The Screengrab : planet of the apes

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

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:45:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

Some comedian, possibly Seinfeld, did a routine once that perfectly captured my own pubescent experience during the final moments of The Empire Strikes Back, that sinking, slowly dawning realization that...holy shit! To Be Continued? Is THAT where this is heading? Are you fucking kidding me, Lucas? You’re gonna make me wait THREE YEARS to find out what happens to Han Solo? Last time around, the big finale was the Rebels blowing up the Death Star and this time it’s...Luke getting a new hand? As an adult, of course, I eventually learned to accept years-long gaps between, say, seasons of The Sopranos and Lost (and...uh...girlfriends), but way back when, it seemed like George Lucas was pulling a cruel prank on his faithful fans. (Little did we freakin’ know...) (AO)

RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

Bad:

Worse:

My esteemed colleague Andrew Osborne said of this last week: "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." Yessir, this movie was the first clue that George Lucas had no idea how to separate his best impulses from his worst. What can I say? I was 11, and I knew that bouncing Ewoks singing a creepy-awful song while the ghosts of Jedis past grin at Luke was a miserable way to end things. Then, when Lucas got around to taking a crap on his legacy with the three prequels, suddenly we had to deal with whiny ol' block of wood Hayden Christensen taking scary ol' Egghead Vader's place, while the Ewoks sang a New Age anthem that left me longing for the relative greatness of the "Yub Jub" song. Hey, Lucas, here's an idea: you put Lawrence Tierney under that mask and then have the Rebels celebrate their victory on a planet where the inhabitants aren't covered in fur. Because when the furry people in your universe get together to celebrate, everyone loses. (HC)

DR. T & THE WOMEN (2000)

Critics were unkind to this movie, but I'm willing to cut Altman some slack. It's not that bad. Even as it states that Dallas society forces its women to interact with constant near-brainless patter, it suggests that underneath each perfectly coiffed hairstyle is a powerful intelligence trapped in a socially empty cage. But it all falls apart at the end. After the above clip, when Dr. Travis' daughter runs away from her wedding with her maid of honor, everything in Dr. Travis' life cruelly falls to pieces and he drives off in an increasingly frantic rain, which suddenly turns into the tornado from The Wizard of Oz, and then he's deposited in Big Bend, where he helps a young woman deliver a baby. I mean, I get the point: somewhere over the rainbow, Dr. Travis is practicing the business of bringing life into this world for the needy rather than assisting rich women with their petty neuroses. But Altman asks too much of the viewer with his sudden left turn, and it doesn't make a lick of sense. (HC)

PLANET OF THE APES (2001)

Tim Burton was in a bind when it came to ending his remake or reboot or re-imagining or retardification of Planet of the Apes in 2001. After all, he couldn’t go with the original surprise ending and expect it to wow audiences all over again. At the same time, it’s Planet of the Apes, so it needs some sort of mind-blower of a twist ending. Ultimately, Burton decided not to spend too much time thinking it through. Wouldn’t it be cool if the astronaut played by Mark Wahlberg manages to get back to his own time…only when he looks up at the Lincoln Memorial, he sees the face of his ape nemesis Tim Roth? And then a bunch of ape police show up with guns? Whoa! It was a nifty image to be sure, but could it possibly be explained by the events leading up to it in the movie? Attempts were made to justify it, but none by Tim Burton. "It was a reasonable cliffhanger that could be used in case Fox or another filmmaker wanted to do another movie," Burton claimed on the DVD commentary. Sadly (or not), no one has taken on the challenge…although as you’ll see in the clip above, some enterprising young people did make an attempt to improve on Burton’s finale. There may be some plausibility issues here, as well. (SVD)

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE (2003)

Run, Kate Winslet, run! Look to the sky and scream, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" And then, ohmigodIdidn'tseethatcoming, it turns out that the anti-death penalty activist framed his own death so that they could prove that the Texas legal system gives innocent people the death penalty. No! And the smoking gun (or, in this case, unsmoking gun) was always right there, just beyond her fingertips! No! No! No! Well, actually yes. As in Alan Parker's repulsive Mississippi Burning, which suggested that change came to Mississippi in the 1960s through the work of white FBI agents rather than the brave, but inconveniently often non-white, people of the Civil Rights Movement, here Alan Parker tries to suggest that an anti-capital punishment advocate in freakin' kill-happy Texas has to frame himself to prove that the Texas justice system occasionally puts innocent people on death row. Jesus, a thousand times no. Here's Roger Ebert from his review: "let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein." I might have gone with Idi Amin, but I think you get the point. (HC)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

Since we spoke earlier of how a great movie earns its ending by putting us through so much with the characters we feel they deserve their closing moments, let’s look at a movie that goes about it entirely the wrong way. There’s no question that the Lord of the Rings trilogy earns a good ending; the cast of characters we know and love absolutely deserve a great moment of closure after all that we’ve been through with them over the space of three entire movies. The problem is, Peter Jackson doesn’t give us one ending; he gives us a dozen. There are so many moments of building climax and rest that it starts to seem like a joke when the credits don’t actually roll through one false stop after another. Sure, Jackson and his writers were working with an incredibly long source trilogy, and to their credit, they did cut out plenty; it was just all the wrong stuff. For a director who seemed all too willing to hack bits out at the beginning of the series, he seemed downright reluctant to lose anything at the end, no matter how tedious it became; and even then, some of the choices he made were dubious. Why did we lose the Harrowing of the Shire – one of the more gripping parts of the final novel – so we could have ten minutes of the hobbits bouncing around on a feather bed? For a movie that gave us scene after scene of excitement in the early goings – for that matter, for a movie whose every installment left you begging for the next movie to come out – the endgame left even the most diehard fans longing for the credits to roll.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

REPO MAN (1984)

Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

Love him or hate him -- and there are plenty of cinephiles in both camps -- it’s hard to deny that nobody could end a movie quite like Michelangelo Antonioni. With plenty of wonderful conclusions in his work, it was hard to confine ourselves to just one Antonioni film (or even two, as we ended up doing), but ultimately we couldn’t possibly overlook the finale of this, his most critically-savaged work. Taken as a whole, Zabriskie Point is a scattershot vision of late-sixties America -- sometimes visionary, sometimes ponderous, often both. But even if you aren’t a fan of the movie, the ending packs a wallop. Sure, it’s somewhat obvious what Antonioni’s up to here, blowing up a gaudy “modern” house that has intruded on the natural majesty of the desert, even showing the explosion from multiple angles for extra emphasis. But it’s how he does it that turns the scene from sledgehammer symbolism to transcendent cinema (besides, this is relatively subtle compared to Antonioni’s other proposed ending, which involved an airplane writing “Fuck You, America” across the sky). As Antonioni shifts the film into some of the slowest slow-motion the cinema has ever seen in order to capture the explosions in exhaustive detail, he manages to exact his cinematic revenge on consumer culture -- watch as he blows up a television, a refrigerator, even a loaf of Wonder Bread -- while simultaneously transforming the destruction into something beautiful, with an assist from a modified version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” For lack of a better phrase, it’s pure cinema. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the notion that even a director as art-damaged as Antonioni knows sometimes his hardened audiences just want to watch stuff blow up real good. (PC)

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) & BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Sorry to ruin it for you, but the planet of the apes? It was Earth all along! Charlton Heston sure feels silly now. But not as silly as he’ll feel when he finds himself the prisoner of underground mutants in the sequel. Now he’s really had enough, and it’s hard to blame him for overreacting. I’ve told this story before, but one more time before they turn out the lights: Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen." (SVD)

WEEKEND (1967)

By the end of the ‘60s, it was clear to everyone that Jean-Luc Godard was through fucking around. He was using cinema less as a means of communication and more as a weapon, but how deadly serious he was about deploying that weapon didn’t become clear until the final scenes of his dizzying film Weekend. The circumstances are brutal enough; the bourgeois couple we’ve followed throughout the film, cheated of their inheritance, resort to murder and end up in cahoots with a pack of radical revolutionaries with a taste for human flesh. But throughout Weekend, Godard was operating on a higher level: it’s full of meta-reference, and the director makes no bones about his characters being tuned into their own artificiality at every juncture. He planned it not as a mere statement, but as a command: this art form, he said, is dead; leave the theatre not to discuss it, but to seize and tear down. It was a powerful message, and a prescient one a year before Paris exploded into a nearly miraculous revolution. But even in that atmosphere, only Godard would have had the balls to give Weekend its famous ending: a simple title card reading “END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD.” (LP)

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY (1966)

Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Leone's, aren't concerned with Western realism, but the myth of the West, which they blow up like Greco-Roman gods. This might be the most iconic and expressionist movie ending outside of, y'know, German Expressionism. The clip above starts after Tuco and Blondie find the graveyard, with the camera spinning through the graves as Tuco races through the rows, looking for the right name. Then Blondie forces him to dig. Angel Eyes appears and there's the first double-cross: the grave Tuco is digging up has bones rather than money in it. The Mexican standoff. The second and third double-cross: Tuco's gun is empty and Blondie didn't write anything on the rock. Tuco digs at the right grave, but as soon as he strikes the gold, there's the fourth double-cross: Blondie has hung a noose over his head while he was working. The camera stays with Tuco as Blondie rides away, and we all watch him disappear, thinking, "wait, that one is The Good?" But he returns and frees Tuco, calling back to an earlier scene of camaraderie between them. It sounds like a story from The Odyssey even as I describe it here. If there had been such a thing as a Mexican standoff when Homer was writing, I'm certain that Odysseus would have found himself at one point of the triangle, one step ahead of the others. (HC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

Set Your DVR!: November 24 - December 1, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Can you believe that it's the end of November already? I've barely gotten over Halloween. But there's some great movies coming up this week, so get that record button ready.

Mon, Nov 24:

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat 11/25 at 12/1 am).

Tues, Nov 25

3:45/4:45 am: The Wild One on AMC. You may ask what that young man is rebelling against? At this point, the answer is: whaddaya got? Later the answer will be: belts.

8:50/9:50 am: The New World on IFC (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm).

7/8 pm: Ride With The Devil on AMC (repeat 11/26 at 12:30/1:30 am). Among the many inversions of your expectations in Ang Lee's Civil War drama is the utter surprise when the pop singer Jewel appears and you do not feel like leaving the room immediately.

11 pm/12 am: The Last Waltz on VH1CL. Why is The Band so awesome? Marty Scorcese wants to know.

11:15 pm/12:15 am: Rio Grande on TCM.

Wed, Nov 26

Don't you have a turkey to baste? Or travel plans? TV offers no excuses to procrastinate on the day before Thanksgiving. Unfortunately.

Thurs, Nov 27

5:15/6:15 am: Solaris on IFC. Tarkovsky version, not Soderbergh.

5:30/6:30 am: Planet of the Apes on FMC (too many repeats to mention over the next four days). Starting with a documentary called "Evolution of the Apes" at 5 am on Thanksgiving Day (here in the US, I mean; apologies to our friends elsewhere who will not be stuffing their faces with bird carcass and pie today), FMC is showing nothing but Planet of the Apes movies until Sunday. Rock me, Dr. Zaius!

10:30/11:30 am: The Godfather on AMC. Family. It's what's important in life.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Godfather, Part II on AMC. You should pointedly insist that your brother (or brother-in-law) sit down to watch this with you when the bastard swipes the last piece of pumpkin pie.

9:30/10:30 pm: Beneath the Planet of The Apes on FMC (too many repeats to mention here over the next four days). A guilty pleasure for some, which is why this POTA movie gets special notice. I should mention that I had no idea that there were so many POTA movies. I remember seeing a few when I was a kid, but I didn't realize that the series went on for so long. My favorite is Under The Volcano Of The Planet Of The Apes, in which Charlton Heston plays a burnt-out diplomat drunkenly careening from chimp bar to chimp bar while his luck slowly runs out.

Fri, Nov 28

9/10 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 3:05/4:05 pm).

Sat, Nov 29

1/2 am: The Harder They Come on TCM. Is this the finest rude boy movie ever made? It certainly has the best soundtrack.

3:30/4:30 am: Hell on IFC. The grandfather of J-horror, this is a shockingly gory Japanese flick from 1960.

7/8 am: THRONE OF BLOOD on IFC. Sorry for shouting, but it seems appropriate to shout when mentioning Throne of Blood, the all-time best version of Macbeth on film. You've got Kurosawa & Mifune. Medieval Japan. Cobweb Castle, witches, a walking forest, and a rain of arrows. Allegedly T.S. Eliot's favorite film. Throne of Fuckin' Blood.

6/7 pm: A Boy Named Charlie Brown on FAM (repeat 11/30 at 11 am/12 pm). Pardon my language. I got carried away. Since you might have family with you over the holiday weeked, perhaps it's a good time to revisit the classics of Charles Schultz? This is the one (as you may remember) about a spelling bee. No, not Spellbound, but you're close.

8/9 pm: Snoopy Come Home on FAM (repeat 11/30 at 1/2 pm). What will that rascal Snoopy do next?

Sun, Nov 30

7/8 am: Sansho The Bailiff on IFC. Fantastic drama about justice misserved in feudal Japan. It's not Throne of Blood, but it's not too far behind.

9/10 am: Twentieth Century on TCM. Classic screwball comedy.

9:05/10:05 am: High and Low on IFC. Frequent commenter Janet says she sometimes thinks this is the best Kurosawa/Mifune movie full stop. I sometimes agree with that.

11:15 pm/12:15 am: The Wizard of Oz on TCM. No Judy Garland here. This is the silent version from 1925.

Mon, Dec 1

I got nothing. Hard enough to go back to work after the holiday weekend, anyway.

DVD Digest for November 4, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week is a big one for classic TV on DVD, plus an old-school sci-fi franchise gets the Blu-Ray treatment.

DVD of the Week: My pick this week is only applicable if you have a Blu-Ray DVD player, which exempts a number of Screengrab readers including myself. However, if you have a Blu-Ray player, nothing this week can touch the release of Planet of the Apes: 40 Year Evolution Blu-Ray Collection (Fox). Of course, even fans of the series acknowledge that the Planet of the Apes films are widely uneven. Yet unlike most franchise box sets which pile the lion’s share of extras on the classic films and leave little for the others, Fox has lavished plenty of care on all of the Apes films, regardless of quality. The biggest news for fans is the newly-restored cut of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which went largely unseen since the 1972 studio test screenings. According to Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak, the new version of Conquest is much more darker and violent than the version that was eventually released in theatres. The set also contains a number of new extras, including new making-of featurettes for each of the sequels, a documentary on the evolution from Pierre Boulle’s original novel to the screen, and isolated score tracks for each of the sequels. In other words, everything that one could possibly need to satisfy even the most ravenous Planet of the Apes fan, although for the rest of all the movies are also sold separately.

For us non-Blu-Ray types, the big news this week is the release of the Fraggle Rock Complete Series Collection (Lionsgate), which collects all 96 episodes of Jim Henson’s classic HBO series in a massive 20-disc box set. In addition, the collection includes an exclusive new Fraggle Rock short directed by Cory Edwards, who will direct the upcoming Fraggle Rock feature film, which I hadn’t heard about until today. Other notable TV on DVD releases include: Batman: The Complete Animated Series (Warner), Futurama: Bender’s Game (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Little House on the Prairie: The Complete Television Series (Lionsgate), and Reaper Season 1 (Lionsgate).

The highest-profile recent release coming to DVD today is the big-screen update of the classic series Get Smart (Warner, also Blu-Ray). This week also brings the indie trifecta of Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian (First Look, also Blu-Ray), Luke Wilson in Henry Poole Is Here (Anchor Bay), and Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth in When Did You Last See Your Father? (Sony). And for the kids, there’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Special Edition (Fox) and Shrek the Halls (Paramount).

The annual onslaught of holiday DVDs continues this year with the A Christmas Story Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), although for my money nothing beats watching this over and over on TNT. Also of note this week is the re-pressing of two John Cassavetes classics, A Woman Under the Influence (Criterion) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Criterion). Finally, there’s the Waterworld Extended Edition (Universal), in case that’s your kind of thing.

Finally, this week’s non-ape Blu-Ray only releases include Monster’s Ball (Lionsgate) and Universal Soldier (Lionsgate). And honestly, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more unlikely pairing. Satantango and Rush Hour? Pretty Woman and Irreversible? I’ll have to think about this one…

Ozsploitation! “Turkey Shoot” (1982)

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

In the U.S., it was released as Escape 2000. In the U.K., it had the provocative title Blood Camp Thatcher. The original Australian title is Turkey Shoot, but by any other name, it’s the eleventy-zillionth exploitation movie to be inspired by The Most Dangerous Game. What we seem to have here is a post-apocalyptic society, or at least a dark, dystopic future of some kind – it’s a little hard to tell, because the opening fifteen minutes that would have explained what’s going on were never shot due to budget cutbacks. I don’t suppose it matters much; suffice it to say that there’s an oppressive regime in place operating prison camps for “re-education and behavior modification.” So-called deviants are rounded up, stuffed into yellow jumpsuits and dumped into these camps to perform back-breaking labor, learn to conform and receive abuse at the hands of the guards.

Among the latest arrivals at Camp 47 are Paul Anders (Steve Railsback), Chris Walters (Olivia Hussey) and Rita Daniels (Lynda Stoner), all of whom are selected to participate in the “turkey shoot.” They will be released from the camp (with no weapons) and given a three-hour head start, after which camp leader Charles Thatcher (Michael Craig) and his chief enforcer Ritter (Roger Ward, best known to U.S. audiences as Fifi from Mad Max, but perhaps more familiar to Aussies from the 80s TV series Professor Poopsnaggle) will hunt them. If the prisoners make it to dawn alive, they are free to go. If Thatcher and company catch up to them, they will die graphically violent deaths.

Turkey Shoot was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, a towering figure in the realm of Ozsploitation. (We’ll encounter more of his work later in this series.) You might even call him the Down Under Roger Corman, and if not for its Australian setting, Turkey Shoot could have been shipped straight out of the Corman factory. (It’s a cousin to the “sports of the future” genre that includes Corman’s Deathsport – a genre I wrote about in this High Hat piece.) The Aussie flavor is somewhat lacking, what with the major roles going to imported almost-stars Railsback and Hussey, and the overall production is rather uninspired (although Trenchard-Smith deserves at least some credit for pioneering the co-ed shower facilities later appropriated by Paul Verhoeven for Starship Troopers). The gore is graphic, if cartoonish: machetes split skulls, machine gun fire separates heads from bodies. The most fun part of the DVD is the making-of documentary, in which none of the participants (including the director) has anything good to say about the movie. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before.

Bonus Attraction: A mutant beastie in half-assed Planet of the Apes makeup is ripped in half by a bulldozer.

Rating: Two Foster’s

Previously on Ozsploitation!:
Dark Age
Razorback

Fantastic Fest Review: “Fanboys”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve mentioned this a time or twelve here, but unlike my colleague Andrew Osborne, I don’t have the Star Wars gene. Sure, I loved the movies as a kid – maybe not quite as much as the Planet of the Apes series or anything with Bigfoot in it – but they never became an inextricable part of my life essence and I definitely wasn’t waiting in some smelly tent for Episode I back in 1999. If we’re playing “Star Wars vs. Star Trek,” Kirk, Spock and the gang win out with me every time. So I wouldn’t appear to be part of the target audience for Fanboys, the long-awaited story of four geeks and a gal who take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch in order to be the first to see The Phantom Menace.

Having said that – and despite all the delays, reshoots and controversies over plot points that dogged the movie in recent months – Fanboys proves to be an enjoyable ride for the most part. If you’ve followed the behind-the-scenes machinations, you know the set-up: It is 1998, and lifelong Star Wars geek Linus (Chris Marquette) has terminal cancer. (This is the part the studio didn’t like, but after an outcry from fanboy nation, it is restored.) Along with fellow Force enthusiasts Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel) and estranged best friend Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus sets out in a van to accomplish the one thing he wants to do before he dies: see the long-awaited first prequel to the Star Wars trilogy. (As an aside, and without giving away whether or not he accomplishes his goal – imagine this is your dying wish and the movie in question turns out to be the freakin’ Phantom Menace. Ah well, at least it wasn’t The Clone Wars.) Road trip hijinx galore ensue, including a pit stop in Austin to pick up top secret intel on Lucas’s fortress from Ain’t It Cool News ubergeek Harry Knowles, a night in jail that will have you rethinking your whole approach to prison pooping, and a rumble at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. There are cameos galore, including actors from the original trilogy, Seth Rogan in multiple roles and even the Shat himself, William Shatner.

Stylistically, Fanboys is sort of a mesh between the Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow sensibilities (Smith has a cameo and Apatow oversaw the reshoots and enlisted many of his regulars), but its secret weapon is co-screenwriter Ernest Cline, who has absorbed every ounce of nerdy minutiae from the past 30 years and deploys his vast store of useless knowledge for both punchlines and poignancy. Although Fogler still strikes me as a poor man’s Jack Black, the core cast is engaging, particularly Kristen Bell as the one girl who’ll put up with the geeks.

My main problem with Fanboys is that I wish it had actually been made ten years ago (as per Cline’s original plan), before geek culture became so pervasive and satisfied with itself. After another decade's worth of prequels, merchandising and ubiquitous references, I don't care if I never hear about Yoda, Chewie or Ewoks ever again. In a way, though, that's beside the point. Star Wars is the secret language of these characters – the way they always communicated. In that respect, it's no different than if the movie had been about, say, terminally ill Cubs fans taking a trip to see their team win their first World Series in 100 years – they'd just talk about Ernie Banks and “Let’s play two” instead of Darth Vader and “May the Force be with you.” The story is really about the friendship, the journey and the laughs along the way, and on that level it works even if you don't give a shit whether or not Greedo shot first.

Related:
Fanboys on the March
Fanboys vs. Darth Weinstein

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: July 26-August 1, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The weekend is here and you could probably find something to do outside, like go to the beach or the dog track, but we both know it’s way too hot out there. For your own safety, I implore you to stay home, crank up the air conditioner and relax with a fruity drink and the finest Screengrab posts of the week.

You know us, always finding diamonds in the dung, like the Top Ten Great Scenes From Not-So-Great Movies (Parts One, Two and Three)

We got up close and personal with Sean Connery and Melissa Leo, but kept a safe distance from Shigeo Tokuda, the Godzilla of geriatric porn.

We bucked the trends and chose to pay some attention to that arthouse curiosity The Dark Knight – including the top 10 reasons it isn’t as good as you think and the foolish editorials comparing Batman and Bush.

We wondered who was goofier – Jon Voight or George Lucas? Then we wondered why Tim Burton had to remake Planet of the Apes.

We looked back to Around the World in 80 Days and ahead to Body of Lies, W and the next Harry Potter.

We checked out the Venice Film Festival lineup (not to mention Anne Hathaway)

And some would say we nuked the fridge.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Of the marquee filmmakers currently working in Hollywood, Tim Burton’s style is one of the most recognizable. A former animator turned filmmaker, Burton imbues his best films with a look inspired by old-school horror films and classic cartoons, while reflecting a deep affection for outsiders. While Burton’s first two features, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, won the director a cult following, it wasn’t until his third that he applied his style to a blockbuster. With 1989’s Batman, Burton demonstrated that he could apply his Gothic visuals to a big-budget franchise in a way that translated into box-office gold.

Aside from the sequel Batman Returns, Burton’s 1990s output didn’t meet with the same fiscal success, but he nonetheless became a fan favorite, and despite the public’s habitual hostility to sequels, there was a lot of anticipation toward 2001’s Burton-directed “re-imagining” of the science-fiction classic Planet of the Apes. However, much of this excitement dissipated upon the film’s release. Aside from a few supporting performances and the state-of-the-art makeup work by Rick Baker, the general consensus was that the movie was a bloated mess. Worst of all, Burton fans saw the movie as strictly a paycheck job, a cash-grab blockbuster from the director they loved. Watching the movie recently, I found it somewhat more interesting than I did on its original release, but it’s still not very good.

One of the problems is that the ape characters are far more interesting than the humans. A great deal of attention is lavished on the apes, not only in terms of the makeup, but also characterization-wise. Each ape is given a distinct and easily-defined personality, be it the ambitious General Thade (Tim Roth), the slimy “human cargo” dealer Limbo (Paul Giamatti), or the human-rights crusader Ari (Helena Bonham Carter). They’re not especially complex, but they’re fun to watch. By contrast, from square-jawed hero Capt. Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) on down, the human characters are bland and unmemorable.

For a while, it feels like the film is attempting something subversive, by placing the audience’s sympathies with the apes to make them ponder their treatment of “lesser” species. However, it eventually becomes clear that Burton is painting the humans as the “outsider” characters. This might have worked had the movie given us any reason to care about the human characters, but it never does, aside from the fact that the audience will be almost invariably comprised of humans rather than apes. As a result, the film is at cross-purposes- the humans are meant to be the good guys, but the apes are far more entertaining.

Most compelling of all is Ari, who ends up torn between her nature as a chimpanzee and her desire to help humans receive “separate but equal” treatment. At one point, the film sets up a quasi-love triangle between Ari, Davidson, and loincloth-clad human Daena (Estella Warren)- a development that becomes all the more fascinating since Ari is far more appealing than Daena, ape status notwithstanding. Unfortunately, the film shies away from the possibilities of inter-species romance, and after Ari’s advances are thwarted, she attempts to appeal to Thade, who casts her out once and for all. Because she is forcefully banished from the apes, Ari’s character loses quite a bit of thematic interest that she might have kept had she freely chosen to take the humans’ side.

Most surprisingly, Planet of the Apes was Burton’s most visually uninspired film to date. Despite the inventive makeup and creative set design from longtime Burton associate Rick Heinrichs, the images in the film are largely forgettable. Part of the problem was the relatively flat studio lighting, which gave audiences ample opportunity to savor Baker’s and Heinrichs’ work but which bore little resemblance to the trademark “Burton look” of films like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow. Certain shots bear the Burton stamp, but for the most part the film could just as easily have been made by an anonymous studio director instead of one of the Hollywood’s most inimitable stylists.

Then there’s the ending. Burton’s Planet of the Apes took a lot of flack at the time for its finale, which confused many audience members while annoying others. Upon further review, I sort of like it, not least for how it appropriates the ending of Pierre Boulle’s original novel. However, it couldn’t possibly live up to the final scene in the original film, which was audacious in both its simplicity and its allegorical implications. By comparison, the “new” ending came off as a case of the filmmakers trying too hard to outdo the classic version. In a way, this is reflective of the whole film- despite the best efforts of the filmmakers to outshine the original Planet of the Apes, the inspiration just isn’t there.

Unwatchable #90: "The Bat People"

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s been quite a journey through the animal kingdom here lately in our Unwatchable series. We’ve met the marsupial werewolves down under in Howling III and the mutant arachnids of Horrors of Spider Island, but nothing can prepare you for the bat people of, er, The Bat People!

In this 1974 tale o’ terror, Dr. John Beck is a bat specialist with a seemingly permanent “Who farted?” expression pasted on his face. His wife Cathy just wants to do a little skiing, but this is a working vacation and there are caves to be toured. She’s reluctant to go along, but once she’s down in the dank underground, the thought hits her: hey, we’ve never done it in a cave before! Their subterranean nookie is curtailed when Cathy falls through into a sub-chamber and a bat divebombs into her hair. John comes to her rescue, but is bitten in the process. A short time later he begins to have convulsions, accompanied by visions of bats pursuing his wife in a black, existential void. This understandably frightens the other people on the ski lift and in the hot tub, so he goes to the doctor to begin the Pasteur treatment for rabies (that’s a series of 20 painful injections in the groinal area, for you laymen).

Despite the treatment, John begins to suffer from some side effects similar to rabies, such as mood swings and dry mouth, and some not so similar, such as actually turning into some sort of, I guess you’d call it, BAT-MAN. When women start turning up dead, the sheriff comes sniffing around, as he can’t help but notice John has a bad habit of leaving incriminating evidence at every crime scene. A series of dull chase sequences ensue, and I think somewhere in the middle John takes refuge in a barn and befriends a philosophical wino, though I may have dozed off and dreamed that part. The plural of the movie’s title is finally explained in the twist ending, which I wouldn’t dare give awa…oh, okay, his wife turns into a bat person, too.

If The Bat People is notable at all (hint: it’s not), it’s as one of makeup guru Stan Winston’s earliest efforts, though I suspect he’d leave it off his resume if the IMDb didn’t exist. When we finally get a full view of the transformed John, he looks less like a bat than an extra who stole a mask from the set of the Planet of the Apes TV series. The movie is also memorable for the insanely oppressive score by Artie Kane, who went on to compose the music for Waterworld. I don’t remember what that sounds like, but here Kane is like a bull in a music shop, bludgeoning keyboards, blaring trumpets, mauling harps, and beating marimbas within an inch of their lives. Apparently he got someone’s attention.

I can’t really get too worked up about The Bat People one way or the other, honestly, so let’s give it two Maurys and be done with it.

Previously on Unwatchable:

91. Horrors of Spider Island
92. I Accuse My Parents
93. Howling III: The Marsupials
94. Invasion of the Neptune Men
95. Marci X

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne Watkins — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:15:00 GMT

With M. Night Shyamalan's latest opus on the horizon, our thoughts are drifting to one of the best and worst things ever to happen to movies: the twist ending. True, the twist ending hit oversaturation in the early '00s, when it seemed like every film ended with a tacked-on revelation that all the characters were dead or the same person or characters in a giant videogame or something. But film history is so full of con games, double-crosses and startling last-minute revelations that it would be a shame to lose the twist ending entirely. Here's an affectionate guide to the 5 kinds of surprise endings. And yes, many films fit into more than one category. Call it a twist. -- Gwynne Watkins

#5 The Twilight Zone
In The Twilight Zone, something seems wrong or off-kilter for the entire film, but it's not entirely obvious what that thing is. When the twist is revealed, it creates a shift in perspective that can be easily explained in one sentence (such as the classic Twilight Zone example, "To Serve Man -- it's a cookbook!") Films that do The Twilight Zone well include The Others, Soylent Green and Swimming Pool. But when it's bad, it's very very bad; look no further than The Village, a cautionary tale for screenwriters everywhere.

#4 The Scooby Doo
This is the twist ending that reveals all prior events in the film to be part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the characters. And they would have gotten away with it, too! It's most commonly seen in con man movies -- The Game, Matchstick Men, The Sting, The Spanish Prisoner -- although it's cropped up to abysmal effect in "gotcha!" films like Basic and The Life of David Gale.

#3 The Donald Kaufman
Named for Charlie Kaufman's fictional screenwriter brother in Adaptation, The Donald Kaufman is the big twist that ostensibly explains everything, but in fact, makes no sense whatsoever. The Donald Kaufman most often takes the form of "They're both the same person!" or "It was all a dream!" Identity, High Tension and Femme Fatale are recent examples.

#2 The Awful Truth
The Awful Truth is the sucker punch of twist endings: a revelation that turns the main character into a tragic figure. Think Luke Skywalker screaming "That's not true! That's impossible!" in Empire Strikes Back, or the final shot of Rosebud in Citizen Kane. At best, it's dramatically satisfying (see Donnie Darko, Memento or Seven); at worst, it makes you want to slap the filmmaker for being a total sadist (see The Mist).

#1 The 20/20 Hindsight
The hardest kind of twist ending to pull off successfully, The 20/20 Hindsight requires the viewer to sit through an entire movie without realizing that a twist ending is coming. Then, after what seems like the film's resolution, the rug gets pulled out from under them. The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects are the classic examples; both have a fake-out ending that's quite satisfying, then a last-minute revolution that turns the whole film on its ear. Others include Fight Club, Planet of the Apes and Saw.

Memoirs of a Movie Ape

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Being a mime in the movie business usually entails getting punched in the face, but Dan Richter managed to parlay his trapped-in-an-invisible-box skills into a key role in “one of the most influential and important sequences in film history.” No, not the tennis scene from Blow-Up; you’ll remember Richter for hooting, beating his chest and – most famously – throwing a bone in the air.

Not only did Richter play “Moonwatcher,” the ape-man who invents weapons of mass destruction in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he also choreographed the “Dawn of Man” sequence that opens the picture. “It so happened I was teaching private classes in mime in London at the time,” Richter told our man Bilge Ebiri at New York magazine’s Vulture blog. “Anyway, I was asked if I would go out and let Stanley pick my brain. I said, "If you give me twenty minutes, a stage, leotards, and some towels, I can show you how to do it." So he hired me to choreograph it, and eventually talked me into playing the part of Moonwatcher as well.”

Most of us probably assumed notorious control freak Kubrick trained his own apes for the film or even built a set of mecha-monkeys in his basement, but in fact Richter conducted his own little Full Metal Jacket boot camp for his fellow ape-men. And although he didn’t design the makeup – that was Stuart Freeborn’s work – he’s still a little miffed that Planet of the Apes wound up with the Oscar for Best Makeup. “It was so below what we were doing! Also, I'll tell you something else: We had stuff stolen. I can't say it was Planet of the Apes, but they were the only other movie shooting at the same time and same place we were. Stanley and I even had someone steal a mask and some ape hands right out from under our noses on the backlot, where someone had hid in a drainage ditch.”

If only the damn dirty apes had kept their stinkin’ paws on, that never would have happened.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

Trona, California: Where Movies Take Root and the Grass Won't Grow

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It's always a thrill for the locals when a commercial film crew comes calling, shooting a movie right there in their own back yard because there's just something about the place that they couldn't capture anywhere else. For the residents of Trona, California (population 1,800 and change), the thrill was all mixed up with the honor of having the star of Urban Legends: Final Cut declare that their town was "the worst place I've ever seen. And I've seen Third World poverty." Hart Bochner, the actor and writer-director of the forthcoming Just Add Water, actually prepared his new project with Trona in mind. He discovered the town years ago when a film he was working on in Bakersfield came to Trona for some night shoots. Apparently the sheer horror of it all — "It was beyond bleak and beyond heartbreaking and almost comical in the personality of the place, where at the center you have this decay where people are forgotten, and surrounding it was all of this exquisite beauty" — was something he needed to address as an artist in order to exorcise it from his psyche. Trona was set up in 1913 as a company town for the local borax mine. (The town, which is 170 miles northeast of L.A., takes its name from a mineral that the lake is rotten with.) It may be best known for its high school's dirt football field [pictured], said to be unique to the continental United States, though maybe some other towns have one but just prefer not to boast about it. (Because of the combination of the heat and the quality of the soil, grass won't grow there.) It has been featured in movies before — it was typecast as the post-apocalyptic landscape in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes — but Just Add Water, which stars Dylan Walsh as a typically luckless resident of the town and Danny De Vito as his new friend, is almost certainly the first movie to actually have grown out of someone's attempt to grasp just what it might be like to be stuck there. Not that Bochner has anything against the people of Trona themselves. "The community," he says, "everyone was so sweet to us." Maybe they thought that if they were really sweet, he'd take them all with him when he left.

God Damn Us All to Hell, Every One!

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

In I Am Legend, Will Smith zips around a depopulated Manhattan in a sports car, with his trusty German shepherd in the seat next to him; if he takes a curve too fast and the pooch soils the upholstery, he can always pick up another one. Smith also high in the tall grass that, intended, has sprouted up in Times Square and hunts deer with the Virgin Megastore in the background. He doesn't have any scenes with the Statue of Liberty, but as Sewell Chan points out in The New York Times, apocalyptic fantasies centered in New York City often go straight for the lady in the harbor. Charlton Heston had a hissy-fit when he encountered her remains at the end of Planet of the Apes; her torch sticking out of the waterline was the last visible trace of a submerged New York in Steven Spielberg's A.I.; and the promotional artwork for the forthcoming Cloverfield uses a smoking, ravaged statue to indicate what horrors may await audiences when that viral-marketed behemoth finally lumbers into theaters.

New York is hardly the only place on the American landscape that has been obliterated onscreen to audience-pleasing effect. The whole point of the 1974 disaster hit Earthquake was, in the words of Pauline Kael, about "seeing L.A. get it." And though Chan includes the 1996 Independence Day in his roll call, noting that it's a film in which "Giant alien spaceships hover over, and then destroy, New York and other major world cities", the fact is that the one thing everybody probably remembers from that picture is the image of the White House exploding. (Even people who didn't see that movie may well still remember it from its once ever-present trailer.) But you know New Yorkers. Chan quotes the architectural historian Max Page as writing, “The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building. For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s pre-eminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end.” But Chan isn't just convinced that this is all about the city; he also thinks it's "tasteless" to indulge in this sort of thing after 9-11. An alternate hypothesis might be that it's actually a sign of health that moviemakers and audiences may be ready to indulge in this kind of scary fantasy again; that they've moved on. Luckily, he was able to reel Ed Koch in for a sound bite. “'They want to see our skyscrapers destroyed because they are envious of them,' Mr. Koch said in a phone interview. Asked whom he was referring to, he said, '"They" is the rest of the country.'” Maybe the monsters and aliens keep attacking New York because they're trying to make friends with us by taking out Ed Koch.