The Screengrab : nicole kidman

In Other Blogs: Drinking in the New Year

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

It may still be too soon after New Year’s Eve for some of you to contemplate the subject of serious drinking, but the dawn of a new year does seem like the perfect time to introduce a new blog to our roster: Booze Movies! It’s the self-described 100 Proof Film Guide and its mission statement is one we at the Screengrab can get behind: “Alcohol--the fabric of film history is soggy with the stuff. Still, film historians have rarely given booze its due. This site is dedicated to setting the record straight.” The latest entry concerns - what else? – Sideways. “Most films have little cultural impact beyond diverting an audience for a couple of hours, but Sideways changed the drinking habits of many Americans. Liquor stores across the country suddenly saw their wine sales rivaling (and in some cases surpassing) their beer sales. Moreover, Pinot Noir, a grape that most consumers had never heard of prior to the film, enjoyed a huge upswing in popularity, while Merlot sales dipped slightly. This can only be attributable to Miles’ advocacy of Pinot and denigration of the latter varietal within the movie.”

Perhaps you read our year-end Top 10 lists last week and thought to yourself, “This is all well and good, but where is Vadim Rizov’s list?” Well, it’s at The House Next Door, and topping the list is A Christmas Tale. “I was so blown away by Desplechin's alleged crowd-pleaser that I stole home uncustomarilly psyched I had the rest of the night open (i.e. empty) to grapple with the film and tease out some explication, if only for my benefit. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I didn't even begin to unpack how much is going on here. At this point it'll take years of re-viewings and reading to get the full benefit of it. For now, the one thing I'll add is that I find Desplechin's broad frame of reference exhilarating: this is a film with equal time for Blackalicious and Mendelssohn, The Ten Commandments and Vertigo, Angela Bassett's ass and Nietzsche.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern has seen The Spirit, and its suckage has inspired some thoughts on the current state of our culture. “You know what it is, man? It's nerd overreach… I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the '80s and '90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of ‘geek culture,’ and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)…We're all used to these articles about, ‘Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He's a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes.’ And people on the internet would become protective of these "geek" filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.”

Roger Ebert wonders: “Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail?” Specifically, he wonders about Nicole Kidman and her ex-husband. “Now consider the case of Tom Cruise. Did you read the buildup before the release of Valkyrie? The picture was widely predicted to be the nail in the coffin of his career. On Nov. 18, 2008, before the film was first publicly screened, Courtney Hazlett of MSNBC.com breathlessly reported: ‘...those who've gotten an early glimpse say not only is the film nowhere near as exciting as a thriller, but Cruise's performance elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs.’…Hazlett did not see the film, and apparently did not see her first sentence (‘the film elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs’) before writing her second one (‘you almost start to laugh’). The story lists three sources: (1) ‘Those who've gotten an early glimpse;’ (2) ‘Sources;’ (3) ‘One person who saw the film.’ Help me out here. Are we referring to three different people, or the same person three times?”

And finally in List-o-Mania – and we apologize in advance – Cinemablend offers The 100 Most Likely People to Die in 2009. Let’s just say if Roger Ebert is reading this, he may not want to click on that link.

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Nominations (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEST ACTRESS

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

Meryl Streep and her peculiar Livia Soprano accent in Doubt will be a shoe-in, and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road is nearly as automatic. Anne Hathaway, as one of our commenters put it, acted the shit out of Rachel Getting Married. Cate Blanchett put on old lady makeup for Benjamin Button. That leaves one wild card slot for Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky.

WINNER
Kate Winslet

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Nicole Kidman (Australia)
Keira Knightley (The Duchess)
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (The Reader)

Like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kate Winslet has managed to be in two likely movies this year. She will be nominated for The Reader since it's a Holocaust movie in which she plays a morally dubious character, which easily trumps nineteen-fifties repression. That, and the fact that she wears a sagging old lady suit and appears naked (though not at the same time, thankfully). The unwritten law of the Oscars states that there must be at least one costume drama in one of the more important nominations, so why not Keira Knightley? Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman seems due for a nomination, and the Academy will want to work Australia in there somewhere. If memory serves, frail white women on that continent tend to do well with the Academy. Anne Hathaway will get a nomination for slumming it in Rachel Getting Married when she might have starred in something far glossier. Meryl Streep will be in the mix due to the need to throw Doubt a bone and because her showing up on the carpet every year in crazy cat lady garb makes everybody happy.

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Angelina Jolie (Changeling)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

One might as well send out ballots with Streep’s name pre-printed on them every year, and this year is no exception, with her turn as Doubt’s Sister Aloysius getting lots of attention. Hathaway’s revelatory performance in Jonathan Demme’s family drama should carry its awards-season momentum to an easy nomination and, I predict, a win, in keeping with the long tradition of hot starlets de-glamming in scruffy movies to win Oscar gold (also, she’s pretty great in it). And Winslet, between Revolutionary Road and her so-called “supporting” performance in The Reader, could be the year’s only serious contender for a double nomination. Beyond there, things get fuzzy. Jolie seems like a shoo-in, considering her baity grieving-mom performance, but we said that about last year’s A Mighty Heart too. Still, don’t count out a Clint Eastwood movie. The final spot will likely be a battle between critical darlings Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), Melissa Leo (Frozen River), Kristin Scott Thomas (I’ve Loved You So Long) and longshot Michelle Williams (Wendy and Lucy). I predict that Hawkins takes this one, but Leo’s a strong possibility as well. Finally, if Cate Blanchett in Benjamin Button makes it here, it probably means the voters are over the moon for the film, so if her name is called on nomination day, look for the movie itself to take Best Picture.

WINNER
Anne Hathaway

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Angelina Jolie (Changeling)
Melissa Leo (Frozen River)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

Despite mixed reviews for Doubt, Changeling and Revolutionary Road, industry vet + scenery chewing + SAG Award nominations (squared by Golden Globe nominations) = Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie and Kate Winslet. Meanwhile, on the indie side of the street, much as I would love to see the delightful Sally Hawkins snag a place for Happy-Go-Lucky, it may be a bad sign that (a) she didn’t score a SAG nomination, (b) some people found her character annoying and (c) others may suspect she was only playing herself. Instead, SAG and the Spirit Awards like Melissa Leo for the token “performance in a movie hardly anyone saw” nomination slot, and thus I’ll go with her (even though I'm one of those people who still hasn't seen Frozen River). And in the five-spot, I’m guessing this is the year Anne Hathaway gets invited to the grown-up table (Bride Wars notwithstanding). She’ll definitely get a nomination, and I bet even Meryl Streep votes for her to win.

WINNER
Anne Hathaway

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS
Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road)

Streep gets picked because it’s in the Constitution that she gets nominated once a year. Winslet, one of my very favorite human beings in all the world, is about ten times the talent that Leo DiCaprio is, but they’ll both get named for Revolutionary Road. The wildly overrated Happy-Go-Lucky won’t get anything but this nomination, but Hawkins’ performance is so talked about there’s no way it’ll miss. Hathaway is absolutely riveting in Rachel Getting Married, but I’m predicting Blanchett will take it, despite having zero charisma with Brad Pitt, as an ‘overdue’ award for Benjamin Button. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: The Academy will be confused by Kristin Scott Thomas’ Frenchitude in I’ve Loved You So Long, and she won’t get nominated despite turning in the performance of the year.

WINNER
Cate Blanchett

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
CATE BLANCHETT (TIE), ANNE HATHAWAY, SALLY HAWKINS, ANGELINA JOLIE (TIE), MERYL STREEP, KATE WINSLET

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
ANNE HATHAWAY

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

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

Ladies Only at Slate Movie Club

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The previous movie year can never truly be put to bed until the Slate Movie Club has convened. In the past we’ve seen fireworks fly, particularly when Armond White was a participant, but recent years have seen a more collegial atmosphere prevail. This year it’s more of a sorority vibe, actually; Slate critic Dana Stevens has invited four female critics to participate in the roundtable. No boys allowed! Since, despite our best efforts, the Screengrab remains largely a boy’s club, we’re all in favor of this development, especially since the self-proclaimed “Vagina Movie Monologues” group is more than willing to dish on such topics as the unusually smooth face of Nicole Kidman.

“We needn't discuss anything prototypically ‘feminine’—though the mere question of what that might mean could make for a great conversation,” Stevens writes. “I'll raise another topic that we've all discussed, freely and hilariously, over drinks but tend to approach gingerly in print: What is the state of plastic surgery on-screen in 2008? And why is this topic so hard to broach without descending (or seeming to descend) into the ‘what has she had done?’ realm of celebrity gossip? Are we entitled to ask what's become of the once expressively mobile faces we come to the movies to see?”

"You know, I was talking to a (male) colleague about how we, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Movie Club, were all cautiously excited about talking about Worked Over Faces (to put it succinctly)—I mean, from a cinematic point of view—and he observed that women are much harder on other women than men are,” Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly responds. “I briefly felt shallow. (He's a great friend.) But then I thought, really, it's that we women look at faces (and boobs, and butts, and the kitchens, gardens, and sunsets) on screen in a different way than men do. It's like—I don't know, it's like we do an instantaneous translation: "Oh, hmmm, Nicole Kidman's forehead and Hugh Jackman's teeth, not real, OK, and now back to Australia.”

In all fairness, we’ve been known to mention the topic of Kidman’s peculiar visage – to say nothing of Mickey Rourke’s Dick Tracy villain-esque face – here at the Screengrab, too. And it should be noted that the ladies of Slate do go on to actually discuss, you know, the movies of the year. You can read the ongoing discussion starting here.

Related:
Slate Movie Club Still Swinging
Nicole Kidman Marries Charlize Theron

Debra Winger: Searched for and Found

Phil Nugent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Rachel Cooke managed to swing a face to face with Debra Winger for the Guardian, who in addition to her flyspeck of a role in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, has published a book, Undiscovered, described by Cooke as "a collection of brief essays and poems with illustrations of doors and windows by her friend, the famous tightrope walker Philippe Petit"--the Man on Wire guy. "I'm allergic to chapters," Winger told Cooke "They give me hives. I wanted doors and portals to illustrate the idea of transformations. I showed Philippe the old doors I collect - I keep them in my barn - and he took out his journal, and it was filled with drawings of doors. So that was it." The book has turned into a hit on the basis of word of mouth, a development that is very pleasing to Winger, whose issues with the bullshit connected to fame surfaced when she was encouraged to promote it. "I wanted to put it out under a pseudonym, but they said: are you fucking nuts? I tried going on The View, and the last time I experienced anything like that was when I was a child, and I got caught in a rip tide, and the lifeguard was yelling 'just relax!' Everyone's talking on top of each other, and it's humiliating, and I have to suffer the whole 'where have you been?' thing - as if the person asking me has been at the center of the universe all this time, and I just haven't checked in."

Of course, a lot of people wonder where Winger--who has spent a lot of the time in recent years tending to her farm in upstate New York with her husband, the actor Arliss Howard (who directed her in the 2002 movie Big Bad Love)--has been because they miss watching her in movies. It's gratifying to hear that Winger would have no objections to doing more work in movies if she could be spared the bullshit, and bewildering to hear that her appearance in Rachel Getting Married hasn't led to a spate of offers. (Though it could be that most directors assume that anyone who gets her to work for him must know the secret handshake that it takes to get her to say yes. Demme was one of those who only managed to summon up the courage to approach her after having come to terms with his assumption that she'd say no.) But Winger's name has also taken on this second life as a catch phrase for the hard time that even greatly gifted actresses have getting treated with respect, let alone offered the roles they deserve. It's fascinating to hear that she is, to put it gently, as ambivalent about this as she is about anything else. The sense that Winger might be a symbol of something gelled after Rosanna Arquette's 2001 documentary Searching for Debra Winger. "I was interviewed for it when it was called something else," she recalls, "and I said to Rosanna at the time, this is your question. I had no idea what she planned on calling the film, and she made me the poster child for something I was not talking about. I didn't give a shit [about what Hollywood was going to do to me]. I was just tired of it." With regard to the scarcity of good roles for actresses, Winger herself would rather address practical issues, such as her observation that "women don't write enough. Because who do they expect to write these roles? Men?"

One thing that Winger has going for her is that, at 53, she still has an expressive kisser, in contrast to, as she delicately puts it, "those boiled faces!" On the other hand, "I have a movie out now and I can't bear to watch it. I see myself up there, and it's not normal to scrutinise your own face on a screen this big; it's like opening a vein. So I do have some compassion for Nicole Kidman, or whoever, who has obviously looked at her face and sort of dissected it, like it's a thing." It's okay, honey, you don't have to add "or whoever" after you say "Nicole Kidman." At film festivals, "the celebrities are dragging their movies in, going 'look at this!' instead of the movie being the thing, and they're just there to support it. It's a case of: 'Look at my dress, at my hair, at my face and ... oh, by the way, there's a movie here, too!' I have this character in my head. She keeps appearing places: on trains, in the city, on the highway. I see her out there. She is heroic, but not like any hero we've ever seen. Society makes women of a certain age invisible. It's convenient. Remember our mothers? How inconvenient they were to us? It's like that, on a grand scale. In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb. And now I feel like I could be the woman to play this role: the invisible woman." So you're saying that you would play it if only somebody would write it? "As you know, I've long been ambivalent about the whole movie star thing. But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to, uh ... work."

Down, Down, Down, Way Down Under: Baz Luhrmann Defends "Australia", Plots "Gatsby"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Baz Luhrmann, seen in the photo at the right maintaining an even strain while trying to fend off the slavering zombie armies who wanted their money back after a screening of his latest epic, Australia, wants you to know that he's not going anywhere, so you might as well just knock it off with the death threats. "We're making people cry," said Luhrmann in defense of his film, a two-hour, forty-six-minute celebration of the complete immobility of Nicole Kidman's facial muscles. (Try anything! Wire her up to jumper cables and run five hundred volts through her. Have Tom Cruise dragged onto the set and let a kangaroo kick him in the nuts. She won't pout and she won't smirk. The woman's a sphinx!) "I know it," he said in defense of the claim about the crying, "because they write to us." (Actually, nobody doubted that the movie is making people cry. We're just open to the possibility that it had something to do with thoughts about what else they could have done with the evening.) "But," he added, "there are those that don't get it. A lot of the film scientists don't get it. And it's not just that that they don't get it, but they hate it and they hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema. They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die.'" The problem, as Luhrmann sees it, is that the film scientist community tends to be between the ages of 18 and 39 and likes their movies more formulaic than he can supply. "This is not a romantic comedy for 40-year-old women or action movies for 17-year-old boys, and that's not OK with some people. It's not OK for people to come eat at the same table of cinema. But you look at movies like Gone With the Wind and Old Hollywood classics, and they don't fit in any box. Corny Hollywood movies from the '40s freak out (the film scientists)."

To combat this problem, Luhrmann hopes, on his next project, to abandon the corny old '40s and jumpback twenty years: he's planning to film F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This would mark the third time the novel has been filmed, following a 1926 silent film starring Warner Baxter, a 1949 version starring Alan Ladd, and the infamous, hugely expensive, misguidedly nostalgic 1974 waxworks edition starring Robert Redford. (More recently, there was a 2000 miniseries made for cable TV; it starred Tobey Stephens, Mira Sorvino, Paul Rudd, and Martin Donovan. There was also a weird 2002 indie called G. that transposed the book's plot and characters to a modern hip-hop milieu.) For Luhrmann, Gatsby provides the opportunity to say something about contemporary society, specifically the economic calamity: "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to...People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation." Given that Australia cost a reported $130 million and has given little indication that it'll be earning that back anytime soon, Luhrmann may have already made his searing indictment of those drunk on money, without knowing it at the time.

While Luhrmann was recasting himself as David Selznick crossed with Paul Krugman, one of his homeland's most flamboyant literary celebrities was recasting herself as a film scientist. Writing in the Guardian, Germaine Greer let fly with this opening: " The scale of the disaster that is Baz Luhrmann's Australia is gradually becoming apparent," and responded to those who praised the film's "myth of national origin" with the observation that "Myths are by definition untrue." In Australia, Luhrmann's gooey, corny epic isn't just a throwback to "Old Hollywood" romances but a political film, one that "is designed to promote the current government policy of reconciliation" by misrepresenting the history of the mistreatment and exploitation of the Aborginal population. In fact, the government had a hand in getting the thing paid for: "Australia cost the Fox Corporation about $90m, minus a hefty tax rebate. The other $40m was contributed by the Australian Tourism Export Council, in the sanguine expectation that the film would do for Australian tourism what Schindler's List did for Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow." The fact that so much is riding on the movie's success has not ensured it good word of mouth or positive reviews even in Australia, where one writer speculated: "it's an elaborate joke. A ruse. A jape. A gag . . . Some drunken nut challenged Luhrmann to break box-office records by making the most astonishingly bad Australian film of all time." Given notices like that, you might forgive a little whining on Luhrmann's part, but he's way ahead of you: "I'm not whining," he's insisted, "because when you do what I do, you expect to be covered in mud. But there seems to be a lot of misinformation."

Take Five: Van Sant

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema. He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures. He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry. And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential. He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural. He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself. His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular. Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be. Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling. But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making. The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did. Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

TO DIE FOR (1995)

Gus Van Sant's first stab at commercial credibility was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which, despite a plethora of good intentions, was his first major dud. In fact, its ineptness in spite of itself might be noted as a pattern that the director would follow in much of his mainstream work, if it wasn't for the existence of his follow-up film, To Die For. Working from Buck Henry's sharpest, nastiest script in decades, Van Sant directs a movie that almost invisibly echoes some of the themes of his previous work, especially in those scenes featuring lovestruck, dimwitted local teen Joaquin Phoenix and his crew. Van Sant rarely overreaches, and manages to let the black comedic tone of the script do its work; his greatest accomplishment is to get a truly memorable performance out of Nicole Kidman, who's better here than she would be again for some time.

GERRY (2002)

In 2002, Van Sant was on the tail end of a bad time. Hollywood hadn't been good to him over the previous half-decade, but to be fair, he hadn't been very good to it, either, with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and Finding Forrester gunking up his resume. Returning to his strange interiors for another shot at indie filmmaking, he released the first of his "Death Trilogy", the underrated Gerry, and a lot of critics were ready to call it his fourth disaster in a row: it's static to the point of tedium, its improvised dialogue (by two actors not especially beloved by highbrow reviewers) was sometimes silly and sometimes impenetrable, and it had nothing resembling a plot. But Gerry was a quiet triumph, a movie that builds almost unnoticably and marks a return to greatness by a director who can do very much with very little.

ELEPHANT (2003)

Van Sant followed up the surprising and effective Gerry with the triumphant Elephant, the best film of 2003. The second of his death trilogy takes an almost transcendently naturalistic look at a small high school on the day of a Columbine-style murder spree; the dialogue, again largely improvised, and the endless, unintrusive tracking shots make Elephant a brilliant contradiction: a movie so banal that it's almost mystical. Through the whole event, from boring ordinariness to life-shattering violence, Van Sant's particular genius is to steadfastly refuse to lead the viewers to anything resembling an explanation for the horror. Forcing us to view everything from the eyes of those who don't understand why they have to die, Elephant reflects our own maddening desire to have random violence made explicable -- and the world's refusal to comply.

PARANOID PARK (2007)

A strangely stirring and deeply affecting film, 2007's Paranoid Park -- based largely on a successful young adult novel -- finds Gus Van Sant returning to Portland and making a key transition from the relentlessly bleak indie sensibilities of the Death Trilogy to the artsy mainstream appeal of Milk. Once again trusting an amateur cast (many of whom were recruited off of MySpace) and a good deal of improvised dialogue to carry the tone of the film, Van Sant also lays in a heavy, dark directorial touch that nails the mood of the story perfectly. He's greatly aided in this attempt by the gorgeous cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's cameraman, Christopher Doyle, and the Zoo-York-clad Gabe Nevins as the affectless skateboarding protagonist. Paranoid Park is a perfect bridge between To Die For and Elephant.

Related Posts:

Screengrab Review: Milk

Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: 'It's the End of a Certain Way I Was Making Films'

Thursday Poll for December 4, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Deal Report: Nicole Kidman Marries Charlize Theron

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

If the voters of California had visualized that headline, Prop. 8 might have had a completely different outcome. Alas, it’s a match made only for the movies (as far as we know): Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron will star in The Danish Girl. Kidman plays artist Einar Wegener, a man with a very smooth forehead who, with the encouragement of his wife Greta (Theron), adopts a female guise for a series of portraits. “What began as a harmless game led Einer to a metamorphosis and landmark 1931 operation that shocked the world and threatened their love,” per The Hollywood Reporter. That operation? Well, it ain’t liposuction.

As we await Werner Herzog’s highly unnecessary version of The Bad Lieutenant, news reports of an even less essential remake have surfaced. Larry Clark (Kids) will direct an update of Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, per Screen Daily. But that’s not all! “Hayden Christensen is in formal negotiations to take the lead in HandMade's remake of Mona Lisa. He will take on a younger version of George, the character made famous by Bob Hoskins in the original.” I’d rather see Bob Hoskins as Anakin Skywalker, but maybe that’s just me.

More! We demand more bad remake news! How about this: “Columbia Pictures is back in the dojo with a new version of the 1984 hit The Karate Kid, which has been refashioned as a star vehicle for Jaden Smith,” Variety reports. That’s Will Smith’s 10-year-old boy, who co-starred with his dad in The Pursuit of Happyness.

Related:
Charlize Theron Is a Sexual Creature
Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHIA LABEOUF

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

ROBIN WILLIAMS

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

EWAN McGREGOR

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

CLINT EASTWOOD

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

NICOLE KIDMAN

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

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Kirsten Dunst is a Jealous Ghost

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Its title makes A Jealous Ghost sound a lot like too many recent rom-coms about the recently deceased haunting their exes, like Over Her Dead Body or Ghost Town, due out Friday. That’s apparently not the case, however, as The Hollywood Reporter describes the upcoming Kirsten Dunst vehicle as a “literary horror movie.” Dunst will play “a young American woman who travels to London to write a dissertation on Henry James' classic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw, only to find that her own circumstances begin to reflect the strange happenings of the story.”

Michael Douglas is keeping busy. In addition to his upcoming turn as Liberace for Steven Soderbergh, he’ll play “a car magnate with a runaway libido” in Solitary Man. That sounds more his speed. Per Variety, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito and Jenna Fischer are in talks to co-star.

Nicole Kidman is attached to The Eighth Wonder, which “centers on an archeological discovery that sets off a globe-spanning race.” Quoth The Hollywood Reporter: “The goal is to create a movie that will be to Raiders of the Lost Ark what the Bourne movies are to James Bond movies: a character-driven, treasure-hunting thriller.” Isn’t that what the Tomb Raider movies were supposed to be? Well, apart from the “character-driven” part, I guess. Those were more boobies-and-shorts-driven.

Related:
Soderbergh Does Liberace
Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s last completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we examined the final performances and films of actors and directors that served as fitting capstones to their careers. This week, in a Top Ten list suggested by YOU (in the general sense, and "Other Matt" specifically), we present ten ignominious exits: the cinematic equivalent of dying on the toilet, suffered by artists who really deserved better.

Charles Chaplin's A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967)

Chaplin's previous film, A King in New York, had been made ten years earlier and was the last film in which he starred; it was a stillborn disaster, and would have qualified as a notably sad ending to his career in its own right if he hadn't managed to follow it up with this thing. But Countess, which he also wrote and produced, as well as having written the music and contributed a cameo appearance, is especially embarrassing for its timeless, packed-in-mothballs quality. It was, after all, made the same year as Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, yet you wouldn't guess from watching it that anything had happened in either filmmaking or the world at large since about 1949. The film's leading man is Marlon Brando, and you couldn't guess from his work here that he'd ever known livelier days, either. Brando was used to directors who welcomed his attempts to fuse elements of his personality with his characters, but Chaplin was an old-fashioned sort who had no truck with that kind of Method foolishness; anything the actors tried to bring in interfered with the clickety-clack of the script that he'd been running inside his head for years. Some people regard some of Brando's later performances as being synonymous with the term "self-indulgent": he stands accused of having undercut his own movies and made his colleagues' lives difficult by abandoning coherence and logic and doing whatever he felt like doing in the name of letting his freak flag fly. But even in something like The Island of Dr. Moreau, he's at least inventive and amusing, stuck in a hopeless project but trying to entertain the audience while he entertains himself. Chaplin's movie gives you the chance to see what Brando looked like when he'd abandoned all hope: chained to a stupid script (and the character name "Ogden Mears"), he slogs through his blocking and reels off his dialogue syllable by syllable, plainly just wanting it all to be over. It's a sign of how thoroughly Chaplin had lost touch with his creative instincts that, once he'd broken the actor of his early attempts to bring some of his own collaborative instincts and energy to the role, he claimed to find Brando's work delightful. A Countess from Hong Kong went over like a fart at a funeral with critics and audiences, but damned if Petula Clark didn't have a number one hit with a reworked version of the movie's theme song. The Beatles, having displaced Charlie as England's most popular international import, must have had a rueful chuckle over that.

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Stanley Kubrick spent more than the last two years of his life working on this, his only film after 1987's Full Metal Jacket. He didn't just work at his accustomed glacial pace; he shot the film once, then recast two important supporting roles with different actors (with Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson stepping in for, respectively, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and shot much of it again. One fringe benefit of the production was that it unexpectedly took its star, Tom Cruise, out of circulation for a couple of movie seasons. Kubrick died a few days after a screening of what may or may not have been his ideal final version of the film for Cruise, his co-star and then-wife Nicole Kidman, and Warner Brothers executives. By then, the media, for lack of other Cruise-related news in the two and a half years since his Oscar-nominated turn in Jerry Maguire, had been flogging the picture so hard that they had at least as much invested in its success as the studio. The news of Kubrick's death ratcheted up the odds considerably: the thought that he had died while putting the finishing touches on something that might be less than his masterpiece was generally considered too morbid a thought to bear. Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999 amid a tsunami of hype, but since the movie itself was hard to stay awake through, the hype itself had a distinctive, abstract quality, given that it was easier to make the movie sound interesting if you sort of reviewed another, imaginary version of the actual picture. The most popular gambit was to devote great seas of ink to discussing whether the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole were the sexiest ever filmed or just the sexiest ever performed by an actual husband and wife; the topic was covered to such a degree that it inspired a backlash, which took the form not of people arguing that the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole weren't really all that sexy but instead, of people arguing that it actually made them uncomfortable to see two married actors going at it on screen, since for all the viewer knew, that might be what they really look like when they're going at it at home, thus raising all kinds of "T.M.I."-related issues. In order to understand just how desperate the hype merchants were to avoid discussing the actual movie, it helps to know that in all of Eyes Wide Shut's two hours and forty minutes, there is not a single sex scene between Tom and Nicole, unless you count a couple of minutes of pre-coital necking which takes place, appropriately enough given the personalities involved, while Tom and Nicole are staring at themselves in a mirror. Bolstered by this kind of Barnum-esque coverage, Eyes Wide Shut did respectable business until word of mouth overcame it and theater owners needed the space for extra screenings of The Blair Witch Project. The question of what Kubrick himself thought of his final film remains controversial, and when Full Metal Jacket star R. Lee Ermey dared to tell an interviewer that his old buddy Stan had told him shortly before his death that he had helmed "a piece of shit", many were quick to come down on the drill sergeant as if he had convened a meeting of all the children of the world to inform them that there is no Santa Claus.

Bette Davis in WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989)

No Hollywood star of the classic era worked harder than Bette Davis for good roles and sustained career longevity. In the 1930s, she breached her contract with Warner Bros. to take roles in English films and then unsuccessfully sued her studio, claiming that they were killing her career by forcing her to appear in "mediocre" films. When her career cooled as she entered middle age, she prankishly took out a classified newspaper ad reminding the industry of her availability. And as she grew elderly, she embraced a new movie image as a hag horror queen and became a not-infrequent guest star on series TV. Whether you admire this side of Davis as an undying devotion to the practice of her craft or see it as the egomania of a Madonna prototype whose life only seemed to be real so long as millions of people were paying attention to her -- and it was probably a little from column A and a little from column B -- it was almost fated to ultimately bite her in the ass, and the last big bite was Wicked Stepmother, a godforsaken "supernatural comedy" written and directed by Larry Cohen. Davis, who was 80 at the time of shooting, plays a witch who marries Lionel Stander and proceeds to turn his family topsy-turvy. Or at least that was the idea: Davis rankled the set after a week of shooting, putting out a statement saying that the script that she had agreed to perform was so bad it was unplayable and that Cohen was deliberately shooting her to look grotesque. For his part, Cohen announced to the press that his star had been too sick to work but was afraid that if her condition became common knowledge, no one would ever hire her again. A look at the movie provides solid evidence for both claims. Davis, frail and with her head topped by a gruesome-looking red wig, does look pretty bad, but even the healthy members of the cast seem on the verge of pitching over from the effects of having to deliver Cohen's dialogue. Whatever really happened, it's kind of amazing that the woman who once went toe-to-toe with Jack Warner might have thought that Larry Cohen would chivalrously watch her back after she'd walked out on him. (Instead of burning the precious footage he had of his famous star, Cohen rewrote the script to explain that Davis's character was now inhabiting the body of a cat and assigned her lines and business to a new character, her "daughter", played by Barbara Carrera.) Davis died a few months after Cohen's reupholstered version of the movie briefly surfaced, like pond scum, in theaters. The finished version includes a nasty in-joke involving Davis' old nemesis, Joan Crawford (whose own final film was the 1970 British scare picture Trog, in which Mommie Dearest co-starred with a dude in a frozen-faced monkey suit). That was pretty embarrassing, but given that Crawford had enough sense and self-restraint to retire after that and spend the last seven years of her life in virtual seclusion, we'd have to judge that Crawford wins that round on points.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

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

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

“This used to be a hell of a good country,” Jack Nicholson’s pot-smoking lawyer George Hanson laments in 1969's Easy Rider. “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it...”

He didn’t know the half of it.

And yet, even after seven-plus years of the Bush administration, the United States is still, for the most part, a hell of a good country, and next week, as the nation barbecues and cherry bombs itself into a frenzy of patriotism over the 4th of July weekend, we here at the Screengrab will join the celebration with a list of movies that show just exactly how and why America kicks ass.

But this week, partly in tribute to the passing of beloved comedian (and scathing social critic) George Carlin, we thought we’d take a cinematic tour of the nastier side of the American Empire. From slavery and the near-extermination of the nation’s indigenous population to rampant corporate greed, bigoted religious fanaticism and horrific military fiascos, the U.S. (and its citizens, including me and possibly you) have a lot of skeletons in our collective national closet.

Fortunately, we’ve also managed to (more or less) hang onto that whole freedom of speech thing, resulting in the following films (some by outsiders, but mostly homegrown) that, to paraphrase Toby Keith, put a boot in the American way.

THE WIRE (2002-2008)

Again, as with last week’s inclusion of Angels in America among the Gay Pride Top Twenty, I’m cheating a bit, since HBO’s epic, five-season dramatization of the death of the American working class, the devastation wrought by the “War on Drugs,” the failure of inner city public schools, the inherent corruption of organizations and the helplessness of the individuals trapped within them is, technically, “just” a TV show. But, taken as a single, sixty-hour cinematic exposé, David Simon’s epic, multi-layered, deeply human depiction of the drug dealers, junkies, cops, dockworkers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, reporters and regular civilians of modern day Baltimore (and, by extension, Anytown, U.S.A.) trumps just about any movie ever made in its unflinching depiction of the ways that Americans become trapped in their own delusions and systems of organization, allowing hacks and sociopaths (like Jamie Hector’s drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, Michael Kostroff’s sleazy lawyer Maurice Levy and corrupt cops Herc (Dominic Lombardozzi) and Burrell (Frankie Faison)) to flourish while system-bucking firebrands like Detective McNulty (Dominic West) and Michael K. Williams’ iconic stick-up artist Omar Little are marginalized or destroyed. But, unlike grim civics lessons like the recent slate of doomed Iraq films (typified by Robert Redford’s deadly earnest Lions for Lambs), The Wire (even at its most harrowing) was never a slog, thanks to the work's relentless humor, suspense, virtuoso writing, astonishing performances and, for all its pessimism, a crucial, inspiring sense of gratitude for the men and women (like Sonja Sohn and Wendell Pierce as “good police” Kima Greggs and “Bunk” Moreland, Deirdre Lovejoy’s tough, incorruptible state’s attorney Rhonda Pearlman and Jim True-Frost’s ex-cop turned schoolteacher “Prez” Pryzbylewski) who somehow manage to keep their heads down, plug away and, ultimately, hold the world together for the rest of us. (Now if only the not-racist-at-all Emmy voters would notice and finally honor The Wire with at least one friggin’ award.)

DOGVILLE (2003)

Lars Von Trier's Dogville (the first of his proposed – and still uncompleted – "U.S.A. – Land of Opportunities" trilogy) certainly got the job done in terms of provocation. Von Trier, already one of the most controversial and divisive directors working today, sure wasn't going to win a lot of friends on this side of the Atlantic when he announced, not long after September 11, 2001, his intention of making three films whose intent was to turn a gimlet eye on some of the ugliest aspects of American culture. And when Dogville was released, it had a polarizing effect almost immediately: for everyone who praised its uniformly excellent cast, its stark, eerie direction, and its brilliantly minimalist set design (which served as an unsettling visual reference to that most all-American of plays, Thornton Wilder's Our Town), there was someone who condemned its inflammatory rhetoric, its brutal tone, and its determination to poke at the festering sores of everything bad about America, from racism to sexism to crime to class inequity. Some critics – no names, no pack drill – apparently became so unhinged over the movie that they spoke of it in terms better suited to hate crimes, or even war crimes, than to movie reviews. But the deeply dividing effect that Dogville had on audiences and critics may have proven nothing more than the fact that the reaction Von Trier gets out of his movies is exactly the reaction that he wants.

ROGER AND ME (1989)

No list of films critical of America could be complete without a Michael Moore documentary (strangely enough, no one at Screengrab headquarters was lobbying for Canadian Bacon), so it was only a matter of choosing which one. In the end, there was no real choice. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the most incendiary grenade Moore has lobbed, but it's marred with some cable access-level conspiracy mongering. In both The Big One and Bowling for Columbine, the messenger overwhelms the message. And I'll confess I haven't seen Sicko yet – I'm simply Michael Moore-d out. But that wasn't the case back in 1989, when Roger and Me arrived in theaters as a most unlikely breath of fresh air. How unlikely? Here was a film released by a major American corporation (Warner Bros.) openly criticizing another major American corporation (General Motors) for its outrageous treatment of its employees. Here was a movie about the economic devastation wrought on an American city by the closing of its auto plants – and it was funny. Moore hadn't worn out his welcome, because we didn't know who the hell he was; he was just this shambling schlub in a ballcap trying to get an audience with GM CEO Roger Smith to find out why his hometown of Flint was being put through the wringer. If his shtick has long since grown stale, it was fresh then, enlivened by such real-life characters as Deputy Fred (who tries to evict the newly unemployed in the friendliest possible way) and the woman who offers rabbits in two varieties: "Pets or Meat." We know now about the manipulations of chronology (Horrors! In a movie?) and many of us have soured on Moore's self-aggrandizing style, but the impact and influence of Roger and Me on documentary film – for better and for worse – cannot be overstated. And if you lost your job on the assembly line and nobody gave a shit, you'd probably be grateful to have a high-profile advocate – even a self-righteous schlub in a ballcap.

BLOW OUT (1981)

The critic J. Hoberman called Brian De Palma's conspiracy movie the last great film of the 1960s, even though it was released during the first summer of the Reagan administration -- a moment that it also memorializes quite well in its own sick way. Set in Philadelphia, De Palma's picture stars John Travolta as a motion picture sound man who inadvertently records the gunshot that sends a car containing a potential presidential candidate and a hooker (Nancy Allen) into a river, killing the politician. Another figure, a photographer played by Dennis Franz, claims to have recorded the crash in a series of photos that are published in a national magazine. Meanwhile, the man who shot out the tire -- Burke, played by John Lithgow -- is committing a series of murders so that he can take out the Nancy Allen character and make it look like the work of a serial killer the papers have dubbed "the Liberty Bell Strangler." Not satisfied with this amalgam of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and G. Gordon Liddy gone off the reservation, De Palma invented his own bogus patriotic holiday, "Liberty Day", so that he could show his hero failing to save the heroine against a backdrop of oblivious citizens garishly celebrating the country whose promise we in the audience can see openly turning to criminal rot.

THE CANDIDATE (1972)

Robert Redford uses his Kennedyesque qualities -- "Kennedyesque" having once been code for anyone really good-looking who might plausibly read his subscription copy of Newsweek -- as a double-edged sword in this collaboration between a director, Michael Ritchie, with a special knack for throwaway slapstick and bits of offbeat Americana and a screenwriter, Jeremy Larner, who was regarded as a walking mother lode of inside political knowledge from his having worked as a screenwriter for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. The film has plenty to say about the importance of money and image, at the expense of substance, in American politics, though what really sets it apart is the absolute hopelessness that comes attached to its cheerful, Zippy-like grin. Redford's Bill McKay is the son of an former governor and old-style pol (Melvyn Douglas) who, thanks to watching his father at work, knows that nothing can be achieved through conventional politics and so works as a liberal lawyer for good causes. He's talked into running against the despicable old conservative incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) so that he can shake up the campaign and bring attention to the real issues he favors; he signs on with the understanding that he can't possibly win. But when he does so badly that he risks becoming a joke, he agrees to let the handlers polish the rough edges on his campaign style, and damned if he doesn't end up winning -- after which he turns to his chief handler (Peter Boyle) and asks, in a state of mild panic, "What do we do now?" Other movies in this period, such as The Parallax View and Executive Action, jumped on the JFK-assassination-theory bandwagon and took it on faith that if anybody decent ever ran for office in this country, the big boys would have him whacked. The Candidate's Nader-esque attitude -- that politics is such a total shuck that nobody decent would ever get involved with and if, by some accident, they did, the compromises they'd have to agree to would reduce them to a dithering nothing -- seems less doom-laden on the surface but is actually much worse, if only because so many intelligent people find it irresistable as a reason for bowing out of political engagement altogether.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

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

Trailer Review: Australia

Paul Clark — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In retrospect, watching the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s latest eye-popping opus on YouTube probably wasn’t the ideal way to experience it for the first time. Which would probably explain why I wasn’t as bowled over by this trailer as I probably should have been. But them’s the breaks, as they say. Still, there’s enough here to get excited about, even on the small screen. Since the rise to prominence of Australian cinema back in the 1970s, Aussie actors and filmmakers have made their mark on Hollywood, and if nothing else Australia is notable as that nation’s grandest, most ambitious cinematic vision to date. To say nothing of the cavalcade of homegrown stars on display, beginning with Hugh Jackman and naturalized Oz resident Nicole Kidman, who’s rarely better than when she’s working with Luhrmann. The only thing I’m worried about is that Luhrmann’s images will be swallowed up in his hyperkinetic editing like they were in Moulin Rouge! But even if the trailer refuses to let our eyes drink in the gorgeousness for as long as they’d like to, this still looks like a must-see.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Plastic surgery is a good metaphor for CGI (a.k.a. "computer-generated imagery"): it works best when you’re least aware of it, adding value without calling attention to its glaring, unnatural fakery. A little and you’re marveling at the natural, age-appropriate sexiness of Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep, wondering “did she or didn’t she?” with regard to nips, tucks and nose jobs. Too much, and you’re recoiling in horror at that freakish Cat Lady lady, gasping in shock over missing noses and airbag lips, or wondering why Nicole Kidman keeps wearing that creepy Nicole Kidman mask.

Hollywood has developed an unhealthy addiction to both plastic surgery and CGI, preferring the obviously fake to the convincingly real, whether in the form of grotesquely disproportionate rock-hard breasticles or pixilated atrocities like Speed Racer, the cinematic equivalent of watching other people's birthday brats play video games at Chuck E. Cheese for an endless 135 minutes.

Did Jar-Jar Binks teach us nothing? Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer a little special in my special effects: cinematic images that make me go, “Oh my God, how’d they do that?” rather than, “Dude, that reminds me of this awesome World of Warcraft battle I just posted on YouTube!”

If you’re one of the CGI addicted who think all non-pixelated movie effects are inherently “cheesy,” consider the following clips an intervention as we here at the Screengrab present five examples of amazing movie moments that had (almost) nothing to do with computer-generated imagery.

Just about any Buster Keaton movie

See that car falling apart while Buster Keaton is driving it? See the front of that house falling and nearly crushing him? See that bridge collapsing with the train on it? All that shit actually happened in real life, not in post-production!

The Road Warrior

Why are high speed car chases with actual cars (and trucks and motorcycles and gyrocopters) better than computerized car action? Gee, I don’t know...maybe the same reason sex with an actual human being is better than internet porn?

The Thing (1982)

Sure, the shape-shifting alien action in John Carpenter’s The Thing may look as fake and unbelievable as CGI...but the viscous, tactile ooze has an icky, organic quality that's very hard to duplicate in the shiny world of greenscreen ones and zeroes.

Altered States

CGI scenes all tend to have a similar look, not unlike the legions of aging Hollywood starlets sporting “trout pout” and Spitting Image puppet faces after one too many visits to the neighborhood Botox dispensary. Directors and special effects coordinators forced to get a little more creative, however, may come up with distinctive, fucked-up and memorable images like those found in this one-of-a-kind Ken Russell phantasmagoria.

Star Wars

And speaking of tactile...one word: models. The star destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars (along with all the nooks and crannies of all the ships in 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien) were and remain more iconic and dramatic than all the CGI pod-racers, Naboo royal cruisers or Trade Federation frigates the computers at Skywalker Ranch have ever rendered.

Don’t get me wrong. CGI has achieved some amazing things: the bullet-time sequences in The Matrix, Gollum and that buck naked Angelina Jolie in Beowulf. But enough is enough, people. It’s time for Hollywood to go cold turkey.

For the betterment of all humanity...CGI Must Die.

The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, Part 1

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

With a few notable exceptions, the elaborate main title sequence has gone the way of the drive-in double feature. In fact, many of today’s movies eschew opening credits altogether, opting to plunge the audience directly into the experience and saving the who-did-whats for last. There’s something to be said for that, but we feel a vital part of the moviegoing experience is being neglected, whether it’s the establishment of tone or mood, or just a playful visual riff on the film’s themes. Join us now for a journey of sight and sound we like to call The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History.

PSYCHO (1960)

If you only know the name of one title designer- and chances are you do- the designer would almost certainly be Saul Bass. Before Bass came on the scene, the opening titles of films were mostly utilitarian, occasionally interesting to look at but primarily a way to honor the studio's obligations to the principal cast and crew. But this began to change after Bass was hired by Otto Preminger to design the opening credits to The Man With the Golden Arm, with his cutout-style animation working in tandem with Elmer Bernstein's score to create a title sequence that's arguably as good as the film that follows. Bass went on to work with Preminger numerous times, as well as filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Robert Wise, and later, Martin Scorsese. But for our money, Bass was never better than when designing titles for Alfred Hitchcock, which he did on three occasions. Any of these (the other two being Vertigo and North by Northwest) would be a worthy entry for this list, but we're going with their final collaboration, 1960's Psycho. For one thing, it's the most deceptively simple of Bass' classic output, with little more than white titles on a black background occasionally shoved aside by grey bars. A perfect rhythmic match to Bernard Herrmann's legendary score, Bass' titles are a classic case of "less is more"- a more complex animation might have given the game away, but Bass preserves the mystery of what is to come while still managing to set the tone for the film before we even see a frame shot by Hitchcock. And this was Bass' greatest breakthrough, to take what was once considered an overture to the feature film and turn it into an organic element of the movie itself.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)

Few people involved in the making of A Hard Day's Night had particularly high expectations for its quality. The producers of the film intended it to be a cash-in on Beatlemania, which they then believed would be short-lived, and its potential took a backseat in their minds to that of a tie-in soundtrack album. However, from the legendary opening chord it was clear to audiences that A Hard Day's Night was much more than a quickie B-movie. Somehow, director Richard Lester had taken the budgetary limits that were placed on him by the money men and flipped them around to his aesthetic advantage. Except for the priceless comic dialogue, everything that makes the film great is in evidence during the opening credits. The black-and-white camera work, intended as a cost-cutting measure, gives the film a scruffy documentary feel, never more so than during the opening titles when the Beatles are mobbed and chased through the streets by actual fans. The sense of humor that permeates the film makes multiple appearances here, as when band manager Norm, for no good reason, struggles with a container of milk. But the most revolutionary element of these credits is the way Lester and editor John Jympson cut the sequence to the rhythm of the title tune, creating an early ancestor to the modern-day music video. As much as they (and the film itself, for that matter) have been imitated and parodied since its release, the original titles for A Hard Day's Night still elicit the same amount of infectious glee they did more than four decades ago.

GOLDFINGER (1964)

The Screengrab legal department has informed us that the inclusion of at least one James Bond title sequence is mandatory on a list such as this, and after careful consideration, we realized there was really only one choice. First of all, Shirley Bassey’s rendition of the title track is clearly the greatest of all 007 theme songs, despite what you Duran Duran fans think. Secondly, although Maurice Binder is justly praised for his many groovy Bond openings, it was graphic designer Robert Brownjohn who established the template of projecting images from the film onto the semi-nude bodies of lovely young ladies, an achievement we rank just below the discovery of the polio vaccine. In this case, of course, those semi-nude bodies are tinted gold, the crowning touch that pushes this one over the top.

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Some observers, looking on Stanley Kubrick's body of work, have concluded that the man who made HAL 9000 a movie star must have been a misanthrope. But maybe it was just that he loved machines so much that he had little affection left over to bestow on human beings. Consider Dr. Strangelove, a film in which there is no trace of romance and little human warmth, and in which sex is a mysterious offscreen force that makes men in the war room snigger in anticipation of post-apocalyptic orgies and that compels the director to show us George C. Scott in open shirt and shorts. But then there is, at the very opening, that entrancing aerial ballet, with the military jets appearing to get it on, while music that suggests a romantic ballad is heard accompanying the credits. In its way, it may be the last real love scene that Kubrick ever shot. In his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, he tried to generate the same kind of heat with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman standing in for the airplanes, and the fact that he was not fully successful may prove that Scientologists are partly human after all. Or maybe it just proves that there are machines and then there are machines.

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Early in Sam Peckinpah's bloody Western masterpiece, there is a sequence, involving a shoot out between two factions (the outlaw gang of the title and the equally heedless, heartless "law men" on their trail) that lays waste to the town's main street, that (among other things) serves notice to the audience that this is not your father's cowboy movie. In order to minimize the number of paying customers who died of massive coronaries during the film's first fifteen minutes, it behooved Peckinpah and his collaborators to prepare viewers as best they could by making with the ominousness. This sequence--with the credits flashing onscreen as the images of the Bunch making their way into town keep freezing and turning to black and white, like cloud formations designed to signal that anyone who sees them had best build themselves an ark--do the trick nicely. No small degree of credit should go to Jerry Fielding, whose music sets a tone both lyrically elegaic and deeply scary. And the concluding freeze frame of William Holden declaiming the line, "If they move--kill 'em!" as that leading candidate for most beautiful four-word phrase in the English language, "Directed by Sam Peckinpah", appears alongside his head, is both a great in-joke and a heartening declaration of personal responsibility on the part of the artist.

SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE (1978)

“You will believe a man can fly,” said the famous tagline of Hollywood’s first big-budget superhero movie. We didn’t, quite – the movie had innumerable problems, and while it set a precedent for movies based on comic books to be profitable and even worth watching, it should be remembered more for being the first than anything like the best. But if there was one moment when it reached perfection, it was its opening credit sequence. A testament to the power of simplicity, the credits beautifully conjured the eternal four-color appeal of comic books by giving us nothing more or less than a simple backdrop of stars (occasionally broken up by something – a nebula? A muscled arm? A fluttering cape?) and the cast and crew of the movie rushing past us in a glorious and understated conjuration of classic comic book cover design. Having already brought together the perfect visual elements, the filmmakers go us one better – and cement Superman’s status as having one of the great credit sequences of all time – by hiring John Towner Williams to produce what is arguably his finest main theme. Williams’ compositions are all too often obvious and overbearing, but here, the triumphant but never aggressive or clamorous tone of the Superman theme fit the mood perfectly. Williams, despite having one of the most storied careers of any film composer, never again managed to so quite so exactly capture the feel of a film in its main title; Hollywood legend has it that, upon hearing it for the first time, producer Alexander Salkind bellowed to him “You’ve saved my movie!”

- Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Read Part 2 of this feature

DVD Digest for January 29, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week finds more titles from the late-summer/early-fall dumping ground coming to DVD, but a handful of gems as well.

DVD of the Week: In a slow week for classics on DVD, the most noteworthy new title is Seth Gordon's documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (New Line). I wasn't allowed to have a video game system growing up, and because of this I often had to sit patiently on my friends' couches while they would finish up the games they were in the process of playing on their Super Nintendos or Sega Genesises (Genesi?) when I showed up. As such, I wasn't exactly eager to see two hours of competitive gaming, but The King of Kong quickly won me over. At heart, it's an unlikely sports documentary, with all of the drama and unforgettable characters that genre's best films contain. As the movie morphs into a de facto showdown by the reigning champ, the showboating gaming legend Billy Mitchell, and the good-guy challenger Steve Wiebe, Kong becomes uncommonly involving. Little wonder that Hollywood wants to turn the story into a feature film, but why wait for the fictional interpretation when you can see the genuine article?

It's a big week for flms that premiered at Sundance 2007, with other notable new releases this week including: Spellbound director Jeffrey Blitz's debate-themed indie Rocket Science (HBO); John August's The Nines (Sony), starring Ryan Reynolds and Hope Davis; and the terrorism-themed horror film Right at Your Door (Lionsgate). In addition, this week sees the release of the Kevin Kline sex-trafficking thriller Trade (Lionsgate), the J.Lo-produced Feel the Noise (Sony), and the direct-to-DVD offerings Canvas (Universal) and Charm School (Sony). And if you're a glutton for punishment, check out Cuba Gooding Jr. in Daddy Day Camp (Sony, also on Blu-Ray), a sequel so dire that Eddie Murphy opted out of it.

TV shows coming to DVD this week: Glenn Close in Season 1 of Damages (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO), and Emergency! Season 4 (Universal). The only major classic films coming to DVD are El Cid, getting released in two separate editions by the Weinsteins, and the obligatory 15th Anniversary cash-grab edition of Groundhog Day, coming out just in time for... well, you know.

Finally, there's the strange case of Warner's The Invasion. The Nicole Kidman-starring SF flop was originally scheduled to be released three weeks ago, but after Warner decided to commit solely to Blu-Ray, the film's release was delayed until this week. So if those of you who read my column of January 8 (thanks, by the way) wondered why The Invasion wasn't in stock at your local video store, now you know.

The Cliffs Notes to Tom Cruise

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Juliet Lapidos offers a handy rundown of "the good parts" in Andrew Morton's new unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise. From the sound of it, the book's focus is on the same two damn subjects that Cruise-related gossip has always centered on: his sexual orientation and his devotion to Scientology. To the thumping disappointment of millions, Morton seems to have found nothing but evidence that Cruise is heterosexual. He even offers testimony that the guy is homophobic, which if true is...well, pretty damn funny, really, since he has to listen to the same rumors as the rest of us. Based on the anecdotes that Morton offers about Cruise's romantic life, you may wonder if people started getting the idea that he must be putting on some kind of an act because, rather than acting on instinct, he works from notes that he made on the courtship process based on his close textual reading of Archie comics. The Tomcat likes to make out in cars and subjects his favored ladies with unholy barrages of long-stemmed roses and love notes, until they have only two options: give in or, like Sofia Vergara, freak out at all the over-attention and slip away through the fire exit while Top Gun is on the phone to the florist again.

Eventually, in the course of this grand narrative, Cruise converts to Scientology and is finally inducted into the deepest secrets of the universe, which are reserved for the eyes and ears of those who have proven themselves worthy of receiving the ultmate gospel of L. Ron Hubbard. According to Morton, church father David Miscavige may have misjudged Cruise's readiness to, as Jack Nicholson once put it, handle the truth: "Tom found the knowledge he had just received disturbing and alarming, as he struggled to reconcile the creationist myth with the more practical teachings contained in the lower levels of Scientology. … It was recalled that around this time relations became 'ugly' between David Miscavige and the Hollywood actor, Tom complaining that he had studied all these years and the whole faith was about space aliens." (All this may lend an intriguing new subtext to The War of the Worlds.) Earlier, under Miscavige's orders, a "team of twenty Sea Org disciples was set to work digging, hoeing, and planting wheat grass and wildflower seed near the Cruises' bungalow. Former Scientologist Maureen Bolstad recalled working until early in the morning in the mud and pouring rain," all so that Cruise and Nicole Kidman could realize their shared "fantasy of running through a meadow of wildflowers together." This was the point where my own faith in Cruise's heterosexuality began to flag, since I find it hard to believe that any straight man would have a fantasy like that. But then I realized that I was being small-minded; I can't really picture any gay men, or hardly any women, having that fantasy either. It could be that Morton missed his real scoop, which, if this story is true, would seem to be that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are actually a couple of eight-year-old girls.

For more Scientology weirdness, check out Dana Goodyear's recent New Yorker article about the church's "Celebrity Centre", a seven-story, turreted castle, originally built as a "a long-term residential hotel for movie stars", where celebrity church members are encouraged to check in for weeks at a time and concentrate on their study of church teachings. It doesn't have much about Tom Cruise in it, but it does have a terrifying description of the annual Christmas variety show, where this year someone took note of cast member Jenna Elfman's last name and took it to the terribly logical extreme.

Citizen Cruise

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In her final, book-length interview with Francis Davis, the late film critic Pauline Kael lamented that entertainment reporters were always wrting about John Travolta as if he were stupid. When Davis suggested that this might have something to do with Travolta's devotion to Scientology, Kael said that nobody seemed to have the same problem with Tom Cruise. That was then and this is now, and the furor over Andrew Morton's forthcoming unauthorized biography of the brainmaster behind Days of Thunder is shaping up to be all about the Scientology association that has done some much in recent years to type Cruise as a towering weirdo in the public eye and may be on the verge of derailing his career. Once upon a time, gossipy speculation about Cruise (and threats from his lawyers regarding same) tended to be all about his sexuality. Now they tend to be about whether it's true that he is the "defacto second-in-charge" of the "religion" and whether his choice of Katie Holmes to be his zombie bride (over such proposed candidates as Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, and Kate Bosworth) was the result of internal negotiations with his Scientologist brethren.

Morton, who made his name serving as confidante and tell-all author to then-Princess Diana (producing a book that became a bargaining chip in the public relations war surrounding the royal divorce) and Monica Lewinsky; he's also written "unauthorized" bios about Madonna and the Beckhams, and reportedly claims that Cruise's current to-do list includes a high-pressure campaign to bring David Beckham to Scientology. He also claims that Nicole Kidman has kept mum about the church since her divorce from Cruise for fear that she would be prevented from seeing the two children she and Cruise adopted together. For his own part, there have been reports that Morton himself has been keeping a low profile for fear of violent reprisals from the Scientology Mafia. Cruise's attorneys have poo-poohed such talk and concentrated on making with the legal threats against the book's publisher, St. Martin's Press. As for Cruise himself, his lawyer Bertram Fields will say only that "He has no intention of reading it." It would seem to be implicit in this statement that for Cruise to pass up a chance to read about himself is no small gesture.

Morning Deal Report: Upgrades and Downgrades

Peter Smith — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:50:00 GMT

Hayden Christensen to play lead role in Neuromancer? Yikes. I've heard stories about Christensen getting in brawls with heckling Star Wars fanboys. At least William Gibson fans probably aren't wielding prop lightsabers.

Kate Winslet replaces a pregnant Nicole Kidman in Stephen Daldry's The Reader. She was apparently the original choice for the role, so that's cool.

The brainiest videogame of the year by all accounts was Bioshock, a spook show set in a mostly-abandoned, subaquatic utopian colony. Now rumor suggests a film version may be on the way.

Making Movies, Singing Songs, and Tanking 'Round the World

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Forbes magazine has crunched the numbers and concluded that the most overpaid star in Hollywood — literally, in terms of how much she’s paid as it compares to how much good her presence onscreen seems to do her movies at the box office—-is Nicole Kidman. What’s that, you say? The talented and discerning star of Cold Mountain, The Human Stain, Eyes Wide Shut, Bewitched, The Interpreter, Fur, The Invasion, Birth, The Stepford Wives, overpaid? David Thomson can’t imagine how anyone could entertain such a churlish notion, but apparently if you run the numbers by someone who can count, it turns out that Big Red’s movies have been earning the studios a return of about eight bucks for every dollar she’s been getting paid--and Kidman got paid fifteen million dollars for her most recent release, The Golden Compass, a fantastically expensive movie intended to serve as the platform for a franchise, though it's proven such a disappointment that it may be lucky to inspire a direct-to-video sequel. She does show a better return than her countryman Russell Crowe, who earned the studios five dollars for every dollar he was paid on such ironically titled duds as Cinderella Man and A Good Year. But Crowe, who maintains a less slavish work schedule than Kidman, has lashed himself to fewer anchors in the last few years, and his current hit, American Gangster, is doing so well, even before the home-video revenues have started rolling in, that much will be forgiven. The usual response to this kind of talk from a star's camp is that a star can only do so much with the material he or she has to work with, and anyway, do you think that a movie like Fur would have done kickass business if it hadn't had Kidman's frosty mug on the poster? In the meantime, as Forbes notes, the golden boy of the moment in Hollywood is Judd Apatow, who’s been behind two modestly budgeted major hits (Knocked Up and Superbad) that didn’t have any stars at all and may have a third before the year is over if Walk Hard with John C. Reilly opens big. Of course, one reason that Apatow’s starless pictures make so much money, even after being subjected to the surreal rigors of Hollywood accounting, is that his budgets aren’t inflated from having to pay one actor fifteen to twenty million dollars right off the bat.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov