The Screengrab : ray liotta

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

RAY & AUDREY, SOMETHING WILD (1986)

“I HATE YOU!” Melanie Griffith’s Audrey (a.k.a. Lulu) screams at her ex-con husband Ray (Ray Liotta) towards the end of Jonathan Demme’s indie cult fave. “I HATE YOU, TOO!” Ray screams back. Ah, romance. Sure, Audrey may toy with an occasional square like Jeff Bridges’ yuppie rebel Charlie Driggs, but only if they’re married (or at least seem to be married) so she won’t be tempted by a genuine connection outside the established dysfunction of her abusive relationship with Ray. A fizzy pop fantasia for every nice guy who ever wished he could steal the girl of his dreams away from the jerk she seems to prefer, as well as a dark reminder of the inexplicable bonds that sometimes bond even the worst couples together like Super Glue.

JOHN McCABE & CONSTANCE MILLER, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)

He’s got poetry in him. If only she could see it. But, of course, she can’t. Or won’t. Or maybe it’s not there in the first place. I think it is, though. Only a hopeless romantic could look at a town as hardscrabble and bitter as Presbyterian Church and see a promising future. Only a hopeless romantic could entertain thoughts of love with the shrewd and removed (and, yes, beautiful) Constance Miller. She loves only two things: money and opium. And those will have her full attention at his time of greatest need. But there’s moments well before that time where you can see the nascent feelings between them, and you can believe in those feelings. When you see the way the camera captures them, you know that it, at least, believes in their love, even when they can’t even accept the possibility. Unfortunately, the Wild West was no place for love, despite what the movies have told you. Without laws, community, or the sure knowledge that you would live until tomorrow, the frontier was not a place to put your trust or life in the hands of a fellow human being. It was certainly not a place to put stock in the poetry in your soul.

DIX & LAUREL, IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

He was born when she kissed him. He died when she left him. He lived a few weeks while she loved him. No, let’s go back. Let’s say you’re a washed-up movie writer (are there any cinematic depictions of movie writers who aren’t all washed-up?). This girl you were seen with has turned up dead, see? And you don’t care, because inside you’re all cold and twisted. But you meet a girl. She inspires you to write. But you can’t control your anger. Being accused of murder makes you angry enough to kill! Someone! Anyone! You think a lot about the dead girl -- enough to convincingly describe the murder scene to your agent and his wife. And now you love the girl, see? You want to marry her. But she’s frightened of you, too. Here’s the question: can you stop yourself from killing her? He loves her. He might be an amoral killer. It’s a hardhearted romance. It’s a flowery film noir. They were made for each other. They were completely wrong for each other.

DAVID & AMY, STRAW DOGS (1971)

Several years ago, my friend and colleague Dana Knowles wrote the best damn article on Straw Dogs I’ve ever had the fortune to read. She argues that David is the real monster of Straw Dogs and Amy is the real victim. And she’s right. David treats Amy with little but contempt, and Amy’s only crime is being beautiful and light-hearted. Knowles points out that Sam Peckinpah was not some Neanderthal or fascist or any of those other words that various critics have leveled at him after seeing this movie. He was a man with a keen grasp on the real-world consequences of violence for the sake of violence (see The Wild Bunch) and macho pissing matches (see, heck, pretty much all of his films). Peckinpah made films designed to provoke a response, but he didn’t necessarily condone that response. Here’s Knowles on David and Amy’s marriage:

Theirs is a horrible, hurtful marriage, though it’s not technically “violent” until quite late in the movie. David seems to have married a beautiful, flirtatious, girlish woman only to hate her for being exactly what he thought he wanted. There’s a revealing moment during his contretemps with the pastor that cuts to the heart of his mixed feelings about having a trophy wife. David is attempting further one-upsmanship by describing his academic objective to Rev. Hood, but the holy man is so distracted by the sight of Amy mixing a drink that he’s obviously not even listening. The look on David’s face is priceless, as if Amy is a weapon so thoroughly unsuited to this exchange that she’s morphed into a liability and wrecked his shot at the intellectual knockout punch he was winding up to deliver. Immediately after they say their goodbyes, Peckinpah cuts to the Sumners preparing for bed, and Amy complains about how awful he’d been to the reverend. David responds with, “No … I like him. And his wife is very attractive.” It’s practically a non sequitur, except that it betrays the moment upon which David is still most focused: when Amy’s allure got the attention that he’d wanted for himself. Even when she’s doing nothing but being, she’s a bit of a thorn in his side. Again and again, Peckinpah shows David incapable of being happy with her as is. In fact, the one and only time that David is entirely loose and playful with Amy comes directly after he’s probed her for information about her past relationship with Charlie and she’s claimed that nothing sexual ever happened between them; a revelation that makes him positively giddy. He never comes close to that state again until the final shot of the movie, and Amy’s nowhere in the frame.

Of course, it’s hard to talk about Straw Dogs without mentioning the rape scene, which cuts between David sitting quietly in a field on a snipe hunt while Charlie assaults Amy. No less a critic than Pauline Kael claimed bluntly that Amy enjoyed being raped, and indeed this is one of the received stories about this movie. Knowles punctures that argument by simply describing what Amy is doing on-screen: looking at the fireplace, the only exit in her line of sight, and then trying to remind her rapist that she is a human being that he nominally cares about, trying to regain some control. But it happens, and it’s ugly and horrible, and her husband David doesn’t even notice that she’s different afterwards. And all that the future holds for them is violence and murder, none of it in service of avenging her honor. And at the very end, she doesn’t even rate a lift into town from David. And that’s just plain cold.

HARRY & WILLA HARPER, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1953)

The clip above is only a snippet, but it captures some of the rotten delusion in Willa Harper’s marriage to Harry Powell. Her prior husband, the father of those adorable/creepy children, killed a couple of men while stealing a bunch of money, and she can’t live with the guilt. Her boss at Spoon’s Ice Cream (the wonderfully named Icey Spoon) is a horrible manipulative wretch of a person who has pushed her into courtship with Powell, a self-styled man of the cloth. There’s a couple of little snags in their marriage. One is that Powell has a thoroughly misogynist view of women, and he will never touch Willa in their union. Well, ok, once, but it’s not for sex. See, the other little problem is that Powell is a serial murderer of widows. When he finally puts his hands on Willa, he’s not so much thinking of le petit mort as the big sleep. Willa’s quivering all right, but for exactly the wrong reason.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Five)

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

VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

KILLA SEASON (2006)

I guess I'm kind of ridiculously humorless, because the whole idea of "guilty pleasures" strikes me as part of the reason people are getting dumber: it's easier to recognize bad material, sit back and mock it than try to engage with anything serious and remotely challenging. For some people, the whole genre of "guilty pleasures" takes over entirely from the non-guilty kind and they surrender. Which is fair enough if you're working a demanding job or have a tough life and don't really care about movies and just want the laughs. But if you have the time and leisure (unemployment induced or otherwise) to want a guilty pleasure that actively challenges your endurance, say hello to Cam'ron's directorial debut Killa Season. Not technically a direct-to-video film (limited tri-state area screenings were scheduled for its release), Cam'ron's endless ode to gangsta life begins with a back-alley craps game which turns into a man getting whacked over the head with an empty bottle for a minor betting infraction, then everyone cheering as Cam'ron pisses all over him while chanting "No homo." Killa Season's main achievement is being consistently morally depraved and technically incompetent at all times. If the amateur videography and dialogue that makes mumblecore sound like the snappiest film noir you ever saw (Juelz Santana: "They trying to take over the block"; cut to random guy: "Yo, let's take over the block") aren't enough to entice you, stay for levels of moral filth surpassing Salo. For sheer grossness, the close-ups of coke pellets being shat out by mules are hard to beat, but less-extreme scenes like the ones where Cam'ron spits on a little girl are constantly forthcoming. At well over two hours, Killa Season will make you question your dedication to unintentional hilarity. Me, I watch it once a year.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 treats real-world physics with less precision than your average Looney Tunes cartoon. Over the course of Louis Leterrer's film, Jason Statham, when not systematically evading and defeating various goons and hirelings (including a hired assassinatrix who, for good kinky measure, shoots up a hospital in her lingerie — Transporter 2 defeats subtext by being even dumber than you'd expect) — consistently test-drives cars in ways I've never seen. My favorite is when, to get rid of a time-bomb on the car's underside, Statham's character hooks it on a construction crane as part of a perfect 360 that lands him on the opposite roof just as the bomb explodes. But there's also the completely nonsensical climactic fight, where Statham and his Euro-foe (Alessandro Grassman) duke it out, bullets and all, while a plane plummets into the ocean, and even after. With such sublime visions of human possibility, why carp about the real world? There's also a smaller pleasure here: anyone fond of the Europudding productions of the '70s — where a bunch of awkwardly accented actors were brought together into an under-written film calculated for nothing so much as maximum exploitation of every country the cast came from — should dig the awkward polyglot cast. When Grassman hisses (in relation to his evil plot to disseminate air toxins) "That's right. Breathe, my friend, breathe" — well, if you're not amused, I can't help you.

HANNIBAL (2001)

The Silence Of The Lambs is a well-crafted and compelling film, but it's basically kind of a drag: with every year, the sexual tensions driving Buffalo Bill seem a little less compelling and defensible, and the sexism card seems like more of a time capsule. Hannibal, on the other hand, is just stupid. Although Ridley Scott's come a long way since Alien, it takes a truly brain-dead mind to settle on his unique way of expressing conflict. When Hannibal's on, the "Goldberg Variations" play; when his nemesis (Gary Oldman) is chewing the screen, the "Blue Danube" plays. And when they meet, they both play at the same time. Hannibal is mostly remembered for its final gross-out brain-eating scene, but it offers more than that: if the sexism seems a little dated in Silence, the leering misogyny of Ray Liotta here is entirely, uh, Liotta-esque, and the constant shots of Florence are pretty without getting all Merchant-Ivory.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Morning Deal Report: Post-Election Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The news out of Hollywood is a little scarce this morning. Apparently there was some kind of political thing going on last night or what-have-you. Things are so slow, The Hollywood Reporter is headlining Jonathan Lipnicki news. You remember Lipnicki, right? The kid from Jerry Maguire? “The human head weighs eight pounds”? Well, the lad is now a senior at Los Angeles' Agoura High School and plans to star in the psychological thriller The Other Side of Innocence. (That would be “guilt,” I think.) He’ll play “a damaged young man who becomes romantically involved with the unhappy daughter of the local chief detective while a serial killer is threatening their town.”

Tough guys galore have signed on for 13, an English-language remake of the 2005 French pic 13 Tzameti. Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, Jason Statham, Sam Riley, 50 Cent and Ray Liotta are all on board for the story of “a young man who stumbles into an underground competition where the wealthy gamble on human beings in a Russian Roulette-like competition,” per Variety.

Ginnifer Goodwin and Nicholas Hoult have joined Colin Firth and Julianne Moore for A Single Man, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel. “Goodwin is Mrs. Strunk, a suburban mom who doesn't share her husband's dislike of their neighbor, a gay professor (Firth). Hoult will play Kenny, a sexually ambiguous grad student who shows an unusual interest in the professor,” per THR.

Related:
Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas
The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)

The title of Tom Wolfe's book refers to the ineffable, super-American quality that Wolfe attributed to the anonymous test pilots who paved the way for the NASA space program -- whose stars, the Apollo astronauts, Wolfe depicted as media puppets by comparison. Phil Kaufman's movie version hangs onto the romantic mythology of the test pilots and treats the astronauts' public packaging as comedy, but it also honors the astronauts as real heroes who, by learning to play the media and sticking together to face down the bureaucrats and the scientists with the Dr. Strangelove accents, proved their mettle and created a new kind of savvy icon for the TV age. Amazingly, this satiric yet stirring popcorn epic wasn't much of a hit in theaters but has since achieved classic status as a home video perennial. It has so many high points that it's practically made for the rewind button.

SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's road movie/screwball romance crams every getaway fantasy destination you can think of into one wild weekend: shanghaied from his lunch hour by Lulu, the boho funk priestess (Melanie Griffith) in the thrift shop accouterments and Louise Brooks 'do, Charlie the office drone (Jeff Daniels) stops by the liquor store, gets screwed to within an inch of his life in the roadside motel, meets his new flame's mom, hits the dance floor during the high school reunion, and barely makes it home Monday morning with the small town sociopath (Ray Liotta) in hot pursuit. Demme keeps things fresh with the jumping soundtrack and the crowded supporting cast, which includes fellow directors (among them John Waters, perfectly cast as a used car salesman) and faces from other Demme movies (such as Steve Scales, from Stop Making Sense, as a tourist-shop cashier who offers Daniels the sage advice, "Charlie, attempt to be cool."). They don't just liven up the screen; the way Demme uses them, the many bit players passing through suggest the variety of life that you pass by and rub up against in just a couple of days spent on the American road. The movie seems to be hinting at a hundred other stories that are out there, ready to be told; the camera just happened to latch onto Charlie and Lulu first.

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Just your typical Depression-era musical comedy based on Homer's Odyssey, O Brother Where Art Thou is often dismissed as one of the Coen Brothers' sillier efforts. Well, sure, it is pretty silly at times, but it's also the Coens' richest, most satisfying serving of pure Americana to date. While Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Fargo had drilled into very specific subcultures, regionalisms and genres, O Brother is as expansive as the American South itself – a melting pot of prison flicks, road movies, musicals, social issue pictures and screwball comedies. From the golden-hued landscapes beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins (and later computer-enhanced) to corny-but-right images like a pie cooling on a windowsill to the Ku Klux Klan/Wizard of Oz mash-up that might have been disastrously offensive in the hands of less skilled filmmakers, the movie is a technical marvel. But more than that, it's a love letter to the pure American music forms of folk, country and blues – the Harry Smith Anthology come to life. And in moments as when the casually integrated Soggy Bottom Boys take the stage to a raucous ovation from an audience that literally runs a racist politician out of town on a rail, it's a celebration of community, holding a cracked mirror up to the best aspects of our national character.

DAVE (1993)

Like all nations, the U.S. has its share of assholes, but even our critics generally concede that Americans, by and large, are basically decent people: optimistic, can-do types, generally willing to help out and do the right thing, especially when our leaders quit pandering to our fear and greed and inspire us to roll up our sleeves and achieve worthy goals. Of course, for all the talk of elites, political insiders, change and the American mainstream in the current election, no president, congressman or media pundit is ever really an average citizen, living as they do in a bubble of power and privilege the nation’s true average Joes (and Daves) can only dream about...which is part of what makes Ivan Reitman’s good-natured political comedy so appealing. Released during the honeymoon period of the Clinton administration, when Bubba was still viewed as a charming, sax-playing, fast-food noshing everyman, Dave tells the story of part-time presidential impersonator Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) who winds up in the Oval Office after the real president (Kline again) suffers a stroke while cheating on his imperious wife (Sigourney Weaver). Oily, Cheney-esque chief-of-staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) arranges the charade, intending to use Kovic as a puppet mouthpiece for his own agenda, but the plan goes awry when the impersonator starts acting more presidential than the corrupt president he started off imitating, using his newfound power to actually, y’know, help and support the American people rather than fleecing them like a vast herd of sheep. After outsmarting Alexander, romancing the First Lady and ensuring that a conveniently upstanding deus ex machina of a vice president (Ben Kingsley) will take his place, Kovic leaves the White House behind and returns to his regular life, where he decides to run for his local city council, echoing the film’s underlying message that our government functions best when our best people are in government.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

He's often cited as America's most patriotic filmmaker, and there's no doubt that to a certain degree, Frank Capra – born in Sicily, and the very image of an immigrant boy made good – deserves the title. But most of his films aren't simply pro-American jingoism: they're patriotic in the truest sense, in that they recognize the flaws of Capra's adopted country and seek to address them, never pretending that this isn't a nation with profound problems, but likewise never succumbing to cynicism and always holding out the hope that even one individual can make a difference. Nowhere is this more evident than in the wonderful Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Although today, the film – buoyed by a tremendously charismatic performance by Jimmy Stewart as the naïve but determined junior senator Jefferson Smith – is considered a classic depiction of grass-roots democracy and the way the little guy can succeed in his struggle against entrenched forces, it wasn't quite so warmly received at the time. Since Capra didn't flinch from portraying Washington as a deeply corrupt place full of crooked politicians and smear merchants, both Democrats and Republicans denounced it as a vicious attack on our noble democracy; some even pegged Capra as a communist agitator determined to stir up trouble. But in the end, the image of Sen. Smith's desperate filibuster has stayed with us as a lasting reminder of Capra's philosophy that one man, no matter how many forces are arrayed against him, can triumph against evil – and what could be more American than that?

Click here for Part One & Part Three

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

Long Drive for “Leatherheads”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

After spending the better part of two decades in Development Hell, Leatherheads finally reaches theaters on Friday. Or as co-screenwriter Rick Reilly puts it on his website, “My writing partner, former Sports Illustrated colleague Duncan Brantley, and I wrote this thing 16 years ago! Sixteen years! Do you realize how many Joan Rivers faces ago that was?”

Actually, it’s even worse than that. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Leatherheads project predates Reilly’s involvement by several years. In the late 80s, Brantley was “researching pro-football's colorful early days and became interested John McNally, a pioneer star player. By calling himself ‘Johnny Blood,’ McNally found he could play for the Duluth Eskimos in the National Football League without losing his eligibility to continue playing college sports under his real name. Brantley decided the birth of pro-football had the makings of a movie and got started writing a screenplay. After a few years, he brought his Sports Illustrated colleague Reilly on board to add some humor to the script.”

That script attracted the attention of Steven Soderbergh, who considered making Leatherheads as a follow-up to his debut sex, lies and videotape. He made Kafka instead, but the project remained on the back burner, periodically resurfacing. Or as Reilly remembers it, “First, Mel Gibson was going to do it, then didn’t. Then George Clooney was, then didn’t. Then Michael Keaton was, then didn’t. Then Ray Liotta was, then didn’t. Then Clooney again, then didn’t. Then it propped open a door at Universal for a few years. Then one day my agent called and said, ‘Hey, would it be alright if George Clooney started filming Leatherheads in February? He’d star and he’d direct. He’s been rewriting the third act all summer in Italy.’”

Things moved quickly from that point and Reilly, who has since left Sports Illustrated for a new gig at ESPN, was thrilled to not only visit the set but appear as an extra in the press box scenes with Renee Zellweger. “I mean, do you know how cool it is to walk around a world that you and your buddy invented? Or watch George Clooney and John (The Office) Krasinski and Renee Zellwegger deliver lines you wrote, while characters you fabricated out of whole beer are coming up to you and saying stuff like, ‘Hey, I’m Hardleg. Nice to meet you!’? And I’m like, ‘Hardleg? We dreamed you up at Chili’s one night!’ It was like taking a 3D tour of your own brain.”

Morning Deal Report: Ellen Page Whips It For Drew Barrymore

Peter Smith — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Rumors confirmed: Ellen Page will star in Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, Whip It!. According to Variety, the film "follows the exploits of alterna-teen Bliss. . . [who finds] herself after joining a female roller derby team." Story by one "Maggie Mayhem." Yup, this sounds like an Ellen Page project all right. Ellen Page: the Winona Ryder of the '00s? Discuss.

Dario Argento is working on Giallo, "an English-language homage to the genre that made him a cult helmer." (That would be giallo, I take it.) Argento's daughter Asia costars with Ray Liotta and Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays "a solipsistic, penis-obsessed lout who makes movies." No, I made that up.

Forest Whitaker to play inspirational basketball coach.

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw