dumbed-down a comic book. The illustrator Kevin O'Neill gave a deliciously perverse period look to Alan Moore's parodic adventure serial about a Victorian era Super Friends team comprised of Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula's old flame, Mina Harker. The director, Stephen Norrington, began work on the project by casting Sean Connery as Quartermain, apparently a sadistic act designed to get fans' hopes up by giving a false impression that he knew what he was doing. Elsewhere, Norrington and his screenwriter, James Dale Robinson (a comics scribe best known for his work on DC's Starman and the miniseries The Golden Age), coarsened and blunted the comic's sly edge, altering its characters for the worse (such as in the wrong call of making Mina Harker explicitly vampiric, even though the starchy proto-feminist of the comic was much more intimidating than any mere bloodsucker) and added new personnel, including a twentyish Tom Sawyer, presumably intended as a sop to the American market, and Dorian Gray, apparently included so that Norrington could hire, and then not fire, Stuart Townsend, just to show that he was stupider than Peter Jackson. The movie provided news for gossip columnists throughout its production, thanks to the battles between Connery and the director. When it was finally over, Connery announced that the experience had inspired him to retire from acting, and it didn't do anybody else's career any favors either.

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT (1974)

Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, an adults-only feature animation based on a Robert Crumb character, helped attract Crumb's work a lot of attention, and the cartoonist has been bitching about it ever since; he can be seen early in the documentary Crumb complaining about how Bakshi browbeat him into giving him the rights and then debased his work. Bakshi's film wasn't very good, but the sequel, which he had nothing to do with, makes Bakshi's work look like the second coming of Winsor McKay. Most of the film, which includes Fritz's encounters with Hitler and various stereotypical mid-'70s "street" characters, settles for being ugly-looking and obnoxious, but it goes for broke in the last section, a mess of racist and anti-Semitic cariactures in which President Henry Kissinger sends Fritz on a mission to New Jersey, which has fallen under black rule and changed its name to "New Africa." If the actual Crumb's work was twice as offensive as his most hard-assed detractors claim that it is, and not funny or aesthetically pleasing at all, it would still be better than this.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Trailer Review: G-Force

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

As a longtime guinea pig owner and enthusiast, I strenuously object to this trailer. Now, don’t get me wrong- I’m happy to finally see them taking the lead in a movie. But oh please, not this one. Guinea pigs are cute and fun on their own, and don’t need sassy voices from the likes of Nicolas Cage and Tracy Jordan Morgan to lend them any extra personality. What’s more, the trailer sells this is a dumbass kiddie take on a mindless Hollywood spy yarn. In other words, producer Jerry Bruckheimer has somehow managed to go slumming here, no mean feat considering that this is the dude who was responsible for King Arthur and Bad Company. Oh, and what’s up with that last exchange? Couldn’t they at least think of some retort from the insulted animal?

A Better Travis Bickle for a Better New Year, and Other Great "Resolutions" Movies

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Today is Twelfth Day, the traditional end to the Christmas season for those of us who need a few days for the hangover to die down before we can start thinking about taking down the lights and chucking the tree out the window. So it's not too late to start thinking about taping some New Year's resolutions to the door of the fridge. Not everyone agrees about how much point there is to making New Year's resolutions; the idea behind them is to make some changes that will make your life better, and the world does not lack for evidence that people don't change. But here at the Screengrab, we think about these thing the same way we think about everything else: as filtered through movies, which is why we don't work for a golfing blog. And in the movies, there is no shortage of evidence that people can change resolve to change their lives. For the better? Eh, sometimes it depends on whether you're living the life or just sitting in the dark, watching it.

THE MOVIE: Taxi Driver (1976)

THE RESOLVER: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)

THE RESOLUTION: In his own words: "I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight." He also decides to try a new hairstyle.

THE RESULTS: Having turned himself into an urban guerrilla soldier in order to assassinate a presidential candidate, Travis, with a little help from the Secret Service, decides to redirect his energies towards persuading a child prostitute to return to her family in the Midwest after re-decorating the walls of a hotel room and corridor with her pimp's brains. After a period of rest and recovery in the hospital, he returns to work, where he finds that the girl who dumped him on their first date after a disagreement over his taste in movies is sufficiently impressed by the change in him to show up, hanging around his cab with a faraway look in her eyes. Clearly a success, made all the more gratifying by the fact that his hair grew out while he was in a coma and the girl never saw him in his ill-considered new look.

THE MOVIE: The Shining (1980)

THE RESOLVER: Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson)

THE RESOLUTION: To use the time and isolation provided by his new winter job to really sit down and focus on getting some serious writing done. Also, if the masterpiece gets finished early, maybe spend some time examining his relationship with his wife and son.

THE RESULTS: Torrence's breakthrough experimental novel, consisting of 38,000 typographical variations on the same ten-word sentence, didn't make Oprah's Book Club, but both Harold Bloom and David Eggers think it was underrated at the time of its original publication. (Back then, many critics questioned whether it would have been published at all if not for the surrounding news stories about Torrence's untimely death and the events surrounding the break-up of his marriage. Certainly the fact that his agent was able to arrange a six-figure movie deal came as a big surprise.) On the face of it, weighing the good against the no so good, this would appear to be a moderate success. However, thinking long term, it should be noted that the ending of The Shining seems to hint that Jack has been this way before, which in turn may indicate that he'll be back. And when he does, with all the life experience he'll be packing, the next book is sure to be dynamite!

THE MOVIE: Torremolinos 73 (2003)

THE RESOLVER: Alfredo López (Javier Cámara)

THE RESOLUTION: To make a better life for himself and his wife, Carmen (Candela Peña), by becoming a pornographic filmmaker.

This Spanish comedy, which is, or should be, dear to the hearts of all good Nerve readers, is a weirdly charming tribute to the homier side of the sexual revolution and the porno chic era. Alfredo and Carmen aren't the hardened pros of Boogie Nights but budding entrepreneurs trying to ride their mom and pop operation into a higher level of the middle class, and they have amusingly mixed feelings about the discovery that Carmen has become an international porn star. Alfredo, who can't compete with his wife for the camera's attention, tries to compensate by letting his artistic pretensions develop, and the two manage to go out in glory with the bigger-budgeted art-porn flick of the title, which also makes it possible for Carmen to conceive a child with one of her studly co-stars, a develop that delights both Carmen and her loving but infertile husband. By going all the way with his resolution, the lucky Alfredo is able to express himself artistically, enrich himself and his family financially, and strengthen his marriage. Somewhere, Jack Torrence is seething.

THE MOVIE: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

THE RESOLVER: Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)

THE RESOLUTION: To end a long-standing and thoroughly enjoyed addiction to drugs, following an unfortunate incident involving a weekend in the woods spent burying a turquoise-faced Heather Graham.

THE RESULTS: Bob trades in a free-wheeling, exciting life as the unquestioned head of a "family" of doper-grifters and a marriage to one of the hottest women in the history of movies (Kelly Lynch) for a sorry, colorless nine-to-five existence and the random wild evening spent being lectured by William S. Burroughs. On the plus side, he is, at twenty-six, a healthy young man, freshly clean and sober, with his whole blooming life laid out ahead of him. On the down side, Max Perlich blows his brains out.

THE MOVIE: Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

THE RESOLVER: Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage)

THE RESOLUTION: To enjoy the exorbitant severance check that he has won as a result of his alcoholism by relocating to a city where the bars never close and drink himself to death

THE RESULTS: A spectacular success. Not only does Ben succeed in drinking himself to death, becoming so liquefied and benumbed that he is able to enjoy having broken glass embedded in every square inch of his naked back, but his glitteringly flamboyant self-destructiveness wins the heart of a fair hooker (Elisabeth Shue), one of those hard-edged but vulnerable blondes made all the more painfully alluring by the emotional and physical wear and tear of her unhappy experience. What's more, in his final scene, in a trope that would test H. P. Lovecraft's ability to suspend his disbelief, he was able to present her with a functioning erection, despite the fact that he was so drunk that his penis was the last remaining part of him that could still stand up. Though it will win us no awards from MADD for saying it, it must be admitted that Leaving Las Vegas makes a much stronger case for getting plowed than Drugstore Cowboy makes for cleaning up your act.

THE MOVIE: Lost in America (1985)

THE RESOLVER: David Howard (Albert Brooks)

THE RESOLUTION: To drop out of society, cash in their savings and the proceeds from the sale of their house to supply them with a $145,000 "nest egg", take to the road (with his wife, Linda, played by Julie Hagerty), and, in his own words: "Touch Indians, see the mountains and the prairies and all the rest of that song."

THE RESULTS: David starts out with a full head of steam but plows into a wall when he and the Missus stop in Vegas with plans to renew their marriage vows. Waking up to discover that Linda has hit the blackjack table and eaten into "the core of the nest egg"--and failing to persuade the casino boss (Garry Marshall) to give them back their money as a goodwill P.R. gesture--David flips out and becomes impossible to live with before settling down to try to start a new life in a trailer home, with Linda taking a job at a burger joint and David working as a crossing guard. After a day of this, he and Linda reconsider their devotion to their new identities as social dropouts and conclude that it would be better for David to return to the bosses he insulted and walked out on "and eat shit." On the most obvious level, it might seem that this resolution ended with a case of clear-cut, absolute failure. On the other hand, the simple fact of it is that most people are what they, deep down, prefer to be, and however much they might wish they were someone else, they don't change. Keeping that in mind, Lost in America can be seen as the story of someone who, in the course of about two weeks, gave it his best shot, found out that he wasn't cut out to be Walt Whitman--which means that he won't spend the rest of his life torturing himself with thoughts about the road not taken--and was able to return to his true path with a minimum of hurt and damage: no harm, no foul. Except that you have to wonder how David would feel right about now, given that he'd be about sixty, and would have spent the last several months watching his retirement fund turn to ash. If Brooks were up for a sequel, it might be scarier than whatever George Romero still has in him.

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:00:00 GMT

PETER O’TOOLE (1932 - )

The standard line on Peter O’Toole is that he’s the greatest actor to never win an Academy Award. He should have won it for Lawrence of Arabia, of course: selected by David Lean based on his stage work (like most great British leading men, who come from a culture where theatre is not synonymous with frothy mass-market musicals, O’Toole carried on a very successful stage career contemporaneous to his film acting), he became an instant superstar. Perhaps the Academy simply assumed, around the time he appeared in My Favorite Year, that if drinking hadn’t killed him by age forty, he’d be around forever and they could award him at their leisure. Though raised in Leeds and soaked in London theatrical tradition, O’Toole is the most Irish of actors: not only for his name and his reputation as a hard drinker, but also for his whimsy, his sly charm, his often self-deprecating humor, his reputation as a raconteur without peer (his autobiographical series Loitering with Intent are some of the most enjoyable books ever penned by a movie star, and show that he shares more in common with Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan than nationality), and, when a role calls for it, fiery intensity. His roles have run the gamut from savage countercultural tour de forces (The Ruling Class) to respectable grand-old-man performances (The Last Emperor), and he’s got a third installment of his autobiography coming out, as well as a performance alongside John Malkovich in a big-screen adaptation of “The Song of Roland”. Hurry up, AMPAS; no one lives forever.

NICK NOLTE (1941 - )

In recent years, Nolte's off-screen reputation as the drunken old caveman from Mars has gone a long way in blotting out his on-screen legacy, which is a great pity -- for us, since he continues to give a very convincing simulation of a man who really doesn't give a shit, except about the quality of his work. He spent most of the first thirty years of his life dicking around accumulating "experience" before he began turning up in bit parts in movies and guest shots on TV series -- he was in many a Quinn Martin production -- before making his movie debut alongside a giggly penis named Don Johnson in the drive-in sequel Return to Macon County (1975). It was a return to TV, in the form of his role in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man that got the studios to thinking that there might be money in them thar pecs. In Nolte's first big-budget movie, The Deep (in which he got to go scuba-diving while modeling the latest in '70s porn star 'staches), he looked wooden with embarrassment, a good sign that his package included a healthy brain. Luckily, he was able to quiet talk that he was an overhyped dullard with fiery performances in North Dallas Forty and Who'll Stop the Rain?, an adaptaton of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers that gave him the chance to play a character based on Neal Cassidy. (A couple of years later, he played Cassady for real in the misbegotten Heart Beat.) Through the 1980s and into the '90s, in such movies as 48 Hrs., Under Fire, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Weeds, Q & A, Lorenzo's Oil, The Prince of Tides, and "Life Lessons", the Martin Scorsese-Richard Price segment of the anthology feature New York Stories, Nolte's hulking yet graceful physique and his ability to invest it with emotional power and suggestions of experience made him a highly welcome presence in a movie culture dominated by dimpled young'uns fresh from the Nautilus room. He was still doing a lot of bad movies for the money, though, and after the 1996 Mulholland Falls, he snapped, announcing to the press that he was taking his star off the door and was now a character actor, pitching his services to the indie film scene and anyone else who had an interesting script that was in no danger of being rewritten on a whim by the studio CEO's niece. A lot of highly paid talent have had days where they wanted to make a similar announcement, but Nolte actually kept to it: he starred in Keith Allen's version of Vonnegut's Mother Night, co-starred with Julie Christie as aging sex bombs in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow, signed on to play Lt. Col. Tree in the strongest section of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, ran the gauntlet for Paul Schrader in Affliction, played Adam Verver in the Merchant-Ivory production of Henry James' The Golden Bowl, made his best case that an American could still look cool to the French even in the age of Bush in Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, and cast a worried, sage eye at Maggie Cheung in Olivier Assayas's Clean. In between, he did a lot of well-intentioned weird shit, ranging from trying on ladies' underwear in Rudolph's misguided Vonnegut blowout Breakfast of Champions to Ang Lee's Hulk, where he did at least manage to prove that he could look weirder and act scarier before his character went CGI. More recently, he parodied his own gruff-psycho image in Tropic Thunder. It may not make for a smooth-looking resume, but no one can accuse him of going gentle into that good night.

CLARK GABLE (1901-1960)

Perhaps more than anyone on this list, Clark Gable deserves to be considered one of the greatest leading men of all time not because he was a great actor, but because he was a great movie star. He practically taught the world what the phrase "movie star" meant during his tenure as the “King of Hollywood” in the Golden Age of motion pictures: the hyper-inflated salaries, the relentless womanizing, the backstage battles over contracts and perks, the feuds with directors and producers, the endless high living. Gable embodied it all, from the time he made the transition into talking pictures to the time he died, going out alongside Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits. So much of his career was good timing: he had become (largely by virtue of his girl-grabbing good looks; the papers called him “young, vigorous and brutally masculine”) the biggest star in the business in time to do a lot of things that no one had ever done before. He broke taboos left and right, and every one of them made him a bigger and bigger star: appearing shirtless, going without shaving, slapping a woman in the face, uttering the word “damn”. So what if he couldn’t bring himself to cry when he played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind? Let all the guys who were better actors collect their accolades: the roguish, cruelly handsome Gable went about his business of being the biggest movie star of all time.

JOHN BARRYMORE (1882-1942)

In its early years, Hollywood studios would sometimes make a big deal about having signed famous stage actors to appear in movies, but few of the actors who had legendary theatrical careers made a very strong, lasting mark in movies. Being able to act on a stage wasn't necessarily a detriment to someone hoping to be a movie star, but the two forms rewarded different qualities to a different degree, and movie and theatrical history is full of names, from Barrymore's sister Ethel to Helen Hayes and Tallulah Bankhead, who tended to lose something in the transition. With the possible exception of Marlon Brando, whose stage performances were said to have had an in-the-moment naturalistic intensity that marked him as made for the movies, and who, once he made it in Hollywood never looked back, John Barrymore probably did a more thorough job than any other big American Broadway star of making the same kind of splash in the movies. The fact that he was such a supernaturally handsome son of a bitch helped, especially in movies like Grand Hotel (co-starring his brother Lionel), where he coasted on romantic glamour. But his most enduring movie roles were in comedies such as Twentieth Century, True Confession, and Midnight, where the verbally intricate demands of high-energy screwball comedy made it possible for him to tap into his full theatrical style, which might have proved deadly if he'd tried doing it on camera in a drama. He also played the washed-up actor Larry Renault in Dinner at Eight (1933), a role that gave him the chance to mock his off-screen reputation yet also milk it for pathos, and in one grand moment, to do both at once: having worn out his last string, Renaut opts for suicide by turning on the gas and then lying back to wait for death, after having carefully arranged that his famous profile will be discovered to its best advantage.

NICOLAS CAGE (1964 - )

Here's the thing about Nicolas Cage: he has humor, imagination, daring, passion, and is clearly not in it to be bored. Because of these things, and because, like many actors who enjoy their jobs, he works a lot, he often appears in material that he can't salvage, and because the spectacle of someone who's not inclined to phone it in even when trying to keep a movie like Ghost Rider or The Wicker Man remake on life support can provide plenty of material for a laugh riot of a YouTube montage, Cage's reputation has dropped like the stock market in the last several years. This same thing happened to Brando and John Barrymore in their day, and it might yet happen to Johnny Depp if by some unlikely misfortune he ever gets ugly enough. But from the pure sweetness of his first unlikely heartthrob roles (Valley Girl, Birdy) to the way he twisted himself into pretzel knots in such surreal-slapstick turns as his dashing hillbilly goofball Hi in Raising Arizona and his corporate high rise bloodsucker wannabe in Vampire's Kiss to his poleaxed romantic lead in Moonstruck, he earned his place at the head of the line. As a member of the Coppola family, he has evidence for his theory that there's a point to being perceived as bankable in Hollywood, and while he's been making embarrassing box office hits since at least Con Air, he's also poured everything he had into difficult roles in major pictures (such as his hell-bent-on-dissolution hero in Leaving Las Vegas) that would be difficult for any other actor to bring off. It's been awhile since he did anything as great as that, but he reaffirms his stature as an honest, hard-working man every time he takes a break from going "Whoa!" in response to fireball explosions long enough to do something as unembarrassing as The Weather Man or Adaptation. And even though his list of projects in the pipeline include not just the hinky-sounding Bad Lieutenant follow-up but Ghost Rider 2, we're not ready to count him out yet.

JEFF BRIDGES (1949 - )

Son of Lloyd and brother of Beau, Jeff Bridges made his movie debut in 1970 and got his first Academy Award nomination a year later for playing cute but not so astute in The Last Picture Show. Although he never threatened to become a culture hero or knock De Niro or Pacino or Redford or Nicholson off the newsmagazine covers in the '70s, he spent his first decade starring in a string of pictures -- Fat City, The Last American Hero, Hearts of the West, Winter Kills, and even the 1976 King Kong remake -- that established him as a solid performer who could be counted on to work hard and seriously at his art while bestowing his own immense likability on any movie halfway deserving of it. Those qualities have kept him in steady demand, even as his lust to keep working and his taste for novelty have sometimes dropped him into flops like TRON (the one that proved that computer games were not going to put the movies out of business) and Somebody Killed Her Husband (the one that proved that Farrah Fawcett was not going to be putting actual movie actresses out of business). But he's kept getting better and plunging deeper for his emotional effects as he's grown older. At his best, he can lift a movie like The Fisher King to near-greatness, or a movie like American Heart (where, as an ex-con, his affability had to fight its way through the hard shell of someone who still felt like a caged animal) above mediocrity, or even give the audience a rooting stake in something as trumped-up as The Door in the Floor. In the final analysis, he probably remains more of a consummate actor than a star, but he's such a consummate actor that when a role absolutely demands to be played by a star -- whether it's the tortured romanticism of his small-time piano player in The Fabulous Baker Boys or The Big Lebowski's stoned Zen master hero or even the baldly villainous flash of his role in Iron Man -- coming across as a star turns out to be comfortably within his range.

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

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Nicolas Cage's Dark Knight

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Your weekend box office champ was Lakeview Terrace, with Samuel L. Jackson scaring up $15.6 million. Yes, Neil LaBute fans, this is the director’s biggest haul ever – beating out even The Wicker Man! Other than that, business was slow at the ticket counters, with Burn After Reading dropping to second place with $11.3 million, and My Best Friend’s Girl at third with a meager $8.3 million – good news for all of us hoping for Dane Cook to be banished from show business. Sadly, the romantic comedy that’s actually kind of funny, Ghost Town, took in even less: only $5.2 million. I guess this means American prefers Dane Cook to Ricky Gervais, which is…ominous, to say the least.

Nicolas Cage will reteam with Gone in 60 Seconds director Dominic Sena for Season of the Witch. “Cage plays a 14th century knight transporting a girl suspected of being the witch behind the Black Plague,” says The Hollywood Reporter. “His compatriots help him bring the girl to an abbey of monks trained in exorcising demons.” It’s a supernatural thriller – like The Wicker Man! (Are you sensing a pattern here?)

Title of the week honors go to Muchas Gracias, Bob Oppenheimer, a period drama picked up by Miramax. Per THR, “The film centers on an American serviceman in the 1960s who is sent on an appeasement mission to a fishing town in Spain after a U.S. military plane crash results in the accidental detonation of four hydrogen bombs; in addition to his role with the locals, the serviceman also embarks on a relationship.” Hey, sorry about all the radiation! Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?

Related:
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Wicker Man (Neil LaBute)
Abel Ferrara Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Bangkok Ludicrous: The Perils of English-Language Remakes

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:45:00 GMT

This week saw the debut of Bangkok Dangerous, a bizarrely titled remake by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun of the bizarrely titled Bangkok Dangerous by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun. The main differences between the two films are that the original was in the Thai language; the star of the 1999 original, Pawalit Mongkolpisit, played a deaf-mute with a slightly less ridiculous haircut than Nicholas Cage sports in the remake; and the second version stinks like the underside of a refrigerator.

Alison Willmore at IFC.com, in left-handed honor of Bangkok Dangerous, prepares a list of other English-language remakes of foreign films by the original directors, and in so doing, illustrates that, though the filmmakers are gambling that a U.S. release will net them the fame and increased audience foreign films rarely receive, it's a sucker's bet. Such movies are almost invariably disasters, from Les Visiteurs, a blockbuster French comedy remade in 2001 as the moronic Just Visiting to the pointless reboot of Michael Haneke's Funny Games in 2007. Perhaps the most disastrous of these movies was The Vanishing, a witless remake if George Sluizer's heart-stopping 1988 thriller Spoorloos that completely deflated all the tension and menace of his original. (Sluizer's latest movie was a Rob Schneider vehicle, which is cruel and unusual punishment even for a man who did The Vanishing.)

One of the shocking revelations in Willmore's list is that, despite her excellent reputation as an actress, Naomi Watts is virtually the queen of the junky English-language remake. Not only did she star in the arbitrary remake of Haneke's Funny Games (eating up a big chunk of the $15 million cost of the film it utterly failed to recoup at the box office), but she also played the lead in The Shaft, Dick Maas' dopey remake of his 1983 horror movie about a killer elevator. No, really.

Related Posts:

Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous

Funny Games: I Laughed, I Cried, I Puked

Morning Deal Report: Calling All Ghostbusters

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Summer is definitely over as far as the weekend box office is concerned. When the top movie of the week is Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous, you know things are a little slow. Taking in only $7.8 million was still good enough for first place, as Tropic Thunder fell to second with $7.5 million. The total weekend gross is expected to be around $66 million, which is what The Dark Knight was taking in at lunch hour just a few weeks ago.

Who ya gonna call? Well, if Ghostbusters is the answer, I’m not sure I even want to know the question. But Variety reports that Columbia Pictures is serious about rounding up the old gang for another round of spook hunting. “The studio has set The Office co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson…The scribes just wrote Year One, a comedy that was directed by Ramis.” I can see Bill Murray being hard up for cash given the news of his divorce but, really, do they expect to be able to lure Ernie Hudson back?

Ed Norton, Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfus will star in Leaves of Grass. It’s not an adaptation of the Walt Whitman poetry collection, but rather “a comedic thriller actor-turned-filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson wrote and is directing.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Norton is portraying twin brothers, one an Ivy League philosophy professor, the other a small-time and brilliant marijuana grower. The professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown for a doomed scheme against a local drug lord (Dreyfuss) that unravels his life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous
Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

Morning Deal Report: Dueling Sherlocks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As if Guy Ritchie didn’t have enough problems, what with the gossip sheets running wild with rumors that A-Rod is shtupping his wife. Now it turns out that his Sherlock Holmes feature will face competition from Borat himself. Per Variety, Columbia Pictures has announced “an untitled comedy that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as master detective Sherlock Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson, his crime-solving partner.” According to Columbia president Matt Tolmach, this re-teaming of the Talladega Nights stars is a sure-fire knee-slapper. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh…having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious." Thank you for speaking frankly, Mr. Tolmach. Of course, this is not the first time rival productions involving the same iconic character have gone head-to-head, as we recall from the great Robin Hood war of the '90s. But then, that was a war nobody won.

The cast of Roland Emmerich’s latest rendition of the end of the world is coming together. Triple threat Thomas McCarthy, who most recently wrote and directed The Visitor, will join John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Danny Glover in Emmerich’s 2012. “As an actor, I've never worked on anything with this scale before, and I always go see these movies,” McCarthy tells the Hollywood Reporter. “This does have a big budget and I do make more money, which is nice, but I know if you take a job like this just for the money, you'll be miserable.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to Nicolas Cage.

Meanwhile, the French hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks) is being remade not only in America (Will Smith will star for Warner Bros.) but in Italy. Variety describes it as a “heart-warmer about a postal worker forced to relocate to a small town in the north where he can't understand the patois, the food or the many quirks.” We’ll wait for the Portuguese version.

Related:

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

Morning Deal Report: Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The controversies of his past are back in the headlines thanks to a recent HBO documentary, so what better time for Roman Polanski to get back to work? Polanski will adapt the Robert Harris political thriller The Ghost, with Nicolas Cage, Tilda Swinton and Pierce Brosnan, Variety reports. “Cage will play a ghostwriter hired abruptly to finish the memoirs of an ex-British prime minister after the first scribe turned up dead. The ghostwriter's research leads him to uncover skeletons in the pol's closet that put the writer's life in danger.” Alas, this doesn’t mean Cage’s Bad Lieutenant remake has fallen through; Ghost will shoot after he completes his work with Werner Herzog this summer.

William Hurt and Zach Gilford will be fishing in The River Why, adapted from the novel by David James Duncan. Per the Hollywood Reporter, this “coming-of-age tale centers on a young man named Gus Orviston (Gilford) and his quest for an elusive rainbow trout, which is a metaphor for the man's internal search for self-knowledge.” Or maybe he’s just hungry.

Finally, that sequel to The Host you’ve been waiting for is on the way. According to Variety, Chinese director Ning Hao will helm the follow-up to the Korean horror film. The sequel “will have to tread carefully to avoid criticizing the Chinese government. Story will concern a calamity caused when people ignore a monster due to their desire for money.” Sounds like another one of those metaphor thingies.

Related:
The Roman Exile: 30 Years and Counting
Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea

Werner Herzog vs. Abel Ferrara: Round 2

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Last time we checked in with the developing saga of Werner Herzog’s planned remake of The Bad Lieutenant, the original film’s director, Abel Ferrara, had extended his best wishes for a fruitful collaboration between Herzog and star Nicolas Cage. Either that or he wished they’d die in Hell, I forget. Herzog himself has been mum on the subject, but now he’s broken the silence to clear the air. Or something like that.

Ostensibly interviewing Herzog about his new documentary about life in Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, those pranksters at Defamer couldn’t resist asking a few questions about the Bad Lieutenant remake. First of all, says Herzog it’s not a remake. “It's like, for example, you wouldn't call a new James Bond movie a remake of the previous one — although the name of the bad lieutenant is a different one, and the story is completely different.”

While Harvey Keitel’s tormented cop roamed the streets of the New York, Herzog has a different setting in mind. “And it's going to be in New Orleans, which is a fascinating place. Part of it was the decision of the producers for tax incentives — which is totally legitimate. However, I thought to myself: ‘We have seen a lot of New York in movies; we have not seen New Orleans in feature films.’ Or very few feature films. After Katrina it's a particularly interesting set-up.”

As for Ferrara, Herzog is delighted with the angry auteur’s wish for his fiery demise, although he professes not to actually know who he is. “Maybe I could invite him to act in a movie! Except I don't know what he looks like.”

So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Herzog’s remake is actually a continuation, except it’s a different cop with a different name in a different city, but aside from that, it’s actually a franchise akin to James Bond. I think I’m more interested now. But I’m not sure.

Related:
Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea
Let's Get Weird with Werner Herzog and David Lynch

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies. (In the movie, the woman, played by Rosanna Arquette, introduces herself to the hero--Griffin Dunne--by reciting a passage from the Henry Miller paperback he's reading; in Lies, the woman tells the hero that he "sounds like someone in a paperback book.") There's also a brief appearance by Larry Block, an actor known for his association with Joe Frank, as the cab driver. This is such a weird coincidence that Andrew Hearst is moved to speculate that it might have been part of a payoff to Frank, but in his own comments on the affair, Frank says that he didn't know Block at the time and was unaware that he'd been ripped off until someone told him that he ought to see the movie. It was just one of those fluky things.

The After Hours screenplay, which also includes a scene built around dialogue lifted from Kafka's "Before the Law"--a steal obvious enough that anyone who noticed it probably assumed it was a deliberate homage--was written by Minion when he was a kid in Columbia's Graduate Film Writing Program. (He was twenty-eight when the movie got made.) Whatever he was thinking when he wrote it, he probably didn't guess that a production team that included Dunne and Amy Robinson (who played Harvey Keitel's girlfriend in Mean Streets would get the script to Scorsese, and that Scorsese would latch onto it when he was looking for a small project he could make fast and on the cheap after his plans to film The Last Temptation of Christ with Robert De Niro collapsed. In a 2000 profile in Salon, Frank declined to name the "Hollywood film" whose producers had "paid him handsomely" for the theft of his material. In discussing the matter in the relative safety of his own web site, Frank took a pretty conciliatory tone towards Minion, pointing out that he took the story in a different direction after using Frank's monologue to achieve liftoff. The film industry may be less forgiving about the whole thing; Minion hasn't been drummed out of the business, but after achieving some whiz-kid renown on the basis of After Hours, his career failed to catch fire. His best-known screenplay credit since then was for the Nicolas Cage picture Vampire's Kiss; he also wrote the Scorses-directed episode of the TV series Amazing Stories and directed a couple of pictures, Daddy's Boys and Trafficking, neither of which got a theatrical release. Maybe he should spend a few weekends taking notes while listening to Car Talk.

Abel Ferrara Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

When we first brought you the news of Werner Herzog’s planned remake of The Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage, we wondered whether the director of the original version, Abel Ferrara, was cool with his intensely personal vision being monkeyed with. Now we have an answer, which appears to be: not so much.

According to Spoutblog, Ferrara addressed the issue during his Cannes press conference for his latest effort, Chelsea on the Rocks. “Ferrara twice talked about Werner Herzog’s alleged Nicolas Cage-starring remake of his Bad Lieutenant,” writes Karina Longworth, “once in response to a question from a reporter, and once just because he apparently felt like he needed to vent. First, Farrara tagged a comment about the remake on to his answer to a question about working outside the Hollywood system. ‘As far as remakes go, Harvey [Weinstein? Not mentioned in this Variety story in connection to the project. Keitel, who starred in the original? Hmmmm....] begged me not to say anything mean, or stupid. [pause] But I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.’”

So yeah, he seems pretty cool with it. Later a reporter mentioned the remake and Ferrara responded, “It hasn’t been remade yet.” When told that it would be, he said, “Don’t count on it.” Could there be litigation in the future? But they’ve already gone to the trouble of making this handsome poster!

Let’s Get Weird with Werner Herzog and David Lynch

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Why do we get the feeling Werner Herzog arrived in Cannes early, hit the open bar and woke up in an alley 17 hours later with a splitting headache and a pocketful of deal memos scrawled on cocktail napkins? Apparently he’s a guy who just can’t say no, but whatever the case, he’s definitely been a busy bee. Yesterday we told you about his highly dubious plan to remake The Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. This morning brings news of yet another project, this one a collaboration with David Lynch.

The two offbeat auteurs are teaming up for My Son, My Son, “a horror-tinged murder drama based on a true story.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Herzog and his longtime assistant director Herbert Golder co-wrote Son, loosely based on the true story of a San Diego man who acts out a Sophocles play in his mind and kills his mother with a sword. The low-budget feature will flash back and forth from the murder scene to the disturbed man's story. A guerrilla-style digital video shoot on Coronado Island is tentatively set for March.”

Lynch will executive produce the project, but that’s not all he has on his plate. His Absurda label will also bring us the return of a director who could out-weird both Herzog and Lynch with one hand tied behind his back: El Topo maestro Alejandro Jodorowski. Asia Argento, Udo Kier and Nick Nolte will star in the “metaphysical gangster movie” King Shot. The Reporter notes that “Marilyn Manson is touted to appear as a prophet in the Sin City-style film, which producer Eric Bassett said has enough sex and violence to guarantee an NC-17 rating.”

Now it’s time for Werner to get some sleep, before we find out he’s agreed to do the next version of The Hulk or something.

Werner Herzog’s Very Bad Idea

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Werner Herzog is remaking The Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. I can’t stop him.

According to Variety, “Nicolas Cage will star in an updated version of 1992's Bad Lieutenant with Werner Herzog directing, Edward R. Pressman producing and Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films financing.” How many red flags can you possibly cram into one sentence? First and foremost, Lerner is the schlockmeister behind the recent Al Pacino fiasco 88 Minutes and Pacino’s upcoming re-teaming with Robert De Niro, Righteous Kill, as well as the latest Rambo reboot. His slate of upcoming productions is crammed with remakes and sequels, including yet another Rambo, re-launchings of both Conan and Red Sonja, Undisputed 3 (there was an Undisputed 2?) and the long-anticipated-by-someone Poe biopic written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

He also produced The Wicker Man remake, which presumably is where Nicolas Cage comes into this. Well, I already knew Cage was shameless. I just want to know how Herzog got roped into the project. As described by Variety, the original 1992 Bad Lieutenant “followed the depraved New York police officer of the title, who was heavily involved in drugs, gambling, sex and stealing; the pic received an NC-17 rating.” That’s sort of putting it mildly. Love it or hate it, Lieutenant was an intensely personal vision from writer/director Abel Ferrera, with a truly out-on-a-limb performance from Harvey Keitel. It would hardly seem to be remake fodder, anymore than say, Eraserhead or Herzog’s own Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Would Herzog really be okay with Abel Ferrara remaking that? For all I know this project may have Ferrara’s blessing, and it’s not that I’m such a huge fan of his anyway, but something about this just reeks of crossing a line that ought not be crossed. This doesn’t help: “The new script's penned by Billy Finkelstein, a TV writer with credits on Murder One, Law & Order and NYPD Blue.”

Hopefully Herzog will have an announcement of his own soon. I’d love to know what he’s thinking.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 3-9, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This was the week that was at the Screengrab:

We offered free career advice to the 21st century Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds.

We watched Nicolas Cage, Michael J. Fox and Bruce Willis debase themselves in the Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials.

We compared two versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, two versions of Lolita, and the two faces of Aaron Eckhart.

We climbed The Towering Inferno and floated down the Apocalypse Now river.

We saw a naked Bo Derek drenched in honey and milk in Bolero, the latest entry in the Unwatchable series of 100 worst movies ever.

We expressed concern for Christina Ricci, hailed Jonathan Pryce and looked forward to seeing Bardot’s ass in high definition.

We told you about the 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows and you told us we forgot about Serenity. Sorry about that.

And finally, we got sweet, sweet revenge.

What a week, no?

Japandering: The Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

We’ve known for a long time that famous American movie stars who would never deign to sully themselves doing television commercials at home have no such compunctions about doing them abroad, most often in Japan. This phenomenon was immortalized in Lost in Translation, of course, but the tasteful Suntory ad that Bill Murray’s character struggles to complete is not necessarily representative of the antics our most respected and treasured movie icons will get up to when they don’t think we’re watching. Nowadays, of course, thanks to YouTube and the invaluable resource Japander, we’re always watching! Let’s assume these five stars haven’t been humiliated enough and put them through the wringer one more time.

NICOLAS CAGE for FEVER PACHINKO

It’s not always easy to tell what these Japanese commercials are advertising, and here is a case in point. At first I thought Cage was selling gum, then possibly a car. While this may be the actor’s best performance in years, those of us unfamiliar with pachinko gaming devices may be a little unclear on the message.

BRUCE WILLIS for ENEOS

Once again I had to do a little research to determine exactly what product or service Willis is shilling here. As far as I can tell, it’s motor oil. I should have been able to figure that out, what with the yellow paint and the Elvis impersonator and the backpack raygun thingy and…what was I talking about?

MICHAEL J. FOX for SOME SORT OF BEVERAGE

Honestly, I can’t tell if Fox is selling beer or canned coffee or some sort of energy drink here. Whatever it is, it makes you do crazy things, like trim hedges into animal shapes! Note Fox’s reprisal of the distressed yelp noise that made him famous in the Back to the Future movies. That’s branding, folks.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER for DIRECT TV

It’s hard to pick just one of Arnie’s ads – he seems to be the king of Japandering. I chose this one because of the multiple roles he plays. It gives us a moment to reflect on what was lost when he went into politics.

BEN STILLER for KIRIN

Are we sure this isn’t an outtake from Zoolander or something? No? How embarrassing.

Watching "The Watchman": An Interview with Kent M. Beeson

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

How did you get your position with Comixology?

Dumb luck, if you ask me! Peter Jaffe, the Online Content Editor for Comixology, asked former ScreenGrab editor Bilge Ebiri to recommend someone to cover film and TV for Comixology, and he named me. I'd done some writing for ScreenGrab, including several on comic books, so I suppose that's why name came up. if I had to guess, I'd say that my ScreenGrab posts on the Watchmen and Shazam! movies had something to do with it, but really, I have no idea.

Why do you suppose Hollywood has made so many comic book movies in the past few years?

I suppose the standard reasons are that the executives greenlighting these movies are the ones that grew up in the 70s and 80s, and grew up reading these comics, coupled with CGI that lets filmmakers show just about anything they can imagine. When those two moments in history coincided, it was bound to be a fertile period. What's really interesting to me, though, isn't that so many comic book movies are being made, but just how important fidelity to the source material has become. It still boggles my mind that Zack Snyder is keeping Watchmen in the 80s -- that never would have happened just a few years ago. We've come a long way from the aborted Tim Burton Superman with Nicolas Cage in a freaky black suit. But even this is a bit of a quirk of history -- I don't think we'd be seeing so many faithful adaptations if it weren't for Bryan Singer's X-Men showing it could be done and Raimi's Spider-Man showing just how friggin' huge it could be.

What are your favorite comic books?

Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, comic or otherwise. Paul Smith's run on X-Men -- I think I might prefer it to Byrne's, actually. Ambush Bug was way ahead of its time. One I loved back in the day, that seems to have been forgotten, was an horror anthology called Wasteland. It was written by John Ostrander and, of all people, improv pioneer Del Close. Some really twisted shit -- I can still remember one story called "R.Ab" that is just... soul-crushingly dark. Like Idiocracy without the safety of the comedy. I always thought this is what reading the E.C. comics back in the day must've been like.

Favorite comic book movies?

The stupidly-titled X2 is, fortunately, stupidly awesome. Spider-Man, I can watch over and over. Akira is great, but it's animated, so maybe that shouldn't count. I have a soft spot for Batman Returns, but the unfortunate practice of overloading a film with villains can be laid squarely at its feet.

Best adaptation?

Spider-Man is the best, I think, but it's adapting a character and his world and not so much a single story (other than the origin), so if you eliminate those, I guess that leaves me with Sin City. Visually, it's breath-taking and kind of addictive -- it's hard to look away from it when it's on. More importantly, though, it turned a series of borderline-unreadable books into something pleasing.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated comic book movies?

Let me go ahead and catch hell from two different camps. The first Superman movie is pretty terrific for about forty minutes when dealing with his origin, but once Luthor enters the picture, it gets too jokey and lame. Reeve and Kidder are impeccable, however. And Ghost World is pretty much ruined by Zwigoff's cheap misanthropy. I mean, Clowes isn't exactly Mr. Positive, but it's clear from the book that he's trying to find some kind of hope. Zwigoff buries it under shots of pregnant women smoking and Blockbuster gags that would never have made it past the Mad TV writing room. There's a reason Bad Santa works -- it's all misanthropy.

I think Hellboy is a bit underappreciated. Considering that the comic isn't very well-written and has one of the most non-sensical origin stories ever -- Mignola came up with the look of the character first and made up everything after, and it shows -- it holds together pretty well. Del Toro's really coming into his own, he's starting to find just what he's capable of, so I'm looking forward to Hellboy II.

When a comic book movie doesn't remain true to its source, how difficult is it for you to turn off your comic book side and simply appreciate it as a movie?

Well, my attack plan for the stuff I'm unfamiliar with -- like Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, or the upcoming Wanted -- is to watch the movie first. I want to be able to enjoy the movie -- or not -- as a movie first, without any baggage, which is how most viewers are going to see these things anyway. And then I go back to the comic. The comic is usually going to have more information anyway, and I don't need to bring that into the movie. I actually started watching Persepolis after reading the first 20 pages or so of the comic, and it totally fucked it up for me -- I had to go back and see it again to fully appreciate how well the filmmakers were able to streamline the story for the movie. Luckily, most comic movies are adapting characters and not specific stories, so it's pretty easy to turn off the preconceptions.

Obviously, with something like Watchmen, that's not going to be possible. I'm not sure how that's going to work. I might have to conk myself on the head and induce amnesia just before I walk into the theater.

What big-screen comic book adaptations have actually improved on their sources?

I just finished the original A History of Violence, and wow, what a stinker. The movie pretty much repudiates the source, which, admittedly, is an interesting way to go about adapting something. Sin City -- well, my loathing of Frank Miller runs pretty deep, so it was great to see such a tiring and self-important comic turned into high camp by simply giving the thing motion. Whenever I see Clive Owen float down to the street in his red shoes, I crack up.

In your opinion, what are the keys to making a successful comic book adaptation?

Jesus, I really have no idea. The first thing that comes to mind is balance -- knowing when to be faithful to the source, and when to realize, hey, this has to work as a movie first and foremost, and just go off. A History of Violence is pretty faithful for the first 1/3 of the book, then it jettisons the rest, to its credit. I don't think the adaptation of The New Frontier went far enough -- there were small changes here and there that indicated that they knew the story wasn't going to work as is, but they really should have rethought the whole thing from top to bottom. But, saying that, I bet we'll see (if we haven't already) a movie that either is completely faithful or totally throws everything out but the title and works perfectly well.

Now that Watchmen is being made, what are some of your other dream adaptations?

I want to say FLCL, but the comic came later. Does Cowboy Bebop count? It was a serialized manga first. I could totally see an adaptation with, say, Ryan Gosling as Spike, Selma Blair as Faye and The Rock as Jet. I think The Rock is underrated as a performer -- for someone who was supposed to be Schwarzenegger's heir apparent, he displays more genuine warmth and a sense of humor about himself than Arnold ever did. While Jet is a badass, he's still essentially the mother of the group, and it'd be interesting to see him in a movie where his physicality is in strict contrast to his role. Matthew Vaughn is doing Thor, but I'd kill for a Gilliam version -- nobody does giants better, and I'd love to see them get their ass kicked by a blonde dude with a hammer.

The Watchman runs every other Wednesday on comiXology. Kent’s piece on Iron Man will run this week.

Don’t Bet the House on Casino Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The success of 21 at the box office ($46 million and counting) probably ensures a whole new wave of casino movies on the way – not to mention a new wave of would-be geniuses who think they can beat the system crowding the tables in Vegas. James Donaghy of The Guardian takes note of Hollywood’s addiction to games of chance. “If some ball-busting genie made Hollywood choose a vice then gambling would win every time. The movies are infatuated with risk-takers: the maverick, the hopeless optimist, the plucky underdog who beats the odds. Then there's the charming conman who breaks the bank at Caesars who never has to buy another drink as long as he lives.”

Sure, it all looks easy enough in 21, with its vastly oversimplified card-counting scenario. Sadly, it’s not that easy or Las Vegas would have closed down by now. “Any casino, of course, is a fool's paradise. A mechanical moneymaking machine designed with the precision and artistry of the watchmaker to separate mugs from their money. As you watch the croupiers, dealers and pit bosses you're watching an optical illusion of fairness. Statistically, the house has an edge… There is an entire industry dedicated to catching the cheats and the city of Las Vegas is a breeding ground for the bleeding edge of high-tech surveillance technology.”

That technology includes 3-D facial recognition software, which should theoretically limit the effectiveness of the fake nose worn by Matt Damon in Ocean’s 13 or the wigs worn by the 21 gang. But Richard Marcus, “the self-declared number one expert on casino cheating,” isn’t impressed. “"Facial recognition is an absolute zero. There's not one person alive who's ever been caught by facial recognition.” That’s not to say he’s a big fan of 21 or the real-life MIT blackjack team on which the movie is based. He’s met two of the members, and “neither one would ever have had the slightest chance of joining one of my casino cheating teams.”

Donaghy concludes with “Four key movie gambling blags” (“blag” being British slang for con or scam, dontcha know), taking a gratuitously mean swipe at Sarah Jessica Parker in his take on Honeymoon in Vegas: “In a brilliant twist on an old classic, James Caan fixes a card game against Nicolas Cage so he can win something totally worthless - Sarah Jessica Parker. Much hilarity ensues (in the minds of the scriptwriters) as Cage tries to win back the thinking man's Mister Ed.” Oof. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas indeed.

Peggy Sue Got Served: Turner Apolgizes to Cage for Dog-Napping Allegation

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner have kissed and made up, which, granted, isn't as hot a mental image as it might have been some years ago. You might expect that two people who starred opposite each other in Peggy Sue Got Married would have the same kind of hard-won, mutual devotion that guys have in movies after they've seen combat together, but Turner enraged Cage with her memoir, Send Yourself Roses: My Life, Love and Leading Roles, in which she claimed that, during the shooting of the Coppola misfire, he was arrested twice for driving drunk and also got into trouble with the law "for stealing a Chihuahua." Cage, who in the words of his lawyer Simon Smith "has never been arrested for drink driving, dog theft or anything else," filed suit against Turner in Britian, famous for its plaintiff-friendly libel laws, after an excerpt from her book appeared in the Daily Mail. Smith added that, "As an actor who stars in many family-friendly films"--apparently the star of Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, and Face/Off is under the impression that he's Dean Jones--"and who has a young child and teenager of his own, Mr Cage was understandably upset at having been wrongly depicted as condoning that sort of reckless, dangerous and criminal behaviour."

Now, in order to make amends, Turner's publisher will insert a correction and an apology into future copies of the book, and Headline and Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail, will run an apology and purge the offending piece from their website. All of which goes to show you that you never know what will tick people off. Let it be recorded that while Nicolas Cage freely admits to having done some strange things in his time, he absolutely will not stand for people alleging that he runs around stealing Chihuahuas! He's been able to buy his own Chihuahuas for years now.

Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous

John Constantine — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:59:00 GMT

First of all, Bangkok Dangerous is a hilarious name. The sixth grader who lives in my brain starts giggling every single time I look at it. It sounds like a caveman warning you to be cautious while traveling. Second of all, am I insane or is Nic Cage starting to look like the Crypt Keeper wearing a Gene Simmons wig? Casting directors, I am telling you, the man is aging. Stop trying to make him look like he’s 30. He isn’t.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the trailer. Looks like Bangkok’s dangerous! There are assassins and slave trading and coups and gangsters and all kinds of stuff. At first, this comes off as being in the same tonal vein as the underrated Lord of War, a serious look into the life of a hired killer giving Mr. Cage ample opportunity to look sad. It shifts gears after the first minute into a big popcorn flick. While watching, I started to question whether or not Cage is a draw for this sort of thing. After all, The Rock came out twelve freaking years ago. Then I remembered that the National Treasure movies made twelve mumbillion dollars. On the whole Bangkok Dangerous looks like it might be alright. If you’ve got one a gift certificate lying around come summer, and you’ve already seen Indiana Jones, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Speed Racer, The Hulk, and every other flighty action movie in theaters, this might be a good choice.

Crispin Glover: Modern-Day Vaudevillian

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Guardian investigates the age-old question, “Is Crispin Glover really a big ol’ weirdo, or what?” On the one hand, you have his recent appearance as Grendel in the big-budget CGI epic Beowulf, which might lead you to believe Glover is settling into the role of eccentric character actor in mainstream Hollywood fare. How strange could a guy be if he’s appeared in both Back to the Future and Charlie’s Angels?

On the other hand, you have Glover’s latest directorial effort, It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, “a psychosexual drama written by and starring Steven C Stewart, who died soon after the film was completed. Stewart, a cerebral palsy sufferer, plays a man suffering from murderous satyriasis, and can be seen in some truly graphic scenes in the film with a number of women, which seems at odds with Glover's description of the screenplay as ‘beautiful and naïve’.” It’s a follow-up to 2005’s What Is It?, which Guardian writer Andrea Hubert describes as, well, “virtually indescribable without at least mentioning a cast comprised entirely of Down's syndrome actors, swastika imagery, blackface minstrels, naked women in monkey masks, with race hate musician Johnny Rebel warbling in the background as snails die gruesome deaths by salt and razor blades.”

It may come as a shock to learn that studios aren’t lining up to finance such projects – at least not directly. There is a method to Glover’s madness: “I get to fund and promote my films off the back of theirs.” Give him credit for putting his money where his mouth is; a lot of actors claim their mainstream work is merely a means of sustaining their commitment to art (coughNicolasCagecough), but Glover is actually using his corporate paychecks for subversive purposes. “What Is It? is a reaction to corporate restraints in the film market whereby anything that can make an audience member unhappy will be excised. And by unhappy, I mean truly uncomfortable, so they're looking at a film and asking, 'Is this right? Is it wrong? Should I be here? Should they have done this? What is it?' Why has taboo been corporately excised from our view? At every step along the conveyor belt of the corporately funded film, someone will say, 'You really wouldn't want to say that.' And what ends up happening is that nothing is said.”

As to the question at the beginning of this post…well, for those of us who caught this infamous Letterman appearance the first time around, it’s never really been in doubt:

In Other Blogs: Oscar Special

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The hot topic this week is the 80th Annual Academy Awards, which will mercifully be over sometime early Monday morning. Until then, there’s still a few items of interest in the blogosphere:

The full coverage over at Cinematical includes not only the staff predictions, but those of Filipino cruise ship bartenders and Jose the Cabbie, as well as a look at the all-important Borgnine Factor: “It's hard to get a statistical breakdown of the Academy's membership, but over the years I've formed a mental picture of the Academy's average member. He's male; he's been in show business for decades, usually as an actor; he's wealthy enough to be "liberal"; he's white…In short, Ernest Borgnine. So, when I try to handicap Oscar picks, I ask: WWEBD?”

IFC Film News clues us in on five Oscar nominees who never existed, one of whom is nominated this year. Roderick Jaynes is “one of the most respected film editors in the business, if one of the most elusive. In addition to penning introductions to the published versions of the Coens' screenplays for Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There, Jaynes was celebrated as one of Entertainment Weekly's 50 Smartest People in Hollywood last year and had been previously nominated for an Oscar for Fargo in 1997.”

Film Threat can always be relied on to focus on what’s really important. Screw the Oscars – who’s going to win the Razzies? A hint – put your money on Nicolas Cage for Worst actor. “He's not an actor anymore, he's morphed into a plague of cinema. All leather and twitches, this Cage fellow.”

Finally, if you’re going to be stuck at a desk somewhere unable to watch on Sunday night and just want to keep current, our friends over at GreenCine will be live-blogging the event. At least you won’t have to worry about what to wear.

The Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray, KINGPIN (1996)

Bowling is enjoyed by millions of Americans of all ages, but in the Farrelly brothers' second film Kingpin, the professional bowling circuit is portrayed as being forever trapped in the seventies. Professional bowlers are seen as sleazeball would-be lounge lizards, dressing in garish clothes, doing cock-of-the-walk victory dances, and relentlessly chasing women when they're not bowling. But in Kingpin, the most telling remnant of their faded vocation is almost certainly the hairdos they sport. In the seventies, Harrelson's Roy Munson and Murray's Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken were well-coiffed slicksters. Two decades hence, they try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their youthful appearance by engaging in that age-old solution practiced by creepy old men the world over — the comb over. True to their characters, Big Ern is better at maintaining the façade — his 'do looks like a woodland creature parked itself atop his pate, but at least it doesn't reflect the light. But once the rivals take to the lanes for the climactic showdown, Big Ern shows his true colors. Usually a cool customer, he lets the stress get the better of his hair, and it gradually begins to detach from his head, until it resembles the world's largest ripped seam. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet's Clementine speaks of having mood hair, but we'd like to think that, as with so many great things in cinema, Bill Murray got there first.

The Leningrad Cowboys, LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA

Rock'n'roll has a history of some pretty questionable hairdos, but none like those worn by the Leningrad Cowboys. Almost surely the most rockin' band to get their start north of the Arctic Circle, the Cowboys first entered the scene as the brainchild of director Aki Kaurismäki, who assembled some of his rocker pals for his 1989 stone-faced mockumentary, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. In the film, the Cowboys, tired of playing in Siberia, mount an American tour, despite their uncertain grasp of the English language. But if their songs mark them as foreigners, their hair is positively alien, with all members sporting uniform black pompadours, each with a large, unicorn-like forelock pointing out into the distance. As the film progresses, we discover that this hairdo is actually a congenital signifier of musical skill — the musically-challenged cousin who stalks the combo has but a tiny tuft to his name. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the U.S. tour is mostly a washout, but they'd find more enduring success at home following the fall of the Iron Curtain. They appeared in two more features, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert film Total Balalaika Show, in which they teamed up with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, as well as over half a dozen music videos directed by Kaurismäki. Finally, the Cowboys made their triumphant return to the American stage for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All the while, the band remained true to their roots, never touching so much as a strand of those terrible, awesome hairdos.

Demi Moore, STRIPTEASE

Some might think the obvious choice here would be G.I. Jane, but somehow even a number-one blade on a pair of clippers only revealed that Demi Moore had a perfectly shaped head, and didn't diminish her hotness in the least. The same cannot be said for the bangs-and-blow-dry look of Striptease. Yeah, we know she's supposed to be playing a stripper, but those are clearly hair extensions, and not very flattering ones at that. Most people at the time were probably distracted by the reveal of Moore's surgically enhanced breasts (we liked the originals just fine, thank you) and there are certainly many places the finger of blame can be pointed in this nuclear stinkbomb of a movie — but you shouldn't underestimate just how bad a haircut had to be back then to make Demi Moore look unattractive.

Kevin Costner, THE BODYGUARD (1992)

The story behind one of Sir Kevin's more laughable haircuts (and, if you've seen his mullet in Robin Hood, that's really saying something) is actually kinda touching: The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard was originally conceived as a vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen way back during the 1970s. When the film was finally made in 1992, starring Costner and Whitney Houston, the star decided to try and channel McQueen; to do so he adopted the legendary icon of cool's trademark close-cropped haircut, which looked fantastic on McQueen but downright surreal on Costner. That said, Costner did have the last laugh: The Bodyguard was one of his worst films, and a stain on screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's career (it had been his first script — turns out he made up for it with The Empire Strikes Back), but it wound up being a huge hit. Indeed, we're not unconvinced that Costner's follicular follies in this film didn't lead indirectly to the George-Clooney-and-his-Caesar-haircut craze a couple of years later. There you go, folks — one more societal ill you can blame on Kevin Costner.

Nicolas Cage, NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)

Full disclosure: For weeks the spot for this entry stood empty on this list, with simply the words "Nicolas Cage, FILM TO BE DETERMINED LATER" holding its place. Because let's face it, any number of films starring Nicolas Cage from the past few years could go here — from the god-awful toupee he sported in Ghost Rider to the goofy balding curls he fretted over in Adaptation (of course, we don't hold that last one against him, not only because his bad hair was a plot point in that film, but also because we have this disturbing suspicion that, had nature been allowed to take its course, that's what Nicolas Cage's real hair might actually look like today). But we're going with National Treasure, for the simple fact that we spent the whole film staring at the slug-like patch of weave at the very tip of the actor's forehead. Seriously, this isn't hair, it's a lid. In these later years, Cage and Kevin Costner have switched places, but if you'd asked us fifteen years ago which of the two would allow himself to go bald gracefully while the other kept trying new ways to make himself look like he had something resembling a "full" "head" of "hair," the answer might have been different.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 1!

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.