The Screengrab : renee zellweger

DVD Digest for May 26, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

In advance of the upcoming shuttering of The Screengrab- just four more days, folks!- the DVD departments of Disney, Paramount, and Fox have graciously decided not to put out any recent releases this week in protest. Thanks for the support, guys!

Unfortunately, this boycott leaves us with precious little to report in regards to recent movies. Put it another way- when your highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the forgotten Renee Zellweger/Harry Connick Jr. rom-com New in Town (Lionsgate), the phrase “slow week” doesn’t quite cover it. If you’re looking for Asian fare, this week also brings Mamoru Oshii’s animated The Sky Crawlers (Sony, also Blu-Ray), as well as two Wayne Wang indies, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Magnolia) and Princess of Nebraska (Magnolia). And let’s not overlook the much-anticipated How to Give Pleasure to a Woman by a Woman (Pacific Media).

Thankfully, there’s a little more of interest in the classics department, although that’s kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Warner is releasing titles from Michelangelo Antonioni, David Cronenberg, John Boorman, Hal Ashby, and Hugh Hudson. The bad news is that this week’s releases include some of these estimable auteurs’ worst films. Now, I’m aware that Zabriskie Point and M. Butterfly have their defenders. However, I’m not sure people were exactly clamoring for a DVD of Beyond Rangoon or director’s cuts of Revolution and Lookin’ to Get Out, no matter how excited Jon Voight is about the latter. At least they’re not in a box set, so you Zabriskie fans can finally watch stuff blow up real good at the end without having to buy a DVD of Al Pacino fighting the Redcoats as well. Also this week: Falling Down Deluxe Edition (Warner).

Now that Hollywood has seen fit to make Land of the Lost into an expensive summer movie, it was inevitable that Land of the Lost: The Complete Series (Universal) would be hitting stores in advance of that. Or if you’re more into the whole cop-show thing, this week also sees the release of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: The Ninth Year (Universal) and The Closer: Season 4 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only slate includes perhaps the “man”-liest triple feature around, with new Blu-Rays of Children of Men (Universal), Cinderella Man (Universal), and Inside Man (Universal) hitting stores today. Also this week: Field of Dreams (Universal), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Extended Cut (Warner), Seabiscuit (Universal), Spy Game (Universal), and True Romance Unrated Cut (Warner).

In the words of Annette Hanshaw, “that’s all.”

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

CHICAGO (2002)

Hot chicks behind bars? Check. A large, in-charge corrupt female warden? Check. Mean girl sparring between the new fish and the reigning cell block queen? Check. Nude lesbian shower orgies and bloody riot scenes? Sorry...Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the toe-tappingly cynical 1975 Kander/Webb/Fosse musical adaptation of crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play about celebrity criminals ain’t that kind of Women-In-Prison film. Helping to restore America’s faith in the potential entertainment value of movie musicals a year after Baz Luhrmann did his level best to destroy the genre with the Excedrin-headache known as Moulin Rouge, Chicago served up catchy tunes and light satire grounded by (relatively) gritty scenes of the “real-world” Murderess Row underpinning the fantasized production numbers. For all the literal and figurative song-and-dance surrounding the press and public’s fascination with lethal jazz babies Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie (Reneé Zellweger), there’s also the other side of the coin: the grim fate of a Hungarian inmate who, unlike her media-savvy cellmates, is probably innocent but gets the noose rather than justice because she can’t speak English and doesn’t know how to game the system for her own benefit. But that’s about as serious as things get: those who prefer more harrowing musical depictions of doomed immigrant ladies destroyed by American xenophobia are welcome to seek out Dancer In The Dark, the entertainment equivalent of a swift hard kick in the crotch you’re not entirely sure you deserved. The rest of Chicago, meanwhile, is a feel-good romp about getting away with murder featuring Zeta-Jones at the top of her game, an unusually tolerable performances by Zellweger (in a role Divine would have really knocked out of the park) and a surprisingly unembarrassing performance by Richard Gere (although as fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak correctly noted at the time, Christopher Walken in the razzle-dazzle role would have been godhead).

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Look, we’re not going lie to you: a lot of what’s awesome about John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell’s one-eyed bank-robber antihero is badass enough to have earned the guy a generation of goodwill despite a subsequent decade filled with Captain Rons and Tango & Cashes. A lot more of what’s awesome about it is the dynamite supporting cast, which includes Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, a tasty Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance as a Fightin’ President, Screengrab fave/That Guy! emeritus Tom Atkins, and Isaac Hayes in a role so tough he almost out-bad-dudes Snake Plissken. But leaving all that aside, Escape from New York twists conventions all over the place: the bad boy reprobate is trying to break into prison, not get out of it, and New York, rather than being the destination everyone’s trying to reach and the place people only leave because they’re about to hit 40 and they can’t stand living with a roommate in Crown Heights anymore, is a maximum security prison where futuristic America dumps its biggest scumbags. (Insert predictable ‘Oh, the wacky world of science fiction, where New York is filled with criminal scum! Ha ha!’ joke here). Much as he did in Escape from Precinct 13, Carpenter takes genre conventions and flips them on their ears, with highly entertaining results.

STALAG 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder’s films are so essential and influential and beloved that it’s hard to pull back and talk about how weird and unsettling and even unpleasant they are. But they are indeed weird, unsettling, and often unpleasant. For one thing, there’s so much fakery that it’s up for grabs what Wilder was trying to elicit from his audience. In Billy Wilder’s eyes, life is about deception. Many -- if not most -- of his main characters are phonies. The cynics are all romantics. The romantics are all cynics. Sometimes they’re deluding themselves, sometimes the rest of the world. His movies also lather on a thick corn hash. That’s not too unusual for a Hollywood director of his era. John Ford and Howard Hawks were both certainly guilty of overcooking the corn. In Wilder’s movies, sometimes the corn is funny and sometimes it seems pointless. It’s all part of the artifice of his movies, the occasionally clumsy sleight-of-hand that he works with to try to distract you from the horror and mess his characters are making of their lives with all their deception. This artifice is occasionally too much for Wilder’s movies, and a few stories that should work (like Ace In The Hole, for instance, or The Apartment) try to hang too much suffering on a premise too phony and characters too empty. However, Stalag 17 goes the other way. It's a good Wilder movie. It did, however, open the door for Hogan’s Heroes, a bad tv show (don’t try to justify your nostalgia to me; it may be iconic but that doesn’t mean it’s good). It also laid the groundwork for the Roberto Benigni atrocity Life Is Beautiful, and a handful of other movies leaping to your mind about the goofy fun time people had in Nazi prison camps. Not that movies about Nazi prisons have to be grim, but c’mon, those flicks have no goddamn perspective. Anyway, the comic relief is far too broad for the movie, the story is pitched somewhere between too cynical and too maudlin, the characters are a little slow on the uptake, and damn if I know how it all works, but Stalag 17 somehow makes sense.

A MAN ESCAPED (1957)

The title suggests a conclusion foregone, but Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is unconcerned with the conclusion. What’s important is the suffocating tight focus on Lt. Fontaine, our captured protagonist, his wide eyes full of twitchy wildness like cornered game, as he goes about the nuts-and-bolts of dismantling the prison about him. The movie opens with a close-up on his hand, testing a car door lever. In a minute, he will leap from the car and be immediately recaptured. But for the first couple of minutes, Bresson’s camera watches him as he holds his breath, waiting for just the right moment. Some men may give up when caught, but this one was built for escape. You will learn soon enough that he is a member of the French Resistance who is headed for detainment in a Nazi jail. He tells his story mostly in short, clipped voiceovers, as few people speak to him or give him a reason to speak during his confinement. But speech is unimportant. His mind is constantly at work planning his escape. Bresson’s taut and economical film lays bare the mechanics of a prison break, provided, of course, that the prison is built and staffed exactly like the one in the movie.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994)

The only prison in Roman Polanski’s film of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden is in the past. Sigourney Weaver plays Paulina, a former political prisoner scarred by her rape and torture while imprisoned. Her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) owes her everything. One night -- the only night in this movie, really -- his car breaks down and he catches a ride from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), who leaves and later returns when he realizes that he accidentally kept Gerardo’s spare tire. The two men have a drink. Meanwhile, Paulina has apparently flipped. She steals Miranda’s car and destroys it, then returns home and begins to torture the man, claiming he did terrible things to her in the past. Her husband is understandably confused. Miranda seemed okay to him. And he knows that Paulina never saw her tormenter while in prison. How can she be sure? Three characters, one night, and a lifetime of human suffering.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

Two Severed Fingers Way, Way Up, and Other Tales from the Hollywood Marketing Division

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

“If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie.” Tad Friend's New Yorker article about modern movie marketing is full of great quotes like that. (It's attributed to a nameless "movie marketeer.") Friend writes, "It is often said in Hollywood that no one sets out to make a bad movie, but the truth is that people cheerfully set out to make bad movies all the time. It is more accurate to say that no one sets out to make a movie without having a particular audience in mind." Here's the way it breaks down: "The collective wisdom [among marketers] is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, 'you’re so gay' banter, and sex—-but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—-but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it)...Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most 'review-sensitive': a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them." On the other hand, a marketing consultant named Terry Press told Friend that “Guys [i.e., "older men"] only get off their couches twice a year, to go to Wild Hogs or 3:10 to Yuma. If all you have [in your movie's target demographic] is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

Although marketing divisions may be the enemy of the art of movies, there is an art to devising a successful marketing campaign. Friend spends much of his time profiling Tim Palen, a 47-year-old who has designed campaigns for Lionsgate films ranging from Crash and W. to Rambo and the Saw franchise. It was he who came up with the weird mix of gross-out provocation and graphic elegance that was the poster image for Saw II: a pair of severed fingers laid out to look like a "II." (The ad was designed to do its work before the movie was released; Palen had to rejigger it so that the fingers' stubs weren't seen before the movie could get an R rating from the MPAA.) Palen's campaigns sometimes have a touch-every-base quality; with W., he had to make the director, Oliver Stone, feel that his even-handed treatment of George W. Bush was being handled with the respect it deserved, while keeping in mind that telling the world how fair and even-handed the movie was would not likely cause panic at the box offices. (Palen was disappointed when W. failed to become the second-biggest weekend grosser because he had an ad set to go that showed a picture of the movie's star, Josh Brolin, sitting on the toilet with the words, "W. Is Number Two!"

Friend happened to be shadowing Palen while he was starting work on a campaign for a new Renee Zellweger comedy, which was originally called Chilled in Miami but is now called New in Town. Palen calls it "The Devil Wears Patagonia." (“Did you see Baby Boom?" he asks Friend. "It’s that. It’s that without the baby.”) Palen worked on devising a trailer for the film with David Schneiderman, who reports on Palen's reaction to the first try: "‘Where’s the Mary Tyler Moore?’ He said, ‘This girl goes to this little town in Minnesota and she’s a cold person, and they warm her up, right? More warmth, more style, more Devil Wears Prada. ’ And I said, ‘I don’t know where that is in the movie.’ And he said, ‘Create it.’ ” You might think that people whose job it is to sell movies to the public would find it helpful to at least put up a front of thinking the movies in question are, well, not garbage, and if you do think that, you may find it sobering to discover just how very wrong you are. Palen worked on a Jessica Alba comedy called Good Luck Chuck that was so bad that Palen can only say that he "got the film open, which was kind of a feat. America likes cheese.”

Trailer Review: New in Town

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Hey dere! It’s yer ol’ pal Margie Gunderson from up Brainerd, dontcha know. And I gotta tell ya that I’m gettin’ a little put off by the way all them Hollywood types are apt to portray my beloved Land of 10,000 Lakes. Now, I’ll always be pleased that those nice Coen brothers were good enough to tell my story for the pictures. But I’m sorry to see that the whole folksy “Minnesota Nice” way o’talkin’ has caught on so strongly in the movies, especially when ya consider that I only exaggerated mine so’s to make the perps underestimate my crime-solvin’ acumen. And while I’m sure that there have been a few stupid tourists who’ve come unprepared for our frigid winters, I’m pretty sure any high-powered executive types like Renee Zellweger who come up here are strongly encouraged to bring warm coats, boots, mukluks and the like. And havin’ grown up in the shadow of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, I can assure you that cow-related vehicular incidents are about as common as wood-chipper killings (seriously though, that’s somethin’ that’s hard for a gal to shake, police chief or no). So while I like some of the good folks who made this movie- that Frances Conroy seems like a real peach, and I sometimes listen to my Harry Connick Jr. CDs whenever Norm isn’t around- this just doesn’t seem like my kinda movie, and I would advise any other native Minnesotan to keep his distance from this so’s not to encourage Hollywood to keep perpetuatin’ the wheezy old stereotypes.

2009 Movie Poster Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

January and February are the traditional dumping ground for the movies Hollywood has given up on. They weren’t good enough to release at the end of the year to qualify for awards consideration, and they don’t have the commercial potential to secure a coveted summer weekend. So what better time to revive a favorite Screengrab feature of yore, in which I preview upcoming releases I know little or nothing about based solely on their posters?

MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D (Jan. 16)

At first I assumed this was one of those IMAX concert movies featuring a reunion of the seminal ‘80s shoegazer band. Sure, it’s an odd image to promote such an event, but it’s not out of the question that the aging members of My Bloody Valentine would choose to hide behind gas masks. On further reflection, however, it’s more likely that this is an ad for a remake of the ‘80s slasher movie. I still don’t really understand the gas masks and pick-axes, but hey – 3D! How bad could it be?

INKHEART (Jan. 23)

It’s time for another reunion of our favorite buddy movie pairing – Brendan Fraser and crappy CGI effects! You loved them in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, you tolerated them in Journey to the Center of the Earth, and you’ll reluctantly accompany the kids to Inkheart, in which Fraser finds a magical library book that brings unicorns and fairies to life.

THE UNINVITED (Jan. 30)

As I indicated earlier, I have done absolutely no research on any of these movies beyond a careful examination of the poster art. So I have no way of knowing whether or not this is actually a remake of a J-horror film, or if it just wants to look that way. I’m going to assume the plot revolves around frightening vampire children terrorizing the new family on the block. It’s apparently not in 3D, though, so you can probably skip it.

NEW IN TOWN (Jan. 30)

Renee Zellweger is a snooty, power-hungry big city executive who is horrified to learn she’s being shipped off to the Alaska branch. Lucky for her, the quirky small-town residents melt her heart, and she learns there’s more to life than a corner office and double skinny lattes. If you loved Northern Exposure, or even vaguely remember it, you’ll find this comedy safe and unthreatening!

THE INTERNATIONAL (Feb. 13)

I envision a dash of Jason Bourne, a pinch of Eagle Eye-style paranoid techno-thriller, a vast conspiracy, stylish Euro-locations and some visual razzle-dazzle when things get slow. Clive Owen is no doubt an ordinary guy swept up in machinations he doesn’t comprehend, while Naomi Watts is the innocent he drags around until she falls for his roguish charm. You’ll see this on a slow weekend. Later you’ll forget you saw it and put it in your Netflix queue.

Related:
Screengrab Movie Poster Preview
Poster-Modernism

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

MALCOLM X (1992)

There was an Oscar ceremony one year where Denzel Washington and Spike Lee were the co-presenters of some category or tribute, and while I may be misremembering the whole thing, it seemed very much like the two of them were pissed, huddled together, leaning over the podium and glaring at the sea of rich white faces before them as they bit through their teleprompter lines in tones of obvious displeasure. While I’m shaky on the particulars, in my mind, I like to imagine the two of them were reacting to the fact that Lee’s masterful, sweeping adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X only received one major Oscar nomination (for Best Actor)...and, adding insult to injury, Washington’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role somehow lost out to Al Pacino’s “hoo-hah” Scent of a Woman nonsense. I’m not always on Lee’s side when he cries racism (as in his recent dust-up with Clint Eastwood), but it’s hard to think of any other reason for such an obvious snub of the kind of period epic the Academy usually rewards (or at least frickin’ nominates). True, Malcolm X was and remains a controversial figure, but as cinema, Lee’s production is a stylistic masterpiece, capturing the shifting tides of his protagonist’s life as he evolves from Zoot-suited hustler to civil rights icon in a film as indelible and essential as Alex Haley’s canonical source material.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1996)

Vincent D'Onofrio probably has the best role of his career as Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer and mama's boy (with Ann Wedgeworth as his mama) who created Conan the Barbarian and other musclebound action icons, while spending his whole adult life marooned in the nowheresville of small-town Texas in the 1930s. A mannered Renee Zellweger plays the young budding schoolteacher and writer who makes a tentative stab at befriending him without ever knowing quite what to make of the tortured fellow. This small, affecting film is in some ways a subversive comment on the whole life-of-a-young-American-writer (or "I, John-Boy") genre, because it captures the quiet, rural life that movies so often depict as being an essential part of the back story of healthy, homegrown creative types, and then shows why anyone who had the imagination to be any kind of writer but found themselves physically trapped there would end up wanting to blow their brains out.

MY LEFT FOOT (1989)

Make no mistake: Jim Sheridan's biography of Christy Brown is a rich and scabrous work, full of fury at both the horror of being born into Irish poverty and a body that won't do what you want it to, and the power of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as a romantic artist with cerebral palsy is in no way compromised or embarrassed by the fact that it won an Academy Award, as if the voters thought this was some Rain Man shit. Sure, for a lot of actors, a role like this would amount to a chance to be applauded and praised for how well they could shake. For Day-Lewis, mastering the physical tremors and folding his body into a pretzel just amounted to laying down the floorboards before he could really go to work.

SERPICO (1973)

When watching Serpico, it's easy to get distracted from the biopic factor. There is the classic man-against-the-machine plot line, the shots of vintage New York...then there is the sense that Al Pacino often seems to be playing Al Pacino, no matter who he is supposed to portray -- though you cannot deny it is interesting to watch him plumb the depths of his own murky psyche. But let's not get lost here: Officer Frank Serpico, was, and is, a real character -- slightly nutty as portrayed by a deliciously young and wounded-looking Pacino, and judging by Serpico's website (hey, go Google it!), quite possibly a few sandwiches short of a picnic in real life. He was of course, a young police officer who went to battle against corruption in the NYPD, for which he paid in health and sanity. Watching Serpico raises some questions: why couldn't Al Pacino be young and beautiful forever? Whatever happened to bringing down the system at all costs? Will people start sticking it to the Man again, now that the economy is in free fall? Will short dark cops start sporting beards and love beads? If American Gangster came out in 2007, does that mean we will have to wait another 34 years for another movie with a similar plot? Who knows...until then, enjoy Al Pacino in a beard.

32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)

Biopics are episodic practically by definition, since it's practically impossible to encompass an entire life without boiling that life down into vignettes. Francois Girard's film about concert pianist Glenn Gould (played by Colm Feore) is probably the most extreme example of this idea. Taking his cue from Bach's thirty-two Goldberg Variations (perhaps Gould's most famous recording), Girard recreates a series of incidents from Gould's life -- from his youth to his concert career, to his later experiments with recording and radio -- with almost nothing in the way of transitional material. In doing so, the film avoids many of the traps of standard-issue biopics, especially the rise-and-fall structure and easy psychoanalysis most filmmakers tend to impose onto the stories of historical figures. There are no subplots about Gould's domestic life, no crisis or obstacle for him to overcome, and scarcely a mention of his relationships or sex life. Girard replaces the convenient formula with a genuine curiosity about who Gould was, what made him tick, and why exactly he retired from public performance at the height of his popularity to devote himself solely to recordings, a moment that feels as offhand here as it allegedly was to Gould himself. What makes the film and its subject all the more fascinating is that Girard doesn't pretend to know the answers, and rather than trying to nail them down, he simply shows us key scenes from Gould's life and encourages us to figure the answers out for ourselves. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is the polar opposite of an Oscar-bait biopic, and is that rarest of cinematic creatures -- a completely accessible movie that encourages, and rewards, real thought and reflection. Could this be why it's currently out of print on R1 DVD?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Paul Clark

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

JESSICA ALBA

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I like sexy women. Sometimes, I like to hear them discuss foreign policy in a purring Greek accent (Arianna Huffington...mrowr!), while other times I've been known to enjoy a more prurient visual display of nubile hips and boobies. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this interest. Unlike, say, my lonely passion for Whit Stillman films, which can apparently no longer be satisfied, the demand for sexy women has glutted the market to the point where it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. Everywhere you look (in pop culture, if not my local gym) there are sweaty, well-toned H-O-T girls and women gyrating their pelvic muscles and shaking their butts in thongs and Daisy Dukes and whipped cream bikinis...so WHY, out of all the sexy women in the world, from Arianna to Miss November 2008, does Jessica Frickin’ Alba get to be in so many movies? Yes, she has a nice bod, and I enjoyed watching her undulate in Sin City as much as the next straight guy...until, that is, the camera panned up to her completely vapid expression, on a face completely devoid of mystery, personality or even the lusty carnality of supporting co-star Brittany Murphy. In real life, Alba may be a sweet, darling lass who bakes pies for orphans, but onscreen she’s got less acting talent and charisma than Ryan Gosling’s sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl...and yet Alba is somehow considered an A-list player, who gets to appear not just on the cover of Maxim, but in major motion pictures, in multiple genres, from action and horror to romantic comedy, while far more interesting and far sexier actresses like Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Mila Kunis, Thora Birch, Marley Shelton (and, no doubt, a huge percentage of the rest of the female S.A.G. membership) bob along under the surface, crossing their fingers in hopes of landing some of the high profile lead roles currently going to America’s favorite bleach-blonde void.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Oh, boo yourself. In the years since his unfortunate death, it has become distasteful bordering on offensive to say anything even remotely critical about Christopher Reeve. And certainly, it’s not my intention to impugn him as a man – he was, by all accounts, a decent human being, a loving husband, and a fine father to his children. The tragic accident which cost him his health was an event to be lamented, and he became a hero in its wake by advocating relentlessly for the rights and dignity of the disabled; and the comeback he made from his paralysis was very nearly a miracle. But before he took that unlucky tumble from a horse, a lot of people already knew what no one is now willing to say: Christopher Reeve was a terrible actor. Wooden, clumsy, and extremely limited in range, he started out as a pretty boy who might have been a modest success if he’d stuck to what he was good at. But Reeve was an ambitious man who soon discovered that his ambition led him to places his talent wasn’t able to go. He was laughable in Somewhere in Time, embarrassing in Monsignor, and, matched up against genuine heavyweight Michael Caine in Deathtrap, he just looked like he wanted to go home. His reputation as an actor, such as it is, rests on the Superman movies he did in the 1980s, but a lot of that adulation is vested in the character he played, and a lot more in the man who was playing him; looking at Reeve’s actual performances in the movies, it’s hard to believe anyone got very excited over that.

HALLE BERRY

It must have taken a phenomenal amount of determination and perseverance for Berry to work her way up through decorative eye candy roles in such movies as Strictly Business, Boomerang, and The Flintstones to more challenging dramatic parts in Losing Isiah and Bulworth, and then to her landmark win as the first African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actress for Monster's Ball and all the attention about her becoming the first black Bond girl in Die Another Day. But Monster's Ball is still a ridiculous movie, and Berry is hardly the least ridiculous thing in it. And her Bond girl made a great entrance, walking in from the surf, but then, as is so often the case with Berry's characters, wore out her welcome as soon as she started talking. Berry can be off-putting because, like Demi Moore, she seems to be less interested in entertaining the audience than in daring them not to respect her; at her worst, she radiates a defensive insistence on her own stature as an actress that is way out of proportion to her proven abilities, which in moments of high drama seem to consist mostly of a tremulous, anxious quality combined with a "Who farted?" expression. And that's when her mouth isn't even moving: her big line from the first X-Men movie ("Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lighting? The same thing that happens to everything else.") has the special distinction of being both the lamest-written and the lamest-delivered line in the history of superhero movies. It's just too bad that her need to be taken seriously may preclude her from doing more comedy. Because if the clip above is any indication, we do have to give her props for having a sense of humor.

ORLANDO BLOOM

Did Peter Jackson have him grown in a lab? In the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings pictures, most of the cast can be seen with hair and sweat flying while Bloom, as the elf Legolas, always looks as if his smooth plastic surface had just been wiped clean with a damp cloth. When I saw the movies, I assumed that he'd been CGI'ed to look that way, on the theory that elves never have a hair out of place even when they go on the flume ride at the water park, but Viggo Mortensen has since told interviewers that he used to stare at Bloom in disbelief while they were filming, wondering how the little bastard kept looking like a fashion spread no matter what got thrown at him or what exertions were required of him. Will Bloom ever find another role as perfectly suited to his lightweight, poreless quality as that of an arrow-shooting elf? He hasn't so far. He was cast as the romantic hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, only to have the movies use his inability to hold the screen with Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley as a running in-joke. It was fun getting to see Brendan Gleeson slap the pluperfect shit out of him in Troy, but the directors who've given him the chance to carry a picture -- in Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown and the barely released Haven -- have only succeeded in putting nasty dents in their own careers. So far, he hasn't done enough damage to otherwise promising projects to qualify as a menace, but that could change: he's supposedly threatening to play the Alain Delon role in Hong Kong action master Johnny To's planned remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 French gangland classic Le Cercle Rouge. If he pulls that off, all will be forgiven. If he screws it up, film geeks of many kinds will want to lasso his balls and leave him hanging upside down from a Times Square billboard.

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

Where did Renée Zellweger come from, and what did she ever do to earn her keep in the gallery of semi-major starlets? She has the acting abilities and charisma of a lutefisk. There is little that is redeeming about her in any of her movies. Especially not her uhm, "method" act as "fat" in Bridget Jones's Diary. Whose hand she greased to win an Oscar for Cold Mountain we will never know. And speaking of Oscars, a nomination for her role in Chicago? You must be joking. Just about every other actor in that movie swept the floor with her. And that includes Mr. Cellophane. All this is quite aside from the fact that she perpetually looks as if she just bit into a lemon.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

There’s a certain amount of humor in the notion of a big fat guy playing an indestructible martial arts machine. But Steven Seagal isn’t laughing. Ever. In fact, he may not even have the physical capability. And if watching close-ups of his portly mug intercut with shots of an obviously thinner stunt man kicking ass on the roof of a speeding train in Under Siege 2 didn’t get the man to laugh out loud, I guess he never will. Which is probably all for the best: based on the witty one-liners in his godawful body of work (as evidenced in the clip above), the only thing worse than Seagal’s “enlightened” action flicks would be a string of inspirational Zen comedies. Speaking of which...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, Mike Myers (despite his loveable Wayne’s World and Austin Powers personas) is a hellacious douche, largely despised in Hollywood for both the right and some of the wrong reasons, by good and evil people alike. As if beating the Powers franchise to death and helping Jim Carrey and Theodore Geisel’s money-grubbing widow to destroy the wonder and magic of Dr. Seuss’ legacy weren’t enough, Myers actually said The Love Guru was “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas,” a statement that’s actually funnier than anything in the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

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.”

"Leatherhead"s Extras Stage Their Own Damn Premiere

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

"“Decade after decade, for well over a century now, the lowly movie extras have been ignored," Robert McClure tells Michael Cieply of The New York Times. Cieply should know; when he's not working as a paramedic, he's a lowly movie extra who has a dual role in the forthcoming George Clooney comedy Leatherheads. The movie was shot on location in the Carolinas, and the local population, which was thrilled to be a part of it all, does not expect to see Mr. Clooney or his co-star Renee Zellweger again in this lifetime. (Not that they don't think Clooney is a nice guy who isn't always welcome down at the barber shop. Tom Ervin, a disability lawyer who appears in the movie as a football official, recalls that Clooney would allow the extras to watch him watch fresh footage: "He'd turn around to us and say, 'Do you guys like that?'") After all, There Will Be Blood, which was shot in Marfa, Texas, didn't even play within twenty-five miles of Marfa, Texas. So, as Cieply reports, the enthusiastic micro-supporting cast of Leatherheads threw together their own premiere of the picture in Greenville, South Carolina, a real nice place to raise your kids up. Tickets go for $25, with proceeds earmarked for a charity fighting starvation in Darfur. (Truly the do-gooding spirit of George Clooney takes root wherever he goes.) What the local premiere lacks in star power it gains in timely edge: it takes place on April 4, four days before the stars are expected to see the fruit of their labors at the "premiere" at Grauman's Chinese Theater. (The proceeds for that one go to the American Film Institute. All this charity is a fine thing, but when is the studio expected to start making some of its money? No wonder Hollywood is going under.) Of that wingding, the good-natured Mr. McClure simply notes: "None of us were invited."

Trailer Roundup: Leatherheads

Paul Clark — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

If a movie about the early days of professional football seems a strange directorial follow-up for Clooney after his Oscar-nominated Good Night and Good Luck, it shouldn't. After all, Clooney has long been most at home in period pieces and comedies that take advantage of his classic leading man appeal and interest in old-school media stories, and this definitely fits the bill. I also like the casting of The Office's John Krasinski as the young hotshot who becomes Clooney's teammate and romantic rival (should be better than License to Wed anyway). But Renée Zellweger? Really? Maybe I'm just not a fan, but she doesn't seem to quite fit into the period setting, although I suppose I should be grateful Clooney didn't cast Jennifer Jason Leigh instead. Still, I'm inclined to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. When was the last time Clooney steered me wrong?

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