The Screengrab : peter sellers

Many Happy Returns, and a Couple of Not-So-Happy Ones: Vin Diesel and the Movie Brotherhood of Those Who Have Come Crawling Back

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It actually wasn't that long ago that Vin Diesel was being touted as a potentially major, breakout star, capable of both carrying a commercial genre movie (Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious) and lending a hand to more nuanced dramatic roles (Boiler Room). It probably feels like a long enough time ago to Diesel, which presumably accounts for his presence in the new Fast & Furious. In 2003, Diesel explained his absence from the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious by saying that he had one foot in three movies--Pitch Black, a lively little B movie that led to the far more expensive sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, and the extreme-007 movie XXX, as well as The Fast and the Furious--with serious franchise potential, and rather then spread himself too thin, he had to decide which two were likeliest to be the most successful in the long term. Five years after Riddick belly-flopped and the failure of the XXX sequel, in which Diesel wound up being replaced by Ice Cube, it's no small wonder that he wants a do-over. (In between the two Fast/Furious films co-starring Diesel and Paul Walker, there was a Diesel-free sequel starring Walker and a Walker-free third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to which Diesel contributed a cameo. The new movie basically reconstitutes the cast of the first film--reuniting Diesel with Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster--making it somewhere between a remake, a sequel, and a "reboot.") Given the dismissive, somewhat lordly attitude that the amply franchised Diesel once showed towards the role of hot-car king Dominic Toretto, it would only make sense for him to have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, given the reception that Diesel has gotten for the movies he's made since XXX and Riddick--The Pacifier, Find Me Guilty, and the disowned-by-its-own-director Babylon A.D.--he might just be happy to be somewhere he's wanted.

He can, at least, take comfort in knowing that he's not the only movie actor ever to take stock of his own career and concluded that his best move might be to hit the "reset" button. In fact, he's practically part of a long tradition:

Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau

Sellers was set on the path to living legend status in England by his work on The Goon Show, and his appearances in such British comedies as I'm All Right, Jack, The Smallest Show on Earth, The Wrong Arm of the Law, and Only Two Can Play and the Stanley Kubrick films Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) made him a favorite in the United States with the art-house audience. But it was his creation of the bumbling French police detective Clouseau in Blake Edwards's 1963 The Pink Panther that put him across with the mass audience. In that movie, Sellers was a supporting player to the top-billed David Niven, and he only landed the role because Peter Ustinov dropped out days before he was to begin filming. But so much of the movie's enormous success was so clearly the result of the slapstick aplomb that Sellers brought to his thinly written part that Edwards brought him back to star as Clouseau in 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Although this was the movie that introduced the actors and characters who would become the standard Clouseau supporting cast--including Herbert Lom as Clouseau's seething, tic-ridden boss Dreyfus (who would here establish a pattern of trying to kill Clouseau after the detective's incompetence had driven him to hysterical madness) and Bert Kwouk as Clouseau's houseboy Kato--the script was actually based on a Broadway play that had in turn been based on a French play by Marcel Archard, called L'Idiot. The screenwriters, Edwards and William Peter Blatty, simply inserted the Clouseau character into the comic-murder mystery set-up, and allowed Sellers to go to town with it. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is that, by casting the delectable Elke Sommer as a ditsy heroine in need of a savior--she plays a woman who's been falsely accused of murder--Edwards actually managed to turn Clouseau into a romantic hero while intensifying his physical and mental incompetence.

A Shot in the Dark, the only Clouseau film that doesn't have the character's name or a reference to the Pink Panther in the title, was probably the funniest of all the Edwards-Sellers collaborations(including the non-Clouseau The Party), and perhaps they should have folded Clouseau up and filed him away after that. So far as Sellers was concerned at the time, that's just what they were going to do, and when United Artists wanted to bring the character back in 1968, they had to make do with Alan Arkin for the ill-fated Inspector Clouseau. But by 1975, Sellers had suffered through an unrelenting string of flops that he later described as "my bad patch", and Edwards had gone down in flames with the big-budget disaster Darling Lili (1970) and a string of smaller but no more successful films. They paddled back to safe land with the 1975 The Return of the Pink Panther, in which Sellers adopted the costume style that Arkin had used in his one turn as the character and introduced the rubbery, incomprehensible accent that some French critics would never forgive him for. Sellers would dutifuly report for work on The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and then The Curse of the Pink Panther (1978), only those with calloused eyeballs could fail to see that this accomplished actor wasn't exactly thrilled to be going through the same old paces again and again. The prodigiously imaginative Sellers was trapped in a role that had gotten smaller over time; no longer a layered if farcical character, the Clousesu of the later films is simply a dolt who is consistently wrong about everything and keeps falling over things yet somehow manages to end in triumph. Yet Sellers was also a famously insecure man who seems to have decided that only as Clouseau could he still star in hit movies. When Sellers died in the summer of 1980, just months after racking up an Academy Award nomination and a Time magazine cover story for his starring role in Being There, he was preparing to reprise the role yet again for The Romance of the Pink Panther. Edwards, who seemed ready to sap the tree until the whole forest was gone, managed to squeeze out one last Sellers-as-Clouseau film--Trail of the Pink Panther, released two years after Sellers's death--using old clips and previously unseen footage, before moving on to such dubious replacements as Ted Wass and Robert Benigni.

Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates

The role of Norman Bates, motel manager, taxidermist, and mother's boy, took Perkins's movie career to another level, but it also got him typecast playing villains and loonies, which became more of a problem as the gifted, intelligent actor's style became more mannered and self-consciously neurosthenic over the years. His leading man days seemed to be over for good when Universal Pictures declared its interest in making a sequel to Psycho with Perkins reprising his role. Directed by the late Richard Franklin (Road Games, Cloak & Dagger), the movie had no input from Robert Bloch, who created the character or Norman in his original novel (and who cashed in on the publicity by writing his own Psycho II novel), nor from Joseph Stefano, who adapted it for the screenplay, and Alfred Hitchcock had been dead for two years. Perkins himself turned down the offer when it was first presented to him, but then, after it became clear that the studio intended to go ahead with or without him, but with another actor playing Norman, he began to feel proprietorial about his best-known role. When you consider that the movie was always going to be something of a travesty, the finished product isn't that awful. In the most effective moments, Franklin had the grace to play the violent set pieces--which include a climactic scene involving a woman who identifies herself as Norman's real mother and a well-timed blow to the head with a shovel--as black slapstick comedy, treating what everyone in the audience knows about Norman's past and his proclivities as a shared dirty joke.

The movie was given a handsome promotional campaign that aimed to tap into nostalgic fans of the original while also reaching out to younger moviegoers who were advised that Norman Bates was the granddaddy of such slasher-movie icons as the boogeymen of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the end, Psycho II, the movie whose title suggested a Saturday Night Live spoof, was a big enough hit that the studio wanted more. And once Perkins had played Norman again, he couldn't seem to get him out of his system. He not only agreed to return for Psycho III (1986), but he also signed on to use it as his movie directing debut. Pyscho III, which began with a sequence that almost could have passed as the opening of Vertigo II and ended with Norman once again headed for the nutbin, was in turn followed by Psycho IV: The Beginning, a 1990 cable TV film, written by Joseph Stefano, in which Perkins co-starred with E.T.'s playmate, Henry Thomas, as the young Norman, and Olivia Hussey, twenty-two yeara after she'd starred in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, as Norman's mother. The film ended with the birth of Norman's son, who may or may not carry the hereditary psycho-killer gene, setting up the potential for a "Norman, Jr." franchise that has yet to be realized. Perkins died in 1992, six years before Gus Van Sant's official (and infamous) "shot-by-shot" remake starring a glassy-eyed and miscast Vince Vaughan as Norman.

Sean Connery/James Bond

Connery renounced and returned to the role that made him a star on two separate occasions. After Connery sat out On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the sixth film in the official Bond franchise, United artists lured him back for the 1971 Diamonds Are Forever with a deal that included a wheelbarrow full of money and the studio's agreeing to finance The Offense, a movie Connery wanted to make with director Sidney Lumet. Connery's performance in Diamonds is probably the best-acted Bond of his career, but so much of what surrounded him in the movie was tacky and played-out that he must have left the set feeling confirmed in his decision to leave the role of Bond to whoever wanted him. So it was a shock when it as announced, thirteen years later, that the now 53-year-old Connery had agreed to return the role. Hitting the interview circuit, Connery coyly insisted that he'd always said that he'd be happy to do another Bond film if he was presented with a wow of a script, and he also hinted that the new movie would make great, subversive use of his advanced age.

In fact, the new film Never Say Never Again, had its roots not in a brilliant screenplay with a daring new take on the character but in the conclusion of a legal battle between the producer Kevin McClory and the producers of the Bond franchise, which left McClory with the remake rights to Thunderball. The resulting film is mostly a tired action flick that looks as if the director, Irvin Kershner (whose 1966 A Fine Madness boasts one of the best of Connery's early performances), hadn't recharged since his previous job, The Empire Strikes Back. Connery moves through it gamely, despite being subjected to such indignities as an ill-fitting hairpiece and a glaring edit where you can see him disappear from the frame and a stunt double reappear in his place. Under the circumstances, he seems understandably happy to leave the film to be stolen by the actors playing the villains, Klaus Maria Brandaeur and Barbara Carrera. Originally, plans were announced to release the movie in the summer so that it could go head to head against the latest "real" Bond movie starring Roger Moore, Octopussy. In the end, the studio blinked, and Never Say Never Again opened later in the fall. Despite its lack of sparkle, it was a huge hit. At this stage in his career, four years away from his Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables, Connery was pretty much bulletproof, and his decision to break his vow, and his having so little to show for it, did his reputation no real harm. Presumably he walked away feeling that the project was worth doing so long as it had succeeded in its real mission--i.e., to give the Bond franchise owners who he felt had underpaid him throughout the '60s a little agita.

Not all unexpected reunions in movies are between actors and characters. Some are between actors and directors, such as the infamously difficult relationship between Henry Hathaway and Dennis Hopper. Early in Hopper's career, Hathaway cast him in his 1958 Western From Hell to Texas. Then in 1966, he used him again in the John Wayne picture The Sons of Katie Elder. In a story that became legendary after Hopper repeated it again to interviewers during his post-Blue Velvet comeback, Hopper was reluctant to give a particular line reading that the director was insistent on, so Hathaway had Hopper do take after take until the broken actor finally did just as he was told--after which Hathaway declared his intention to have the already shaky actor driven out of the business. Three years later, Hathaway hired Hopper for a small but memorable part in True Grit, the movie that would win Wayne an Academy Award for Best Actor. Hopper has speculated that Hathaway decided to make this magnanimous gesture because Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Margaret Sullavan and the producer Leland Hayward, and thought that the young man deserved to be given the chance to support his new family. If anything like that did go through Hathaway's mind, the joke was on him: Hopper had been using his time off from banging on casting office doors to get his own directorial debut made. The movie, Easy Rider, which made it clear that there was a wide audience for a "youth cinema" that identified itself as part of the counterculture, was released in the summer of 1969, the same time that True Grit was playing to audiences who saw it as an antidote to new-fangled ideas and strobe-happy trip sequences. Both movies established themselves as zeitgeist hits and cleaned up, but Hopper and Hayward's marriage wouldn't survive to the end of that year.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

CLORIS LEACHMAN AS FRAU BLÜCHER & GENE HACKMAN AS THE BLIND MAN IN YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

April Fool! Uh...by which I mean I apparently miscounted, and there are actually 38 great comedic performances on this list instead of 35 -- (it's been that kind of week) -- but I couldn’t bring myself to skip two of the funniest characters in the history of cinema (especially now that we know the actors who portrayed them were bonin’). Indeed, the topical bonin’ reference is pretty much the main reason I decided to single just Leach and Hack out from Young Frankenstein's perfect storm ensemble (including Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn and Peter Boyle). But as great as all the rest of the cast may be, I have to admit, Gene Hackman’s cameo in Brooks' horror parody is one of those magical movie moments that literally makes me laugh every single goddamn time I see it...and while some may be suffering from Leachman fatigue after the performer’s stint on Dancing With The Stars, I’ll always love the lady for going on TV and shaking her badonkadonk a year after being told she was “too old” to reprise her role as Frau Blücher (insert horse whinny) in the Broadway adaptation of Brooks' film. Or, as Lisa Timmons posted at Socialite Life: “...by God, if she wants to die by acting her ass off on...Broadway, then get the heck out of her way, I say. It's like refusing to let a cowboy die with his boots on. Blasphemy.” To which I say: amen, sister. (AO)

GEORGE C. SCOTT AS GENERAL BUCK TURGIDSON IN DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Not to take anything away from Peter Sellers – who played three roles in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black nuclear holocaust comedy and played them to perfection – but the best comic performance in the movie came from George C. Scott, an actor not normally known for his comedic roles. And, in fact, Kubrick had to trick him into the performance: Scott was encouraged to play way over the top in what he thought were piss-takes, but which Kubrick ended up using in the film. Scott was furious and reportedly vowed not to work with the director again, but it’s that supremely hysterical overacting that sells the role. Writer Terry Southern specialized in creating authority figures whose behavior was entirely inappropriate to their station, and no one fits that role better than Turgidson: allegedly patterned on gung-ho anti-communist General Curtis LeMay, Buck seems completely incapable of treating the imminent nuclear exchange seriously. He fields calls from his mistress, starts fistfights with the Soviet ambassador, and displays a childishly enthusiastic pride at the possibility that one of his damaged planes will bust through Russian radar and trigger a doomsday bomb. Scott’s wild enthusiasm actually leads him to topple ass over teakettle in one scene, a happy accident that perfectly fits his character’s role as an egomaniacal child who has been placed in charge of unthinkable power. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTONIO FARGAS AS THE ARAB IN PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)

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

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

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

ZERO MOSTEL AS MAX BIALYSTOCK IN THE PRODUCERS (1968)

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

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

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, the other day, my lovely Polish bride was attending a work function at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, when she looked up and saw a tall, craggy guy dressed in camouflage, surrounded by a gaggle of teenage sons, and suddenly realized she was face-to-face with none other than Bill Ghostbustin’ Ass Murray...

...April Fool!

Oh...no, wait...that actually happened...and, indeed, America’s annual Day of Pranks is blessedly over for another year...yet considering we already kicked off the month with a salute to fools, and considering Entertainment Weekly just ran a big, page-wasting spread on the Greatest Heroes and Villains of All Time, your pals here at the Screengrab figured now would be as good a time as any to salute our real heroes...the Comic Relief.

Now, of course, the second we started compiling this list, we realized we’d undoubtedly forget at least two worthy choices for every name we picked...so feel free to remind us who we missed down below in the Comments section, and mayhaps we’ll run a Reader’s Choice list of faves at some future date. But in the meantime, please to enjoy our picks for THE 35 FUNNIEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME!

DANNY KAYE AS HUBERT HAWKINS IN THE COURT JESTER (1955)

Most people know that comedy isn’t pretty, but it need not necessarily be mean. Consider the career of Danny Kaye -- in his heyday, one of the biggest draws in Hollywood, not only because he was funny but also because he was so darn likable. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his most enduring movie, The Court Jester -- a film so benignly hilarious that it’s equally enjoyable for children and cinephiles. Taking his cue from the Technicolor swashbucklers of yore, Kaye throws himself into the role of the hapless resistance fighter-turned-jester with a childlike glee, even during the Errol Flynn-esque sword fights. But he’s at his best when engaging in his trademark wordplay. Who can forget the famous "pellet with the poison" exchange? Even better is the extended "Maladjusted Jester" number, in which Kaye, playing a hapless carnival performer-turned-freedom fighter masquerading as the "king of jesters and jester of kings" (long story), gets his chance to entertain the court. The story is put on hold while Kaye sings, dances, and jokes -- a risky move, because if the scene doesn’t work, the movie has nothing to do but stand… "and stand… and staaaaaaaaand…" Thankfully, it’s brilliant, thanks primarily to Kaye’s formidable talents and, it must be said, his innate likability. It’s this latter quality that makes the film work even today: at plenty of times during the film, Hubert has the option of resorting to violence or devious tactics, but that would be out of character for Kaye, so he must come up with more creative (and humorous) alternatives. It’s rare to find a movie that’ll make one smile throughout even between the laughs, but The Court Jester fits the bill perfectly. (PC)

PETER SELLERS AS INSPECTOR JACQUES CLOUSEAU IN A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)

Every year, the legend of the Pink Panther films gets a little more tarnished. The endless remakes and reboots, the franchise sequels Steve Martin cranks out when he wants to restock his wine cellar, and the fact that they were never great pieces of cinema in the first place all conspire to rob the original Blake Edwards films of their magic, year after year. But lest we forget, the Pink Panther movies, as poorly as they have aged, were a showcase for the comedic talents of Peter Sellers, and in this film – the best of the series by a mile – it’s easy to see why he was once considered the funniest man in the world. What’s made the Clouseau character last is that Sellers made him a vehicle for so many types of comedy: gross physical slapstick, outrageous (for the time) sexual gags, wordplay, linguistic tomfoolery, broad ethnic comedy, improvisational brilliance, and even the odd subtle character moment. No comedian alive at the time could so deftly blend all those elements into a single character, and no one has been able to do it since, which is why the latter-day films, even starring as they do a once-gifted comic like Martin, are such a travesty. As if all that’s not enough, consider that Sellers made A Shot in the Dark in the same year that he did Dr. Strangelove! That’s a one-two punch that proves that there was literally no type of comedy he couldn’t make completely his own. (LP)

JOHN BELUSHI AS BLUTO IN ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)

Some might say "Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life." Happily others beg to differ. The loose cannon and gross-out pre-med under-acheiver John "Bluto" Blutarski is John Belushi at his slovenly best. He's that guy you kind of hate for being obtuse, but love for providing a breath of fresh air in pretentious situations like college, work and life. Bluto is the dispenser of such pearls of wisdom as "My advice to you is to start drinking heavily." Also, who can forget the crashing apart of the black & white reconciliation float in the homecoming parade? There would be no Animal House without Belushi's cherubic moron with a heart of gold (and stand-up ethics). (SCS)

ALYSON HANNIGAN AS MICHELLE FLAHERTY IN AMERICAN PIE (1999)

Hannigan, had already spent two years using Buffy the Vampire Slayer as her delivery system for the message that sexy dorks rule the universe, before jumping at the chance to really put that idea across here. Popping her words like gum and making "Like you have a shot at anyone else!" sound like a siren's love lyric, she instantly created a generation of men who will die empty and unfulfilled if they never meet a friendly-seeming bookish geek who's just biding her time until the moment is right to slap them across the face and scream, "Say my name, bitch!" Her absence from movies since then, except for an American Pie sequel or three and the even sorrier Date Movie, has been a real sore spot for some of us, made no easier to take by the possibility it raises that she might just be too happy at home with that wimp bastard she married to be seeking out work. Out of respect for her personal happiness, some of us have refrained from attempting to murder her spouse, even though we suspect that she'd look adorable in black. Enjoy motherhood, sugar britches. (PN)

SACHA BARON COHEN AS BORAT IN BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Overexposed? Sure. Mimicked to death? Definitely. Still one of the decade’s most iconic and consistently hilarious lunatics? Without question. Sasha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani journalist made his stateside debut on HBO’s Da Ali G Show in 2003 but came to national prominence with Larry Cohen’s 2006 hit, in which he traveled across America “learning” about the country while searching for his dream girl, Pamela Anderson. Posing as the inappropriate Borat amidst real people supposedly not in on the joke, Cohen pokes, prods and enrages citizens in an attempt to reveal something humorously honest about their patience, prejudices and standards of propriety. The social critique provided by Borat’s discomfiting gags, however, never takes precedence over the outrageous hilarity of his scenarios. Whether convincing an all-too-willing group of Southern bar patrons to sing along to “Throw the Jew Down the Well” on HBO, or engaging in a nude hotel wrestling match with his obese sidekick Azamat (Ken Davitian) in Borat, Cohen’s faux-reporter is a preeminent absurdist prankster whose comedy is best summed up by his own catchphrase: Is Nice!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

See It First: A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Nick Schager — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Every week, new films come out. But are you, dear Screengrab readers, ready for them? In this weekly column, I'll be offering up an old-school film recommendation to prepare you for the big screen’s latest and – hopefully – greatest.

This week, anyone interested in buying what The Pink Panther 2 is selling – which, from the looks of things, is Steve Martin's overripe French accent, lots of lame pratfalls, and a bunch of formerly respectable thesps slumming it for an easy payday (Jeremy Irons, what’s become of you?) – will first want to become acquainted with 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Despite being the second of Blake Edwards' Pink Panther films, it’s the first in which comedian par excellence Peter Sellers – relegated to second fiddle in the original, more generic The Pink Panther – was unquestionably front and center. Freewheeling and ridiculous, and featuring not only a great Sellers performance but a borderline-brilliant turn by Herbert Lom as Clouseau’s increasingly exasperated and twitchy superior, it’s a superior sequel that, despite the absence of a substantial plot, an opening animated sequence featuring the titular cat, and even the series' signature theme song, remains a brisk, cheery model of slapstick nonsense and droll wit.

Enjoy this tease, and then fire up that Netflix (fast!)

DVD Digest for February 3, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a whole mess of “classic” movies flood the DVD market, which is good, since the recent releases coming out this week aren't all that impressive.

Heading up the classics crop is the Being There 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray). The good news is that the Blu-Ray disc will contain a number of intriguing special features, including an alternate ending. The bad news is that most of these features aren’t going to be on the standard DVD, so if you don’t have Blu-Ray, you’re sort of stuck. Still, definitely a movie that should be part of any good movie lover’s collection, no matter what form. And speaking of Peter Sellers movies, this week also brings the Peter Sellers 5-Film Collection (Lionsgate), which includes I’m All Right, Jack!, The Smallest Show on Earth, Carlton-Browne of the F.O., Two-Way Stretch, and Heavens Above!. Likewise, there’s a similar box set devoted to the work of Sellers’ mentor Alec Guinness- Alec Guinness 5-Film Collection (Lionsgate)- includes The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, The Captain’s Paradise, and The Ladykillers (a rather better selection than the Sellers set, I’d say).

More classics being released this week: Yentl Extended Director’s Edition (MGM), now featuring 30% more Streisand close-ups; the musical phenomenon RENT: Filmed Live on Broadway (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Friday the 13th, Parts 1-3, Uncut Deluxe Editions (Paramount, Part 1 also Blu-Ray), to tie in with the upcoming remake; the animated family film Oliver & Company 20th Anniversary Edition (Disney); John Carpenter’s wicked awesome Assault on Precinct 13 Restored Collector’s Edition (Image, also Blu-Ray); Richard Donner’s Inside Moves (Lionsgate); and the enticingly titled Silverado Single-Disc Version (Sony). Finally, Sony is releasing their second wave of their “Martini Movies” series, with this week’s releases being Getting Straight, Our Man in Havana, Five, Vibes, and Gumshoe.

On the recent releases, this week brings Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products, also Blu-Ray); Michael Cera in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah in The Secret Life of Bees (Fox, also Blu-Ray); the wine-centric comedy Bottle Shock (Fox); and Everybody Wants to Be Italian (Lionsgate), the movie that tries to prove that, uh, everybody wants to be Italian. Also, this week brings the long awaited release of Private Valentine: Blonde and Dangerous (Sony), yet another failed attempt at movie stardom by Jessica Simpson. After all, if you want to be a big-screen star, it helps if your movies actually get released in theatres.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include Bewitched Season 7 (Sony), Colombo Mystery Movie Collection: 1990 (Universal), and The Partridge Family Season 4 (Sony).

Finally, Fox is unloading four comedy favorites on Blu-Ray this week: Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, Office Space, and Sideways.

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE IS THANKFUL FOR:

BARTON FINK (1991)

It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself agreeing with the French, and it wouldn’t be the last. But when this richly layered film by the Coen Brothers swept the major awards at Cannes, it was, for me, a confirmation that what I had only previously suspected was indeed true: Joel and Ethan Coen were not just good directors, not just great directors, but the greatest living American filmmakers. Barton Fink, to this day, is not one of the Coens’ best-loved films; it tends to be very divisive, and while its greatness isn’t frequently in question, where it belongs in their filmography is hotly disputed. For me, even in the wake of later triumphs like Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men, it seems obvious that it’s one of their greatest movies, and likely their best altogether. For a movie that was apparently scratched out during the making of Miller’s Crossing to help the Coens overcome a bad case of writer’s block, it’s astonishingly deep and complex, a deft blend of satirical comedy, character-driven drama and existential horror that seems all along to be about one thing and ends up being very profoundly about another. Not even The Big Lebowski equals Barton Fink as an evocation of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and its intricate, dreadful set design surpasses anything the Coens have ever done. And to top it all off, it’s one of the few cinematic evocations of the process of writing that isn’t an embarrassment. The day I saw Barton Fink is the day I finally realized that the greatness of Hollywood films wasn’t a thing of the past: it was something I was living through.

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

One of the marks of a truly great film is that it seems you can never find enough things to say about it. Sitting down to write this, I wondered what I could mention about The Big Sleep that I hadn’t already talked about a hundred times; but now, I realize I could write a hundred pages about it and still not even begin to cover all the things worth discussing. Although everyone involved with this imperishable hardboiled detective yarn was at the top of their game, its greatness is largely the work of four geniuses at the absolute peak of their powers: the brilliant pulp novelist Raymond Chandler, who provided the source material about Philip Marlowe’s foray into pornography, blackmail and murder; the great novelist William Faulkner, who was brought on to write the unforgettable screenplay and who added his own raffish twists; the consummate professional, director Howard Hawks, who filmed one of the tightest movies of the era; and actor Humphrey Bogart, who cemented his role as perhaps the greatest leading man of all time with his utterly wonderful performance as Marlowe. Every single set piece in the film works perfectly; it’s a testament to how well the movie succeeds that whenever someone brings up the fact that the plot has a massive hole in it, it’s only to say that it doesn’t really matter one whit. The movie is drenched in L.A. atmosphere despite its back lot settings, and not a single performance is a dud: Bogart and lead actress Lauren Bacall got all the attention, but everyone, from the hired goons to the butler, shines during their moments on camera. Often identified as the father-film of the golden age of noir, I’d argue that The Big Sleep is lacking a few key elements of my favorite cinematic genre, but it does contain enough of them that it kick-started my interest in crime dramas; and maybe it’s a good thing that it’s not pure noir. If it was, it would have no competition.

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove did a lot for me. It was one of the first movies of my color-charged adolescence that taught me how to appreciate the virtues of filming in black and white. It was my first introduction to the work of the savagely funny Terry Southern, whose ultra-black absurdist humor, and whose underlying premise that people in high places were like as not entirely insane, would be a huge influence on my later life. It was my second encounter, after The Shining, with the great Stanley Kubrick, who I am still convinced is even more brilliant than he is generally given credit for, and that’s considerable. But most of all, what it did for me was to convince me of something that, up until then, I had not believed, and that even now, in my darker moments, I suspect might not be the case: it convinced me that a funny movie could also be a great movie. I had always had an affinity for comic writing, especially of the variety as poisonous and coal-black as that found in this Cold War apocalyptic comedy, but I was also learning to appreciate great art, and I so rarely found the two within shouting distance of one another that I started to despair. The truly great, I decided, and the truly funny, were incompatible, and I’d have to make a choice. Luckily, Dr. Strangelove came around and showed me how wrong I was. It is unquestionably a great film: brilliantly structured, astonishingly well-filmed, crammed full of great performances, and featuring a few set pieces (the first shots of the War Room, in particular, and the breathtaking hand-held shots of the invasion of Burpelson Air Force Base) that are undoubtedly the work of a great filmmaker. But it is also a paralyzingly funny movie, and the telephone conversation between Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley and the unseen Soviet premier may be the most hilarious scene I’ve ever encountered.

PERSONA (1966)

Just before I saw Persona for the first time, I was starting to get worried about myself. My taste in movies ran decidedly towards rugged genre work, and there was something unsettlingly dude-ish about my attraction to films about murderers and lowlifes. And I didn’t quite understand what great acting really was; I tended to confuse character with acting, and I often mistook dynamic presence for talent, not realizing they are two substantially different things. What’s more, my attempts at appreciating Ingmar Bergman had been pretty thoroughly jobbed. Sitting in a small theatre in Phoenix in 1993, though, changed all those things. Persona, which today I count as one of the very tiny number of movies I’d contemplate if asked to name my all-time favorite films, was a quiet, sinuous film whose significant emotional power came entirely from within instead of being generated by external threats. Its acting was explosively great, and yet so subtle and calm as to be nearly invisible; it taught me the value of reaction, of contemplation, and of silence to great acting. It showed me what Bergman was truly trying to do, and allowed me to finally appreciate him for what he was; and, beyond that, it proved to me, in the same way Dr. Strangelove had proven that comedy and genius were not incompatible, that a movie could be deeply, intrinsically philosophical and not be pretentious, preachy or incomprehensible. Genre film never really relinquished its hold on me, and I later figured out how to look far enough below the surface that I could see depth when there had seemed only to be tension; but that’s a lesson I never would have learned if it weren’t for Persona.

WAVELENGTH (1967)

“Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses never happened,” asked the Scottish experimental writer B.S. Johnson, “and still rely on the crutch of storytelling?” It’s a question I’d learned to ask of literature, but until I lucked into a screening of Michael Snow’s daring structuralist masterpiece Wavelength in college, I had not yet learned to ask it of film. Every movie on my list, I included because I’m thankful that it introduced me to some new element of filmmaking that hugely enriched my life as a viewer. In the case of Wavelength, it’s simply stated: it taught me that there was such a thing as experimental film. That alone opened up huge new vistas for me, and led me to great filmmakers like Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Chris Marker, and, especially, Stan Brakhage. Wavelength itself is quite a curiosity, even decades after its debut: a 45-minute tracking shot across a New York loft, accompanied by disjointed conversation, hints of a murder, an atonal whine, the final and unending terminal focus on a photo of the ocean. It straddles the border between narrative and non-narrative while opening up huge possibilities for visual poetry, the freeing of the camera from spatial limitations and traditional usages, and the nature of time in this most time-based medium. Prints of Wavelength are hard to come by, and often as not in terrible condition; it would be wonderful if America treated Snow (who filmed Wavelength here) as well as he’s regarded in his native Canada.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

OST: "The Pink Panther"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film. In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come. Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants: a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers. While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed. It's not Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch. Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration. He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention. Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound. If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese. He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

While the soundtrack to The Pink Panther is a mighty fine listen on its own -- cue it up at your next swingin' bachelor pad party and offer everone a round of pink squirrels, you wannabe -- it works best in the context of the film, where, as a unified whole, the combination of music and visual creates an absolutely perfect evocation of Europe at the tail end of the Swingin' Sixties. Listening to it in full, as the immediately remembered but somehow never overworn main theme swings its way into your soul, lets you forget about what comes next and remember the days when Peter Sellers was young, alive and full of prome, Henry Mancini wasn't a shadow of his former self grinding out TV hackwork for the paychekc, and Blake Edwards actually knew how to direct funny movies. Doesn't seem that long ago now, does it?

BEST TRACKS: Of course, "The Pink Panther Theme" -- signifying on screen the appearance not of Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but of David Niven's infamous jewel thief, the Phantom -- is one of the certified classics of cinema soundtracks. Its slow, sinister build into a rip-roaring lounge jazz number is unforgettable from the first time you hear it, and seems to lose not an ounce from repetition. But there's more here than just that famous number: take a listen for "Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)", a swinging vocal number with a Continental feel written for young starlet Fran Jeffries, which went on to be a big hit for crooner (and frequent Mancini collaborator) Johnny Mercer. There's also the oddly named "Shades of Sennett", a rollicking piano number used in the movie's final chase number, that conjures British comedies and American honky-tonk blues -- but rarely the silent movie era it seems to predict in the title!

Related Posts:

OST: Fight Club

OST: Blade Runner

Summer of '78: "Revenge of the Pink Panther"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78! I’ve been on vacation, so this week we’re catching up on the past few Thursdays.

Revenge of the Pink Panther

Release Date: July 19, 1978

Cast: Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Dyan Cannon, Burt Kwouk, Robert Loggia

The Buzz: Peter Sellers returns for the final time (sort of) as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau.

Keywords: Sequel, Clouseau, Farce, Transvestite, Clothes Blown Off, Farting Scene, Dominatrix

The Plot: In an effort to prove he has not lost his killer instinct, the head of the French Connection orders the assassination of France’s greatest detective, Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The “beum” fails to kill Clouseau, although the world believes he is dead. Former Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is released from the insane asylum and is reinstated to head the investigation into Clouseau’s death. (This is a minor continuity error, as Dreyfus had been disintegrated by his own doomsday machine in The Pink Panther Strikes Again, but let’s not split hairs.) With the assistance of his faithful man-servant Cato (Burt Kwouk), Clouseau goes undercover in a variety of disguises in order to solve the mystery himself. In the course of his investigation, Clouseau stumbles upon French Connection boss Douvier's former mistress Simone Legree (Dyan Cannon), who informs the great detective that her ex-lover is the would-be assassin. Together they pursue Douvier to Hong Kong (with Sellers in an offensive buck-teeth-and-coolie-hat combo), with Dreyfus – now convinced Clouseau is still alive – hot on their heels. A tour-de-farce chase ensues, or at least that’s the plan.

The Test of Time: In the pre-Jaws portion of my movie-going life, my favorite movies included Snoopy Come Home, Herbie Rides Again and The Return of the Pink Panther. For this I do not apologize. The fact that I was still eagerly anticipating new Pink Panther movies as late as 1978 may be a bit more shameful, but at the time I didn’t realize Peter Sellers was a comic genius wasting his little remaining precious time on slapdash Blake Edwards slapstick. (He did waste time on even worse things, of course.) The series had grown increasingly cartoonish over time and was virtually a live-action version of the Road Runner by this point, which would be fine except that I can’t help but notice this one isn’t very funny. It’s painfully clear that Sellers was on the sidelines when most of his pratfalls were performed, and he’s scraping the bottom of his barrel of humorous disguises and hilarious voices. (OK, the inflatable parrot on his shoulder during his “sea captain” routine made me chuckle.) When Clouseau ends up in drag being whipped by a dominatrix, it’s not nearly the outrageous spectacle Edwards seems to think, and that pretty much sets the tone for this subpar outing. Naming a character Balls is not really a sign that you have any. No, Edwards only proved he had enormous, senseless balls after Peter Sellers’ death, when he kept cranking out Pink Panther movies. The ones starring Roberto Benigni and the immortal Ted Wass were bad enough, but there was nothing sadder than Trail of the Pink Panther, made up of Sellers outtakes and ending with a Sellers stand-in being shit on by a seagull. By contrast, Revenge is a comic masterpiece.

Quotable Quote: “When you have been killed as many times as I have, you get used to it, believe me.”

2008 Equivalent: Tragically, it’s Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther 2.

Previously on Summer of '78: The Swarm

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Peter Sellers, THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980)

Peter Sellers (arguably) got away with heavy lids and mangled diction in his portrayal of the Charlie Chan-esque detective Sidney Wang in Neil Simon’s 1976 murder mystery spoof Murder By Death partly because the performance matched the film’s smart, silly, good-natured tone: Wang was likeable and sophisticated rather than the butt of, y’know, a bunch of sophomoric “wang” jokes, and what racial humor there was tended to satirize Hollywood’s portrayal of Asians more than making fun of actual Asians (“Moose on wall talk!” Wang says at one point, prompting the exasperated response, “THE moose! THE moose! Say your goddamned articles!”). Unfortunately, Sellers’ portrayal of Sax Rohmer’s controversial master criminal Fu Manchu a few years later was nowhere near as smart or successful, featuring brain-dead groaners like the following lyrics to Manchu’s climactic glam rock number (don’t ask): “The cops they tell you I ain’t nice, the Fu knows how to fry the rice.” Making Sellers’ depressingly bad final performance even more ignominious, though, is the fact that, without Fu Manchu, the legendary comedian’s last film would have been the far more fitting career zenith, Being There. (Although, either way, the actor’s reputation still would have suffered the final ignominy of 2004’s bizarrely overpraised HBO hatchet job The Life and Death of Peter Sellers).

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in THE CANNONBALL RUN II (1984)

Neither Frank Sinatra nor Dean Martin was primarily known for his film work, but both made their mark. Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity, and Dino won accolades for his role in Rio Bravo. Their Rat Pack movies like Ocean's 11 and Robin and the Seven Hoods were popular successes if not particularly memorable films, but the quasi-Rat Pack flick Some Came Running represents the high-water mark for both ring-a-ding-dingers as actors. If it had ended there, no complaints. Sadly, Burt Reynolds succeeded Frank and Dean as ringleader of the next generation of Rat Packers, and coerced both (along with cohort Sammy Davis, Jr.) into The Cannonball Run II, perhaps the laziest big screen version of Hollywood Squares ever conceived. How lazy? The actual cross-country race was animated by Ralph Bakshi, while Sinatra's scene with Reynolds was clearly shot on two different continents in two different decades. As for Martin's "I'm not really drunk, I'm just pretending to be drunk" performance, let us not even speculate. Both made appearances on TV subsequent to Cannonball II, but cameos on Magnum PI did nothing to rectify this sad cinematic end.

Veronica Lake in FLESH FEAST (1970)

Never a great actress but one of the indelible beauties of '40s Hollywood, Veronica Lake -- she of the blonde peek-a-boo hairdo and world-weary kewpie doll face -- vanished into tabloid infamy and then total obscurity after her peak of wartime fame but managed a small, brief comeback in the late 1960s when nobody was looking. The 1966 Canadian film Footsteps in the Snow was her first movie in fifteen years, and one year later she starred in the mega-low budget horror film Flesh Feast, which wasn't released until 1970, three years before her death. (Presumably it took the producers that long to collect enough change digging under the couch cushions of friends and family members before they had enough saved up to get the film developed.) Lake, her distinctive looks now a fond memory and her acting chops still at the beginners' stage, plays a mad scientist who has developed a youth-restoring technique that involves the application of flesh-eating maggots. The members of the local chapter of the Unrepentant Old Nazis Party employ her to help them regenerate der Fuhrer, little knowing that Dr. Lake lost her family to the Nazis and she is actually looking to have Hitler strapped to her surgical table so that she can give him a good talking-to. The climactic face-off between these two raises the question of whose shame is greater: the once iconic Hollywood star who has sunk to the level of flinging maggots in the face of an actor pretending to be Hitler, or an actor whose career reached its high point when he got maggots flung in his face by a Hollywood has-been?

James Cagney in TERRIBLE JOE MORAN (1984)

James Cagney had been retired from acting for twenty years when he agreed to join the large, distinguished cast of 1981's Ragtime. As New York Police Commissioner Waldo, Cagney looked stumplike and was largely immobile, but he also had the old fire in his eyes to set off his wry half-smile and dandy period mustache, and managed to bark out his lines with gratifying professional force. Plans were made to take advantage of Cagney's new willingness to perform by starring him in a TV movie in which he would play an aging New York boxer. A script was custom-tailored to the old star, clips of the young Cagney (taken from boxing pictures he had made decades earlier) were interwoven to create some nostalgic poignance, and an ace supporting cast (counting solid pro Art Carney and up-and-comers Ellen Barkin and Peter Gallagher, if not local cameo hog Edward I. Koch) were brought in, seduced with the promise of working with a legend. But by the time the film went into production, Cagney's health had declined, to such a degree that he looked miserably pained and unhappy even for a man in a wheelchair. In fact, Cagney was in such bad shape that he couldn't always deliver his lines audibly, so someone had the bright idea of bringing in night club impressionist Rich Little to dub his lines for him. The upshot is that Cagney's "final role" amounts to footage of a dying man being wheeled around the set while listening to someone do his best Jimmy Cagney imitation. Cagney's old co-star Pat O'Brien, who also appeared in Ragtime, reportedly urged the legend to return to acting by telling him, "Do it, Cagney. It's medicine." But Terrible Joe Moran makes you wonder if sometimes the cure isn't worse than the disease.

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

America The Dissonant: Seven Movies That Send Mixed Messages About U.S.

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Last week, because it was the 4th of July and because we’re such red-blooded, flag-lapel-pin-wearing patriots, we here at the Screengrab celebrated some of our all-time favorite Pro-America movies. And the week before that, because we’re also dirty rotten elitist commie pinkos, we focused on movies that dared to criticize the American Empire. And now, to complete our nationalist trifecta, we examine a third type of film: movies that are designed to make the U.S. look kick-ass, but actually wind up making us look kinda lame-ass.

THE PATRIOT (2000)

That great American Roland Emmerich first treated us to his overblown brand of Fourth of July fireworks in Independence Day, but that little-seen arthouse curiosity is covered later in the list. In The Patriot, Emmerich jumps back in time a couple hundred years to show us the true meaning of Independence Day. Which is, of course, the kicking of major British ass. Mel Gibson plays a wealthy southern landowner with no slaves who goes all Mad Max 1776 when the redcoats burn down his house and kill various members of his family. Arming his two youngest boys with rifles and himself with as many guns, knives and hatchets as he can carry, Gibson sets out to liberate his oldest son from the Brits who have seized him. The ensuing slaughter is shockingly savage for a summer popcorn flick, and for a moment you think the movie might actually be interested in exploring some areas of moral ambiguity. The moment passes. Emmerich isn't interested in any of the actual root causes of the Revolution; this world-changing event serves as mere window-dressing for a routine revenge thriller – an excuse for some flag-waving rah-rah to jack up the stakes and make The Patriot seem like it's about something.

COBRA (1986)

A perennial plank in every political campaign is law & order; no matter how low the statistics actually get, voters rank crime as one of their top concerns in every public opinion poll. Unfortunately, the law & order platform usually has an ugly side, and this movie couldn’t have been a more jaw-dropping cautionary tale about the dangers of a brutally empowered police force if it was actually trying to be. In 1986, post-Rambo and at the peak of his popularity, Sylvester Stallone starred in and wrote the screenplay to Cobra, in which he played the black-clad, submachinegun-toting police officer Marion Cobretti, opposing a shadowy outfit called the New Order, who you might think wanted to play gloomy, depressing post-punk songs at everyone in America, but in fact were even worse: they wanted to overthrow democracy and institute the rule of the strong over the weak. Deciding to beat them at their own game, Cobretti simply cruises around Los Angeles, dressed like a gay Nazi biker and, dispensing with democratic fripperies like due process and prohibitions against cruelty, simply massacres every criminal unlucky enough to wander into his sights. Torturing, burning, gutting, and gunning down dozens of people throughout the course of the movie, Stallone managed to alienate even some of his die-hard fans: while the movie made decent money and temporarily knocked Top Gun out of the #1 slot, a decent number of filmgoers as well as critics found its vision of law & order America as a place where the cops acted as little more than roving death squads pretty repugnant.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola, debuting Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival, famously said, “My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam.” And like Vietnam, it is something too sprawling, too massive, too chaotic and complicated to be assessed in a few simple sentences. At turns it seems heartily pro-war and virulently anti-war; it conveys the insanity of the entire interventionist approach while still seeming to lay the blame on soft, coddled grunts and incompetent civilians. This inherent contradiction isn’t just circumstantial: it arises from the fundamental clash of worldviews between the director and the screenwriter. John Milius, the writer of the original script, meant it to be simultaneously a rebuke to what he perceived as the weakness and unrealistic expectations of anti-war protestors and a celebration of the virtues of the warrior spirit. Much of this approach survives in the finished film, especially in the diffident portrayal of Colonel Kurtz, who at times seems more heroic than insane. Meanwhile, director Francis Ford Coppola meant for Apocalypse Now to be a straightforward adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, with American anti-Communism taking the place of Belgian colonialism and Kurtz portrayed as a murderous madman. In the end, the movie, meant by one of its creators to be a celebration of the American intervention in Vietnam and another to be a condemnation of same, attains a terrifyingly uneasy balance between the two. After the torturous production of the movie had finished, Coppola said, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” Much the same could be said about America in Vietnam.

RED DAWN (1984)

And speaking of John Milius...the aforementioned screenwriter directed this Reagan-era blood-wet dream (based on a story co-written with Kevin Reynolds) about a Russian invasion of Middle America (or, as many conservatives prefer to think of it, America), complete with terrifying imagery of the Golden Arches obscured by Soviet paratroopers...oh, the humanity! How evil are Milius’ commies? So evil that, shortly after landing in a field outside a high school in Calumet, Colorado, their very first order of business is to machine-gun an unarmed black teacher (nice touch, John) who wanders outside to see what’s going on. Because, y’know, that’s how commies roll: no algebra for you, capitalist pig-dogs! Forget attacking military bases or other strategic targets: this U.S.S.R. knows the best way to cripple Yankee morale is to cut off our access to fast food and varsity sports! Fortunately, the popular jocks of Calumet High know where to find guns and ammo in bulk, and before you can say “Second Amendment,” their one-time football team, the Wolverines, has transformed into a crack guerilla group of...um...insurgents, willing to engage in extreme acts of ultra-violence to drive the foreign superpower from their land. Probably best not to think too deeply about how the story would be different if the town under siege were, say, Tikrit, or if the Colorado teenagers with easy access to automatic weapons were nerds instead of jocks and the high school was in neighboring Columbine. In Milius’ world, the good guys are joyless, soulless killing machines, the bad guys are joyless, soulless killing machines in different uniforms (and, thus, bad) and violence is the only answer. WOLVERINES!!!!!!

THE CAINE MUTINY (1954)

The film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s wildly popular 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny was a mess. Wouk had been contracted to write the screenplay himself, but was fired after turning in a script that was over four hours long; difficulties in casting plagued the production, which also went highly overbudget; and director Edward Dmytryk felt that Columbia Pictures kept too tight a rein on him and didn’t let him make the movie he wanted to make. In addition, there was a great deal of political pressure on the production; in order to secure the Navy’s cooperation in making the picture, the studio had given all sorts of assurances that no one would be made to look bad, and with anti-Communist fever sweeping Hollywood and the American public much less certain about the Korean War than it had been about WWII, everyone was walking on glass to make sure the story, about a mutiny aboard a minesweeping ship commanded by the unstable, paranoid Captain Queeg, didn’t come across as too anti-military. All of these factors and more contributed to the uncomfortable ending of the film: after the mutineers are acquitted by a court-martial tribunal following a dramatic meltdown on the stand by Queeg himself, their defense attorney turns on them, calling them goldbrickers, cowards and gutless wonders. He saves most of his rancor for the cynical intellectual Lt. Keefer, who he accuses of having masterminded the entire situation just because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. The whole thing ends up ringing rather hollow, both dramatically and philosophically, and defuses the rest of the movie’s far more interesting conflict (one’s duty in wartime balanced against the malfeasance of one’s commanding officer) for a simple-minded pasty, sneaky egghead vs. upstanding macho man one. For a movie that sets itself the task of questioning the meaning of honor and duty to end up claiming it’s better to follow a deranged lunatic into battle than listen to some smart-ass college boy does no service to the military tradition it goes to such lengths to protect.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Appropriately enough, I first saw this movie on July 4th weekend, in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was killing time waiting for the Olympic Village to be finished. There wasn't much to do, so to get out of the heat until the Braves game started, I ducked into a theater that was screening this Roland Emmerich atrocity. What stuck with me over the years isn't so much its incompetence or its bombast – it's really no worse than any number of other alien-invasion flicks, and it's been outdone dozens of times since then in sheer alienating volume – but its coldhearted determination to ruthlessly exploit every noxious Hollywood stereotype in existence. In a movie which purports to be patriotic, from its name right down to its 'fightin' president' character, it instead turns out to be jingoistic, as the nations of the world are helpless to do a thing against marauding extraterrestrials until the good-hearted Yanks do what they've done since the Great War: pull their foreign fat out of the fire. Aside from the horrendous stereotypes embodied in the main cast (including Will Smith as a wisecracking fighter pilot, Randy Quaid as a crazy kook no one believes, Vivica Fox as a hooker with a heart of gold, Margaret Colin as a bitchy career woman, Brent Spiner as a misguided intellectual, Harvey Fierstein as a mincing queen, and Judd Hirsch as a Jewish caricature so odiferous its only competition comes from Julius Streicher cartoons), there's also the astonishing montages that occur when the alien motherships are disabled: African tribesmen hoot and holler, waving spears (!) around and looking as if they accidentally left home without the bones in their noses, and gibberish-spouting, kaffiyeh-clad Arabs ululating mindlessly, unable to even make themselves understood until a helpful white man gets on the blower to explain the situation to his American brethren. What purports to be a feel-good action blockbuster, more than ten years later, now plays like a cartoon of the invincible ignorance of American foreign policy.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

In the Year of Our Lord 1994, there was no middle ground in America: you were either Pro-Gump or Pulp-ist. You either looked at life as a box of chocolates or as an overpriced Martin & Lewis milkshake. And if you were the kind of gal who dressed as Mrs. Mia Wallace with a hypo full of adrenalin sticking out of your breastplate or the kind of guy who dressed like Jules or Vincent in a skinny tie and black suit jacket that year for Halloween, then you probably weren’t all that surprised when the groundbreaking instant classic Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Oscar to the revisionist history of the sixties and seventies where all the peace-loving hippies were fools and dupes who never accomplished anything but their own self-destruction and the good-natured dimwit who accepts the status quo at face value is rewarded with happiness and, of course, obscene wealth. Unlike Being There, which used Peter Sellers’ blank-slate gardener, Chance, to satirize the willful, self-reflexive gullibility of the American people, Robert Zemeckis’ insidiously reactionary comedy pretends to celebrate simple American values while actually championing the type of anti-intellectual, head-in-the-sand, cross-your-fingers-and-hope-you-win-the-lottery malaise that led to eight years of the recent Voldemort administration and (egad) the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Related Stories: America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S., America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S.

Trailer Review: The Pink Panther 2 (teaser)

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

After more than three decades in the business, you’d think Steve Martin would have a better idea of his strengths and weaknesses as an actor. For example, he’s generally excelled at playing normal-seeming guys who try (and generally fail) to maintain their composure, as well as people who aren’t as smart as they think they are. One thing that’s for sure is that two Pink Panther movies still haven’t made him any good at being a more kid-friendly Peter Sellers. Once again, Martin seems to take the vaguely Frrrrrrrrrranch ack-sont as an excuse to turn Clouseau into a character who almost willfully gets into mischief, when Sellers’ immortal incarnation was deadly serious about going about his work, even while working well above his mental pay grade. Of course, this teaser shows nothing from the movie, but then it shows us everything we need to know- the third-rate slapstick, the kid-friendly antics, and Martin, once again getting everything all wrong.

Take Five: Gotta Get A Guru

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru. But let's face it: Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent. Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us.

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons: first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

CANDY (1968)

This big-screen adaptation of the Mason Hoffenberg novel (actually the infamous Terry Southern writing under a pseudonym) is generally regarded as a major failure. It's not that there weren't talented people involved -- besides Southern himself, and his co-writer Buck Henry, the cast is crammed with fine actors -- but the entire film seems to go off the rails from the very start. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't plenty of bizarre treats for those with the energy to sit through it. This updating of Voltaire's Candide is purely Southern in the sense that authority figures are always portrayed as phony, venal, and couching some grotesque habits or appetites. In this instance, we're treated to the the sight of the monstrour Grindl -- a sex-crazed Hindu guru played by an overheated Marlon Brando -- putting the poor, put-upon Candy in yet another compromising position.

THE PARTY (1968)

All right, so technically, Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi ("That is what my name is called") in the Blake Edwards farce The Party isn't a guru. (That title more rightly belongs to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Sellers in 1979's Being There.) But he is Indian, sort of, and he does speak in Hindi platitudes that those around him mistake for pearls of inscrutable eastern wisdom. For example, when asked who he thinks he is, he responds, "In India, we do not think who we are. We know who we are." Whoa, heavy. The rest of the movie is pretty much straight-up Blake Edwards comic fare, and it falls flat on the stereotypes at times, but a few scenes are still paralytically funny forty years later, especially when a stoned Bakshi comes across a parakeet cage and solemnly intones the name of the birdseed: "Birdy Num Num."

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

In this stunning, surreal, and nearly incomprehensible masterpiece by ultimate provocatuer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guru is Horacio Salinas, a Christlike thief who is half savior and half mountebank. Under the tutelage of the Alchemist, a mysterious figure played by Jodorowsky himself, he and his gang of mystical banditos -- each named for a different celestial body -- plan nothing less than an assault on Heaven, where they will depose the reigning gods and take their places. Visually, this is exactly the sort of film people talk about when they talk about crazy European art films: it's bewildering, deliberately offensive, totally impenetrable, and weird for the sake of being weird. It's also absolutely brilliant, and Jodorowsky -- who's the real guru here -- shows us what it might be like inside the mind of the truly enlightened -- and it alternately makes us gasp at its beauty and scares the hell out of us.

HOLY SMOKE (1999)

Jane Campion's weirdest movie -- which, if you think about it, is really saying something -- features the always-engaging Kate Winslet in the role of a young woman who decides to embark on a quest for spiritual self-discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Along the way, she encounters the guru Chiddaatman Baba (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) and falls under his sway -- and that's just where the movie begins. From there, she is confronted by Harvey Keitel as a deprogrammer -- sorry, "cult exiter" -- hired by her family to get her back, and discovers that he's not without his own guru-like tendencies. A battle of wills, intellects and bodies ensue over the terrain of feminism, spirituality and sexuality, and the movie degenerates into a bit of a chaotic mess, but it's at least a glorious mess with two terrific actors like Keitel and Winslet at the fore.

When Movies Are Too Timely for Their Own Good

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Everybody complains that big Hollywood movies don't show enough awareness of current events, but a lot of people get just as uncomfortable when their escapist entertainments seem to be getting to close to reminding them of what they were hoping to get their minds off when they fled to the theaters. Last year, a full-blown media circus sprung up in Britain around the still-unsolved case of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl who was reported missing from the Portugal resort where she and her family were on vacation. (The case received a lot of media attention partly because the parents actively sought it out in their public calls for help in finding their daughter, which in turn attracted shout-outs from celebrities.) One side effect of the case is that Ben Affleck's cracking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which happens to deal with a murky case involving a lost little girl, had its English premiere postponed out of deferrence to sensitive feelings stirred up by the actual case. (Affleck himself has said, "We are acutely aware of the situation... we don't want to release the movie if it is going to touch a nerve or inflame anyone's sensitivities." Now, with the movie finally slipping into British theaters, Andrew Hubert does a quick run-down of other high-profile releases that had to bob and weave to keep from being overshadowed from actual events, in many cases unsuccessfully. Perhaps the most obvious forerunner to Gone Baby Gone in this department is The Good Son, which was made at a time when its star, Macaulay Culkin, was seen as having worn out his welcome as America's favorite twinkling child freak. Directed by thriller specialist Joseph Ruben from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, the movie was supposed to exploit the queasy feelings that Culkin inspired in some while easing his transformation to "real actor" by casting him as an evil child psycho. Unfortunately, by the time it was ready for theaters, a news story about a British toddler who was murdered by a couple of ten-year-olds had helped set off a wave of paranoia about killer kids. The movie was denied a theatrical release in England, and while it made it into theaters in the states, it did disappointing enough business that poor Culkin was required to paste his smile back on and star in Richie Rich.

There was also a real spate of these things in the wake of 9/11; Hubert doesn't mention Collateral Damage, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the last throes of his action movie career, played a fireman on the revenge trail after Arab terrorists blow up his family, but he does cite the over-the-top black comedy Buffalo Soldiers, which was punished for depicting members of the American military in an unflattering light at a time when hyper-patriotism was suddenly the flavor of the year. (Ironically, not long before September 11, 2001, Tim Blake Nelson's O was quietly dumped into theaters after two years on the shelf. That movie, which updates Othello to a modern high school, with Mekhi Pfifer as a basketball star dating Julia Stiles while Josh Hartnett whispers poison in his ear, reportedly freaked studio chiefs out because they saw "parallels" to Columbine in it, an unlikely enough possibility that it's worth considering that maybe they just felt like burying a movie that centered on an interracial romance. (By the time O was released, Stiles had starred in another interracial high school romance, Save the Last Dance; it was a hit, which might have helped spring O from movie jail.) Then there's Dr. Strangelove, which did manage to overcome having its first test screening on November 22, 1963. For some of us, the great modern movie mystery is: why did they cut the pie fight scene in the war room that was originally supposed to end the film? Everyone who might have some inside knowledge of that one has been asked about it, and so far as we've been able to determine, no one has ever given an answer that matched up with somebody else's. George C. Scott told a Playboy interviewer that the scene--which, as he recalled, included the line, "Gentleman, out beloved president has been struck down in the prime of life by pie! We demand merciful retaliation!"--was cut because of the Kennedy assassination. However, Terry Southern once told a Yale writing class that the real problem was that the people onscreen were smiling too broadly, because, according to writer Jeff MacGregor, they "all had too much fun hurling pies at George C. Scott." Peter Sellers once gave a long, vivid description of the scene to a Rolling Stone interviewer before explaining that "Stan" just thought it went on too long; discussing it in a documentary about the film, critic Alexander Walker insisted that the pies flew so hard and fast that "you couldn't tell what you were looking at." Always Mr. Analytical, Stanley Kubrick just insisted that he was making a "satire" and that the pie-throwing was too "farcical". Reports that Kubrick kept obsessively going back to the drawing board, and that somewhere in the vaults there are scenes of HAL 9000 hitting Keir Dullea with a pie and Private Pyle squirting the drill sergeant with his rubber carnation, remain unconfirmed.

No, But I've Read the Movie: LOLITA

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Usually, Hollywood is a tad standoffish about tackling the great novels. If they do it right, they win the admiration of critics, but risk losing the mainstream audience, who will think of their project as snooty and highbrow. If they do it wrong, people still won't go see the movie, plus the critics will turn the whole thing into a laughingstock. Producers are generally willing to let someone take a crack at one of the classics once and only once, and then only if they're an established filmmaker and there's nothing too controversial about the book. How, then, did not one but two movie versions get made of one of the most inflammatory, misunderstood and potentially dangerous books of the 21st century — a book that not only quite openly asks us to identify, to a certain degree, with an effete intellectual pederast, but which was written by one of the pioneers of postmodernism? Some might suggest that certain producers and/or directors simply jump at the chance to cast a movie starring a hot nymphet, but we are not so cynical here at the Screengrab, oh goodness no. We will not speculate how it came to pass that two high-profile film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant, subtle, subversive and daring story came to pass — one of them, by a titan of the silver screen, made less than a decade after the novel's publication and the other, by a flaky British director whose movies have always been a heartbeat away from softcore porn — and instead focus on the respective qualities of the two films.

A lot of people didn't think Lolita would ever make it to the big screen once, let alone twice. For all the pretentious, self-deluding protagonist Humbert Humbert's talk of "nymphets", he is nakedly and, for the most part, blindly and unrepentently a pederast — a dirty old man who chases after young girls and compensates for his failings by passing intellectual judgment on everyone else around him. This was, and is, considered a pretty volatile subject, even considering Hollywood's history of sexualizing young women; indeed, the tagline for the 1962 Stanley Kubrick version of Lolita was "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" Part of the answer to that is by soft-pedaling Dolores Haze's age: in the Kubrick film, she's sixteen and in the Adrian Lyne version, she's a year younger — both a level of remove from the highly uncomfortable fact that in Nabokov's novel, she's twelve. Regardless of the controversy that raged (and will probably always continue to rage) around the book, especially from people who haven't read it, Lolita is rightly considered one of the greatest books of the post-war and post-modern era. The films, however, are a touch more difficult to critically assess. Kubrick's 1962 version was well-received at the time, snaring an Oscar nomination and a handful of Golden Globe noms, but has it stood up to the test of time? Adrian Lyne's 1997 edition wasn't expected to be very good, and after a successful run overseas had a hard time finding distribution in the U.S. from controversy-shy studios until it eventually had to debut on cable. Was it better than its reputation? Let's you and me find out.

WHAT THEY HAD: Aside from being directed by a genuine master of the medium, the best thing Kubrick's Lolita had going for it was the coup it scored in getting Nabokov himself to pen the screenplay. If this didn't exactly ensure that it would remain faithful to the book (see below), it would at least ensure that the script wasn't a total wash. It was a gorgeous-looking movie, and with a couple of notable exceptions (see, again, below), the cast was top-notch, even if Peter Sellers was so overblown and overused in his role that a number of commentators (including Nabokov himself) suggested that the movie should be called Quilty. Lyne's version wasn't as assured in terms of filmmaking, largely because Adrian Lyne is worth about one and a half feet of Stanley Kubrick, but it was very stylish, and the always-terrific Jeremy Irons as Humbert was ably matched with the phenomenal Dominique Swain as Lolita. If Swain's career never let her equal this performance, she could at least be proud that she took one of the most difficult roles in modern drama and absolutely nailed it to the wall. Additionally, and to their credit, both films managed to weather the storms of controversy they met with, and although both suffered from studio interference to make the story palatable to sex-shy American tastes, neither was entirely wrecked because of it.

WHAT THEY LACKED: Kubrick's Lolita may have suffered the most; it doesn't hold up well compared to most of his other films, and at times comes across as lifeless and flat on the screen. Sue Lyons is pretty much a disaster as Lolita, having the right look but not even remotely the necessary acting chops, and Shelley Winters sometimes seems completely lost as her mother, Charlotte Haze. Studio tinkering and his own lack of familiarity with the discipline of screenwriting blunted the impact of Nabokov's script, and the whole thing, overall, comes across as one of those noble experiments that you want to like a lot more than you really do — not that it's a bad film by any means, but to call it, as some critics do, a great one is to force yourself to overlook a lot of its flaws. If Lyne's movie succeeded more on its own terms, that's only because no one expected anything out of it in the first place. It's certainly not a great film either, and not even as good a film as Kubrick's, but it didn't have the same high expectations as did a movie with Kubrick and Nabokov's names attached. Lyne wasn't lucky enough to snare Vlad as his writer, the novelist having passed away some twenty years prior, so he mistakenly assumed that if you can't get the guy who wrote Pale Fire, get the guy who wrote The Deep End of the Ocean. He also cast the merely competent Frank Langella in the role previously occupied by the resplendent Peter Sellers, and made the mistake of asking Melanie Griffith to portray a human being, something she has always had trouble with.

DID THEY SUCCEED?: Probably no version of Lolita is ever going to fully succeed; if Vladimir Nabokov himself couldn't pull it off, what chance does Adrian Lyne have? The transcendent value of the novel lies first and foremost in its rich, beautiful use of language, and second in its detailed and subtle crafting of irony; the former comes across on the screen not at all, and the latter, often, quite poorly. Lolita is a book that everyone is always constantly rushing to misinterpret, and looking at the production history of both films, that was clearly the case here; it didn't help much that, in the case of the 1997 version, the foremost misinterpreter of the book was director Adrian Lyne. He not only brought his trashy erotic-thriller sensibilities to a story that didn't need them, but he also seemed to completely miss the point of how funny Lolita is. Whether brought on by his own self-seriousness or a misguided sense of respect for the source material, that's a fatal mistake, and whatever its other flaws, it's not one that Kubrick's 1962 version made. It seems impossible that some future director will gather the courage and resources to take another crack at Lolita and avoid the pitfalls of the previous two versions, but as unlikely as it might be to think that someone will film a third version of the book, who would have ever predicted someone would film it the first time?

Trailer Review: The Love Guru

Paul Clark — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, I wrote about the trailer for Step Brothers, the latest comedy from the inconsistent but prolific Will Ferrell. By comparison, Mike Myers only makes a new film every few years — excepting voiceover work in Shrek movies, The Love Guru is his first starring vehicle since (uh oh) 2003's The Cat in the Hat. Given how much time Myers has had to develop this movie, you'd think it would look pretty funny, but alas, you'd be wrong. In this dire Indian-flavored comedy, Myers stars as the guru Pitka, an internationally-famous holy man who comes off like a cross between the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Hrundi V. Bakshi, the Peter Sellers character from The Party, though less serene than Sexy Sadie and not as funny as Mr. Birdy Num-Num. Whether he's engaging in labored physical comedy with a little person or trading quips with sworn enemy of funny Jessica Alba, it's clear that Myers has become a shade of his formerly hilarious self. Sadly, we're now stuck with the Mike Myers who never met a gag he wouldn't repeat half a dozen times, rather than the young tyro who had us (or me, anyway) gasping with his Scots rendition of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." It's a shame, really. I miss that guy.

Face/Off: Children of Men

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, permit me to bore you with one of my very earliest movie memories. My mom took me to the 1973 animated Disney version of Robin Hood, in which the title character was played, if memory serves, by a small red fox. And when this fox was asked to express his feelings towards Maid Marian, he sang out, "I love her more than life itself!" The line was, I now suspect, not wholly original, but at the time it was new to me, and it stirred me deeply. I think that from that moment on, I have lived my life in hopes of finding someone, or something, I loved more than life itself. So far, the results have been mixed, but I can truly say of Children of Men that I love it more than life itself and that the movie has in turn accepted my love gracefully and never punishing me for it by using it to make me feel stupid, small, or unworthy, which is more than I can say for certain redheads of my acquaintance.

Since there are no bad scenes in the picture, and in fact precious few that could not be pointed to as jaw-dropping evidence of its stature, it is not easy to single out one, but I will settle on the chase scene from around the middle of the movie, with Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey and Pam Ferris fleeing the farmhouse in a car that won't start, with the goonish "revolutionaries" in hot pursuit. Coming after the much-remarked earlier car-chase-shootout that the director, Alfonso Cuaron, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, labored so hard to capture in a single shot, it's hard not to see this scene as a statement on Cuaron's part: "Technology is great that I could do that, huh? Oh by the way, I can do this, too!" The terrible suspense of the scene, accomplished over what ought to be the handicap of our knowing that Owen isn't going to check out this early in the story (but wait — didn't we know that about Julianne Moore, too? For Christ's sake, push harder, Clive!), is nerve-racking testimony both to Cuaron's sheer skill and the effortless way that Owen, with his unforced audience rapport, has quietly laid claim to the viewer's emotions. It just goes on and on, a moment of horror stuck in the mire, like a nightmare that you start hating yourself for not waking up from. It's so simple it's dumbfounding that it should be so powerful — but then not everybody who ever got his hands on a camera, a car, and a half-dozen actors is in Cuaron's league. Most of them don't deserve to be regarded as being in the same profession.

Leonard, since I know you are an intelligent and honest man, I imagine that about this point you'll want to just chime in, "Yup, he's right, no way to argue with any of that," and then we can both sign off for the day.

LEONARD PIERCE: As tempting as it is to just type "you're right" and collect my fee for two-words'-worth of effort, I feel that would be a disservice to our readers, as well as to my reputation as a combative jerk. I am glad that, in Children of Men, you have found the unconditional love that is the object of all human striving. Perhaps I am a cynic, but I have given up hope of ever discovering such purity of feeling in any human endeavor outside of a bottle of gin; it is, I fear, beyond the capacity of any woman, stuffed animal or movie — and, I say with some regret, especially beyond the capacity of Children of Men. Like the cliché about political outrage, I fear that if you can't find anything to dislike in Cuarón's crowning achievement — and particularly in the car-chase-that-isn't — you just aren't looking hard enough.

On a certain level, I almost want to agree with you; there are hardly any bad scenes in the picture, provided you define 'scenes' as the big, impressive set pieces that stick in the mind after viewing it, and not the tedious and often eye-roll-inducing moments that hold those scenes together. My initial reaction on seeing the film was that it was a dozen or so individual scenes ranging from very good to absolutely brilliant, but all held together by a rickety, nonsensical plot that was amounted to little more than a series of hokey chase scenes. Six set pieces in search of a movie, you might say. And nothing seemed, on subsequent viewings, to affirm that first reaction than the farmhouse chase scene. There were scenes in Children of Men that left me breathless with their virtuosity and emotional power, but so sorely did the chase scene test the sacred principle of suspension of disbelief that if I was out of breath, it was only from heavy sighing. Having already established the later-to-be-beaten-into-the-muddy-earth point that people are often so blinded by their own interests that they will behave selfishly under the worst of circumstances, Cuarón's script now asks us to believe that the revolutionaries (I certainly can't dispute your characterization of them as goonish, though I mean it more in a Peter Sellers way than a Benito Mussolini way) are not only asinine, but supremely incompetent. The director even seems to anticipate the objection to this outlandish chase scene, establishing by a clunky bit of exposition that the armed rebels can't just open fire on the car lest they injure the pregnant Kee, a.k.a. the most important MacGuffin in the world. We're not made privy to what the disastrous consequences would be if they just shot Clive Owen, or the car tires, or just found someone who could run faster than an aging, out-of-shape reporter pushing a car through the mud, but one assumes they would be equally intolerable.

This isn't just a case of not being able to accept a film's internal logic. I'm perfectly willing to go along with the entire scenario of the movie, nebulous as it might be. But this scene is purely a case of a filmmaker having a neat idea and pushing ahead with it no matter how nonsensical it plays out on screen, just to show that he can do it. It's called shredding, and it can surely be impressive, but it's rarely noble.

At this point, my friend, there is no shame in a one-word surrender, though I sense it might take the form of "Nuts."

PHIL NUGENT: I could say that Children of Men is, like many great movies, a dream, a nightmare vision of how bad things could be based on where we are now, then leap aboard that "internal logic" qualifier and ride the sucker like Seabiscuit. But as it is, the scene in question is one that I think makes perfect sense in human terms. If it looks a little odd at first glance, I would submit that this is because even sophisticated filmgoers are so used to action scenes that derive their full measure of believable human behavior based on what happens in other movies' action scenes that they may at first be confused by seeing one in which the characters onscreen act like people. Three of them are scared out of their wits and the rest of them just discovered, at an ungodly hour, that their world is collapsing. It makes sense that the atmosphere would be a little different than in the planned murder that precedes it or confused in a different way than in the full-blown firefight that will come, when a killing fever that spreads across several city blocks inflames and emboldens the people caught up in it. Nor do I find it unlikely that the guys with the guns might not want to just blow Clive Owen's head off in front of the little mother. None of them want to do anything that might jeopardize that pregnancy, and since none of them has been on hand for one before — and had already concluded that they'd never get the chance — why is improbable or contrived that they'd choose to err on the side of caution and not subject her to a bloody trauma? It's not as if Owens's escape isn't on the order of a miracle. (Am I conceding that the happy conclusion of the scene, if not the elements that go into it, counts as an implausibility? I suppose I might be. Certain implausibilities one learns to accept, as a filmgoer, as the price of getting the movie on to the next scene.)

And I must object to your referring to Kee as a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated definition of a MacGuffin is "what the spies are after but the audience don't care." Love it or hate it, surely we can at least agree that Children of Men would not be the same movie, in either its intentions or its actual achievement, if it had been possible for the casting director to have ever said to Cuaron, "We're having trouble finding the right person to play the only pregnant woman in the world; how about we just change her to a roll of microfilm?" On the other hand, I applaud your description of the revolutionaries as being more of the Peter Sellers than the Baader-Meinhof variety. But then, I have a sneaking hunch that this might be true of most "real" self-styled revolutionary terrorists, maybe even including the real Baader-Meinhof gang.

LEONARD PIERCE: One of the reasons the chase-scene revolutionaries in Children of Men don't make sense in human terms, to me, is precisely because they (like many real-world terrorists, which is presumably a big reason why they're terrorists instead of, say, accountants) don't tend to err on the side of caution. Of course their world is collapsing — and faced with a world on the verge of collapse, people don't often react with thoughtfulness and circumspection. With the most important thing on the face of the planet slipping with painful slowness through their grasp, it's very hard to believe that the revolutionaries, especially the furious dreadlocked blond who's been looking for an excuse to blow Clive Owen's head off for half the movie, would suddenly get all overwhelmed with softness lest they upset the little mother. If they let Kee escape, the baby is as gone as if she lost it from trauma, so why take the chance? (Incidentally, the point you raise about the goons being unfamiliar with the mysteries of childbirth, to me, exacerbates the unreality of the scene rather than mitigates it; if they don't know how pregnancy works, why would they know they'd be endangering it by taking Clive out at the kneecaps?)

Beyond that, the scene seems to contradict the film's own message: it is a lamentable aspect of selfish human nature that people will behave in harmful and destructive ways even when everything around them is falling apart. This is certainly the message conveyed by the mass social unrest depicted in the rest of the film — faced with a world that may cease to exist in fifty years, people behave in the most appallingly short-sighted ways. And yet in the farm chase, shown in microcosm, the revolutionaries behave in just the opposite way. It's not the first or the last time these mixed messages appear (the presence of the baby in the movie's final quarter has a magical pacifying effect on the violent mind of man, except when it doesn't), but it's one of the most egregious, and it's frustrating — almost maddening — for those in the audience who desperately want the movie not to screw up the good will it creates with its often stunning and brilliant set pieces.

I suppose that, in the end, we have to resort back to the old cliche about the suspension of disbelief — if you really buy into the premise of a film and find yourself enjoying it, you're much more likely to forgive or even embrace the implausibilities it may throw at you. From your perspective — from the perspective of someone who loves Children of Men more than life itself — the scene is a perfect example of the sort of miracle its director can pull off, a moment that in lesser hands could have been an embarrassment, but instead works perfectly and serves to reveal some of the movie's greatest strengths and deepest truths. From my perspective — from that of someone for whom Children of Men is an ambitious failure, a collection of great scenes that never quite manage to cohere — it's just something that stays with you as a reminder of why the movie wasn't all that it should have been.

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Walter Huston as President Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)

This 1933 picture, which opened during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, was directed by Gregory La Cava, but the real driving force behind the production was William Randolph Hearst, who intended it as a primer designed to show FDR how he ought to go about solving the country's problems. President Hammond is a compromise candidate, a cynical party hack who couldn't care less about his country's citizens or its future. But then he's injured in a car accident and slips into a coma, and when he comes out of it, he's a changed man, and he rolls up his sleeves and begins to do whatever it takes to make things right. His methods include firing his whole cabinet, threatening to declare martial law until Congress lets him do whatever he wants, and having all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed. His reign of righteous terror climaxes with a scene where he gathers all the ambassadors of the world's nations onto a yacht and treats them to a show of American military power that convinces them that they have no choice but to disarm and quickly fork over the money they owe the U.S. from the first World War. Having rendered the United States prosperous, crime-free and dominant, President Hammond contentedly drops dead; the movie leaves open the possibility that he's been dead since the car crash and that his body has been serving as an earthly conduit for the Lord. FDR wound up being a disappointment to Hearst, not taking much from the Hammond playbook, but some historians think that the movie may have actually prophesied the administration of a much later American president.

Donald Pleasance as The President of the United States, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

You know, sometimes you really feel sorry for Donald Pleasance. The poor guy survived the Blitz, fought in the Second World War, and went on to become President of the United States despite the constitutional hindrance of having been born in England. And what does it get him after forty years of struggle? Some mouthy stewardess blows up Air Force One and leaves him stranded in New York (which just happens to be a maximum security penitentiary, peopled with murderers, drug lords, and assorted human scum — nothing like it is in real life, of course), where he is continually menaced by the guy who sang "Grazing in the Grass." U.S. presidents in action movies tend to break down pretty cleanly into one of two categories — the Fightin' President, who punches people and shoots down alien warships, and the Frightened President, who cowers in a corner and waits for a real tough-guy he-man to come rescue him. For most of Escape from New York's run time, Pleasance's unnamed President is decidedly the latter, and we're clearly meant to feel some degree of sympathy towards him as he awaits rescue (like Nixon, he apparently has a secret plan to end the war). Still, it's hard not to come away feeling a bit of sympathy for the terrorists — after all, the guy did turn Manhattan into a prison. Won't somebody think of the restaurants?

Terry Crews as President Camacho, IDIOCRACY (2006)

Postponed for over a year before getting a blink-and-you-missed-it release last fall, Mike Judge's cult-classic-in-the-making imagined a future in which the morons have inherited the Earth. In a world where Starbucks sells both lattes and handjobs and crops are watered with Brawndo™ Energy Drinks, it only makes sense that the President of the United States would be a trash-talking, hard-partying ex-porn star and five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion. President Camacho, played with great comic relish by ex-NFL defensive lineman Terry Crews, is the kind of fearless leader who sports a tank top and American-flag warmup pants at Presidential functions, brandishes a machine gun during his State of the Union address, and rides a four-wheeler everywhere he goes, national security be damned. But his actual leadership skills are limited to making the country's smartest man his new Secretary of the Interior and tasking him to solve the nation's famine problem in one week, or else he'll get thrown into the ring during a nationally-televised monster truck rally. A few decades ago, it might have been tempting to read Judge's vision of the presidency 500 years from now as a dystopian satire conceived by a former high-school outcast sick of seeing the dumb jocks get all the glory. But nowadays, when having a significant speaking role in Predator is as accurate an indicator of electability as any previous public office, one can't help but wonder whether it'll even take five centuries to place us squarely in the political climate imagined by Idiocracy.

Charles During as President David Stevens, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

Charles Durning's President Stevens is a squat, foul-mouthed sign of the post-Nixonian times. On the one hand, it's doubtful a pre-Nixon president would have been allowed to drink and curse this much on-screen: Stevens has a "fuck" for every occasion. But he's also made directly responsible for the U.S.'s post-Vietnam fallout, blackmailed by Burt Lancaster into promising to reveal — on national TV! — our cynical, soldier-killing true reasons for entering the war. Impressively naive, Stevens is forced to condemn the administrations preceding him: he retains Nixon's profanity but none of his attitude.

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