The Screengrab : platoon

Take Five: Stoned

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Still, in our opinion, the greatest thing that Oliver Stone has ever done, the hugely underrated Conan the Barbarian found him paired in the screenwriting duties with director John Milius. Milius, an unabashed right-wing war hawk and suspected crypto-fascist, had a habit of butting heads with '60s liberals like Stone, with the conflict bringing out the best in both of them; he'd previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, even more of a lefty than Stone, on Apocalypse Now, and their diametrically opposed viewpoints about the Vietnam War resulted in a crazed masterpiece. Conan is no less so; Stone's cynical pro-civilization standpoint and Milius' joyously pro-barbarian views resulted in a movie that is uncannily faithful to Robert E. Howard's violent, amoral books.

SCARFACE (1983)

Even to Brian DePalma's most vociferous defenders -- a dwindling number in which we count ourselves members in good standing -- there is a general recognition that Scarface, his updating of the 1930s gangster classic to the Miami drug trade days, isn't actually a very good movie. But it is a very important movie, insofar as it influenced dozens of later thug-life pictures both better and worse than it was; and, what's more, for its many, many failings, it's a compulsively watchable movie. Even if you know about its overblown performances, its ridiculous ending, and its general sense of aimlessness and enervation, you hardly ever want to turn it off. And a lot of that is down to screenwriter Oliver Stone, who crammed it full of so many hilariously quotable lines that it became the biggest influence on hip-hop since James Brown.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone have been tied together by fate since early on. They share similar styles and similar obsessions, and both were rumored for many years as wanting to do a remake of the woozy film version of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead. The one time they worked together was on 1985's Year of the Dragon, a film in which all of their strengths and weaknesses were apparent. Just before giving full voice to his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, Stone hints at them here, constantly and darkly; his dialogue is often flat and creaky, as opposed to the gloriously lurid bombshells of Scarface, but his characters and scenarios compliment Cimino's hyperactive sense of busy detail and rhetorical bombast, and he plays on themes of male bonding and sudden violence as a social actor that he'd later explore as a director.

8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)

The last movie Stone would write for a director other than himself (aside from the aforementioned Evita, to which his contributions were minimal) was Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie reviled by many but regarded by others as a miniature masterpiece that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. Whatever the case, its favors -- which, for its defenders, include some gorgeously lurid violence and dialogue so scuzzy it borders on the beautiful, as well as a nice lead performance by Jeff Bridges -- are hard to discern under lots of muddle. Did Ashby really direct, or did Stone take over when he was fired? Did Stone really write, or is Robert Towne responsible for the script Stone could no longer handle when he ended up behind the camera? We may never know; and a lot of people simply don't care.

Related Posts:

Dissecting/Debating W.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Warners DVD Keeps John McCain Interview Under Lock and Key

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Warner Brothers is fending off reports that they are keeping promotional materials for the November 11 release of the 1987 film The Hanoi Hilton on DVD under wraps rather than using them to stir up interest in the movie rather than advertise any connection to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. The movie, which was released during the same wave of Reagan-era Vietnam films that included Platoon and Full Metal Jacket (as well as such gung-ho popcorn entertainments as Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films), is a sympathetically intended treatment of the American presence in Vietnam that is set among the prisoners of war being held at the Hoa Lo prison where McCain served his time as a P.O.W. (The movie is not meant to depict any actual person's experience. However, it does make room for an appearance by an idiotic American movie star and war protester, played by Gloria Carlin, who is called "Paula" but is obviously meant to be Jane Fonda.) Earlier this year, McCain filmed an interview about his own prison experience which was to be included on the DVD. Now, reports Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Warner Brothers has "moved quietly over the last few weeks to block any promotional showing" of any part of that interview, for fear that it "might embroil the project in electoral politics." A spokesman for Warners' home enterttainment division describes its decision as "just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.” In response, Lionel Chetwynd, the British-born Canadian-American writer-director of The Hanoi Hilton, has fired back that "Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel.” And you thought that British-born Canadian-Americans never got off any good ones!

Released by the infamous Golan-Globus/Cannon Film company, and starring Michael Moriarty in his Method-space alien phase, with a supporting cast that includes David "Hutch" Soul, Jeffrey Jones, Paul Le Mat, John Diehl, and Doug Savant, The Hanoi Hilton originally managed to bring together people of all different political beliefs and attitudes about the war in brotherly agreement that this was one shitty movie. A barely detectable blip on the radar screens during its brief spell in theaters (despite attempts by some commentators to pull in conservative moviegoers by hailing it as the anti-Platoon), it has since found an audience of appreciative veterans and nostalgic military hawks who discovered it on videocassette and late-night showings on cable TV. Chetwynd, a self-styled Hollywood conservative whose screenplay credits include the TV films The Siege at Ruby Ridge and DC 9/11: Time of Crisis and who had a hand in Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die, a "documentary" feature, intended as a back-atcha to Michael Moore, has recently had his attempts to arrange screenings of the movie squelched by Warners lawyers, although Daniel P. Tokaji, an associate professor at the Ohio State University law school, told the Times that “I don’t immediately see what law they would violate.” Chetwynd, who points out that another studio, Lions Gate, doesn't seem to be keeping the pre-election day release of W. under a barrel, probably sees all this as a part of a liberal-Holywood conspiracy to keep his movie from doing its part to propel John McCain into the White House. Those who've taken a look at McCain's latest poll numbers may suspect that it has more to do with Warners not wanting to damage DVD sales by tying their product to a failing brand.

Red Suspension of Disbelief: Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Would Like to Clarify

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Stanley Weiser, Oliver Stone's co-writer on the 1987 Wall Street, has just published his apologia for his part in the creation of the popular image of the morally shifty, massive-balled financial insider as American hero. (Weiser also wrote Stone's forthcoming W. as well as other politically crusading movies and TV films such as Murder in Mississippi, Freedom Song, Rudy: The Rudy Guiliani Story, and 1987's Project X, in which Matthew Broderick fearlessly rescued monkeys from The Man.) Wall Street, which starred Michael Douglas as maverick financier Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen, who had already done time as Stone's youthful fantasy alter ego in Platoon, as his corruptible protege. Douglas, playing a role designed to click with moviegoers' memories of the kind of charismatic heel role that his father had all but taken out a copyright on decades earlier, had his star heightened by the movie, for which he won an Academy Award. (As for Sheen, he can now be seen rotting before the viewer's very eyes on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The other representatives of the show's title are played by Jon Cryer and some kid. I think somebody's math is off.) Meanwhile, Gekko's showboat moment, the "'Greed is good' speech", has become not just a one-scene highlight reel of Douglas's career but a signpost moment in 1980s culture, a phenomenon that's been challenging the 60's status as The Decade That Refused to Leave. (Oliver Stone, of course, has a foot solidly in both.) A recent critics' symposium on the possible effects of the Wall Street crash pointed to that speech as a choice example of satire that was adopted by people who steadfastly refused to get the joke.

With the current financial meltdown, Gekko's name has been coming up a lot lately, always with the understanding that to cite the character by name is to use a form of shorthand to conjure up images of predatory jackals in power suspenders. What isn't always apparent is that the people citing Wall Street as some kind of dire prophecy remember that the movie started out as stale news and then had the great good fortune to become an unplanned comment on breaking news, circa 1987. Stone had decided to do a movie about Wall Street around the time that the hammer started coming down on insider traders, including Ivan Boesky, who was arrested and started selling out his fellow street rats in 1986, the same year that he had delivered a "greed-is-good"-type speech ("I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself") at the University of California. (Weiser says that Gekko was partly based on Boesky and partly based on other high rollers. He was also partly based on Stone; Weisner writes that the director's "rants" and "unpublishable barbs proved to be the precise varnish with which I needed to coat Gekko.") The movie was treated as a big deal leading up to its release--Stone had won the Oscar for Platoon earlier in the year--but there was also a feeling reported in the trade press that nobody really had huge box office hopes for what amounted to "two hours of people talking about money." Then the 1987 Wall Street crash hit, and audiences who knew that something important was happening but were having trouble figuring out just what it was from reading the business section crowded into theaters to see if they could better make sense of the big news story of the day if it had Darryl Hannah in it. At the time, the 1987 Wall Street freak-out was widely reported as the death knell of the go-go-80s/Reagan era, but it turned out that greed had been, if not necessarily good, then sorely misunderestimated.

According to Weisner, Stone conceived of the idea of "a movie about Wall Street" pretty much on the spot, veering away from the idea of a movie that he had ordered Weisner to research about the 1950's quiz show scandals, and casting it in ambitious literary terms before either he or his collaborator had any idea of what it might entail in terms of a story or characters. "Read Crime and Punishment over the weekend," he told Weisner, "and we'll talk Monday." Weisner, to his credit, admits to having made do with the Cliff's Notes. When he reported back that he didn't see anything in there that they could apply to Wall Street, Stone, who may very well not have been clear about anything about Crime and Punishment except that he liked the title, told him to go read The Great Gatsby instead. (Weisner rented the movie.) After this unpromising beginning, things went on to work out okay, but Weisner marvels at the fact that in the last twenty years he's "run into quite a number of younger people, who upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it . . . but often for the wrong reasons...A typical example would be a business executive or a younger studio development person spouting something that goes like this: 'The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko.'" If he had it all to do over again, he says, he would rewrite Gekko's big line to read: "Greed is Good. But I've never seen a Brinks truck pull up to a cemetery." This would certainly have had a different effect on audiences, assuming that, like me, they would have had no earthly idea just what it's supposed to mean.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)

This Italian film, directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, is about the people who don't fight in war but who just do their best to keep their lives from being completely overrun when it comes to town. In this case, the people are Tuscan, and it's late in the summer of 1944, with World War II winding down and the local fascists preparing to blow up anything they can before the Americans arrive. The people of the village sneak out under dead of night and prepare to hit the road, hoping to stay alive until they encounter the Yanks; the movie is presented as the memories of a woman who was six years old then, and it's infused with a playful surrealism that colors the many incidents, making them seem touched by magic. Which, at this point, is entirely appropriate for a movie where the people can't wait to embrace the invading Americans.

14. PLATOON (1986)

Drawing on memories from his own experiences in combat, Oliver Stone won Best Director and Best Picture for his grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, where (in the words of star Charlie Sheen, back when he was a serious actor rather than a smirky sitcom star), “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.” Earlier films (notably Apocalypse Now) had, of course, tackled the Southeast Asian “police action,” but the topic was generally as unpopular on the big screen as Iraq films are today. Platoon, premiering four years after the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., marked a cathartic cultural shift in America’s perception (and digestion) of the war: without Platoon’s critical and commercial success (and the flood of Vietnam movies, TV shows and video games that followed), a parody like 2008’s Tropic Thunder would have been unthinkable, not to mention sacrilegious. Yet, even though Vietnam era slang (being in “the shit”) and combat details (cigarette packs in helmet bands, etc.) are now war movie clichés, I’ll never forget seeing Platoon for the first time, when the wounds of America’s last great military misadventure were finally starting to heal, then watching shaken veterans around the theater hanging back after the lights came up, grouping together in pain and reminiscence.

13. SHAME (1968)

It’s probably no coincidence that most of Ingmar Bergman’s starkest films were made at the height of the Vietnam War, a time when the horrifying images of battle were being broadcast on television sets all over the world on a nightly basis. Bergman’s most explicit take on the horror and senselessness of war, Shame, begins in quintessential Bergman fashion, focusing on a pair of married musicians (played by Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, of course) who have retreated from their old lives onto a remote Swedish island. Their marriage could hardly be called happy, but it’s comfortable and secure, far removed from the rest of world, including a war that’s been raging in the distance. Suddenly and without warning, the war comes to their doorstep. But despite the handful of battle sequences, Shame has nothing to do with combat, and everything to do with the poisonous effect of war on everyone it touches. Ullmann, who is concerned only with the well-being of herself and her husband, finds herself accused of treason. Their home is destroyed. Ullmann sleeps with a local bureaucrat, perhaps out of self-preservation, but perhaps for other reasons. And Von Sydow reveals himself to be either a coward or a vindictive scumbag, depending on one’s perspective. Bergman refuses to pin the story to a single war -- it’s certainly not Vietnam, in spite of when he made it. Instead, Shame is a condemnation of the very idea of war and the effect it has on humanity -- not merely the literal death and destruction, but also the psychic fallout it leaves in its wake, which can linger long after any memory of why the war was fought in the first place.

12. HENRY V (1944) & (1988)

Shakespeare's play, which came in so handy for pundits looking for a point of comparison for George W. Bush's transformation into a great war leader after 9/11, was a propaganda piece celebrating the great victory of the outnumbered English by the overburdened French at the Battle of Agincourt. But because Shakespeare knew the value of ambiguity and multiple meanings, the work is open to various interpretations and can be staged in different ways to emphasize different possible themes. Laurence Olivier had a personal triumph as both director and star with the 1944 version, which, being made during World War II, not surprisingly treated the material as the occasion for a rousing, jingoistic hard sell for patriotic warfare. Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh, making his movie debut as a director and also starring in the title role, had no war to promote and so saw fit to stage the work as a big, baroque spectacle with ironic attitudes towards the expressions of patriotic fervor, film noir lighting, and what Pauline Kael called a "deranged Darth Vader entrance" for himself. As it is, both movies are huge, happy wallows in showy stagecraft and the best acting the British can always offer at the snap of a finger. (Branagh's, in particular, is the kind of movie where Paul Scofield has a walk-on.)

11. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein, master of the montage and one of the greatest pioneers of early cinema, made two classic war films, both very different from one another. His first, Battleship Potemkin, is often cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and that’s not just hype: aside from the legendary Odessa Steps sequence, it contains some of the earliest uses of montage, and generally establishes itself as a movie using visual language light-years beyond what anyone else was doing at the time. But as a war film, it is unquestionably subversive: it was designed as a piece of pure propaganda in which the oppressed sailors of the battleship rise up in righteous anger against their cruel Czarist overlords. At no point do we have anything but sympathy for the heroic mutineers, and no less a personage than Josef Goebbels declared that anyone might become a Bolshevik after viewing the movie. Alexander Nevsky, on the other hand, is as much a celebration of patriotism and loyalty as Potemkin was of rebellion and revolution. It didn’t reach its peak of popularity until a few years after it was made, when Russia and Germany were at each other’s throats, but its ability to induce a patriotic fervor, as audiences cheered at the Russian peasant army driving out the Teutonic Knights, was unmistakable. And while it wasn’t the artistic success that Battleship Potemkin was, it did feature an unforgettable score and one scene that rivals the Odessa Steps sequence: the famous battle on the ice of Lake Peipus, which stands as one of the most thrilling battle sequences ever staged for film.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Hollywood's Best Iraq Movie: Generation Kill

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Lions For Lambs, Robert Redford’s think piece about recent U.S. foreign policy, sounded like a pretentious, humorless slog. Rendition: ditto. No End In Sight and about a zillion other well-reviewed documentaries about the current Middle East mess popped up at my local art house for about a week, only to disappear before I got out to see them (though, to be honest, I probably never tried very hard). In The Valley of Elah is # 71 in my Netflix queue, and United 93 haunted my TiVo for months before I finally admitted that waiting 'til I was in the right mood to watch it probably wasn’t something that was likely to happen for years.

It’s not that I want to keep myself ignorant about the truths and half-truths of the War On Terror. It’s not that I can’t handle dramatic subject matter. And it’s not that I don’t support the troops. But, like many Americans already saturated with information about the infuriating incompetence and arrogance of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy misadventures since 9/11, the past seven years have been such a demoralizing downer that spending my free time deliberately subjecting myself to fresh, Hollywood-inspired fits of impotent rage seems like the leisure time equivalent of driving around in rush hour traffic for kicks. And yet, somehow, after numerous box office failures, Hollywood has finally managed to get the War on Terror right...on the small screen, at least, with HBO’s seven-part adaptation of Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, based on his observations as a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion during the early days of the current Iraq war.

Are you watching this show? If not, imagine the second half of Full Metal Jacket with more characters, desert locations and hip-hop and you’ll have the basic idea. And yes, I just equated a TV show to a Stanley Kubrick classic, a comparison only possible because, like Jacket, Generation Kill is the product of uncompromising, honest-to-God pop culture genius in the two-headed form of David Simon and Ed Burns (NOT the handsome one from Saving Private Ryan), creators of the justly praised, unjustly underseen and unrewarded HBO masterpiece The Wire.

Like their previous collaboration, which nailed the details of the misbegotten War on Drugs so accurately that cops and drug dealers were among the show’s biggest fans, Simon and Burns have said their main goal with Kill was to depict Marine life during wartime in a way actual Marines would recognize without calling bullshit...and by all accounts they’ve succeeded. Their obsession with verisimilitude over political axe-grinding or boot-in-the-ass patriotism is one of the reasons Generation Kill bears comparison to Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and other grunts-eye-view dramatizations of the day-to-day boredom, frustration, terror, absurdity and pride of military life.

Alternately funny, exciting, terrifying and infuriating, Generation Kill honors the skill, bravery and professionalism of America’s fighting force while also depicting the forces, large and small, that frequently cause it to malfunction so badly.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

Mentors don't always do well in Oliver Stone movies. The hero of the autobiographical Platoon had two of them, but one of them got killed and the hero wound up having to shoot the other. The fast-talking uber-capitalist Gekko is luckier; he has a smart wardrobe to construct around his power suspenders, an Academy Award, and a famous speech that will get replayed on the nightly news every time there's a market downturn or somebody who's worth more than the national revenue of Venezuela gets nabbed for insider trading. Actually, Gekko's weak link is agreeing to share his wisdom with the obnoxious little mouth-breather played by Charlie Sheen, the scowling kid from the wrong side of the tracks with the chip on his shoulder. Unable to work out his issues, Sheen screws his sensei over and then adds injury to, well, injury by setting him up and selling him out to the feds. Back when Wall Street was in theaters, it was possible to feel sorry for Gordon at the end, but since then it's become possible to get some perspective on these things. Today, after his stay at some Club Fed, he probably has his own reality TV show. Charlie Sheen can watch it when he gets home from his job scrubbing public toilets.

Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), THE KARATE KID (1984)

I feel confident that Pat Morita's martial-arts-instructing janitor richly deserves his place here, even though I'm actually pretty sure that I never did see The Karate Kid. (Hell, I might be less sure if I had seen it.) Consider that this is a guy who, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance here, managed to pull off a comeback almost a decade after he'd ill-advisedly abandoned the cast of Happy Days for a starring role in the sitcom Mr. T and Tina. (Can you tell me what ever became of Tina?) And he must be really good in this, because a lot of people lined up to see the movie, and they must have had their eyes glued to him, because I did see The Outsiders, and the one thing I remember from that is that looking at Ralph Macchio will make your eyeballs bleed. True, most of his biggest later roles would be in Karate Kid sequels, and while I'm not sure that I ever saw any of them either, I'm sure that they gave him the chance to really explore the possibilities of the character, plus he got to meet Hilary Swank. Clearly he was a fellow anyone would be well advised to seek out for advice, except on the subject of which Gus Van Sant movie to appear in. Wax on, wax off, motherfucker!

W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), BARTON FINK (1991)

Lured to Hollywood with the promise of easy money and big-screen glory, Barton Fink (John Turturro) quickly reaches an impasse in his writing. So with nowhere else to turn, his producer suggests that he find an established writer to mentor him. For his troubles, he gets W.P. Mayhew. Mayhew, played by a pre-Frasier John Mahoney, is a literary legend clearly modeled after William Faulkner, one who has toiled on countless screenplays for the studio in all possible genres. Tellingly, Barton first discovers Mayhew while puking out his liquid lunch in the men's room of the studio commissary. But Barton is so starstruck that he pursues him anyway, despite Mayhew's reputation as a washed-up souse. Unfortunately for the would-be student, the master whose guidance he seeks is too busy drinking and ranting at his secretary/live-in lover(Judy Davis) to give him much help with his writing, and indeed, it's Davis who's been doing most of the writing lately anyway. Yet while Mayhew isn't the mentor Fink bargained for, he's nonetheless valuable to Fink, providing him an objective lesson in what can happen to even truly great writers when they've been swallowed up by Hollywood. The lessons he teaches aren't pretty, but Barton isn't likely to forget them.

Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004)

The schlubby regulars at Average Joe's gymnasium are facing difficult times. With their beloved gym struggling financially and facing takeover from a more sophisticated fitness center, they have to raise a boatload of money to keep from going under. So they do what any bunch of scrappy underdogs would do in a similar situation- they enter a nationwide dodgeball tournament, even though they're not especially athletic and can't compete with more experienced dodgeballers. What's a ragtag band of self-labeled Average Joes to do? Find a coach, that's what. Or more precisely, let a coach find them. But not just any coach, mind you. None other than Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn) a fifties-era dodgeball legend who's now confined to a wheelchair. With a mixture of abuse and tough love, Patches whips the Joes into shape using exercises such as one founded on the theory, "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." Faster than you can say "Eye of the Tiger," the Average Joes are national contenders. Of course, their ascent has less to do with Patches' coaching style than it does to the demands of the plot- to say nothing of divine intervention from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris- but Torn is so irascibly funny in the role that it seems wrong not to include him. After all, how can you not love a guy who gets a line like, "is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway, because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Cole (J. T. Walsh), THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Midway through its narrative, Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's seamiest pulp classic pulls the brakes on itself to fill in Myra's (Annette Bening) back story, to show that she learned the intricacies of the con-artist's game at the feet of the old pro Cole--played by J. T. Walsh, an actor with a blandly sturdy facade that, more often than not (Breakdown, Sling Blade, Nixon, The Last Seduction), served as the mask of a mean, sick puppy. Here, he's onscreen just long enough to show the highs of his profession (pulling off a sweet scam and celebrating after) and the lows (he goes nuts). Maybe the filmmakers wanted to get him on and off fast so that he didn't turn to the audience and make a bonus pitch for the United Way.

--Paul Clark; Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

You really have to hand it to Oliver Stone; whatever you might think of the quality of his movies, he sure does know how to rile people. He virtually invented Vietnam revisionism with Platoon, pissing off all the people who wanted to buy into the Rambo vision of a mighty America sold out by craven politicians; he irritated pretty much everybody with JFK and was practically elevated to Satanhood with Natural Born Killers; he drove conservatives batty with his sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro in Comandante; and his World Trade Center irked people of every political stripe. After returning to Vietnam for Pinkville (a dramatic retelling of the My Lai massacre), his next rumored project will be a documentary biography, in the Comandante mode, of the hugely controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It’s a move likely to enrage conservatives in the U.S., but right-wingers in Iran are already furious — they’ve hated Stone since he directed Alexander, a film about the Macedonian emperor who is reviled by Persians as a hated conquerer. As the Guardian reports, conservative newspapers in Tehran are already going buggy at the idea of their beloved leader being immortalized on film by a man who already directed The Doors, a film about "one of America's perverted and half-mad singers; someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so." (The article also provides a helpful side-by-side comparison of the careers of Ahmadindejad and Jim Morrison.) — Leonard Pierce

That Guy!: Richard Edson

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Baseball season is nearing an end, which means that so, too, is my chance to watch TV commercials. I’m not much of a television watcher (well, I watch a lot of TV, but mostly on DVD), and about the only time I get a chance to see mainstream commercials is before a feature at a movie theatre, or during baseball season. That’s just fine with me; the things rarely live up to the standards of either high art or low camp, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Imagine, then, my surprise when a commercial for Traveler’s Insurance cropped up during a Red Sox-Cleveland playoff game featuring one of my all-time favorite character actors: this week’s That Guy!, Richard Edson. It’s actually a pretty good bit of casting, for a commercial – who better to embody Risk, the very personification of bad luck, than the laconic, hangdog Edson? His long, weary face (almost always sporting a mustache of one kind or another) and perpetual look of a wheedling cajoler has made me a longtime fan of his infrequent movie roles; he’s not the most prolific actor out there, but he tends to steal the show whenever he shows up. Give him one line, and he’ll capture the audience’s attention. A multi-talented and multi-faceted individual, Edson is a gifted photographer, but before making his first film, he was best-known as a musician; in fact, he was the great Steve Shelley’s predecessor as the drummer for Sonic Youth. Moving on to the art-rock ensemble Konk, he was discovered by Jim Jarmusch, who found he shared interests with Edson, and like most people, was captivated by his unique appearance and demeanor. He’s appeared in big movies (taking part in a mini-Vietnam revival with consecutive roles in both Platoon and Good Morning Vietnam) and small movies (like almost every other interesting actor in Hollywood, he had a bit part in Mike Figgis’ bizarre 2000 film Timecode), and tends to get the parts that are a little too brainy or subtle to go to Flea. (Astonishingly, though, Edson – a Coen Brothers company player if there ever was one – has never appeared in a Coen Brothers film.) For over twenty years, he’s been a reliably solid actor with a hugely memorable face and a forgettable name; but for those who do remember it, seeing it in the credits of a film or TV show (such as a memorable turn as Lowell Stokes in the underrated cult TV drama American Gothic) is nothing less than a promise of good things to come. And as Norman Mailer once asked in very different circumstances, isn’t culture worth a little risk?

Where to see Richard Edson at his best:

STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984)

Edson was playing percussion for Konk when he met Jim Jarmusch. So taken was the director with the musician’s attitude and expression that he cast him in a lead role in his soon-to-be classic Stranger Than Paradise. Playing Eddie, the hapless friend of lead John Lurie (also a New York musician, from the Lounge Lizards), Edson puts in what would be his first film appearance – and his first in a long series of scene-stealing performances. A terrific performance in a must-see film.

FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986)

Edson's best-known character is the joyriding, ingratiating garage attendant in whose care Alan Ruck’s Cameron leaves his father’s vintage Ferrari 250 GT. Edson sets off the movie’s central dramatic conflict, but screw that: he also gets a couple of the most classic lines in '80s cinema as a nervous Cameron puts him in charge of the car. Edson even manages to get off a zinger on the unflappable Ferris himself: asked if he speaks English, Edson replies, "Uh, what country do you think this is?"

EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

It’s easy to miss Richard Edson in one of his finest roles: he gets enough screen time, but he’s nearly unrecognizable without his mustache, and duded up in a ten-dollar pinstripe suit.In John Sayles' excellent adaptation of the Eliot Asinof book on the notorious Black Sox scandal of 1919, Edson plays the gambler (and crooked ex-prizefighter) Billy Maharg, a pug who’s turned into such a needling chiseler that you wonder how he ever won a fight in the first place, unless it was by making his opponent feel sorry for him.

— Leonard Pierce