The Screengrab : ray milland

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

FARGO (1996)

Any number of Coen Brothers movies revolve around bumbling get-rich-quick schemes, many of them involving kidnapping, but few characters in film history have gotten in as far over their heads as car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). Jerry’s not looking to make a big score just for the sake of accumulating wealth; as the movie begins, he’s already in deep financial doodoo, although we never find out the exact nature of his troubles. To his credit, one of his schemes is not so boneheaded: a property investment proposal he brings to his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson. In fact, the plan is so good Wade decides to take on the investment himself rather than lending the necessary money to Jerry – though he does offer a nominal finder’s fee. In Jerry’s mind, this betrayal may make his alternate plan more palatable – arranging for the kidnapping of his wife and bilking Wade out of the ransom money. This plan goes much, much worse, however, and before it’s over Wade and his daughter are dead, Jerry is led away in handcuffs and Steve Buscemi is fed into a wood chipper. All that for a little bit of money. (SVD)

THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Stephen Frears’ tight little modern noir is immeasurably aided by strong efforts at every level: the source novel is one of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson’s best, the screenplay is provided by Donald Westlake, another crime novel pro, and of course, the cast is dynamite, from the leads to bit parts to Pat Hingle’s chilling mob boss, Bobo Justus. But one of the least-noticed thematic bits of brilliance is how it treats the different layers of confidence games, and how getting rich quick through the art of the con means very different things to different people. John Cusack’s Roy Dillon is strictly a short-con operator: pulling little hustles, tricks and sleight-of-hand jobs that keep him in nice suits and decent hotels as long as he keeps moving. His mother, the determined Lilly, is much more the get-rich-quick type, handling her mobster employer’s money as he manipulates the outcome of horse races through cleverly spread-out bets. And the seductive Myra Langtry is a long con type – although she’s reduced to hustling, her specialty is big-money cons that take months or years to pay off, but when they do, they pay off in the millions. It’s a fascinating look at the economics and expectations of the day-to-day life of the habitual criminal. (LP)

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)

There’s no heist in David Mamet’s House of Games, but there are more cons than one film should be able to support. That Mamet’s debut delivers its endless barrage of tricks and ruses with exhilarating proficiency is a tribute to the writer/director, whose interest in hard men living hard lives and pulling off very hard endeavors is encapsulated by this tale of a psychologist (Lindsay Crouse) lured by a master crook (Joe Mantegna) into a web of lies. As with most of Mamet’s work, women – in this case, Crouse’s protagonist, the lone female in a story full of men – don’t fare very well. Yet there’s something fascinating about the way the writer/director stages Crouse and Mantegna’s duel as a sort of primal battle of the sexes, the latter’s attempts to swindle the former coming off as a conflict of both gender and education (she the intellectual, he the graduate of the school of hard knocks). House of Game’s psychological warfare may not always be pleasant, but the head-games played by Mamet remain magnetic, so skillfully constructed and executed that one relishes the opportunity to be duped. (NS)

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)

This Roger Corman sci-fi flick stars Ray Milland as Dr. Xavier, whose experiments give him the special X-ray vision that he first uses to turn a suburban dance party into his own personal stag show, only to find himself reduced to plying his trade at a carny operated by Don Rickles. Finally, though, Xavier makes the trek to Vegas to use his creepy peepers to clean up at the tables, using perhaps the best method of outsmarting Sin City that the movies have ever come up with, since it doesn't require knowledge of advanced math or buying a suit for Dustin Hoffman. We eagerly await the day when some gifted film student has the brainstorm of doing, as his thesis project, a mash-up of this movie and Scorsese's Casino, so that the haunted Xavier can flee from Don Rickles only to find himself running into Don Rickles. How could Hell be any worse? (PN)

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

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

Morning Deal Report: The Passion of the Rourke

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

He’s never going away, folks. Mickey Rourke has signed on to yet another project, this one called Passion Plays. “Mitch Glazer will write and direct the indie tale, the logline of which is being kept under wraps,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Glazer is the screenwriter behind the Al Pacino CIA saga The Recruit and the Bill Murray holiday comedy Scrooged.”

Danny De Vito is bringing the Crazy Eddie story to the big screen. De Vito will direct the biopic of Eddie Antar, founder of the electronics chain, Variety reports. After “losing control of his company in a hostile takeover, Antar went on the lam after the new owners uncovered his financial shenanigans and the SEC charged him with stock fraud.” By the way, if you remember the TV ads for Crazy Eddie’s – “His prices are in-SAAANE!!” – that’s not Antar. It’s an actor. Another illusion shattered.

Here’s a remake we never thought we’d see – X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has signed to update the original Ray Milland thriller. If you’ve somehow forgotten, it’s the story of a “scientist who is near a breakthrough in X-ray vision technology when his funding is cut off. Desperate to show results, the doc applies eye drops that eventually cause him to lose control over his growing powers.”

Related:
Mickey Rourke's Whiplash
Coming Soon: 55 Remakes!

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Remembering Claudette Colbert: "Easy Living" and "Midnight" on DVD

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

There were so many inventive, witty, sparklingly funny romantic comedies produced by Hollywood in the 1930s that the only logical reason that some of them aren't famous classics is that there were already too many famous classics in this genre and the Westerns were getting jealous. as noted already in our regular DVD roundup, today marks the first appearance on shiny steel discs for two winners, Easy Living (1937), which is not to be confused with a 1949 Jacques Tourneur film of the same title starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball, and Midnight (1939), which is not to be confused with any of the fifty or sixty other movies with that same title, many of which center around a heavyset person who attempts to work out some childhood trauma that had been nagging at him by dismembering a co-ed. If you are unfamiliar with these films and the trend in fast-paced, fast-talking, sexy entertainment from which they arose, you might wonder how they compare with the modern sex comedies you can enjoy in today's theaters. There is no question that, when compared to a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they are in some ways deficient. For instance, you will search through these DVDs in vain for a single moment in which the penis of the third-string male lead of How I Met Your Mother is comically, and graphically, deployed. You won't be seeing Don Ameche unzip either. But they do have other things going for them.

For one thing, both hit the ground running, almost as if their makers knew that they'd someday be released into a mass-information age where they'd be competing for the attention of people who had a new video game to tackle. In Easy Living, which is set in New York when that was still way cool, Jean Arthur is on her way to work when she's hit by a fur coat that an enraged millionaire (Edward Arnold) has thrown out a window and makes the mistake of wearing it. (She loses her job because everybody thinks that she must be a gold-digging creature of loose morals and winds up without enough pocket change to afford dinner at the automat, which is staffed by the millionaire's son--Ray Milland--who's just stormed out of the mansion determined to make his own way.) In the continental-flavored Midnight, Claudette Colbert gets off a train in Paris in the middle of the night with nothing but the evening dress on her back and sets out to snare a rich husband--like, now, before she starves. (She meets a millionaire--John Barrymore, exultantly pop-eyed--who ropes her into his marriage problems by hiring her to bewitch the gigolo who's got his own wife, played by Mary Astor, fatally distracted.) You might have noticed that, unlike today's comedies, which depend for their plots and much of their humor on the emotional blocks of a bunch of Peter Pans (or "lovable slackers") and the overgrown cheerleaders (who are supposed to be "career women") who are doomed to sort of love them, the thirties films, which were made for audiences for whom the Depression was a still-fresh memory and the Second World War a looming reality, are full of more-or-less grown-ups who see their options being closed off by financial hardship. They have to resort to absurd, madcap strategies and improvisational stabs at reinvention to keep from falling into an economic pit that makes it seem that much more unlikely that they'll find true love at the end; Colbert's character in Midnight is not untypical of screwball romantic heroines in that she sees true love as a threat, a distraction that might wreck her plans by taking her eye off the ball. If I had gotten that job as DVD columnist for The Daily Worker, I could really go to town with this.

Easy Living and Midnight have a couple of big things in common behind the scenes. One is that both were directed by the insufficiently remembered Mitchell Leisen, a former art director who brought a shimmery, Art Deco look to the material that resulted in a near-perfect souffle, airily stylish but with enough earthly gravity to support slapstick pratfalls and such gags as Barrymore indulging in a funny voice when he makes a well-timed prank phone call. Another thing the two films have in common is that both were written by professional wisecrackers--Preston Sturges, who did the original script for Easy Living, and Billy Wilder, who wrote Midnight with his partner Charles Brackett--who hated Mitchell Leisen's guts. The news that Sturges, in particular, was unhappy was with Leisen did with his script for Easy Living (and also with Remember the Night, a cruelly little-known, Christmasey romance that Leisen and Sturges collaborated on the next year) remains puzzling, but maybe something in both Sturges and Wilder was pushing them to be dissatisfied with the director's work because both of them knew it was time to take charge of how their material was filmed; Sturges would move behind the camera in 1940, and Wilder would follow suit in 1942 (with The Major and the Minor, which also comes out on DVD today as part of the same TCM-approved series). So, in an indirect way, Leisen helped to launch a couple of directing careers that would soon eclipse his own. But the man who made Easy Living and Midnight need not be laden down with backhanded compliments. He's got the real thing coming to him.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Every Which Way to Witch Mountain

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Those of us who came of age in the ’70s long ago came to grips with the realization that there is absolutely no aspect of our childhoods that won’t be recycled, regurgitated or (guh) re-imagined by Evil, Evil Hollywood. Whether the final straw was Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Richard Linklater’s Bad News Bears or that TV movie about Evel Knievel starring the guy from CSI is a matter to be debated by scholars and historians for decades to come. One thing we know for sure, however: it isn’t over yet. We know this because Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (you know, the Tooth Fairy) has signed on for something called Race to Witch Mountain.

It’s not that 1975’s Escape to Witch Mountain is some sort of untouchable classic. If its release didn’t coincide with your time in grade school, it’s even possible that you’ve never heard of it. The story of two orphans with paranormal abilities fleeing an evil tycoon (Ray Milland) with the help of a curmudgeonly Winnebago driver (Eddie Albert) was fairly typical Disney fare of the time, but it struck a chord with those of us kids who enjoyed entertaining the possibility, however slim, that we might develop the ability to make the family station wagon fly. Also, I’m confident I was not the only seven-year-old on my block with a big crush on Tia, the girl witch played by Kim Richards. (Fun IMDb fact: Kim Richards is Paris Hilton’s aunt.)

In the new version, expected to be a more action-oriented affair, the Rock plays a Vegas cabbie who helps the witchy kids escape the clutches of Ciaran Hinds. Redundantly enough, this is not even the first time Witch Mountain has been remade. A made-for-TV version aired in 1995, and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, beginning with the clip below.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This weekend marks the opening of The Eye, starring Jessica Alba as a blind young woman who regains her sight thanks to corneal transplant surgery. Unfortunately, this happy situation brings her to grief when her new peepers start feeding her frightening, apocalyptic visions. If the plot sounds familiar, if may be because The Eye is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong film by the Pang brothers. But it might also have something to do with the fact that, from the 1960 French horror classic Eyes Without a Face to more recent films such as the 1991 Body Parts (itself based on a French novel called Choice Cuts), it's easy to think of other movies where experimental transplant surgery has had unhappy side effects for the lucky beneficiary. (Steven Spielberg's first professional directing gig was "Eyes", one of the segments of the 1969 pilot for the horror anthology series Night Gallery, in which the fates play a cruel joke on a nasty eye transplant patient, played by Joan Crawford.) Although a great many movie doctors have plied their trade wisely and humanely, saving many fake lives in the process, it's still true that there have been a great many ambitious medical breakthroughs in the movies that have yielded questionable results, and worse. To wit:

THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971)

Case in point. This low-budget horror movie really nails the potential dangers of reckless and unregulated transplant surgery. Or maybe it really nails the potential dangers of giving Bruce Dern a medical license. Dern plays an unprincipled, deranged — dare we say, Dernesque — mad genius who's squatting out in the desert, idly sticking extra heads on raccoons. When a drooling, murderous sex maniac stops by to ask Dern how's tricks, our hero sees his chance and grafts the head of this leering cretin onto the oversized body of the pure-hearted village half-wit. It turns out that the pervert, by virtue of his stronger will and general alpha maleness, gains control of the shared body, a development that leads to scenes where helpless innocents are killed and molested by the monster, scenes that are intercut with close-ups of the actor playing the meanie resting his head on the shoulder of the actor playing the sweet idiot; the latter moans, rolls his eyes, and generally registers his disapproval, while the former sniggers and makes Billy Idol faces. Dern and his creation are destroyed at the end of the movie, but a year later, some exploitation film scientists who somehow got ahold of his notes grafted Ray Milland's head onto the body of Rosey Grier in The Thing with Two Heads. It can easily be distinguished from this movie because the scientists who perform the operation on Grier and Milland do not have a concerned best friend played by Casey Kasem.

JUNIOR (1994)

For some of us, the disappointments related to this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle began with the news that he was not playing the Peter Bagge comics character of the same name. Instead, the future Governor of California plays a gynaecological scientist (check) who specializes in fertilization medication (double check) who, in order to draw attention to the effectiveness of his new super-drug, doses himself with progesterone, estrogen, and his own meds, has an egg that's been fertilized with his own sperm implanted in his abdominal cavity, and conceives a child which he then decides to carry to term, because it will make him a better person (with you so far), much as cross-dressing did for Dustin Hoffman. The fellow scientist who anonymously supplies the egg is played by Emma Thompson, who comes to love Arnold and looks forward to raising the child with him — and that's where I get off the boat. It should be noted that Schwarzenegger was not the first man to give birth in a Hollywood comedy; the same thing happened to Billy Crystal in the 1977 Rabbit Test which comprises the entirety of Joan Rivers's directing career. But that movie made no attempt to explain or justify its plot scientifically: Crystal's pregnancy was best explained as a miracle, though Crystal probably thinks that the only miracle related to Rabbit Test is the fact that he was ever able to find work again.

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)

If saving the brain of a man widely considered to be history’s greatest monster doesn’t count as the very definition of a bad application of medical technology. Worse still, they don’t just save Hitler’s brain — they save his whole head, so we don’t even get any respite from that annoying push-broom ‘stache of his. No, he just sits there, looking as evil as a stand-in who doesn’t actually look all that much like Hitler can possibly look, burbling around in his jar, waiting for someone to invent Futurama and hatching many a nefarious scheme. By the time this movie came out, Hitler was well on his way to becoming less a sinister historical figure and more of a Dr. Octopus type, a comic-opera supervillain trotted out every time someone wrote a cheap take-over-the-world screenplay. And screenplays don’t come any cheaper than the one in this doozy, which is actually two almost completely unrelated movies (check out the different hairstyles, car models, even film stock from scene to scene) crammed together and broadcast more or less as a TV timefiller in the mid-‘60s. Not since the Golden Age of Ed Wood have there been so many bad special effects, so much terrible acting, so many egregious continuity errors. We here at the Screengrab don’t pretend to be experts on the psychology of Adolf Hitler, and we certainly don’t say this to excuse the man or his lifetime of evil deeds, but we feel quite certain that if someone did bring his head back to life in the confines of an electrified jar, that disembodied, unholy head in a jar could make a better movie than this.

FLATLINERS (1990)

Flatliners was meant to be an intelligent, provocative, moody thriller that blurred the line between good and evil. Unfortunately, they gave it to Joel Schumacher to direct, and so it instead turned out to be yet another object lesson in the ongoing saga of Schumacher’s incredible ability to destroy anything with which he is even remotely involved. In the film, a bunch of medical students decide to take a break from getting drunk and complaining to subject themselves to clinical death in order to determine if stories of what lie beyond the veil of mortality are really true. Each time, they experience more and more of the other side before being resuscitated; and each time, they become whinier and poutier until Kevin Bacon, In his most Judd Nelsonish performance to date, starts bitching and moaning to a stained glass window like it was his mom and it had just told him he was grounded on prom night. Indeed, while the characters in the film channel the eerie experiences of a world beyond death, the actors who play them – including Bacon, Julia Roberts, and a delightfully pissy Kiefer Sutherland – do an amazing job of channeling the relentless unpleasantness of the Brat Pack. We won’t give anything away for those who have yet to see this misbegotten pile of Schumakings, but rest assured, it won’t be long that you’ll be praying for the entire cast to die for real.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

It is a little-known but nonetheless completely true fact that sometime after the Vietnam War, the United States military developed secret technology that would allow them to bring dead people back to life and turn them into ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines. Unfortunately, the technology only seemed to work on heavily muscled men of northern European origin, which is how we ended up sending both Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme to the Persian Gulf to blow up terrorists. There were practical reasons not to use these two (they are both terribly bad actors, and at times, the screen threatens to fold in on itself like a quantum singularity at the sheer blankness of their personalities) as well as psychological ones (if you’re going to send two ultra-efficient, superhuman robotic killing machines on a top secret mission together, why would you pick two guys who hated each other so much that they essentially murdered each other the last time they were paired up), but none of that makes any difference when there’s towelhead ass to be kicked, so off they go on one of the most overblown, ridiculous 1980s action movies to not actually be made in the 1980s. Apparently, the medical technology that allows people to be brought back from the dead and turned into murderous cyborgs can do nothing to prevent their tendency to smirk, pose shirtless, and make terrible puns at the drop of a hat, which is probably why the program was ultimately abandoned. This rank cheeseball of a picture was directed by Roland Emmerich, who would later inflict such god-awful stinkbombs as Independence Day and the 1999 Godzilla remake on the world. How anyone could sit through Universal Soldier and come out of it thinking “You know what that guy needs is a MUCH BIGGER BUDGET” is itself a medical miracle.

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Many of the medical breakthroughs on this list are included because they're just plain inexplicable. After all, who in his right mind would think grafting a second head onto a human body constitutes scientific progress? But there is a different strain of movies of this sort, in which the researchers' goals are admirable but the experiments themselves are misguided at best. Perhaps the best example of this kind of movie is Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea. Now, anyone who has ever lost a loved one to Alzheimer's Disease will be sympathetic to the aims of the project headed by Saffron Burrows' Dr. Susan McCallister. But when she discovers that sharks maintain a constant level of brain activity even in advanced age, she hits upon the brilliant crazy-ass idea of creating giant mutant sharks with giant mutated brains that she can harvest in the hope of finding a cure. Trouble is, she neglects to give the sharks a healthy, socially productive outlet for their increased mental capacities, no doubt because with all the time her research demands, she has no time left to teach her subjects underwater chess or to translate Proust into shark language. So the giant mutant geniussharks do what giant mutant genius sharks are prone to doing- they escape and chow down on all nearby humans, most memorably the project's chief investor, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Happily, the sharks go down in the end, a setback for Alzheimer's research but a victory for human mental superiority. How else to explain the genius-fish being vanquished by the likes of LL Cool J and the future star of Homeless Dad?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2!