The Screengrab : phil nugent

Now Playing At The Screengrab In Exile...

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:12:00 GMT

Andrew Osborne Reviews T.V. Party: The Documentary

Phil Nugent's "Don't Forget The Flaming Arrows!"

Paul Clark Promises Famous Last Words To Return!

Scott Von Doviak Reviews Sons Of A Gun

And more to come at the Screengrab In Exile...stay tuned!

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "Dreamchild" (1985)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

This fanciful British movie boasts one of the unlikeliest collaborations of the last twenty-five years, Dennis Potter and Jim Henson. Potter wrote the script, which is built on a culture-clash factoid from 1932: that year, the 80-year-old Alice Liddell--who, many decades earlier, had been Alice Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll's heroine and the original audience for his Wonderland stories--sailed to the United States to visit Columbia University as part of the celebration of Carroll's centennial. (She died two years later.) Alice is played, by Coral Browne, as a grumpy, out-of-sorts old woman at odds with the new world and a trial to her hired companion, a waifish young girl named Lucy (Nicola Cowper). When they arrive in New York, the two women become attached to Jack (Peter Gallagher), a motormouth newspaperman who decides to serve as Alice's promoter. He also begins a romance with Lucy, which distracts the girl from her usual focus on her employer's every whim and leaves the increasingly befuddled Alice more unmoored than ever. Life is slipping away from Alice, and as it does, her memories, which are ever more indistinguishable from her fantasies, rise up to engulf her.

In flashbacks, we see the young Alice (Amelia Shankley) in her relationship with the Reverend Dodgson (i.e., Carroll), played by Ian Holm, which is based on shared love and affection but also creepy, and not just because Dodgson's feelings for the child may be tinged with sexual longing, but because the girl, acting on what she senses about him, can't resist flaunting her power over him by humiliating him and making him squirm. (Does one reason this movie hasn't made it to DVD have to do with the reluctance in the culture at large to view someone like Dodgson--a man who may have had desires that he channeled into creative work because there was no acceptable way for him to act on them in life--as something more sympathetic than a monster? Can Lewis Carroll co-exist in a world with Dateline NBC?) She also steps into the world of Carroll's books and has conversations with his characters--the Mad Hatter, the March Hair, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle--that are often disorienting and upsetting. Henson's Creature Shop created huge puppets modeled on the John Tenniel illustrations from the books, and they are not cuddly. The Mad Hatter looks as if he'd taken a dose of radiation that only made him both stronger and meaner; the March Hare could bite your head off.

Like a lot of Dennis Potter's works, Dreamchild is a mixed bag, and there are times, especially in the scenes involving the endearingly mismatched young lovers, where the director, Gavin Millar, seems to not have a clue how to stage this stuff but is prepared to hold his nose, dive in, and hope for the best. But it's generally entertaining except for the sequences that are just downright stunning, and it builds to a remarkable scene when the aged Alice, thinking back on her cruelty towards Dodgson, is able to incorporate her better understanding of their relationship and forgive them both. It gives way to an equally remarkable ending, with the older Alice on a rock by the sea, reunited with both Dodgson and his characters. You can believe they're all still out there somewhere.

Screengrab Review: "Pontypool"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

When thinking of those who, in our lifetimes, have made major contributions to the shape of pop mythology, let no one forget the name of George Romero. When I was a kid, growing up between the time that Romero's first and best movie, Night of the Living Dead, planted the seeds of his achievement, and the release of its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, cemented it, I spent maybe half my young life watching and reading about horror movies. Partly this was research: at the playground, the jury was still out on whether monsters actually existed, and if they did, I wanted to be ready for them when they stormed the house. Mummies didn't occupy my thoughts to any special degree: they were easy to outrun, and besides, so long as you didn't go violating any Egyptian tombs, it was easy to stay on their good side. Vampires and werewolves were a lot worse, but at least there were clear, set-in-stone guidelines for dealing with them: daylight, wooden stakes, silver bullets, full moons, everybody who dipped a toe into the horror genre knew the drill. But zombies? Now there was a disappointing monster. There weren't many zombie movie classics, and those seemed to be vague on the rules regarding zombiedom. Basically, a zombie was a big, reanimated dead guy with bugged-out eyes and no personality who, under the distraction of the voodoo master who had resurrected him, stagger up and throttle you. No zombie ever looked as if he enjoyed his work, and there was no consensus on how to deal with one, or even if it was the zombie you wanted to target or if you should go over his head and take it up with his boss. Vampires, werewolves, and even most mummies were free agents. Zombies were the hired help.

All that changed thanks to Romero. With two movies and some help from a few enthusiastic Italian imitators, Romero completely changed not just the rule book but the contemporary identity and meaning of zombies in horror movie culture. Voodoo? Fuck that noise. The modern zombie may still not be the life of the party, and he tends to travel in packs, but he's out for himself, and there's no mystery about what he wants. The boy is hungry. Zombies lurch around, using their superior numbers to overwhelm their victims, on whom they plan to dine. The solution to the problem is also simple and direct: bring a shotgun and a mop. Think of it: thirty years ago, when Dawn of the Dead was just being released and Night of the Living Dead was an acknowledged midnight classic but not yet seen as the starting point of a whole damn sub-genre, zombies were monster movie runner-ups on the verge of disappearing altogether on account of political correctness. (It's hard to give a dignified representation of a voodoo priestess.)

By now, we're already at a point where the cliches that Romero created are understood to be part of the shared general knowledge of moviegoers, and are drawn upon by filmmakers who like to insist that they're not "really" making a zombie movie. Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (which Scott von Doviak reviewed here when it played at SXSW, and which goes into release today) isn't "really" a zombie movie, in the same way that 28 Days Later, which (like Pontypool) was about virus-maddened mobs, wasn't a zombie movie, just as Guillermo del Toro's Cronos wasn't a vampire movie, and Mike Nichols's Wolf wasn't an update on Lon Chaney, Jr. But both Pontypool and 28 Days Later are zombie movies in the sense that they play by their own version of Romero's rules, and play on the expectations that the audience builds up based on cues the movies send out that we're in Living Dead territory. (In fact, one of the first not-really-zombies zombie movies was Romero's own The Crazies, which came out between the first two installments of his living dead saga and which established some durable new cliches of its own.) Neither Pontypool or 28 Days Later is really imaginable without Romero's movies, and Pontypool in particular depends on the precedent set by Romero's movies to keep the audience with it for the first half hour, when the prolonged wait for something to happen is actually made more tolerable by the fact that we have a pretty good idea of what that something will look like when it does happen.

Pontypool is set almost entirely in a small radio station in the title locale in rural Ontario, and for most of the first half there are only three characters onscreen: the morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his beleaguered producer Sydney (Lisa Houle), and the fresh-faced young techie Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who's just back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. (And when circumstances take one of them out oif the picture, a new character appears out of nowhere to ease the transition.) Grant--described by New York magazine reviewer as "an egghead incarnation of Don Imus" (which I think may be a non-litigious way of saying a version of Don Imus that isn't a smug, lazy scumbag)--is an aging, haggard-looking "fight the power" type who likes to gas on about "developing a relationship" with his listeners by challenging them (i.e., pissing them off) and whose catch phrase is "taking no prisoners!" He has apparently been reduced to manning the mike in this jerkwater burg because of his past indiscretions, and the first half of the movie includes the makings of an entertaining comedy about this self-styled provocateur's attempts to adjust to his new surroundings as Sydney fills him in on the sorrows and family connections of the nobodies he's making fun of on the air and lets him in on the local trade secrets, such as the fact that the "Sunshine Chopper" from which the station's traffic reporter delivers his broadcasts is actually a Dodge Dart parked on a hill.

That all pretty much goes out the window as the suspense plot develops. Snug and isolated in their studio, Grant and company begin to pick up reports--from the traffic reporter, from phone-in callers, from a BBC reporter trying to get his own handle on the story--that a deranged, gibbering mob is tearing around Pontypool, tearing people apsrt with their bare hands. As the descriptions of the carnage going on outside the studio grew more detailed and grisly, evidence mounts that there's a virus at work that spreads through the English language; people who succumb to it are particularly susceptible when uttering terms of endearment, such as "honey" and "sweetheart." Conceptually, Pontypool might be a blood-soaked spin-off of William S. Burrough's zen koan "Language is a virus from outer space" (and also, maybe, one of Alan Moore's old comics stories for 2000 A.D.) The script, by Tony Burgess, is based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, but it would be a bang-up radio play. Given the War of the Worlds set-up and the metaphorical use of spoken language--and the use of a breakdown in language as a sign that a character is about to start slavering blood--it's kind of amazing that Burgess didn't shape the material with a radio play in mind. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that radio plays are one of the few forms that now have less cultural cachet than Canadian-based midnight movies.

Bruce McDonald, whose credits include Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, the Ellen Page showcase The Tracey Fragments, and the TV series Twitch City, has always struck me as being sort of like the Canadian Alex Cox. Like Cox, he's a self-styled hipster weirdo who picks his projects to serve his image, but unlike Cox, he's not so infatuated with himself that he makes the mistake of thinking that he's made a wild, provocative movie just by signing his name to it and hanging out on the set while the cameras roll: he does make a little effort to entertain. His greatest success here is with McHattie, who has a great radio voice and who, with his gaunt features and frame and black cowboy hat, is an indelible image of the motor-mouthed hipster malcontent who's just found himself on the wrong side of sixty. The scenes in which McHattie's Grant, on the air and flying by the seat of his pants, valiantly tries to string together the hazy reports coming his way into a coherent picture for his listeners add up to a stirring depiction of professional competence that may be more exciting than the reports themselves.

But the downside of McDonald's relative modesty as a director is that it costs him something in both energy and conviction. And his pursuit of cool at all costs can be self-defeating: a scene in which Sydney undercuts the news of a character's death with a cheap sick joke destroys the emotion that the movie has achieved without replacing it with anything stronger. The last third of Pontypool, which is when it's most like a conventional zombie-attack picture, is the weakest, and it devolves into a real mess. The film will be most satisfying to those who like their horror movies to wear their "conceptual" timber on their sleeve. (When a character says, "Talking is risky, and talk radio is high risk," he might be reading the Director's Statement on camera.) It's "interesting." But it's never scary, and I'm not enough of an avant-guardist to see that as a good thing in what's billed as a horror movie.

That Guy! Joe Don Baker

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It's possible that Joe Don Baker's name is as well known as his face, which sort of goes against the grain of those featured in the "That Guy!" franchise. However, one reason the name is well-known is that, in the last several years, it's picked up some currency as a punch line. Any name that starts out "Joe Don" and keeps going for another couple of syllables is apt to strike some people as that of a thuggish redneck hick, and that's how Baker was caricatured by the wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when they ran a couple of his tackier starring vehicles in the 1990s. Is it out of deference to the fine tastes and sensibilities of the robot critical community that Joe Don has yet to appear on Inside the Actors Studio? This is one thing that sets him apart from, say, Billy Joel and Ricky Gervais. Another is that Joe Don actually attended the Actors Studio.

There is always cause to be wary whenever a white male claims to have suffered from discrimination based on his physical appearance. Usually there is cause to be openly derisive. Still, back in the 1980s, Joe Don Baker told an interviewer that it was very hard for him to get Hollywood to see him as anything other than a violent cracker with a pea-sized brain, and he told the interviewer this in response to a question about why he had taken to spending so much of his time working in England. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the '60s, Baker appeared in movies and on TV, in Westerns (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Wild Rovers) and working-guy parts (Adam at 6 A.M.). He got a boost from the 1971 TV film Mongo's Back in Town, which served notice that he could bring a compelling degree of sensitivity to a tough-guy part, and also served notice that he might have to spend a certain amount of his career playing guys with names like "Mongo." He got a bigger boost the next year, playing Steve McQueen's brother in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, although he would later assure interviewers that he and Peckinpah were not the best thing that had ever happpened in each other's lives.

The success of his next film, Walking Tall, made him a star of a specialized, B-movie sort, and led to him taking pre-emptive measures against all many of unsavory types in a string of films, including Phil Karlson's Framed and the notorious Mitchell. His fling as a leading man burned out with the TV film To Kill a Cop and the short-lived TV series spun off from it, Eischied. After that, he settled into the familiar That Guy! routine of long patches of honest labor with the occasional stretch of lying in clover. He played a fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa in the TV film Power (1980), threatened Chevy Chase in Fletch, jousted with James Bond in License to Kill, got throttled by De Niro while attempting to enjoy a midnight snack in Cape Fear, had a high old time playing Joseph McCarthy to James Woods's Roy Cohn in Citizen Kane, stood viciously accused of being Winona Ryder's father in Reality Bites, did the dirty work for the man in Panther, took seeing his son get killed by evil white gorillas really well in Congo, kissed and made up with James Bond in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, and showed, in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, that he could make fun of his trailer-park image as well as any robot. For TV, he played Governor "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in the biopic George Wallace and buckskinned superlawyer Gerry Spence in The Siege of Ruby Ridge.

Where to see Joe Don Baker at his best:

WALKING TALL & CHARLEY VARRICK (1973)

Like it or not, the role of Buford Pusser, scary Tennessee lawman extraordinaire, will always be the first thing that leaps to most people's minds when Baker's name comes up. There are reasons enough to like that fine: Baker gives a strong star performance that endows the club-swinging sheriff considerable dignity. Like Dirty Harry, Pusser has to be portrayed as self-righteous, but Baker also gives him a quality that would be unthinkable in an Eastwood character: a longing for a peaceful life, a desire to just settle down and raise his family and tend to his own back yard, which the villains, by the sheer spreading force of their wickedness, have made an untenable option. (The movie opens with Buford bringing his wife and kids back to their country home, presumably to escape the corruption of the cities. If someone doesn't step up, the small-town corruption may make the country culture just as dangerous and unlivable.) Walking Tall is a primitive, pro-head-cracking movie, but Baker gives it its human dimension: he's the hero partly because he suffers for his actions, never because he happens to be the one who looks coolest when blowing people's heads off.

Even in the wake of the film's success, there were signs that Baker might not be looking to retire from acting and get into the more profitable business of Charles Bronson imitations. One was that he followed up Walking Tall with the supporting role of the Mafis enforcer Molly in Don Siegel's The title character is played by Walter Matthau; he's a bank robber who has chosen his bank recklessly and wound up with several hundred thousand dollars that Molly's employers very much want back. Baker swaggers through the role with a vast grin on his face, as if he never quite got over the kick of seeing his character's name in the script. The film is one of those twist-upon-twist capers in which the omniscient hero is always at least a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, which could easily become tiresome. It benefits greatly from Baker's way of making it clear that, as far as he's concerned, Molly is very much the undefeatable star of the movie playing out in his head. His confidence almost makes you think that he might just turn out to hold the winning hand after all, whereas the glee with which he looks forward to indulging in his full capacity for sadism when he dispatches the hero makes you glad that he doesn't.

THE NATURAL (1984)

In the early '80s, Baker had dropped far enough off the radar screen that his cameo here as "the Whammer"--i.e., Babe Ruth--amounted to a juicy comeback. The movie is a travesty of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel, but Baker does full justice to his end of it: he tears into the role of parodying the Babe as if he were playing a contemporary figure who had seized control of the globe's supply of penicillin. He gives the Whammer a magnified version of Molly's gloating self-satisfaction in what a hot shit he thinks he is, and some of Molly's sadism, too: engaging the green kid Roy Hobbs in a contest, batter versus pitcher, in order to impress a mystery woman (Barbara Hershey), he sums Hobbs up, wrongly, as an innocent hick, and still licks his chops at the prospect of humiliating him. Yet you can't help rooting, or at least feeling for him a little. He lives up to the descriptions of Babe Ruth as the ultimate Jazz Age celebrity, a one-man parade through Times Square.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (1985)

This six-hour British TV miniseries is the proudest accomplishment of Baker's time across the pond. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who later made Goldeneye, as well as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and the Antonio Banderas Zorro pictures, and who is now readying a big-screen remake of Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone. For the love of God, try and get your hands on the original so that when you see the remake, you can better appreciate all the ways in which they're certain to fuck it up. The TV series is a Thatcher-era paranoid thriller about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The late Bob Peck plays a Yorkshire police detective who witnesses the murder of his daughter (Joanne Whalley), which he and his colleagues assume must have been a botched attempt on his own life; it turns out that she was active in anti-nuclear politics and involved in what the government considered to be terrorist activities.

Baker enters the picture playing Darius Jedburgh, a CIA agent stationed in the country who is aware of some sort of skulduggery that might be connected to the daughter's murder. Baker, who took a cut in his usual salary for the chance to be a part of this, took full advantage of the opportunities that acting in a miniseries can provide for fleshing out the odd little corners of a character's range of personality. The memory of his big climactic moments, bawling out the assembled guests at a NATO conference while disintegrating from radiation poisoning and brandishing a pair of plutonium bars, stays fresh in the mind, but so does the image of him sitting in front of the TV in his house in London, cradling a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap and watching the ballroom dancing competitions, marveling, "How do they move like that?"

Th-Th-That's All Folks: THE SCREENGRAB CURTAIN CALL!

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:00:00 GMT

So, th-th-that's all folks. Enjoy the last precious remaining hours of the Screengrab while you can, and be sure to look for us here at Nerve.com, in the archives at www.thescreengrab.com, at our new blog the Screengrab In Exile, and also...

Andrew Osborne:
Look for me at The Ol' Bait Shop, The Ol' Blog Shop, New England Screenwriters, and if The Meat City Beatniks ever comes to a theater near you, be sure to buy a ticket!

Scott Von Doviak:
Check out Scott's blog, his tweets, his book Hick Flicks and the continuation of his journey into Unwatchable madness!

Leonard Pierce:
Look for Leonard at A schediastic hootenany and the Onion A.V. Club!

Phil Nugent:
The Phil Nugent experience rolls on at The Phil Nugent Experience!

Hayden Childs:
Read Hayden at From Here To Obscurity, and check out his book, Shoot Out The Lights!

Paul Clark:
I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to write for the Screengrab for the last two years or so. In the future, I’ll be devoting more of my energy to my blog Silly Hats Only, where I’ll be carrying on a few of my favorite Screengrab traditions- including the reincarnated Famous Last Words, starting in June- and exploring some new ideas as well, I hope. I’ll also continue to be involved in The Muriel Awards, and you can follow me on Twitter under the username “opalfilms”. Be seeing you.

Nick Schager:
Nick can be found at Lessons of Darkness, Slant magazine, IFC News, Cinematical, and on Twitter.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg:
For more Sarah go to: http://www.sarahclynesundberg.com/

Vadim Rizov:
Vadim lives on at The House Next Door.

Lauren Wissot:
Lauren's work can be found at Beyond The Green Door.

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

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)

So, a few years back, my lovely Polish bride was in a production of the theatrical version of The Bad Seed, where bratty little hellspawn Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) gets away with a whole lot of evil behavior, including (gasp!) matricide, simply because the gullible adults in the story (much like the gullible adults of today) are unwilling to see children -- especially cute little white children -- as anything but perfect little angels. But in the Hays Code ‘50s, villains simply HAD to be punished, at least in the movies, leading to one of the most ludicrous finales in cinematic history, whereby the bad seed gets her comeuppance Old Testament style with a good ol’ bolt from the blue courtesy of God (or possibly Zeus) Himself...followed by a dorky curtain call (complete with a comical “spanking” for McCormack) to reassure skittish audiences that, hey, folks! It’s just a movie! See? Everybody’s alive and well and no evil will ever befall you if you stay on the right side of the tracks with all the decent, well-dressed, respectable Christian people...honest! (AO)

THE QUIET AMERICAN (1958)

We could keep you up all night babbling about all the movies that softened and betrayed the endings of their source material (and even original screenplays, in some cases), denting otherwise excellent movies: Stella seeming to reject Stanley's blandishments in A Streetcar Names Desire, Mel Cooley squawking "Get me the FBI!" at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and on and on. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about the dangers of well-intentioned American efforts in Indochina may take the prize, though -- partly because it has so much to recommend it (particularly Michael Redgrave's performance as the aging British reporter whose disapproval of the title character -- Audie Murphy -- is gummed up with the knowledge that the younger man is his romantic rival, and the sensuous, flowing atmosphere and camera work), which makes it all the more frustrating when Mankiewicz betrays Greene in the last scenes. The revelation that the American was the moral angel he believed himself to be, and the decision to have the woman the two men shared turn away from the surviving member of their triangle in disgust, was a significant enough alteration to lay waste to everything that had come before it. (The 2002 version, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, is in many ways a clunkier piece of filmmaking, but it holds up better just by being true to Greene.) (PN)

NO WAY OUT (1987)

This slick update of The Big Clock relocates the action from the world of magazine publishing to Washngton, D.C., where the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) kills his mistress (Sean Young, so it's not as if a jury in the world would view him unsympathetically) and launches a search for the woman's other lover (Kevin Costner) while working the angle that she may have been the victim of a possibly apocryphal Soviet mole called "Yuri." Naturally, he puts Costner in charge of the investigation. In what appears to be the ending, Costner manages to slip away after exposing the bad guys; then, in the concluding scene, it is revealed that Costner, an actor who has trouble passing for anything but a lifelong resident of California, turns out to in fact be Yuri, the Russian mole. It's a twist ending, and to steal a line from David Edelstein, it's twisted, all right. (PN)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

For the most part, Steven Spielberg's take on Philip K. Dick is one of the director's smartest and most accomplished entertainments in recent years, topped off with one of his most mind-melting bad endings; it's like seeing an Olympic athlete ace the first nine parts of the decathlon before fleeing the course to get fucked up on hillbilly heroin. The drop is so deep and so sudden that some enterprising geeks have an explanation for it: they'll tell you that everything that happens after Tom Cruise is sealed away in his frozen prison tube is actually a dream that his character has of being rescued and redeemed; despite what the movie shows you, as the credits roll, he's actually still locked away in there and the villain is triumphant. If some guys sitting at computer keyboards could come up with a nifty idea like that, how come Spielberg, with access to every writer in Hollywood and the millions to pay them, had to settle for the ending he wound up with? (PN)

HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002)

This Woody Allen comedy stars our hero as a washed-up movie director who, given the chance to make his comeback film, suffers an attack of hysterical blindness and has to blunder through the entire production without being able to see what he's directing. Of all Allen's recent misfires, this one feels especially revealing because of the way that he fails to leap at the chance to score some sure laughs with the obvious joke that's waiting to be made: at no point do we get to see any of the footage that's been okayed by this poor bastard working in the dark. This, it turns out, is only the fair warning for the well-worn groaner awaiting us at the end, when the disgraced director receives the happy news that his blind man's movie has been declared a masterpiece by...the French! For a guy who's spent more and more time in the late stages of his career accepting plaudits from those same French critics and audiences, this counts as perhaps the laziest instance of biting the hand that feeds on record. (PN)

GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

Martin Scorsese's period epic was inspired by a 1928 book that was a garish collection of tall tales recounting the "real" hidden history of New York City. By the time Scorsese and his screenwriters got through embellishing it further and welding a plot to it, the result was practically a steampunk fantasy of barbaric city dwellers with a few Mad Max extras sprinkled in having knife fights all over the Five Points district. Which is fine; it definitely counts as something to see. However, the movie crashes as it strains to build to a proper climax. The main plot, involving a conflict between the local dictator Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his arch-nemesis (Leonardo DiCaprio) happens to climax just in time to collide with the 1863 Draft Riots, an actual historic event that, as Scorsese stages it, smashes into the storyline like a runaway truck tearing through the back of the theater and steamrollers the main characters. The most charitable interpretation is that Scorsese was trying to show how petty and, in historical terms, forgotten the people whose struggles he'd been involving us in for the preceding two and a half hours really were. But it feels as if The Lord of the Rings had ended with the news that the year was actually 1945 and Mordor was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, and that just as Frodo and Gollum were battling for the ring, they were all wiped out by the dropping of the atomic bomb. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

MELVIN AND HOWARD (1976)

Jonathan Demme's version of the meeting of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) and Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) begins with a beauty of a long opening sequence, with Melvin giving the broken-down derelict Hughes a ride in his truck after picking him up in the desert in the middle of the night and gradually melting away his surly, defensive paranoia with the warmth of his cornball, middle American sincerity. The movie ends with a lovely little dream that finds the two of them back in the truck, with Howard taking the wheel from the exhausted, put-upon Melvin. Dennis Potter must have seen it and liked it, because he wrote a variation of it into the ending of his own 1985 film Dreamchild, with Lewis Carroll and the old woman who'd once served as the basis for his Alice standing in for Howard and Melvin, and it killed there, too. (PN)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

When I first saw Apocalypse Now on VHS in the late '80s, the finale left me breathless. Willard terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice, took Lance down to the boat, and then, after they crept away down the river, the promised airstrike fulfilled Kurtz's final instruction and exterminated them all. In the above clip, over the footage that floored the teenaged me, Francis Ford Coppola himself explains why this was not his intended interpretation. But what does he know? Coppola, who would later go on to direct such gems as The Godfather Part III and the Robin Williams vehicle Jack, thought that what the film really needed was another hour dealing with French imperialism in Southeast Asia. Although Saturday Night Live cut to the quick in their satire of the ending (Martin Sheen played a man hired by the studios to travel up river and shut down the production, and Coppola, out of ideas, blew everything up), the explosion of the set and murder of the people who worshipped Kurtz like a god is a better fit for the themes: the destructive clash of Western imperialism and other cultures, Willard becoming as hollow as Kurtz, and the fucking horror, the horror. The Coppola-approved ending is below (some of it has been translated to another language, but the visuals are what's important at the end), and while the juxtaposition of Willard's face and the statue is beautiful, luster is lacking compared to the deep reds, yellows, and whites of the airstrike. (HC)

THE BIRDS(1963)

End of the world. You expect it to come from someplace obvious, like a nuclear blast or a plague or a monster from the deep. But instead nature has turned on us, and nothing's ever going to be the same. The clip above discusses the ending that Evan Hunter intended in the script. His version had more gore, but the visual implication in the actual ending of the movie is much more unsettling, the birds covering every surface, the horrible sound of their cooing and calls, the sky dark and ominous as the car slowly starts to twist along the road. End of the world. (HC)

And, of course, we certainly couldn't forget...

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

CASABLANCA (1942)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

...but if we DID forget any of your favorites, then hopefully these two guys can pick up the slack...

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Sometimes, bringing a movie to a transcendent stop just comes down to the right sign-off line. Take it away, Joe E... (PN)

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

You might think we're double dipping here, since this same scene wound up on our list of great deaths scenes last week, but fuck it: Babe Ruth was a great hitter and a great pitcher. And when Joel McCrea, having taken what satisfaction he can from making the world a few louts shorter and knowing that his old pard (Randolph Scott) has had his trustworthiness restored to him, sinks to the bottom of the frame, and out of our world, it's a better than fitting end to both the character and the movie. Later Peckinpah films would end memorably and well, but never again would he get such a massive emotional effect so quietly. (PN)

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

The kind of unstructured crazy comedy that Mel Brooks (and, back then, Woody Allen) practiced in the '70s tended to collapse when time came to give the movies some kind of wrap-up. His collaboration with Gene Wilder is the best-sustained -- maybe the only sustained -- movie of Brooks' career, and part of what makes it satisfying is that he actually managed to provide a logical, happy ending that develops from the story instead of crashing through the rafters. You've got to be glad for these crazy kids. (PN)

CHINATOWN (1974)

Forget it, Jake. What did you do in Chinatown? As little as possible. One of cinema's best indictments of the corruption of power, Chinatown pulls no punches. No movie has better illustrated the brutal correlation between money and water rights in the arid climates of the Southwestern U.S., nor been quite so willing to show how the stewards of the public interest debase themselves acting as lackeys to the wealthy and powerful. This is exactly what American exceptionalism is trying to cover up, but the truth is that hiding something rotten only adds to the stench and decay. It takes a European eye, but not just any European eye, to see through the high gloss of rhetoric covering the post-War growth of the U.S. No, to get it right, you'd need a very particular European: one who had lived in the U.S. for a number of years, a person who lost his mother to Auschwitz and who himself spent his childhood surviving by wits alone while ducking Nazis and Nazi informers, a man who lost his wife, unborn child, and a bunch of his friends to the uniquely American Manson Family. That's the guy to look his audience in the eye and tell them that their cynical gumshoe is going to lose everything through his faith in the system, the monstrous Noah Cross is going to get away with rape, murder, and incest, and the femme fatale with the heart of gold is going to die for their sins. Forget it, he says, we're all in the dark, and no one knows if sticking their neck out makes things better or worse. I usually find nihilism appalling, but I'll be damned if Chinatown isn't a much-needed slap in the face. Where your run-of-the-mill misanthropes like Todd Solondz never got over being bullied in 7th grade, Polanski offers concrete reasons to assume the worst about people, especially when power and money are involved. It leaves you with a sour taste in the mouth and a queasy gut, but it leaves you wiser, too. (HC)

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

TERRY LENNOX: Nobody cares.

PHILIP MARLOWE: Nobody but me.

LENNOX: Yeah, well, that's you, Marlowe. And you're a born loser.

MARLOWE: Yeah; I even lost my cat.

[Reaches for his gun...]

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Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

EASY RIDER (1969)

I remember this one time a friend of mine was running behind on an elementary school creative writing assignment, scribbling the last lines of his composition just before the teacher collected our papers, and so his otherwise well-written tale of Old West adventure ended with a coyote suddenly popping up and devouring his cowboy protagonist. The abrupt, nihilistic climax of Easy Rider has a similar slap-dash quality (and why Peter Fonda’s Captain America would follow the gun-toting rednecks who just shot Dennis Hopper’s Billy the Kid rather than, say, driving away from them must have something to do with them funny cigarettes he was always smoking). On the other hand, gun-toting rednecks aren’t exactly known for their tolerance or decision-making skills, so a couple of yahoos taking potshots at hippies doesn’t exactly challenge my willing suspension of disbelief, even today. And considering the apocalyptic culture wars of the 1960s (which claimed RFK towards the end of the film’s production phase) and the outlaw mythos deep in the story’s marrow, some kind of fatal downer was probably inevitable. But Easy Rider’s characters don’t even get the dignity of a last stand. “We blew it,” Fonda’s biker states in a prescient epitaph for the end of hippie optimism and the rise of Nixonian neo-conservatism, just before Captain America gets killed by his own gas tank and his life savings goes up in smoke while he and his buddy die like dogs on the side of a road to nowhere. (AO)

8 ½ (1963)

Fellini’s semi-autobiographical fantasia inspires and infuriates in equal measure, the film’s whimsical imaginativeness somewhat offset by its indulgent self-satisfaction. Nonetheless, even if some of Fellini’s phantasmagoric flights of fancy rub me the wrong way, the ending is a stunner, a carnival-esque This Is Your Life procession of a director’s (Marcello Mastroianni) past and present acquaintances that resonates as an evocative representation of the myriad lives we touch, and are touched by, throughout our fleeting years. (NS)

THE LEOPARD (1963)

Luchino Visconti's epic masterpiece, set in Sicily in the 1960s, is a rich evocation of a whole society on the verge of disappearing, with the changes that Garibaldi's revolution were about to effect seen through the eyes of a middle-aged aristocrat, the Prince, played by Burt Lancaster. The film's long last section -- which gave the Coppola of the Godfather films and the Cimino of The Deer Hunter a high bar to aim at -- is the Prince's world at its apotheosis; the final moments give you a rare sense of a man feeling the summation of his life up to that point and sadly accepting the feeling of his potency slipping away. (PN)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

For most of its running time, this Cold War conspiracy fantasy dances on the line between thriller and satirical comedy, which makes it all the more unnerving when the clock ticks down and the picture suddenly becomes very serious in tone. It's as if the filmmakers' amusement at the ridiculousness of the McCarthyite witch hunters who inspired their story was gradually swamped by their disgust at what they'd done to their country. Sinatra's final speech, lamenting the fact that no one will ever know about the true heroism of Raymond Shaw, is one of the most hearfelt moments of his film career, and the sobering end point that the movie deserves. (PN)

KISS ME DEADLY (1955)

Restored ending:

Chopped ending:

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer is a nasty piece of work on the page, a misogynistic thug with a fascist mentality who lives in a world of strawmen who are always proving him right. When adapting Spillane's novel Kiss Me Deadly, screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides played up Hammer's sadism and narcissism, showing him to be a bully rather than the tough-guy hero Spillane obviously saw. The movie Kiss Me Deadly adds a great McGuffin, too, in the form of a suitcase full of some sort of glowing atomic energy that quickly becomes a nuclear blast when explosed to the air. In the original ending of Kiss Me Deadly, when the femme fatale unleashes the bomb, Hammer and his assistant Velda escape into the surf while the house explodes. At some point soon after its release, however, someone cut up the ending so that it appears that the house explodes before Hammer and Velda escape. This version won many admirers for its raw pessimism. But it wasn't the intended ending, and the restored version, in which Hammer is shot and has to be supported in his escape by his assistant who he's treated like crap throughout the flick, actually seems more narratively satisfying. (HC)

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Despite its sincere hero, its elaborate plot, and its European trappings, The Third Man is a film noir through and through, and though Joseph Cotten plays the hero as a man on the good side of the law, he’s no less doomed. It’s also one of the most devastating film portraits of unrequited love. Even though he makes it through the film alive, unlike his memorable friend (and later foe), the roguish Harry Lime, like any good noir anti-hero, he’s sunk by his desperate desire for something that will forever elude him. In this case, it’s the love of Alida Valli’s Anna, who can’t shake her passion for Harry even after she finds out that he was a murderous criminal who didn’t love her the way she loved him. Cotten foolishly attempts to apply reason to matters of the heart, and simply can’t understand why Anna would be so devoted to a cruel man who treated her – and everyone else – so shabbily, instead of a good man who really loves her (like, of course, himself). Anyone who’s seen the end of the movie, where Cotten’s Holly Martins waits patiently for Anna outside of Lime’s funeral only to have her walk past him without even a perfunctory glance, has a hard time thinking that the twice-dead Harry is the one who got the better end of the deal. Director Carol Reed and producer David Selznick – who had argued about everything else during the production – agreed on the ending, against the wishes of author Graham Greene, who wanted a more upbeat finish. Greene was a great writer, but Reed and Selznick were right; no happy ending could have bested this heartbreaking scene. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

FAME (1980)

To me, nothing says “ending” like an all-singing, all-dancing grand finale...and while there are dozens of great movie musicals that climax with memorable showstoppers -- from Hairspray’s “You Can’t Stop The Beat” and Hair’s “Let The Sun Shine In” to the painterly tableau of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence at the end of 1776 -- I’ve always had a special place in my heart for “I Sing The Body Electric,” which features most of the major characters from the original 1980 version of Fame (as opposed to all the moist, crappy knock-offs that followed). The number gives me chills every time I hear or see it performed, capturing as it does that terrifying, exhilarating moment of maximum potential when young graduates teeter on the verge of their leap of faith into adulthood. (Plus, it’s nice to see Coco with her shirt back on, none the worse for wear after the icky photo shoot of a few scenes earlier.) (AO)

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Dennis Potter's stylized Depression musical stars Steve Martin as Arthur, a sheet music salesman who thinks he has to believe in the happy songs he peddles to survive the throbbing nightmare is his real life. His ever-escalating flight from reality ultimately leads him to the gallows. The movie ends with his last fantasy, in which he escapes to dance in a production number with the heroine (Bernadette Peters), the only logic behind it being the conviction that no one could suffer so much in life unless it was a set-up for the happy ending to come. It's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" as staged by Hermes Pan. (PN)

MEMENTO (2000)

Christopher Nolan’s calling-card head-scratcher begins with its ending and then works backwards to its start, which one assumes is the traumatic event that bestowed Guy Pearce’s tattooed vigilante with short-term memory loss and propelled him down his vengeful path. What we get instead is something more confounding, a mordant and melancholy conclusion that compels us to consider the relationship between memory and identity and, just as pressingly, forces us to once again reconsider everything about the story we thought to be true. (NS)

THE DEVIL'S REJECTS (2005)

Rob Zombie’s neo-exploitation redneck horror show overflows with disturbing grindhouse violence, highlighted by a motel room kidnapping-torture sequence that’s just plain mean. Yet at the mid-way point of The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie turns the tables on his cop vs. psychos scenario, positing William Forsythe’s lawman as the true sadistic lunatic and the Firefly clan as empathetic antiheroes, a transparent bait-and-switch provocation that culminates in a slow-motion blaze-of-glory finale (set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” no less) that brazenly thumbs its nose at propriety. (NS)

THE UNFORESEEN (2007)

The most unforeseen conclusion to Laura Dunn's documentary about land development and water rights in and around Austin, TX (which is where I happen to live) came when I wound up sympathizing with the heavy. Even though this guy has defied environmentalists and the civic will, he too has ended up on the sharp and pointy side of his political beliefs, and it feels less like just desserts than even more tragedy. (HC)

THE ORDER OF MYTHS (2008)

I can't tell you the great thing about the ending of The Order Of Myths, because there's always that chance that you haven't seen it, and it would be shameful to spoil the reveal at the end. Let's just say that most of the film proceeds without a narrative voice, allowing the subjects to tell their own story without comment. And yet filmmaker Margaret Brown is always a couple of steps closer to the story she's telling than she lets on at any point up until the end. Her reveal transforms your understanding of the previous 75-odd minutes, a trick that is clever enough in fiction films but downright revelatory in a documentary. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Last week we saluted Slim Pickens’ whooping death trip aboard a nuclear bomb, but of course, that was only the beginning of the end of Dr. Strangelove. There’s no pie fight as Stanley Kubrick had originally planned, but we do get to see the great minds of the War Room contemplating the bright side of nuclear annihilation (10 women for every man!), the continuation of Cold War tension through the end of the world and beyond, and of course, the song we hope will be playing in your head as the Screengrab fades to black: We’ll meet again…don’t know where, don’t know when... (SVD)

THE PASSENGER (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s ennui-drenched cinema reached something of an apex with The Passenger, the tale of a reporter (Jack Nicholson) who, while in Africa on assignment, assumes a dead stranger’s identity to escape the soul-crushing disaffection of his own life. It’s a beguiling pseudo-noir that culminates with one of cinema’s most awe-inspiring shots, a 7-minute single take – in which the camera magically passes through a room’s iron-barred window and then rotates 180-degrees – that expresses the film’s faith-and-philosophy-tinged portrait of the folly of dreaming about escape. (NS)

CARRIE (1976)

The shock ending of Brian De Palma's horror classic provides a hint as to how De Palma got the reputation in some quarters as a rip-off artist: it's a direct steal from the ending of John Boorman's Deliverance, from just four years earlier. But it's also a clear indicator of how De Palma, in the quarters that matter, earned the reputation of a master director: his execution smokes Boorman, whose scene was a bit of a botch. By contrast, De Palma's makes audiences jump as high as anyone has ever managed without installing ejector seats in the theater. (PN)

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Just a quick word to acknowledge how clever Spielberg was to have the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holies, the subject of all of this strife and death, crated and boxed away in an anonymous government warehouse, presumably one of thousands of forgotten treasures. That's a wry sense of humor there. (HC)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

The best movie endings are the ones that come at great cost, the ones that make us feel that we’ve lived with these characters and that their eventual fate, whatever it is, has been earned. The greatest recent example of this is Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a truly epic sequence of events, changes of scenery and direction, life, death, moral redirection, and any number of other twists and turns, the young lovers Jen and Lo, hiding out at the Wudan temple, fondly recall their time together in the forbidding, barbaric deserts, where their love had first blossomed. “Make a wish, Lo,” says Jen, in one of the most perfect deliveries of a movie line in modern memory; “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again,” he replies. Jen then silently hurls herself off the edge of the temple, into the clouds below, suspended first and then flying, calling back to a legend they’d discussed during their desert idyll as Tan Dun’s majestic, gorgeous music plays us to the credits. It’s one of the most romantic endings imaginable, and guaranteed to raise a lump in the throat of all but the coldest viewer – a scene that’s truly earned. (LP)

25TH HOUR (2002)

For most of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton) is shown coming to grips with his upcoming incarceration -- saying goodbye to his loved ones, trying to determine who sold him up the river, even asking his best friends to beat the snot out of him so he won’t look like an easy target for prison rape. But just when Monty has more or less accepted his fate, the morning he’s scheduled to make the trip up to prison, his dad James (Brian Cox) meets him for the trip with an alternative -- to escape and start a new life. Over the next ten minutes, James paints a beautiful picture of this way out -- go West, find a little town in the desert, get a new identity, and so on -- and with Terence Blanchard’s elegiac score playing behind him, the plan is as tempting as it is far-fetched. But there’s a steep price for this escape, as Monty could never return to his old life. And so, the central theme of the movie snaps sharply into focus -- the choices we all must make in life. James is prepared for the possibility of never seeing his son again as long as he knows he’ll be okay, but is Monty ready to give up everything he knows for freedom? As we see him passing all those New Yorkers he once railed against, now smiling at him and seeing him off, we wonder if he can sacrifice his past to save his future. And just when he’s come to the end of his imagined life, all of a sudden he snaps back to his real one, back in the car on the road to destiny, and Lee’s camera lingers once again on Norton’s face. The choice is yours, Monty. (PC)

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Review: "Moon"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Duncan Jones's Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the sole human being employed at a mining station at the title location by a corporation called Lunar Industries. Sam is weeks away from completing a three-year stint that will end with the arrival of his replacement and his return to Earth. He's settled into a hermit's existence, kibbutzing with "Gerty", an all-purpose computer gofer with the voice of Kevin Spacey, letting his hair and beard grow out for weeks at a time, then getting a shave and a haircut to check in with his family and company masters back on Earth via telescreen conferences. Then...something happens. It would be unfair to give too many plot details away, since Moon, with its limited cast and scenic options, needs all the surprises it can hold in reserve. But the movie does turn on the idea that, in the future, technological advances will make work in space routine, grubby, even tedious, and that the corporations on whose behalf this work is performed may regard their intergalactic labor force less as Buck Rogers heroes than as insects whose air supply can easily be cut off if they present any inconveniences. In interviews, Jones has gone out of his way to pay tribute to the movies that plowed this line of speculation in the past, including 2001 but also such later sci-fi films as Silent Running, Alien, and Outland. Back in Kubrick's day, the idea that anything about life in outer space could ever become so routinized that it might become boring was a fresh joke, and even then, there were scenes in 2001 that maybe went beyond the call of duty in showing just how boring things in space could get. (There's a reason that it's not easy to recall, just of the top of your head, what's the second best movie starring either Keir Dullea or Gary Lockwood.) It takes a special kind of genius to depict tedium without seeming tedious, and in fact, tedium is something that Moon has plenty of.

Moon does have the look and feel of a labor of love. Jones shot it in 33 days, on a tight schedule, at England's Shepperton Studios, and he and his team, which includes the production designer Tony Noble, the art director Hideki Arichi, and the cinematographer Gary Shaw, did a hell of a job, especially on the interiors of the base where Rockwell and his robot sidekick make their home. (Outside, the miniatures used for the rovers that tootle across the lunar surface look very much like toys. This aspect of the film is not without its charms, compared the glossy hollowness of so much CGI animation, but it doesn't do much for the movie's attempt to sustain the illusion of where we are.) The look of the movie is hermetic and businesslike; it looks lived-in and smells of stale air. Jones is obviously taken with the idea of what it would be like to spend years of yourself trying to keep yourself amused in this dead, lonely environment without choking to death on the packaged food and fluorescent light. The only problem is that he's perfectly achieved an environment that would be convincingly horrible to live in, and failed to supply much in the way of the distraction from this nightmare that some more characters and knottier plot threads could have provided. As soon as you've had some time to admire the effort that went into creating this world, you're as eager to get the hell away from it as Sam.

Moon is Sam Rockwell's one-man show; he's really the only person in it. It might have been fun to see a flashy actor like the Kevin Spacey of old in this role; he could have really broken a sweat to keep you watching. (Spacey's voice performance as Gerty basically comes down to the inside joke of hearing Spacey, the most untrustworthy actor imaginable, spending the whole movie sounding solicitous. Compared to such precursors as 2001's HAL 9000 and Alien's Mother, Gerty is probably the nicest all-powerful electronic intelligence in the genre's history, but it's hard to put your trust in it, just because it sounds like Verbal Kint.) Rockwell is an amusing, likable actor, but here he doesn't supply enough presence of invention to hold you on his own. A talented comedian, Rockwell was well cast in the Star Trek spoof Galaxy Quest, in which he played an actor who, thrust into an actual sci-fi adventure, rebelled--pettishly, with his voice set at full whine--against his identity as the guy who's added to the regular group of characters so there'll be someone to kill off. When things go badly for Sam Bell, Rockwell turns in limply upon himself, and for long stretches doesn't even have anyone to whine at. And Hunt and his screenwriter, Nathan Parker, are too vague on the details of how the company's three-year plans work; you get the feeling that nobody is ever supposed to make it back to Earth at all, which makes it odd that there is in fact a functional escape pod handy. Moon has details you can drink in and a faint, dreamy emotional ache (amplified by the score by Clint Mansell), but the stuff that the details and atmosphere should be there to serve--the people and the story-- never come into focus. It feels more like the work of a hobbyist than an artist. As a moviemaker, Jones builds a great ship in a bottle.

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "The Outside Man" (1972)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The French director Jacques Deray had an international hit with the period gangster film Borsalino, starring Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. That probably helps account for his getting to make The Outside Man, a thriller whose special appeal derives in part from its outsider's look at both Los Angeles and the kinds of movies that grow there. The movie, whose script is credited to Deray, Jean-Claude Carrière (who also worked on Borsalino as well as Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Return of Martin Guerre, and Godard's Every Man for Himself) and Ian McLellan Hunter (an English writer best known for serving as a front for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo on Roman Holiday), is notable for being the only movie I know of to lure Jean-Louis Trintignant to the States. (The only other English-language production I've ever seen him in, 1983's Under Fire, was set in Nicaragua and shot in Mexico.)

Trintignant plays a hit man who is seen arriving in L.A. and taking a cab from the airport to the accompaniment of a blaxploitation-worthy song, with a vocalist named Joe Morton braying a catalog of the never-ending headaches that go with being an outside man. (Despite extensive research, I have been unable to determine whether this is the Joe Morton, star of stage and screen. But based on the sound of the singer's voice and the state of Morton's career circa 1972, I will list the possibility that it is him as "plausible" until given reason to believe otherwise.) He has been flown in to dispatch a leathery old gangster (played, in his final performance, by the veteran movie tough guy Ted de Corsia, of such second-string noir classics as The Naked City, The Enforcer, and The Big Combo), a task he performs before the movie has hit the fifteen minute mark. For a minute there I thought this was going to be one short movie. Luckily, Trintignant has been hired by the kind of people who think that allowing the smart professional killer who has done the job you flew him in from Paris to do simply get on the next plane and go back home makes less sense than hiring Roy Scheider to run all over creation trying to kill him. No wonder that former gangsters ranging from George Raft to Henry Hill in professional experience have had no trouble making sense of how they do things in Hollywood.

The Outside Man is a deep-dish slice of early '70s crime movie, but with a slightly askew line of sight. Not until Quentin Tarantino hit the ground running had an L.A. movie shot in so many locations that no one had ever thought to include in a movie before, and never would again. A traveler, not a tourist, Deray revels in the kind of everyday, billboards-and-storefronts tackiness that most Hollywood filmmakers would shell out thousands of dollars to get the locals to cover up. On the run from Sheriff Brody, Trintignant carjacks Georgia Engel, Ted Baxter's girlfriend, in the parking lot of a Safeway and holds up with her and her mouthy little boy (played by Rorshach himself, Jackie Earle Haley) in their apartment, which looks as if it should be in black and white, with a pool of blood on the carpet and a caption crediting the photograph to Weegee. Having sampled the wonders of American TV and broken the world record for enduring Jackie Earle Haley's company, Trintignant commandeers a vehicle and hits the highway. He picks up a hitchhiking hippie who expresses concern for his soul. "Lis'sen, fren'", says Trintignant, "evert'ing is just fine between me and Jesus." Unconvinced, the hippie continues to lecture Trintignant on the importance of beign saved. Then he notices that Roy Scheider is in the next lane and has a gun pointed at them. "Jesus!" says the hippies, just before Trintignant ducks and Scheider puts a bullet between his eyes. I hope that answers any questions you had about why a man in Trintignant's position would be picking up hitchhikers.

The Jesus freak scene is probably The Outside Man's funniest moment, but nothing can prepare you for the wild and woolly climax, with Trintignant flying in his own reinforcements and using them to crash Ted de Corsia's funeral, "crash" being the operative word. The funeral parlor scene is brightened by a funny cameo by Talia Shire as a chatty cosmetician, and George Engel is a hoot: long after you think she's gone from the movie, the cops keep bringing her back, every time somebody is killed, to ask her if it's the guy who abducted her, and of course it's always somebody else. (She eulogizes Scheider thusly: "I mean, he was polite and all, but he had a gun.") It's too bad that Ann-Margret, as a bartender who becomes Trintignant's helpmate, doesn't bring too much to the party; she acts awfully grand for somebody who works in a strip bar wearing what looks like a fifty-pound marshmallow on her head. (Or, for that matter, somebody who co-starred in Viva Las Vegas.) But Angie Dickinson is in fine, cougariffic form as the murdered mobster's wife, who appears to have had him whacked so that she can move in on both his money and her stepson. The Outside Man is ready to do whatever it takes to to pump some life back into its genre, whether it's put Angie in a bikini, deliver Georgette to a crime scene, or drag Trintignant to the roller derby. As Larry David says, whatever works.

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Ed Park on Edward Gorey's "The Black Doll"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The writer-artist Edward Gorey is probably a special favorite of plenty of movie freaks who sometimes have to turn away from the screen and let their heads cool off with a book. A legendarily omnivorous cultural consumer, Gorey himself poured into his work images inspired by his intake of silent movie serials, Gothic art design, early horror films and and stylish B pictures such as Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. The awesome Ed Park (author of the awesome novel Personal Days, writes in the awesome Moving Image Source: "Gorey also claimed to have exhausted the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art. There he immersed himself in the multipart crime epics of Louis Feuillade (not just the famous Fantômas and Les Vampires but the all-but-unseeable Tih Minh and Barrabas, “the greatest movie ever made”) and encountered one of his 'great influences,' 'a film that no one ever put together': 'The Museum of Modern Art just had all the footage of it. It was Italian, it was a serial, it was called Grey Rats. But it was completely out of context. You’d be watching and say, “Oh yes, that happened half-an-hour ago.” Somebody had thrown it all together in a big box, on reels, and we watched it that way, it took about two weeks.'" Park adds, "This is the dream life: obsessive eyeball mileage, movies as long as a night’s sleep, scenes shuffled out of order, cause following effect, sustained silences in which mouths move and every title card seems to crystallize the swarming drama into koans."

Gorey died in 2000, a development that did nothing to cool the ardor his fans will always have for more work from his pen. Park's observations on the artists were occasioned by the publication of a new small book, The Black Doll, which contains the script Gorey wrote in 1973 for a silent film that was never made. (It was originally published in Scenario magazine in 1998.) Park describes it as "not so much a revelation but the happy, one-time offshoot of a fully formed aesthetic sensibility" and "an enjoyable read in its own right. The images aren’t there, but his words conjure them vividly." Gorey, who once made “a half-hour film that got lost after the rough cut was made,” suggested to an interviewer that the script might serve such directors as Werner Herzog, Pedro Almodovar, or Lars von Trier. Park suggests that the ideal man to make it would probably be Guy Maddin, and it's hard to argue with that. Of course, the publication of the script does very little to increase the likelihood that anyone ever will film it. Everything Gorey did seemed so much the pure product of a mind that saw the world in a way very different from anyone else; the wonder is that he got as much of it safely transferred to paper, in a way that we can only assume (or) hope) did justice to the form it took inside that head.

That Gal! Amy Madigan

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Amy Madigan has been one of my favorite actresses for twenty-five years now. She's maintained her place in the rotation even though I've managed to see less and less of her as the years go by. A quick peek at IMDB confirms that she's never stopped working for very long, but it became clear pretty fast in the 1980s that she wasn't going to become a movie star, partly because she's never done "kittenish", and she's spent an awful lot of the past ten years working in movies that nobody saw and in TV shows about doctors that I didn't see. (I'm a hypochondriac. The last thing I need is to spend my down time learning about new symptoms.) Her last good role in a movie worthy of her time was in Gone Baby Gone, and it's probably not a coincidence that the picture also featured Ed Harris--her husband, who she met on the set of Places in the Heart and with whom she also co-starred in Louis Malle's Alamo Bay, Winter Passing, the TV film Riders of the Purple Sage, and Harris's own directorial debut, Pollack. One interesting aspect of her having been married to Harris for most of both their film careers may be that Madigan always has an easy reminder of how much easier it is for men to slide back and forth between a (relatively) great variety supporting and ensemble roles and character leads than it is for a woman.

Madigan has always had such strength and power onscreen that it must have cost her some roles--big roles that were being cast by people who find such power in a woman intimidating (and who extrapolate from that that folks in the audience will have trouble "relating" to her) and also small roles where the worry is that she'll stand out too much, as if it's supposed to be a bad thing when an actress is cursed with having such an effect on audiences that they can't take their eyes off her. This may be something that Madigan can't do much about, since she doesn't seem to be one of those performers who disappear into the woodwork when they're not acting. At the 2001 Academy Awards, when Elia Kazan tottered out to collect his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the camera picked her out, sitting in the audience, next to her husband, not clapping. I mean, she was not clapping up a goddamn storm, and glowering silently at the spectacle onstage. I remember the sight of her better than I remember most of the movies that were nominated that year. (I also remember looking at Harris and thinking, My God, son, if you know what's good for you, you'd better not clap!)

Where to see Amy Madigan at her best:

LOVE CHILD (1982):

This "true" story about a woman who entered prison at 19, had an affair with a guard, got pregnant, and fought for the right to hold onto her baby while in prison was directed by the infamous Larry Peerce, and in most respects, it's a like a Lifetime movie on hillbilly heroin. (Mackenzie Phillips failed to stage a comeback through her role as the prison's ducktailed head bull dyke.) But it was Madigan's first starring role, and those of us who saw it when it came out--on HBO, I mean, nobody saw this thing when it was in theaters--really knew we were seeing something. Madigan carries the movie to the movie on her back. She was in her early thirties but looked much younger, and uses her fireplug quality--the short frame seemingly on the verge of exploding from its own surplus of energy--very effectively to convey the David-and-Goliath side of the story, but without a trace of parthos; she's not a David you'd bet against. A year later, she got to give birth after a nuclear holocaust in the TV film The Day After, raising fears that she might be on the verge of being typecast as pregnant women carrying to term symbolic tokens of a second chance.

LOVE LETTERS (1983): This quiet, searching, imperfect yet emotionally rich film was written and directed by Amy Jones, and at the time it came out, it inspired some loose talk that it might be part of a new run of films looking at sex and love from a woman's perspective. (It wasn't, at least not from Amy Jones, whose subsequent films as writer and/or director amount to a steaming pile of junk, from Indecent Proposal and the Halle Berry vehicle The Rich Man's Wife to the Beethoven films. Earlier, she directed The Slumber Party Massacre from an original script by the novelist Rita Mae Browne. That one has a cult rep among people who want to believe that it must be intended as some kind of parody. People will always be kind...) The movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a single woman who, having found a cache of old letters written to her late mother by a man not her father, is compelled to jump into an affair with a married photographer (James Keach). Curtis is brilliant, and her scenes with Keach are fine, but it's the scenes she has with Madigan, playing her best friend, that set a new standard for capturing the distinctive rhythm of two intelligent women who care a lot about each other talking around the fact that one of them is doing something very, very stupid.

STREETS OF FIRE (1984)

Madigan has spent so much time playing rural and country women of good peasant stock that it's a real kick getting to see her as an urban action warrior. In Walter Hill's deranged "rock & roll fable", she plays McCoy, a two-fisted, pistol-packing super-mechanic with a tough-gal catch phrase: "Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna do it?" If Hill has employed her to hang around him when he was working on his scripts and bark that line out whenever his mind started to wander, he might have had more of a career since Ronald Reagan's first term. The movie stars Michael Pare, once a highly touted star of tomorrow who might as well have had "Where Are They Now?" scrawled across his birth certificate, as a pretty-boy bad-ass who's on a rescue mission to save his ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane) from the clutches of Willem Dafoe and his band of toughs. (They're so bad, they force the Blasters to perform for Jennifer Beals's body double in Flashdance.) When Pare and Madigan join forces, the movie seems to think that now she's his sidekick. It's so cute! Legend has it that Hill originally asked Madigan to read for the part of Pare's sister, and that after she'd done so, she pointed out to him that McCoy (who was originally written as a man) was the only part in the script worth a damn and, you know, what have done for me lately, Walter? Maybe if she's tried that line on her husband, she would have gotten to play Jackson Pollack.

CARNIVALE (2003--2005)

This HBO series would probably be finishing up its run right about now if the network had committed to the six-year plan that the producers intended. Instead, they cut it off after two seasons--and few who saw the second-season finale walked away thinking they had reason to complain, because the show seemed already to be doing a thorough job of swallowing its own tail. The show, about occult hocus-pocus set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, was a murky stab at an instant Twin Peaks-style cult hit, but it did provide you with a way to check in on Madigan week after week. She played the formidable sister of the scary preacher man played by Clancy "voice of Lex Luthor" Brown, and she always improved the show's focus, even when she couldn't even pretend that her character has a better idea than you did of what the hell was supposed to be going on.

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "Million Dollar Legs" (1933)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Mysteriously absent from any of the DVD packages of W. C. Fields films, including the two mighty useful but uneven five-disc Comedy Collection sets, the 1932 Million Dollar Legs is a compendium of golden shtick. The producer, Herman Mankiewicz, and the director, Edward Cline, who started out in the business as a Keystone comedian, were happy to make the most of the new sound technology that finally made it possible for Fields to cut loose on-camera, but they also included shout-outs to the silent era: Ben Turpin, the silent comic whose entire persona was his perpetual cock-eyed expression, slithers about as a spy, throwing his black cloak in front of his face like Dracula to subtly telegraph that he may be up to no good. Fields plays the president of Klopstokia, where all the women are named Angela and all the men are named George, and where all the inhabitants are master athletes. This pointedly includes both Fields and his arch rival, played by vaudeville veteran Hugh Herbert; the two of them routinely arm wrestle for control of the government, even though both men look as if the only way to get them from one end of a race track to the other would be to set the last beers in creation at the finish line. The film's romantic lead is Jack Oakie, the comic who is perhaps best for his Mussolini parody in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and who looked a little like a young, housebroken Jonathan Winters. "Isn't he handsome, father?" coos Fields's daughter, Angela. (See above.) "Yeah," replies Fields, "but I'll fix that."

The plot involves Oakie, a master brush salesman, winning over his prospective father-in-law by arranging to bring the athletically advanced Klopstokians to the Olympics, where they can win every event and save their faltering economy. Herbert and his traitorous mob try to thwart him by having the ultry-sultry Mata Machree (Lyda Roberti) distract the athletes and seduce the pure at heart Oakie; I'll risk a flood of "spoiler alert" complaints by revealing that things turn out all right. Million Dollar Legs is a true feat of a very rare kind, a comedy that achieves and sustains a cloudborne, homegrown-surreal tone with nary a Marx Brother in sight. Herman Mankiewicz wrote Citizen Kane, you know. If the market for Fields collections is stalled and the Jack Oakie box set just ain't gonna happen, why doesn't some genius stick these 64 minutes on the next Kane re-issue as the world's funniest Easter egg?

"Rotenburg Cannibal" Loses Privacy Case to Ban Movie; Court Chews Up and Spits Out His Arguments

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

In one of those news stories that I like to believe have been generated only because the people involved knew how badly I needed to be reminded how lucky I am to be alive at this moment, a German court has ruled that the movie Rohtenburg, which was "inspired by" the story of the convicted murderer Arwin Meiwes, can be shown in that country. The movie was banned in 2006 in response to a complaint filed by Meiwes himself, who is serving a life sentence. Rohtenburg, which was released outside Germany under the title Grimm Love, was directed by Martin Weisz, who later made The Hills Have Eyes 2. The film stars Keri Russell as an American graduate student whose research in criminal pathology leads her to study "Oliver Hartman" (played by Thomas Kretschmann, of The Pianist, King Kong, and Valkyrie). Meiwes argued that, despite the fictionalization of the case, the movie was still close enough to his case that it "infringed" on his "personal rights."

Meiwes, known to tabloids as the "Rotenburg Cannibal", enjoyed a vogue as an Internet cause celebre when word got out that he had killed and eaten a man he had arranged to meet for this purpose through a website called the Cannibal Cafe, which advertised itself as being strictly for fantasy role-playing. Disregarding the fine print, Meiwes and Bernd Jürgen Brandes, who had answered his ad looking for "a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed", got together in Meiwes's apartment in 2001 and proceeded to videotape their encounter, so that no one would later get the wrong idea. On the tape, Brandes has the bright idea that Meiwes should get things rolling by biting off his penis; what follows confirms that biting a man's penis off is much harder than it sounds, news that will strike many of us on this side of the gender divide as deeply reassuring. After giving Brandes more than enough time to announce that this might not be such a great idea after all, Meiwes finally cut the penis off with a knife, after which he tried to sautee it, but you know how it is the first time you try out a new recipe, especially when you have company over. Meiwes did offer some of the dish to Brandes, but he declined, explaining that he had recently had his penis cut off and so didn't really have much of an appetite. (Meiwes wound up feeding it to his dog.) Meiwes subsequently helped his new friend to the bathroom, where Brandes stretched out in the tub for a little lie-down. There, having made sure that Brandes was well-medicated, Meiwes allowed him to bleed to death before harvesting his flesh and storing it in his freezer. He ate off it for months before getting in trouble by placing another ad online. This resulted in a visit to his home by the police, who found the videotape and proceeded to get the wrong idea from it after all.

The case led to considerable ethical wrangling over whether or not eating someone who has voluntarily signed on to be eaten constitutes a crime. (It also set off a wave of hand wringing when it was discovered that Germany had no actual laws discouraging cannibalism. (For the record, I don't tell everyone who enters my apartment that I expressly forbid them from peeing on the couch. Some things you just assume are understood.) Meiwes was originally given an eight-year sentence for manslaughter, but in 2005 he was ordered retried on the grounds that that ain't right; it was then that he was found guilty of murder and hit with the life sentence, so it's no wonder that he was already in a bad mood when word reached him about that somebody had made the movie of his life, and that it got his name wrong and starred Felicity. In its decision over whether the movie was an intolerable violation of Meiwes's right to privacy, the court reportedly took into account the fact that Meiwes himself "gave many interviews on himself and the crime and signed a marketing contract with a production company in 2004. The case has been the subject of a book, several additional films, and songs by Rammstein and Marilyn Manson." Meiwes has said that he himself hopes to someday write a book discouraging young and impressionable readers from eating people, or maybe just advising that if they're determined to eat people, they should maybe not videotape it and just take their chances. Meiwes's dog could not be reached for comment.

Screengrab Review: "The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A new documentary, The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, makes a pretty convincing case for its heroes as major cultural figures of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially in terms of their inescapable, pervasive influence: as the only songwriters Walt Disney ever put on staff at his studio, Richard and Robert Sherman were responsible for many a tune that, in the words of John Landis, "drilled" its way into the skulls of millions. The sons of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter named Al Sherman, Robert--the older, more serious one, who now looks like Robert Morse on Mad Men--and Richard--the younger, more effusive, giddier one, who in old photos looks like Oscar Levant--began dabbling in the business in the 1950s, a period when Robert, who describes himself as a frustrated novelist, did a lot of writing with other people. The brothers cemented their partnership, and found themselves on their true career path, when they scored a hit for Annette Funicello, then a teen idol as the Mouseketeer with the rack. That got them an audience with Disney, who set them to work on a movie version of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers, and who was confirmed in his suspicions that they were his boys when the Shermans got ahold of a copy of one of Travers's books and unwittingly built an outline based on the same six chapters that Disney had underlined in his own copy.

The Mary Poppins project turned out to be more of an obstacle course than the brothers expected; ever the dreamer, Disney had put a lot of thought into sweat into it before he'd made any headway in persuading Travers--who Robert Sherman describes as "a witch", his jowls trembling faintly, as if afraid that she still might be able to hear him--to sell him the rights to the material. The Shermans were just two of many Disney employees called upon to soft soap the lady, until she relented and permitted Julie Andrews to descend from the skies with an umbrella in her mitts. (At the premiere, Travers sat through the movie with gritted teeth and, at the end, turned to Disney to sweetly tell him that now she'd have to get to work reclaiming her vision. Even more sweetly, he replied, "That ship has sailed." I'd hate to think what he'd have said to Lewis Carroll or Rudyard Kipling.) By the time the Shermans picked up their Oscars for Mary Poppins, they were practically old Disney hands, having already written songs for The Parent Trap a number of less-remembered Disney features (In Search of the Castaways, The Sword in the Stone, Big Red, etc.) The morning after, they marched into Uncle Walt's office, brandishing their prizes. "Well, boys," he greeted them, "you hit a home run. Just remember the bases were loaded." It's funny how many stories about Walt Disney seem to be about how lucky he was that more of the people he engaged in conversation weren't packing heat.

The documentary is full of interview subjects who point out that the Shermans, who for Disney also scored The Jungle Book, The Happiest Millionaire, The Aristocats, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks and also wrote "It's a Small World After All", brought a musical-theater approach to his films. Another way of putting it is that they helped establish the notion that feature films for children, including if not especially animated features, had to be designed as musicals. Whatever you think of this, it turned out that when the Shermans had helped ensure a market for their work after they left Disney Studios at the end of the '60s, depressed over Walt's death and the feeling that the place was becoming less like a family and more like a factory. They found that they were much in demand by filmmakers who were looking to get a bite of Disney's market niche, starting with James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, who hired them for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and including the makers of Snoopy, Come Home, The Magic of Lassie, The Slipper and the Rose, the Reader's Digest films based on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the Steven Spielberg production An American Tail. Richard even slips in the surprising information that his favorite of all their scores is the one they did for Hanna-Barbera's 1973 cartoon version of Charlotte's Web.

The Boys was directed by the Sherman cousins: Gregory V. Sherman, who's Richard's son, and Jeffrey C. Sherman, Robert's eldest boy. They appear briefly in the movie themselves, mostly to stress the unusual nature of their collaboration, which is that it's apparently unusual for members of their different clans to see each other in public and not cross the street to avoid saying hello. For as long as any of the younger Shermans can remember, when they got dragged along to public events where both brothers were likely to appear, the rule was to politely say hello and then decamp to the corner of the room farthest from whichever end the other Shermans were seated. It doesn't appear that this was the result of some calamitous break; the brothers just don't socialize, which sort of makes sense when you consider how much time they had to spend trapped in a room together when they were working. (Alan Menken, part of the team that would displace the brothers at Disney around the time of The Little Mermaid, says that he tries to choose his collaborators based on who he wouldn't mind spending a lot of time with, and marvels that anybody could do it at all with a member of their family.)

It's just that, at some point, the arrangement seems to have gotten a little nuts, to the point that Robert didn't think of informing his brother when, after the death of his wife and a lifetime spent in California, he decided to move to London. A number of people invoke Robert's war service, which included a tour of the Nazi death camps, to explain what they see as his darker nature, and there's a prickly moment when Angela Lansbury, the star of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, admits to wondering what could have been going through Robert's head when he saw the action climax to that film, in which a bunch of animated suits of armor and Ang on a flying broomstick fend off a Nazi invasion of Britain. In the end, though, some things can't be explained, just marveled at. The most telling contrast in the movie may be in the interview footage in which the cousins try to get their fathers to discuss their relationship and the nature of their estrangement. Richard tries to, tears up, and begs off, complaining that it's all too "personal." Robert can't seem to understand what there is to talk about. Family snapshots don't have to bore in to reveal a great deal.

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "I Went Down" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The snowballing reputation of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson reached a peak with The Seafarer, which he directed at the National Theatre in London in 2006; last year, the Broadway production won the actor Jim Norton a Tony Award, to go with the Olivier Award he'd won the year earlier for his performance. McPherson himself has directed three feature films, the latest of which, The Eclipse, was recently picked up for distribution after playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. McPherson's first produced screenplay was for I Went Down, an Irish gangland buddy comedy that was a huge indie hit in Ireland in 1997 but achieved only measly distribution here. At that time, McPherson was an unknown quantity here, and for the most part, so were the movie's stars, Peter McDonald and Brendan Gleeson. It was the John Boorman film The General, released here the same year as I Went Down, that helped raise Gleeson's profile as everybody's favorite Irish gangster, a position he shored up last year when he co-starred with Colin Farrell in the playwright Martin McDonagh's movie writing-directing debut, In Bruges. That movie actually has a striking family resemblance to I Went Down, though I Went Down is both lighter in tone and the better, more well-sustaned movie; unlike McDonagh's, it doesn't fall off a cliff overreaching for significance.

McDonald and Gleeson play Git and Bunny, a couple of layabouts who are ordered by a small-town gangster with a face like a bank overdraft notice (Tony Doyle) to run an errand for him, sending them out on the road to bring back an old associate (Peter Caffrey) who he claims is holding some money for him. You know that Git is a good lad because he got into trouble by assaulting a goon who was threatening a friend who hooked up with Git's fiancee while Git was serving an eight-month prison sentence. (It turns out he took the rap for his father, who, it turned out, was terminally ill and didn't survive to see the sentencing date.) You can also see that his run of bad luck has left him with a fatalistic attitude that he only begins to tentatively shake off when he and Bunny collect the gangster's old pal and begin to pick up signs that all may not be as they've been told. ""Did you ever make love to a gangster's wife?" Caffrey asks his new road partners, by way of conversation. "Jesus, you can't really enjoy yourself. It's like making love with the angel of fucking death on your shoulder"

As Bunny, Gleeson is decked out in the trappings of a fortyish rockabilly cat, with sideburns you could use as a can opener. Bunny, who helps set the tone for the slick job of gangstering that he and and Git will be performing off by stopping for gas in a stolen car whose fuel tank he can't get into, looks like nothing but a 200-pound handicap for the first leg od the trip, but he snaps to as he and Git warm to each other and he begins to have a stake in whether or not he makes it to the next day in one piece. (It turns out that he, too, in his own bearish way, is nursing a broken heart. Before setting out on the road, he stop by the house so that he can look through the glass and call out to the wife he's separated from, who's trying to hide in a corridor; he gently points out that he can see her clearly. He also phones in from the road, asking the little girl who answers if he can talk to an adult. "No," she says cheerily, as she hangs up. The director, Paddy Breathnach, keeps things simple, letting the actors develop their own weird rapport and make the most of McPherson's dialogue. (In the only other film of his that I've seen, te 2001 Blow Dry, the director went a little nuts, trying to cram brightly spotlit eccentricity down the audience's gagging throat.) I Went Down may be a small, distant stepping stone in McPherson's and Gleeson's careers, but it's a beautifully cut stone, more gem than pebble.

Phil's Film Faves, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) & SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's movies were essential to my having survived the 1980s. I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience during the week when I saw Stop Making Sense five times; I've never seen another movie, including dance films and martial arts flicks, that conveyed to me so much of the pleasure of physicality, of moving your body, and there was something about seeing all those people joining their skills together and losing themselves in the shared experience of being simultaneously brainy, goofy, and hot that suggested everything I wanted to get, and never got, from college. The mixed-tape road trip of Something Wild, where the wild weekend gives way to a trial by fire that leaves the hero and heroine stronger, was everything I wanted out of the rest of life, including the handcuffs and the used-car-salesman cameo by John Waters.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

I've always loved horror movies, I've always loved comedy, and I've always loved the idea of comic horror midnight movies that go just far enough in the direction oftoo far. Maybe if more movies that light out in this direction got it right, it would matter less to me that Stuart Gordon got this one just right. But most of them don't.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

What I just said about midnight movies? It goes double for crackhouse-rat comedy.

SONGWRITER (1984)

This movie, starring Willie Nelson and Rip Torn, written by Bud Shrake, and directed by Alan Rudolph during those three weeks a decade when his meds are working, captures the spirit and flavor of Texas hipsterdom as it has always come across in the best of Nelson's music, Torn's acting, and Shrake's writing, and that's about as hip as things get in the South. I myself, a product of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, have spent about a month total in Texas my whole life, but am not above resorting to a contact high.

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

Can we talk? I don't get girls. Never have, never will. I miss signals, I misread situations, I don't know...I just don't get girls, okay? And if I may presume to speak for the losers of the world for a second, being one of those people who doesn't get anywhere with other people in that way can sometimes make it a sobering experience to sit in the dark watching a lot of movies in which couple effortlessly hook up. But if I ever saw a movie in which my own fantasy of the best way you could hook up with somebody, this is probably it. Two nice, smart people just run into each other, take a chance, and for as long as the movie is running, it pays off, only to end with a cliffhanger. The director, Richard Linklater, later resolved things with his sequel, Before Sunset, and I like it fine, but I think I may have enjoyed the nine intervening years of wondering even more.

I met Linklater once, not that he would remember. It was at a festival where he was showing his first movie, Slacker, and someone tried to introduce the two of us, and I actually, fairly elaborately snubbed him, because I'd heard about--hadn't seen--his movie and thought it sounded like a pile of shit. After snubbing him (and mortifying the person trying to make the introductions(, I walked away invisibly pinning a medal to my chest, and the last time I looked back at Linklater, he was smiling at me in a very nice way that I may only imagine seemed to say, "Gee, before I made a movie, this fellow would be one of the biggest jackasses I've ever met, but now, he wouldn't even make my personal top 500!" Maybe I don't deserve to get girls.

MAGNOLIA (1999)

I could get very personal here too, but I'll just say that I saw this movie at a moment when I very badly needed to see this movie. It is, of course, the movie that, of all P. T. Anderson's works, is the one most likely to get a shoe thrown at you if you sing its praises before a mixed audience. Both these facts probably have something to do with the fact that, while there are other movies of Anderson's that I think are better, his having made this one is the reason I'd be happy to take a bullet for him.

Phil's Film Faves, Part One

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

A while back, we here at the Screengrab made our best stab at listing our picks for the greatest movies of all time. This is a classification that is distinctly different from naming our favorite movies, movies that, in many cases, happened to come into our lives at just the right moment, packing a style or a mindset that happened to hit us right in the soft spot, and that entered our bloodstream, affecting our judgements from that point on--though it not unheard of for favorite movies and greatest movies to overlap. A list of one's nominations for greatest movies tells one a lot about a person's ideas about art and history, about which breakthroughs matter to him in a way that, if they were not a part of what movies have come to be, he would care a lot less about them all. Our favorite movies tell us a lot about ourselves. Permit me to bore you with a little about me.

IT'S TOUGH TO BE A BIRD (1969)

DAD, CAN I BORROW THE CAR? (1970)

Both these short films were made by Ward Kimball, one of the "Nine Old Men" remembered as having been key to the development of the animation department at Walt Disney Studios. They were eventually shown on the TV anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney in the 1970s, which is were my barely formed retinas took them in. Bird is mostly animated, with some live action mixed in; Car is mostly live action, but with lots of animation effects. These range from quick gags to sequences that suggest the surreal, politically charged animation being done in Eastern Europe at the time, as well as Terry Gilliam's brand of animated cut-outs. Kimball, whose reputation is that of the wild man among the Disney old guard, had a simple, direct approach: pick a subject and garland it with as many visual gags as he could come up with. The wildness was all in how far afield his comic imagination could go, and how happy he seemed when he was slapping things together as fast as he could. I saw these films when I was so young that I subsequently forgot having seen them at all, but a few years ago I saw Bird again, and just a few months ago I found Car on a bootleg DVD, and as soon as I recognized what they were, I realized how much I'd loved them as an infant, so much so that I wanted more stuff like that to cram into my head. In a strange way, I think this desire planted the seeds for a lot of things I like, ranging from Svankmajer to Godard at his most discursive to Monty Python to Requiem for a Dream to the rambling monologues of This American Life. Discovering something that had a major impact on shaping your tastes when they were still at the developmental stages can weird you out a little.

JAWS (1975)

This was the first feature film that I loved unreasonably, and I think it's a good pick for a first love. The story is simple and uncomplicated and involving, and Spielberg brought it to life by lavishing upon it an amazing level of inventiveness at telling it visually, so much so that, in scenes such as the famous moment when the shark unexpectedly appears in the background of the shot while Roy Scheider has his head turned and is in the middle of spitting out a line in the other, he was able to give the viewer a jolt at the same time he got you laughing at his mastery of the conventions he was turning inside out and the audience expectations with which he was playing. It also has a subversive, satirical edge that connects it to the best of '70s pop culture: even someone who'd seen as few horror movies as I had by that time knew that it was unusual for the director to implicitly side with the hippie know-it-all scientist with the unsightly beard against the blustering macho man who thinks he's scored a goal in their ongoing war of personalities by glowering and flattening an empty beer can with his paw. (For years afterwards, I was trying to impress people by imitating Richard Dreyfuss's aplomb at squeezing a paper cup in response, not recognizing that it lost a lot of context.) Not long after I saw Jaws for the first of I hate to think how many times--not very long after at all, in fact, because I was too young to see it when it first came out but was allowed, after two years of screaming and crying over my cruel deprivation, to see it when it was re-released in 1977, thanks in no smart to my parents' very well-timed and much-enjoyed divorce, Star Wars came out. I used to try to reason with people who were raving about it at the playground. "Guys," I'd say in my reasoning-with-idiots voice, "there is no shark in this movie."

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) & YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

I know that she has many suitors, but for my part, let me just say, in all selfishness, that I will always be grateful for having seen Holy Grail at precisely the moment in my life when a movie that begins with the opening credits malfunctioning and ends with a police raid on the set would strike me as the greatest thing in the world. Frankenstein's appeal was less avant-garde. Let's just say that, for all of my childhood and well into my adolescence, I got most of my information about what was going on the movie theaters of our great land from the movie satires in Mad magazine, and it was a great thrill to see what was basically the greatest Mad magazine movie satire ever projected on a thirty-foot screen.

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) & CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)

Elliot Gould's acting in these two Robert Altman's movies is the kind of thing that cults are meant for. It's as if he were living some kind of improvised coffeehouse monologue--too sweet to be by Lenny Bruce, but not requiring the kind of hepcat skeleton key that you might need to make sense of Lord Buckley. He's funny and seemingly detached but not above showing how much he really cares when he realizes that he's made a terrible mistake--a mistake that he invariably makes for the best of reasons, for refusing to sense the worst about a friend. And if he strikes a lot of people as flaky, that may be because he's his own man in a way that, even then, set him completely against the times, which more and more looks like the most genuinely heroic position for an American to take. I tried like hell to achieve this degree of loosness for a few years in my twenties, and I even thought I had it for a while, but in retrospect, I'm afraid that I was just unemployed.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)

My other big acting man-crush from that period is Al Pacino's performance here, and it couldn't be more different in its appeal, because I'd never seen anybody channel that much controlled energy before. The whole movie is a wonder of the New York actor's art, with people like John Cazale and Charles Durning and Sully Boyer and Chris Sarandon delicately matching their styles to Pacino's and providing the quiet contrast that makes his sustained liftoff possible. I once had a new roommate who had never seen this movie, and I was very eager to show it to her. I still remember the moment, about fifteen minutes into it, when she asked, "Umm...how much longer before they get out of the bank?" It's funny, those moments when you immediately know that it's not going to work.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Excuse the appearance of cross-promotion, but I've already written about this one.

2 Years Ago in the Screengrab: The Romantic Comedy Subsidy Program

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

FALL, 2007: Matthew McConaughey is sitting in front of the TV in his trailer when the door swings open and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, ushers us inside. McConaughey springs for the remote, but before he can switch off the set, we can see that he's been watching himself in the 1996 John Sayles picture Lone Star. Bernanke simply smiles, but Kate Hudson doesn't bother stifling her laughter. McConaughey blushes. "Did'ja read Janet Maslin's review of that one in the New York Times?" he asks. "Compared me to Paul Newman. Said that I should have had the lead in it, that I should have had Chris Cooper's part."

Hudson sits down next to him on the couch and gives him an affectionate hug. "I should show you my notices from Almost Famous sometimes," she purrs.

"'Course," says McConaughey, "Chris Cooper's got an Academy Award now. Which he deserves! He kept at it, kept acting, and you know, I decided to do this instead." Then he remembers that Bernanke is in the room. Looking up at the Chairman, he adds, with just a race of sheepishness in his voice, "And I'm proud to do it. It's important work."

McConaughey and Hudson are working on Fool's Gold, the latest project of the Federal Rom-Com Make-Work Administration, a division of the Fed that was set up under Alan Greenspan in 2002. A dedicated Randian, Greenspan saw the Administration's work as a way to generate work in the film business while at the same time isolating the kind of mediocrity that was so offensive to him as a follower of John Galt. Every year, the F.R.C.M.W.A. would put into production a handful of films that would keep the most mediocre technicians, directors, actors, and crew members fully employed and occupied, boosting the national employment numbers while keeping those employed from polluting the talent pool from which those trying to make actual good movies were forced to draw. The F.R.C.M.W.A. projects might employ a few good supporting actors, just to make the experience bearable for those involved; on projects so fetid that no good actor wanted any part of them, they could always make do by casting Dane Cook in multiple roles.

It was decided early on that, to make it easier to identify the F.R.C.M.W.A. projects from the other films released in a given year, three people who had established acting careers for themselves would be hired to exclusively appear in the Administration's pictures. It was a hard sacrifice; it meant effectively retiring from the acting profession. Hudson and McConaughy were among those first approached. Hudson was quick to sign on. "It just sounded easy, you know? I mean, I hear these other girls talk about creating characters, testing themselves, trying new things, blah blah blah, and maybe I don't get it. I do this, and I still get paid and my picture's in People and if there's a 'rock star'"--Hudson rolls her eyes as she makes air quotes with her fingers--"that nobody else wants, I can marry him. Maybe I'm missing something, but if you can get that with hard work and I can get it just by watching my diet and showing up, why would I want to do any hard work, when knowing that it's not even supposed to be any good is such a tremendous load off." She shrugs. "I guess I'm my mother's daughter, y'know?"

McConaughey took some persuading. "I sort of miss acting," he admits. "I mean, maybe I was only any good in like, one out of fifteen times at bat...that little bit I did in Dazed and Confused, it was kind of entertaining, right?" He looks at me open-mouthed for a long time. I'm slow to catch on that he's actually waiting for me to say yes. I nod, and he looks very relieved. "Now, you take your A Time to Kill and your Contact and your Amistad--okay, I'm a little bitter about Amistad. I think that Steven Spielberg could have protected me better. I mean, maybe not guide me to a good performance. I understand that he had a lot of other things to think about on that one. But he was in charge of the editing, not me, and there's just so much he could have cut out that would have made it less embarrassing. You know, that moment where I'm supposed to be a lawyer in the 1830s, and I get a ruling that I like, and I pump my arm and say, 'Yes!' like I'm playing pick-up basketball...I asked him, years later, I asked him, 'Steven, I know I deserve the blame for being the one who did it, but why didn't you just cut it out?" And you know what he told me? He said, 'Matthew, I remember when you did it during filming, I had what my doctor later diagnosed as a mini-stroke, and when I came to, I didn't remember you'd done it. And then when we were editing, every time I saw that moment in the footage, I'll be darned if I didn't have another mini-stroke, and forget all about it again. I didn't retain my awareness that you done it, and that I'd left it in the picture, until the red-carpet premiere. I mean, when I saw you do it up there on the big screen, naturally, I had another mini-stroke and blacked out. But this time, when I came to a few minutes later, everybody in the theater was still laughing."

McConaughey continues, "So I did keep plugging away, and I wanted to keep trying, but I was up late one night mulling over the offer, and thinking about how my career was going. And the last real movie I did was this thing where I fought a dragon." McConaughey's eyes seem to mist over. "I picked up the phone and said, sure. If it's good for the economy..."

McConaughey and Hudson co-starred in the F.R.C.M.W.A's first project, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Since then, McConaughey has starred in 36 films for the administration, with Hudson making 47. This is the first time they've co-starred since Ten Days, making it a bittersweet reunion for them both. They and the others who've become an essential component in the process have learned a lot as they've gone. "Sometimes," Hudson says, "in the early days, there'd be a line in a script that makes you laugh, and you're like, whoa, how did that get in there? It''ll turn out that the writers have trouble padding out the scripts to feature length by themselves. So they'll 'borrow'"--she makes the air quotes again--"lines or ideas from their friends, or family members, or something the saw on the Internet, or somebody peeing himself in front of the bus stop, and it may turn out that those people have some talent." It used to be policy that anything good that found its way into a script would be peeled off and submitted to the writing staff of The Simpsons. "But," says Hudson, "that doesn't really happen anymore since Ben came on board with his little 'brainstorm.""

Bernanke succeeded Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve in 2006 and was immediately briefed on the workings of the F.R.C.M.W.A. "And at that time," he says, "the Iraq War had really hit the wall and the guys whose bright idea that was were not in very great demand, so there were all these neo con geniuses roaming the halls of the White House, starting crap games and weeping. So I thought to myself, these are guys who were brought in for their understanding of foreign policy and national defense, and when a bunch of lunatics from Saudi Arabia staged a terrorist attack on American soil, their big master plan was, we should find a country in the Middle East that has no connection to these nut jobs and where there's a tin horn dictator who won't even let them set a toe inside the country, and invade that place, and topple the government, and create such chaos that everybody there hates our guts, and the lunatics who attacked us can roll in for the first time ever and use it as their farm team, that'll show 'em. I got to thinking, wow, what would a bunch of minds like that do with a subject like courtship strategy? So I told Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Condalleezza Rice, and Richard Perle that it was vital to our national interests that I had spec scripts for romantic comedies from each of them on my desk within the week, and within four hours Feith turns in the screenplay of Failure to Launch!" The scripts are produced under pseudonyms. It turned out that Rice, who prepared for the assignment by buying a box set of Love, American Style, had a sense of farce structure just rudimentary enough in its general level of competence that her scripts have a chance of being slightly better than bearable. Bernanke sells them to Jennifer Lopez's company.

I note that neither McConaughey nor Hudson has yet made a film with the third working headliner of the F.R.C.M.W.A., Jennifer Aniston. Is that a matter of just never finding the right script.

"Actually," says Bernanke, "that's kind of a soft spot around here, because while Jennifer is a very important member of the Administration, she doesn't know that she's in the Administration. Along Came Polly, The Break-Up, Marley & Me--she thinks they're all real movies. And we humor her because she's such a valuable member of the team. You see, the scripts that Jennifer does, they aren't generated in-house. Somebody trying to do his best actually wrote them, but they're absolutely F.R.C.M.W.A.-quality. Jennifer herself picked them out from the pile; she has the most unerring instincts for what it is we do. We like to this of her," Bernanke beams, "as our little truffle-hunting friend."

Screengrab Review: "Easy Virtue"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The new comedy Easy Virtue opens on an English country estate in the 1920s, a repressive, pastoral setting presided over by Kristin Scott Thomas as an icy matriarch with a burnt-out war veteran husband (Colin Firth) and a pair of marriageable daughters (Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson). This creaky idyll is about to be temporarily busted open by the appearance of the prodigal son (Ben Barnes) and his new bride, a American race car driver and widow played by Jessica Biel. The movie is the first in quite a while to be based on a play but Noel Coward, a dedicated entertainer who, in the name of meeting the great mass audience halfway, was willing to work in movies, even co-directing (with David Lean) In Which We Serve, the wartime stiff-upper-lip film that he starred in, wrote, and directed. But he didn't appreciate seeing the theater pieces that he thought of as his real works fiddled with and dumbed down for movie audiences, and after Hollywood turned his operetta Bitter Sweet into a Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald vehicle, he vowed to never have anything more to do with the place.

Easy Virtue, which was directed by Stephan Elliott, from a script (by Elliott and his usual writing partner, Sheridan Jobbins), that is carefully calibrated to bring the original material into line with an eight-year-old's idea of the mature Coward's style of debonair, fashionable entertainment, is a sterling testament to the old boy's good judgment. I had started wincing at the strained broadness and the sound of feet not quite hitting the marks intended early on, but I didn't realize just how low Elliott was prepared to sink until the doodling period-jazz score began to sound eerily familiar. It took me a second to recognize the theme from Car Wash in a quaint jazz-band arrangement. That wasn't the really shocking part; that came a few seconds later, when the faint sound of a vocalist appeared on the soundtrack, crooning about how you might not get rich but that, unlike sitting through this movie, it was still more pleasurable than digging a ditch. In other words, not only does this movie include a '20s-style version of the Car Wash theme, but the filmmakers kind if want you to notice that. They're not ashamed of it.

Elliott, the Australian director best known for the drag spree The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, fills Easy Virtue out with this kind of silly shtick, which serves to advertise his presumed superiority to the material even as it exposes his low opinion of his audience. It's a movie made by people who are drawn to period material because they think the past is just the ginchiest. The sets don't look lived in, and the costumes don't look as if they've been off the rack for more than a minute; if they did, it would interfere with the museum-quality atmosphere. Except that, in keeping with Elliott's taste for in-your-face booga-booga comic effects, it's a museum that doubles as a pop-up book. People make wide-eyed leering faces while reading "scandalous" classics such as Lady Chatterly's Lover, and hand each other newspapers while mentioning that Houdini has died. Kris Marshall plays the family butler, who in the time-honored tradition of drawing room comedies is forever signaling his sardonic awareness of his masters' idiocies. Marshall has aplomb and dexterity, and he might have been very funny if the audience were allowed to notice his impertinence out of the corner of the eye. Elliott lobs him into your lap, so that you get tired of him surprisingly fast.

It's Biel who has the worst time of it, though. Strappingly tall and athletic-looking, with the camera fixated on her pert nose and perfect white choppers, she passes for a member of a superior race, and that's probably the idea: the conquering heroine from America coming to the old mother country to offer the liberating power of her starshine to anyone smart and loose enough to want to accept it, which turns out to mostly be the hired help. (The aristocrats, especially the womenfolk, just feel threatened by her.) Biel isn't dislikable--though her blonde bob makes her seem less warm and friendly than her usual long brunette tresses--but she isn't funny and she never seems relaxed. This kind of material should be a vacation for accomplished performers to breeze through, looking glamorously turned-out while making their witty lines sing; that's how Scott Thomas and Firth play it. (Firth walks off with the movie, because he has the luck to play a character whose wartime experience has left him alienated from the soft, trivial social world around him, which gives Firth the excuse to look as if he's loftily above the bad movie everyone else is sunk in.) Biel looks like she's working hard, and she has no idea how to give shape and music to her lines; she just rattles them off, while looking relieved that she'd managed to remembered them.

And Elliott, while focusing on making sure that she always looks great, still manages to fail to protect her. When the harpies around Biel sneer at her for her composed reaction to a piece of gossip about the death of her first husband, Biel huffs through a puff of cigarette smoke that she isn't about to indulge in "amateur theatrics" just to impress them. When your leading lady is giving a sophisticated-modern-woman performance that looks as if it belongs in a high school play, maybe you should just cut the line about how she doesn't go in for amateur theatrics. Easy Virtue was filmed before, by Alfred Hitchcock, as a silent movie, and a number of people have used this new version as an excuse to marvel at how wrong-headed it was to turn such a dialogue-heavy play into a silent movie. But after hearing the lines spoken by someone who doesn't know how to say them effectively, stone silence and some title cards would come as a relief.

22 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Nailing "The Last Temptation of Christ"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

MOROCCO, FALL, 1987: I arrived on the set of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ a week into the filming. Andre Gregory, stripped to the waist, is standing knee-deep in water and ranting at the extras, who are writhing and wailing and flagellating themselves. I'm still adjusting to the heat and dust that the filmmaking team has already had a chance to acclimate itself to. The sun is doing strange things to my eyes. I thought I saw a goat with the head of Wallace Shawn run to the edge of the river to drink, but shrugged it off. A member of the crew picked up the goat, tucked it under his arm, and carried it back to the catering tent. The goat kept talking about how much it enjoyed sipping cold coffee in the morning and reading Charlton Heston's diaries until the sound of its voice was cut short by the sound of an axe connecting with its neck.

Scorsese himself wanders back from the line of portable toilets and looks at the screaming, bloody mess going on in the river. "Wow," he says to no one in particular, then flags down his cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus. "Listen," he says, "I don't want to get you in dutch with the union, but maybe you should cut your break short and film some of this, y'know? Maybe we could use it." Ballhaus nods and turns his camera toward the scene as Scorsese heads for the catering area.

The prospect of Scorsese telling a Biblical story is an exciting one. His Catholic background is felt in every frame of Mean Streets and Raging Bull. If one knows the devotion and passion that the director is likely to bring to religious themes, it makes it all the more frustrating to listen to the ridiculous complaints that have been coming from conservative religious groups who expect the movie to be an exercise in blasphemy. This is Scorsese's second try at getting this movie made. He was all set to go in 1983 with a cast that included Aidan Quinn in the title role, but Paramount got cold feet and pulled the plug at the last minute. This time, Scorsese is determined to get the movie finished no matter what. Word has it that he sought out a secret line of support as a safety net, just in case Universal tried to withdraw funding. If the stories are true, then he was right to hedge his bets. Sidney Sheinberg, the head of Universal, was reportedly on the verge of canceling the production shortly before he was hospitalized with mysterious stomach pains. (Doctors subsequently removed a nest of locusts that had somehow managed to make their home in his abdomen.)

I find Scorsese in the catering tent. A true hands-on director, he is helping prepare lunch, personally slaughtering the animals that have been smeared with lambs' blood and trussed up beneath a giant pentagram, a symbol the matches the crimson tattoo on Scorsese's bare chest. "O dark prince, accept my offering!" he screams as the knife in his hand comes down for the last time, opening the throat of a deer. The spray of blood hits Scorsese right in the face, but with the reflexes of a trained butcher, he barely winces. He wipes his hands and face with a wet toilet offered to him by his assistant, then whips off the antlers and animal skin that he has been using to protect his head and back from the ferocious sun. "Hi," he says as he shakes my hand, "I'm Marty, pleased ta meet'cha!" You can still see the shy, asthmatic little boy from Queens inside the powerful Hollywood player.

"I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm like very excited about having the chance, having the chance to make this picture," he says, looking down at the mob at the river. "It's, it's a, it's just a very personal thing to me, and after awhile, you're prepared to do anything to get made. Anything." He turns to look at his crew sorting the carcasses to go on the grill, then grabs my face with both hands and looks deep into my eyes. "Aaaaanything!!" he stresses.

"You know, some people have been trying to depict this production as some kind of sacrilege, and that's kind of funny for those of us who do understand the project and what your intentions are. I know some people who think you must be angry about that, but I imagine that you must see it as sort of amusing."

"Yes, yes, sacrilege, blasphemy, that is, that is very funny, it amuses me, it makes me laugh, mwahh-hahh!! It hits me in the whadadya whadadya whadaya call it the funny bone, that it where it hits me. Where it makes me laugh. Hey, Randy, how's that venison coming?"

"This is some hard terrain you're shooting in," I say, watching as the chaos at the river accelerates and a man dressed incongruously, in a long black cloak and black hat, strolls along the bank, taking notes. "Have any of the actors had trouble working under these conditons?"

"It's been, it's, it's been, what you say, a very lively, most unconventional shooting environment. For sure, it has. And people have reacted to in any number of surprising ways. Willem Dafoe, when he's not working, he mostly hides in his trailer, weeping and curled in the fetal position. David Bowie spent his first half hour on the set wandering around muttering something about Berlin, then joined Dafoe in his trailer. Harry Dean Stanton is talking about buying a house here."

The man in the long black cloak turns to face the tent. "Oh, no," mutters Scorsese. "Please don't look at me. You can be here, you can leave notes, you can watch the dailies, but please, please don't ever look at me, not like that..."

Sensing that this might be a representative of Scorsese's secret investor, I ask, "Who is that guy. Would it be all right if I talked to him?"

"Nggggggghhhhh!!, replies Scorsese, "I, I do not think, I would not suggest that you, I think that would be a very bad idea, am unfortunate idea, one that I would in fact urge you not to pursue. Please don't. I urge you, don't. And whatever you do, don't sign anything he gives you. " He turns and holds me by both my arms and, looking me in the eyes again, silently mouths the word, "Don't." Then he turns and looks again at the man in black, and murmurs, "I passed him yesterday when he was talking to Barbara Hershey. Something about Botox..." He seemes to shudder.

The sky, which was clear and bright, suddenly turns black and the sound of distant thunder is heard. "Good set of ears on him, that's for sure," says Scorsese.

"You've worked as an independent filmmaker and from deep inside the industry," I say. "Even this far into your career, you've sort of gone back and forth. Do you think you'll ever work this way again?"

"No. No no no no no no no no no, I do not forsee that happening," says Scorsese. "I cannot anticipate the project on which I would want to repeat this particular experience, so no. It's just that this one means a lot to me, you know? I am...provisionally obligated to do another picture with my financer, a picture of his choosing, but based on the suggestions that he's got up his sleeve, I am fairly comfortable in my hopes that the actuality will not materialize. I'm pretty sure. I think. I hope." For the third time, Martin Scorsese looks me in the face, but now his expression is different, beseeching, hopeful yet frightened. "You don't happen to know," he asks, "if it's true that the remake rights to Cape Fear are up for grabs?"

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:05:00 GMT

The Worst:

Anakin Skywalker in RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

So after three films and six ardent years of my impressionable childhood and pubescence, George Lucas delivers an incredibly satisfying climax as Darth Vader finally comes back to the righteous side of the Force by killing the Emperor (in one of the very best “villain falls screaming to his death” scenes ever), and then, after a tantalizing glimpse beneath the mask in The Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Lord of the Sith is finally revealed...as Egghead? As soon as Vader’s face was uncovered, I immediately wanted to un-see the image, which completely undermined everything that was cool and mysterious about the galaxy’s biggest badass, turning what could have been a heart-tugging farewell into an embarrassing goof. And then, to make matters worse, Egghead suddenly materializes at the grand finale Ewok rave with the shiny, happy ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi...a scene Lucas inconceivably managed to make even worse decades later by adding Hayden Christensen. What’s that thing the kids say nowadays? Oh, yes: epic fail. (AO)

Jimmy Durante in IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD, WORLD (1963)

Stanley Kramer's "ultimate" slapstick comedy attempts to compensate for its director's lack of any sense of humor with sheer tonnage of comic performers. And what better way to set the tone for what follows than with a series of close-ups of a beloved old man looking very uncomfortable as he lies against some rocks coughing and raving while dying in pain? Judgement at Nuremburg was funnier. (PN)

Some poor bit player in RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART II (1985)

Nothing sums up Sylvester Stallone's distinctive brand of cheeseball heroism like the scene from this movie in which Rambo encounters a Vietnamese soldier who reacts to the sight of the leathery white war god by staring at him in gaping awe, patiently waiting for John Boy to take aim with his bow and exploding arrow and blow the fellow to bits. One theory holds that the guy had reached the point of welcoming the chance to get out of the movie and couldn't find a good, hard rock to beat his head against. (PN)

SHIRLEY MACLAINE, THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961)

There’s nothing particularly grotesque or shocking about Martha Dobie’s suicide in The Children’s Hour. The character, nicely played by a young Shirley MacLaine, hangs herself in the barely-seen way characters used to do in the old Hays Code days; in fact, it’s considerably less gory than the Lillian Hellman play upon which the film was based, in which she shot herself in the head. The reason it belongs in the Cinematic Graveyard of Infamy isn’t because of the circumstance, but rather the cause: The Children’s Hour, despite a substantial clean-up job by producer Sam Goldwyn, director William Wyler, and screenwriter John Michael Hayes, was a play about two women accused of lesbianism. The storyline is changed to hinge on the sin of adultery to satisfy the Production Code, but there’s plenty of subtext still in place, and most filmgoers at the time were hardly ignorant of the attendant publicity surrounding the film that made it perfectly clear what was really going on. The death of Martha Dobie thus became the most prominent example (though hardly the last) of the “that gay’s gonna die” syndrome in American motion pictures, where any prominent homosexual character, or even one that’s hinted to be homosexual, is guaranteed to be dead by the end credits. (LP)

ROBBI MORGAN, FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

Robyn “Robbi” Morgan isn’t the best-known actress in the world. She hasn’t had a film or TV credit in 25 years, and if she’s known at all today, it’s for being the wife of third-tier game show host Mark Walberg. Likewise, her character in the first Friday the 13th movie wasn’t important; she had no key lines, a forgettable personality, and no impact on the plot at all. She even died in a fairly ordinary way for a movie of this sort, getting her throat slit as she sat behind the wheel of a car. So why are we including her on the list of the all-time worst movie death scenes? Call it our very own Tomb of the Unknown Victim. Morgan’s death at the hands of Ma Voorhees was the first contemporary murder in the first Friday the 13th movie, and thus, the first of a massive wave of teenage mortality in the dismal 1980s heyday of the slasher flick. More teens died on screen at the hands of vengeful psychopaths from 1980 to 1990 than died in the real world from violence, car crashes and drug overdoses combined, and the very first of them was Mrs. Mark Walberg. It seems her suffering will never end. (LP)

JACKIE EARLE HALEY, WATCHMEN (2009)

Jackie Earle Haley already had one memorable on-screen death to his credit when he started filming Watchmen. In 1975’s Day of the Locust, he plays a child star who is gruesomely murdered by a character with the not-yet-ironic name of Homer Simpson. Many fans of the Watchmen comic believe that the death scene of the brutal vigilante Rorschach, played by Haley in the film version, is an emotional high point of the book; terminally dedicated to his own unshakable sense of justice, he determines to expose the film’s villain, but he’s confronted by Dr. Manhattan. Knowing his fate, Rorschach shows emotion for the first time in the book, crying in the snow and screaming “DO IT!” to the man who will, seconds later, murder him. The movie, as it does with many scenes from the book, gets it exactly wrong; by implicating Dr. Manhattan in the villainous scheme, it changes the whole dynamic of the action. Haley plays the scene defiantly instead of helplessly. And worst of all, when the deed is done, we cut to the character of Nite Owl witnessing the killing (no one sees it happen in the book), and he reacts with the biggest dramatic cliché in movies: he raises his arms to the sky and shouts “NOOOOOOOO!” (LP)

WOLFGANG KEILING, TORN CURTAIN (1966)

Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed torturing both his leading ladies and his audiences, so it’s no surprise that his films featured a number of memorable demises (see Psycho, elsewhere on this list) or near-demises (who can forget the sight of Grace Kelly being brutally strangled in Dial M for Murder – from an audience point-of-view shot, no less?). Torn Curtain isn’t one of Hitch’s better movies; it’s a slow-moving, generally weightless Cold War spy thriller made after his post-Birds career short-circuit. But it does feature a death scene that, if it’s not one of the worst ever made, is at least one of the most uncomfortable to watch. Wolfgang Keiling plays East German espionage officer Hermann Gromek, who Paul Newman finds himself in the position of assassinating in a remote farmhouse. Gromek turns out to be harder to kill than Rasputin, and the battle between the two men turns into an agonizingly brutal showdown: the German is beaten with a heavy kitchen tool, choked, pummeled with a shovel, stabbed with a butcher knife, battered about the head repeatedly, and finally crammed head-first into a gas oven, where he slowly and painfully suffocates. It’s hard to watch, even by Hitchcock standards. (LP)

AL PACINO, SCARFACE (1983)

Al Pacino, apparently, is well on his way to becoming the movie biz’s King of Bad Deaths (see The Godfather Part III elsewhere on this list). You can almost trace the point of his career decline to the day he decided to take the lead role in Brian De Palma’s Scarface, an influential and endlessly watchable but not actually any good movie in which he does not so much play Cuban drug lord Tony Montana as overplay him. Or, to be precise, over-overplay him. There is not a single drop of subtlety in this entire movie, from the first frame to the last, and Pacino passes up no chance to not only chew the scenery, but eat it completely and swallow it in one gulp. Everything from his outrageous accent to his beyond broad body language is yards over the top, and that applies to his death scene as well: playing like a parody of the video game it would eventually become, the movie shows us Tony Montana, coked to the gills from a sandbox-sized pile of powder on his desk, mowing down wave after wave of faceless assassins, and twitchily spitting out Oliver Stone’s amusingly loopy dialogue until his final, gory, spasmodic exit. Just like the rest of the movie, you know it’s terrible, but damn – you simply can’t look away. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Seven)

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

Philip Seymour Hoffman in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Do not watch the attached clip until you see the movie. I repeat: see the movie first. Ironic though it may seem given the title of this movie, this scene cannot stand for the whole expericne of Synecdoche, New York. Actually, that's sort of the point of the movie: the little moments of life can never replace the whole of experience. In the above scene, which is the last in the movie, the end is nigh, all is in tatters, and it's too late for new realizations. I find the scene almost unbearably poignant, which is quite the magic trick, considering all of the weird, unsettling elements the run through the scene. And yet: always the tears. (HC)

Kevin Spacey in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

The murder of Spacey's Jack Vincennes in Curtis Hanson's adaptation of James Ellroy's '50s-set police procedural is designed to be the single greatest shock in a movie full of them, and a low point in the audience's capacity to hope for a bearable outcome: if a guy this smart could walk right into his killer's kitchen with his guard down, what hope is there that the lugs he leaves behind will be able to crack the case? Spacey does it full justice, running the gamut from dismay to despair to dark-humored self-amusement at having been played, all in about half a minute, while letting the light drain from his eyes as if he'd been able to borrow God's personal dimmer. If Spacey has done little since he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, at least in terms of his choice of movie roles (except give audiences reason to think that he might be far less smart than advertised), let no one doubt that the man has chops. (PN)

Jeff Daniels in SPEED (1994) & Denis Leary in GUNMEN (1994)

Speed is as nifty as high concept gets, a pretty much perfect wind-up toy movie, but it does have one, almost jarring moment of pure, deep feeling: the moment when Daniels, the best actor in the cast by a fair margin, triggers the explosive device that he immediately realizes is going to kill him, and just stands there, trying to be ready for what he knows is coming and can't prevent. Amusingly, the noisy, rolling junkyard that is the Mario Van Peebles-Christopher Lambert flick Gunmen, which came out a few months earlier, includes a scene that, while kind of dandy on its own, gains weight when seen as a pre-emptive parody of the Jeff Daniels scene. Gunmen's chief villain, played by Denis Leary, whose constant flow of exasperated, blustering complaints and insults makes it seem as if he's throwing peanut shells at the screen even as he himself is in the movie, barges into a cabin, throws open the door, and eyeballs the bomb that's set to go off in a second. "Well," he says, choosing his famous last words carefully, "fuck me!" (PN)

Paul Reubens in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Words fail me. (PN)

Shelley Winters in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

It's safe to say that the ten minutes captured in the clip above constitute a snapshot of one of the worst marriages in cinema. I'm sure Shelley Winters' Willa Harper would have gladly traded her union for the relatively sane one in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? First, her new husband, the preacher-ish Harry Powell lets her know in no uncertain terms that there will be no canoodling in this marriage. Then there's how her kids claim that Powell is constantly trying to threaten them into revealing where her no-good murdering thief of a first husband hid the money he stole from the bank. And her boss up at the store, Icey Spoon (!!!), who pushed her into this marriage, is always sticking her nose in as if nothing's wrong. Then, when she realizes the truth about Powell, she's too far gone to even attempt to defend herself. Her final resting place (starting at around 3:25 in the clip below) illustrates just how tragic a role that life has chosen for her. (HC)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Nick Nolte in WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN? (1978)

You could argue that this isn't technically a death scene, since Nolte's character doesn't die on-camera; in his last scene as Hicks, the Marine turned heroin courier, he's walking along the train tracks in the desert heat, determined to hold up his end of the agreement to meet his partners somewhere down the line, despite the fact that he's bullet-riddled and bleeding to death. He staggers along, alternately wincing in pain and performing old basic-training drill session games like a man fighting off sleep, and the next time we see him, he's dead. But seldom has an actor thrown himself with greater conviction and physical force into the act of dying. Nolte was in the best shape of his life -- Veronica Geng wrote that his body "was burned down to pure will" -- and especially well-equipped to seem alive enough to fully communicate the cost of a man's death. When he finally goes down, it's as if a whole species had been wiped out for good. (PN)

Bruno S in STROSZEK (1977)

Werner Herzog himself doesn't even know what the dancing chicken is a metaphor for. Perhaps Ian Curtis thought he knew. Even as Bruno S tries to lift himself out of life, he finds himself only circling up and down, while his truck winds around until it explodes, and they can't stop the dancing chicken. (HC)

Sean Connery in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

John Huston's long-delayed version of the Kipling story -- he'd originally planned to use Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable in the roles played here, magnificently, by Michael Caine and Sean Connery -- has a childlike desire to believe in adventure-book heroism that is shaded by an old man's wry awareness that violence and conquest are never purely heroic, and that while futile gestures can seem stirring and beautiful, they're also, well, futile. Connery goes out in glory here, as he would a dozen years later in The Untouchables, and a word should be said for his and Caine's sidekick, Saeed Jaffrey, whose last scene would bring Gunga Din out of the grave, saluting. (PN)

James Caan in THE GODFATHER (1972) & John Cazale in THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

Once upon a time, Michael Corleone had two brothers. A small army took one away from him. The other one he had to take care of himself. Here again we have the dichotomy between quiet death scenes and big, loud ones, and it's no surprise that Sonny, who for all his faults is the white-hot life force in The Godfather, an uncontainable live wire surrounded by people older or meeker or more icily calculating, goes out big. Perhaps more haunting is the death of John Cazale's Fredo, who goes out like an already flickering candle hit by the breeze, or like an afterthought. Sitting in a little boat and about to feel his brains emerging from the front of his head, he bows his head to pray -- and while it could be that he senses what's coming, it would be totally in character if he just wanted to catch a fish. (PN)

Slim Pickens in PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

Sam Peckinpah's elegy for the West is also an elegy for a disappearing generation of character actors. When James Coburn requests that old sheriff Slim Pickens accompany him to a shoot-out with outlaw L. Q. Jones, Pickens replies that he's gotten to a place where he doesn't do much of anything "unless there's a piece of gold attached." He then loads his gun and returns the money that Coburn's just thrown to him, thus establishing himself as one of those Peckinpah characters who mainly talks so that he can have the thrill of contradicting himself. (Jones, who goes out with shaving cream on his face, shot down while executing a comic heartbreaker of a wobbly-legged attempt at a heroic last charge, is another: "Us old boys oughtn't to be doin' this to each other," he complains to Coburn, while the two of them enthusiastically go about doing it to each other.) Fatally ventilated, Pickens, followed by his no-nonsense wife and deputy (Katy Jurado), staggers to the side of the river to die. His head slowly moves from side to side, so that it isn't clear what he's looking at, but from the expression on his face, you'd pay a lot to see whatever he's seeing. (PN)

HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1967)

Kubrick has a reputation as a cold bastard, but it's a terrible, moving moment when the only character in 2001 who seems to have a past, some intellect, and an emotional life bites the dust, out there in the iciness of space where there's no one he can turn to for help. You will be remembered, HAL 9000. (PN)

Vera Clouzot in LES DIABOLIQUES (1955)

I should start by mentioning that the above clip will spoil the greatest shock of this shocking movie. All of the tension in the prior 97 minutes comes to a sudden, heartstopping moment. I've seen this movie many times, and have yet to breathe during it. Be wary. (HC)

Alec Guinness in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949)

This one offers quality in bulk, because Guinness plays eight characters -- the members of the D'ascoyne family, each of whom has to be eradicated by the social-climbing antihero (Dennis Price) so that he will have no obstacles standing between himself and the dukedom he means to inherit. It's hard to single out a favorite, but we'll confess to a special affection for the one that Price doesn't have to take out himself: Admiral Lord Horatio D'ascoyne, who dies as "a result of a naval disaster which arose from a combination of natural obstinacy and a certain confusion of mind." (PN)

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Arnold Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)

Why do people keep ruining James Cameron’s perfectly good endings? First, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley goes through hell to save poor little Newt in Aliens, only to have friggin’ David Fincher whack them both in Alien3 (because, of course, it’s much cooler to kill off beloved, memorable characters than, say, to create interesting new ones). Then, in T2, Cameron finished off the story he began in the original Terminator with a scene of noble, sacrificial self-immolation by the villain-turned-hero/father figure Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 (a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger) that clearly implies the threat of a future evil robot dystopia has been averted...and a decade later, we’re right back where we started with Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As it turns out, Arnie didn’t have to lower himself into that vat of molten lead after all (a scene I could only illustrate with the clip above, since every other version and parody on YouTube has embedding mysteriously disabled, possibly by Skynet). But the scene nevertheless makes my list of great deaths (even though cyborgs can't technically die) because, even more than the hyper-stylized imagery of 300 or Sin City, the fiery shot of the doomed cyborg descending towards oblivion captures the operatic melodrama at the heart of the modern comic book ethos as well as any Mexican standoff in the days when epic grand finales were Sergio Leone’s stock-in-trade. (AO)

Random Thief in AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998)

There are death scenes, there are gruesome death scenes, there are over-the-top nasty and ridiculous death scenes, and then there’s the unforgettable murder perpetrated by Edward Norton’s white supremacist in Tony Kaye’s American History X. In the ghastly attack, Norton’s skinhead confronts three African-American gentlemen trying to break into his car by shooting at them, killing one and injuring another. While spitting racial epithets, he forces the wounded man to place his open mouth on the street curb, and then stomps on the back of the man’s head, thereby fatally splitting his jaw (and face). Twelve years after first seeing the film, the mere thought of the moment still makes me cringe. (NS)

Jean-Paul Belmondo in BREATHLESS (1960) & PIERROT LE FOU (1965)

If you ever sit down to a compile a list of memorable death scenes from the movies -- an activity that I recommend, by the way -- you may find that they divide neatly into two categories, the quiet and reflective (typified at one end of the scale by the end of McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and the wild and flashy (summed up at the other end by James Cagney in, well, anything). In the films that bookend their period of collaboration, Jean-Luc Godard and his star Belmondo hit both extremes. In their breakthrough hit, Breathless, Belmondo, lying in the street with a bullet in his hide, came to terms with his happily misspent existence and enjoyed telling off his girlfriend one last time. Five years later, in Pierrot le Fou, the older and wiser man bids farewell to this cruel world (and to Godard's universe) by breaking out the boom sticks. (PN)

Godard's love of the purity of cinematic worlds is at its apex here. Pierrot Le Fou is a lusciously colored, beautifully shot film about how films -- along with other pop culture trappings -- steal logic from seemingly intelligent people. His characters vacillate between complex and ridiculous. Emotions are heightened without warning, the highbrow ideas of the film are treated to the most lowbrow signifiers, and suddenly Anna Karina is bursting into lovely song. When Belmondo, as Ferdinand/Pierrot, decides to off himself in the most dadaist way, he suddenly seems to realize that the absurdity that holds him in thrall is about to kill him. Ah, but it's too late. Such is the life of the modern man, I suppose: hypnotized by stories and images until the mere fact of living one's life is the same as starring in a fascinating and bizarre movie. The drama will kill you. (HC)

Janet Leigh in PSYCHO (1960)

Arguably cinema’s most famous death, Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Psycho remains a classic for a variety of reasons: the unexpectedness of the incident; the chutzpah Hitchcock exhibits in killing off his heroine midway through the story; the terrifying notion of being attacked unexpectedly and while defenseless; and the editing of the scene itself, a master class in audio-visual synchronicity that manages to convey a monumental amount of violence and bloodshed while never once showing the murderer’s knife making contact with Leigh’s skin. Plain and simple, it’s the death scene by which all others must be judged. (NS)

King Kong in KING KONG (1933)

For pure iconography, few cinematic sights hold a candle to that of King Kong battling aircrafts while clinging to the Empire State Building. Yet while the gargantuan ape’s subsequent fatal plummet to the NYC streets below is, ostensibly, a “happy” ending, what’s remarkable about the climax is how melancholy it plays. Carl Denham may believe “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast,” but the truth is that he – and we, as consumers who crave the type of entertainment sold by hucksters like Denham – are truly responsible for the fallen beast’s death, a truth that lingers long after the final fade to black. (NS)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A lot of my friends have been going through break-ups and divorces lately, which means they’ve probably also been hearing that old familiar friends/family/Facebook folk wisdom about how the end of a relationship is like a death, which must be properly mourned.

And, given that we're down to our next-to-last Thursday list before getting dumped for some younger, sexier blogs by Nerve, your pals here at the Screengrab, having moved beyond denial, anger and bargaining, figured we oughta tackle grief -- well, grief and “holy shit, did you see that guy’s head explode? How frickin' cool was that?” -- with THE SCREENGRAB’S FAVORITE DEATH SCENES OF ALL TIME, including...

The Guy With The Exploding Head, SCANNERS (1981)

Holy shit! How frickin' cool was that? I remember first seeing the aforementioned Exploding Head Guy during one of the montage sequences of the 1984 theatrical clip show Terror in the Aisles (a horror film comprised entirely of classic moments from other horror films, kind of like the Scary Movie franchise without the dick jokes). Later, I saw David Cronenberg’s Scanners in its entirety, although the only thing I really remember about it now is the scene above, where renegade telepath Darryl Revok (B-Movie Hall of Fame villain extraordinaire Michael Ironside) totally blows that bald dude’s skull apart -- with his mind! -- in one of the most memorable death scenes in cinematic history...second only, I suppose, to John Hurt’s demise in Alien (below) for its shock value imagery. In a way, then, it’s sad to realize that, in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and the recent wave of torture porn cinema, the image of a bloody cranium bursting like a ripe watermelon is now considered tame enough to show as a sight gag on The Daily Show. (AO)

John Hurt in ALIEN (1979)

Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) goes to investigate an abandoned spaceship. He finds a chamber full of eggs. One of the eggs hatches, releasing a creature that latches onto his face, knocking him unconscious. His fellow crew members take him back to their ship, where they watch over him until the creature lets go and he awakens, seemingly okay. Then, during a meal, Kane gets violently ill, and a screeching, phallic monster bursts out of his chest cavity...in the process terrifying a generation, immediately elevating Alien above the majority of its contemporary peers, and providing one of the most horrific birth-rape images in the annals of cinema. (NS)

John Cassavettes in THE FURY (1978)

Some men just make you want to get to the point, big-time. Cassavettes is of course legendary as the man who, some say, created the independent American film movement -- but he earned his rent as an actor in other people's movies, and as an actor, he made his strongest impact in man-you-love-to-hate roles. The one that everyone probably remembers best is Guy, the hungry New York actor who pimped his wife out to Satan, a gesture that his character here -- Childress, a top-secret government operative with a dead arm and deader eyes -- would sniff at as the move of a rank amateur. Childress lays waste to most of the cast of Brian De Palma's visually lush horror thriller, only to meet his match in a telekinetic teenager who must share her director's movie-geek interests and black sense of humor, since what she has planned for him is actually a choice parody of the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. (PN)

Robert Shaw in JAWS (1975) & Samuel L. Jackson in DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Hitchcock used to talk about the difference between suspense and surprise in terms of a bomb under the kitchen table. If it suddenly goes off in the midst of a breakfast conversation, you have a moment of surprise. But if you keep cutting to the bomb ticking away while your characters sip their coffee and chomp their bacon…well, now you have suspense. Hitchcock’s thesis can also be applied to movies in which characters are eaten by sharks. (Hitch didn’t mention farce, although that’s a third option.) In Jaws, we have Quint, the old man of the sea, a man seemingly destined to be eaten by sharks ever since he escaped that fate after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the end of World War II. He goes kicking and screaming, sliding down the deck, reaching for a hand that can pull him to safety…suspense! In Deep Blue Sea, we have Samuel L. Jackson giving one of those action movie “rouse the troops” speeches. Just at the moment we’re sure he’s going to lead his team to victory over the shark menace…surprise! (SVD)

JAMES CAGNEY IN WHITE HEAT (1949)

From the first time you get a look at Jimmy Cagney’s unhinged, short-tempered gangster Cody Jarrett, you know he’s not going to end well. Cody is ruthless, bloodthirsty and marginally sane, and like Hamlet, he likes his mother…a lot. When Ma Jarrett (who’s just as crooked and crazy as her boy Cody) finally catches a bullet in the back, he goes completely off the rails and turns from a colorful, hot-headed gangster to one of the most murderous psychotics in the history of crime dramas. Finally betrayed by an undercover cop posing as a trusted member of his gang, Cody’s end comes when he desperately scrambles up the side of a gas storage tank. Fighting it out through a hail of bullets and a cloud of tear gas, he spits death at the cops below, refusing to go out without a fight, but the end seems near when the police snitch catches him with a couple of sniper shots. Even then, he’s got a bloody-minded determination to go out on his own terms: he recklessly fires his pistol into the gas tank, and just before it goes up in a huge, fiery explosion, he screams a defiant echo of the toast he used to raise to his late mother: “Top of the world!” (LP)

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

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

That Guy! John Glover

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

In the late 1970s, in a string of films of wildly varying quality and interest (including Annie Hall, Julia, the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Somebody Killed Her Husband, and Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace and Melvin and Howard), John Glover established himself as a real one-scene wonder, an eccentric, highly skilled actor who was able to take a very brief amount of screen time and use it to make as strong an impression as anyone else in the movie. He was much in demand in the 1980s and into the '90s, doing a lot of work in a lot of different shades and flavors, ranging from a man trying to show the sick hero (Aidan Quinn) of the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost who to die, of AIDS, with dignity, to a doctor who sues his hospital to firing him for having a disfiguring disease on an episode of L.A. Law to the pitchman for a lethal car-protection device in a parody commercial that opened Robocop 2. Yet his combination of brazen smarts and the energy level of an electrified fence seemed to make him especially prone to being cast in villain roles, culminating in his playing the devil himself in the short-lived cult TV series Brimstone. By then, he had also given ample evidence of having the most versatile hair in the history of acting.

In recent years, Glover has been of a presence in TV and on stage than in movies; he may actually be best known to young'uns as Lex Luthor's father on Smallville, a role he played for seven seasons before the character kicked off. Since then, he's been seen as Ron Rifkin's boyfriend on Brothers and Sisters and as Zachary Qunito's father on Heroes. He's currently on Broadway, playing Lucky in a highly praised production of Waiting for Godot alongside Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, and, as Pozzo, John Goodman--Those Guys! of much repute, all.

Where to see John Glover at his best:

52 PICK-UP (1986): This Elmore Leonard adaptation, directed by John Frankenheimer, suffers from an equilibrium problem: the villains are so much more entertaining than the people they're tormenting that it keeps throwing the picture off balance. But of all the performances that inspired one critic to proclaim Glover "the prime rotter of the '80s"--including his scheming stepdaddy in Masquerade (1988) and a smiling hatchet man out for Bill Murray's job in Scrooged (1988)--this is the most flamboyantly show-stopping. His slimy mastermind and amateur filmmaker Alan Raimy is a trained bookkeeper who "found better ways of making money; these include blackmailing Roy Scheider for having slept with a lissome young thing, and then, when that doesn't pan out, blackmailing him after framing him for the lissome young thing's murder. (It goes without saying that he had filmed both the sex and violence, for maximum persuasiveness.) One reason this performance stands out in the Glover rogue's gallery is that he has a first-rate partner in another That Guy!, Clarence Williams III. While Glover, lean and gaunt, dances in place while working his motor mouth, Williams, huge and near-mute, looms menacingly over those he's trying to impress while they wonder if the color of his eyes exists in nature. In his own prize scene, Williams tortures his girlfriend (Vanity) to find out if she's sold them out to Schedier, and, after she squeals that she would never dream of doing such a thing, sits up, murmurs, "I believe you," and then, after pausing and gazing into the nether distance, laments his great character failing: "But I believe everybody!"

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990): Joe Dante's sequel to the 1984 "E.T. Goes Nutzoid"-genetic freak of a summer movie came out right about the time that Glover started confessing to interviewers that he'd like a crack at parts that were less villainous and funnier. He plays Daniel Clamp, a cartoon of Donald Trump, back in the days when Trump was a high-end cheeseball celebrity (Page Six, Spy magazine, Doonesbury) and not just a low-end cheeseball who plays a tycoon on reality TV. The role is still kind of villainous, but it's mostly a comic opportunity, and Glover delivers a sophisticated-sophomoric performance that meshes will with the general outlines of a film that's conceived as a feature-length, (mostly) live-action salute to master Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. This was especially impressive at the time, when Glover could also be seen starring in a production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People that Jack O'Brien directed for public television, which really ought to be available on DVD.

LOVE! VALOR! COMPASSION! (1997): Terrence McNally's highly acclaimed 1994 play, which follows the lives of a group of gay male friends over the course of three holiday-weekend getaways, lost something in the transition to this stiff movie version, but at least it gave Glover, a member of the original Broadway cast, a chance to preserve his dual performance. He plays a pair of English twin brothers: John Jeckyll, a sour, dyspeptic put-down artist, and James, who is beloved by all for his sweet disposition and generous nature. (Dr. Jeckyll and ... get it?) Glover shows his stature here partly by the traps he evades: he plays both brothers (the nicer of whom is dying of AIDS) as individuals and not as conceits made flesh, and does it so well that, by the end, it may be John, the acidic brother who knows that no one will ever love him as easily as everyone loves his twin, to whom your heart goes out.