The Screengrab : robert de niro

Reviews By Request: Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The conventional wisdom regarding cinematic plot twists is that they be unexpected. This means that either the audience shouldn’t see that a twist is coming, or that they shouldn’t anticipate the particular twist that the movie has in store. So what to make of a movie like Angel Heart? Here is a movie that more or less announces from the beginning that nothing is what it seems, and the film is filled with clues that are somewhat less than subtle. Yet at the same time, it’s entertaining and stylish enough that it entertained me even as I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I more or less guessed where it was headed, but I had a good time getting there.

Consider an early scene in the film, in which the detective protagonist Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) meets his mysterious retainer Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to discuss the case Harry has been investigating. In most detective movies, Cyphre would be portrayed in a way that makes him seem slightly off, but wouldn’t hint at his dark secrets. But rather than trying to hide Cyphre’s true nature, director Alan Parker almost dares us to guess, as he tempts Harry by offering him $5,000 to take the case (a pretty good sum for a fifties-era gumshoe), then uses his elegant long nails to peel one of the hard-boiled eggs on his plate. Angel knows something is afoot, but he’s so anxious (both by Cyphre and the eggs, since he’s “got a thing about chickens”), and in thrall to the money being offered that he doesn’t even try to guess what. But it becomes pretty clear to the audience who Cyphre really is by the time he mentions that eggs are seen by some cultures as symbols of the soul then takes a big bite from one of his eggs, a sinister glare in his eye. It’s almost like… Parker wants us to guess.

Really, the whole movie is like this. And while as a mystery Angel Heart leaves something to be desired, it’s much more successful as an exercise in lurid style. Parker, who first worked as a commercial director, has always been more comfortable with visuals than with substantial narratives, which torpedoed serious efforts like Angela’s Ashes and The Life of David Gale, but was well-suited to more stylized and less plot-driven fare like Pink Floyd: The Wall (Evita straddled the line, making mincemeat of plot and character development but providing thrilling, almost Riefenstahl-esque lighting and choreography for the production numbers). Angel Heart fits into the second category, which goes a long way toward explaining why this is one of the director’s more interesting films.

If Parker doesn’t seem especially interested in making a whodunit, that’s because they’re largely a setup for the story’s seamier trappings- the dingy home of a morphine-addicted doctor, the shadowy back alleys of old New Orleans, the ornate choreography of a late-night pagan ritual. Likewise, Parker’s use of blood makes the movie feel almost like an old-school giallo in parts, complete with leering closeups of freshly disembodied corpses and the various organs that were removed in the process. And the notorious sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet is one of the more memorable of Parker’s career, so frenzied and over the top that it must be seen to be believed. That the scene in its current form was actually edited down so that the film was get an R rating just goes to show how far Parker was willing to go to get his effects.

However, the movie would be nothing more than empty style without the assured lead performance by Rourke. Even prior to his nineties career meltdown, Rourke excelled at playing down-and-out guys who thought they were smarter and more charming than they actually were, and the role of Harry Angel was a perfect fit. While many actors would have turned Harry into a retro-cool archetype, Rourke’s performance is eccentric (look at the way he reacts whenever he spies a chicken) and emphasizes his deep-seated anxieties and preoccupations. Rourke isn’t afraid to highlight Harry’s less capable side- for a detective he can sometimes be pretty slow to pick up on things, and he occasionally makes some pretty big mistakes out of carelessness. Yet he’s so engaging in his rumpled, careworn way that it’s hard not to like the guy, and to feel sorry for him once the story has painted him into a corner.

In the climactic scene of Angel Heart, Rourke faces off against DeNiro for the final time, as Harry finds out not only Louis Cyphre’s secret but also his own. DeNiro was still in the full flower of his talent at the time, not yet having become a bloated parody of himself. But it’s Rourke who shines in this scene, as he cries out “I know who I am!” again and again. As the scene continues, Rourke wrings one emotion after another from this line- first defiant, then pathetic, then resigned- and it’s a reminder of what a fine actor he was back before we nearly lost him to his own self-destructive impulses. When I saw The Wrestler this past winter, I knew that it was designed to be Rourke’s comeback vehicle, but I had only a limited exposure to the early years of his career. Now that I’ve seen Angel Heart, I’m eager to see more.

For my final Reviews By Request column here at Screengrab, I’d like to pay tribute to one of the Screengrab’s favorite sites, The Onion A.V. Club. One of the A.V. Club’s most interesting regular columns is The New Cult Canon, a weekly feature written by the talented Scott Tobias. Every week, Scott takes on a fairly recent cult-friendly movie, and he was gracious enough to recommend five of his favorite New Cult Canon selections for this column. Which of the following should I review next?

Online Surveys & Market Research

In case you’re having trouble reading the poll, the choices are: Bitter Moon (Polanski), I Am Cuba (Kalatozov), King of New York (Ferrara), Married to the Mob (Demme), and Millennium Actress (Kon). And remember, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Morning Deal Report: Katie Holmes in the Dark

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins have scripted the thriller Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a thriller that will star Katie Holmes. The movie “is based on a 1973 ABC telepic about a young girl who moves in with her father and his girlfriend and discovers they are sharing the house with devilish creatures,” Variety reports.

The Irishmen are coming! “Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer will play the leads in The Irishman, a crime story that Jonathan Hensleigh will direct,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Stevenson will play Danny Greene, “a violent Irish-American gangster who competed with the Italian mob in 1970s Cleveland and ended up provoking a countrywide turf war that crippled the mafia. Walken will play the loan shark and nightclub owner Shondor Birns, and Kilmer is a Cleveland police detective who befriends Greene.”

Robert De Niro and Edward Norton will reunite for the psychological thriller Stone. “Story centers on a correctional officer (De Niro) who is seduced by the wife of a convicted arsonist (Norton) up for parole.” De Niro and Norton previously appeared together in The Score.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 25-May 1, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Hi, it’s Vince with Screengrab and you’re gonna be in a great mood all day cuz you’ll be grabbin’ your troubles away with Screengrab. Ya like lists? We got lists. How about Great Beginnings: Screengrab’s Favorite Opening Scenes of All Time? We got Parts One, Two and Three. But come on, that’s not good enough. Tell ya what, we’ll throw in Parts Four and Five, no extra charge. Now you’re cookin’ with gas.

How about reviews? Everyone likes movie reviews, right? We got Winnebago Man. We got The Limits of Control, how ‘bout that? You throw your Eldorado in there, you mix it with your Perestroika – come on, you’re not gonna get this at Ain’t It Cool News, am I right?

I’m just getting started here, folks. Watch this – you’re gonna love my posts:

25 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Better Zmed Than Red

Precursors: Dead Man (1995)

Screengrab Death Watch: Day One

Getting Darrined: When the Sequel Doesn’t Need You

Forgotten Films: "Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson" (1993)

Robert De Niro’s Pantyhose and Other Treasures

Robert De Niro’s Pantyhose and Other Treasures

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:30:00 GMT

In 2006, Robert De Niro donated an archival collection containing “more than 1,300 boxes of papers, film, movie props and costumes” from throughout his motion picture career to the Harry Ransom Center, a research library and museum at the University of Texas in Austin. “Filling more than 300 archival boxes, the paper portion of the collection includes De Niro's heavily-annotated scripts and correspondence, make-up and wardrobe photographs, wardrobe continuity books, costume designs and posters, and extensive production, publicity and research material,” according to a press release from the Ransom Center.

“With about 8,500 items filling more than 1,000 boxes, the costumes and props within the collection constitute the Center's largest single costume holding and include such iconic items as the leopard-print boxing robe worn by De Niro in Raging Bull (1980) and the voluminous, body-length coats of the creature in Frankenstein (1994). Some of the costumes and props are accompanied by wardrobe continuity books that include notes from the wardrobe crew and photographs of De Niro in costume.”

It took more than two years to inventory and catalogue the collection, but it is finally available for viewing by the public. The Ransom Center’s web site has a searchable inventory, so I was able to find a few items of particular interest, including:

Key chain with key and silver fob engraved with “Hotel Ritz” from Goodfellas

Off-white cotton briefs with blue, white, and gold elastic waistband (Fruit of the Loom, manufacturer) from Meet the Fockers

Beige lycra sheer seamless pantyhose, worn by De Niro in Cape Fear

You’ll need an appointment to view De Niro’s pantyhose, but I think we can all agree it’s worth it.

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: John Belushi's "Noble Rot"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

It was twenty-seven years ago last month that John Belushi died, at the age of 33. At the time, Belushi's movie career was approaching a crossroads. At the end of 1981, he had released two films, Continental Divide, and Neighbors, that had an important place in the trajectory of his career--they were the first features he'd done in which he played a clearly defined starring role, rather than as a standout member of an ensemble cast (as in National Lampoon's Animal House and 1941), in a movie that (unlike The Blues Brothers) wasn't a pretested spin-off of something he'd done on Saturday Night Live. Taken individually, Continental Divide was a tepid comedy for which Belushi tried to stretch himself to play a romantic lead, and a flop, whereas Neighbors was a misplayed, sloppy travesty of Thomas Berger's darkly comic novel, which Belushi came to hate, and which actually made some money. Neither film capitalized on what Belushi might have been able to bring to movies, but between them, they seemed to sum up what Belushi (perhaps ill-advisedly) wanted to do, and what the studios, to his horror, thought he was good for.

That tug-of-war was going on as Belushi spent his last days mulling his choice of projects: a comedy based on (or at least yoked to the title of) The Joy of Sex that was being pushed on by the studio, and Moon Over Miami, which the director Louis Malle and the playwright John Guare, fresh from their upscale success with Atlantic City, wanted to tailor to Belushi and Akroyd's talents. (It would have starred Belushi as a small-time con artist employed to help Akroyd, as an uptight FBI agent, cook up an Abscam-like sting operation.) This time, though, Belushi had his own pet idea, a script called Noble Rot that he and Don Novello were adapting from a screenplay by Jay Sandrich called Sweet Deception. If Belushi was disgusted by what the bosses were offering him but nervous about jumping into the art-movie deep end with Malle and Guare, it must have made sense to him to try and work with Novello, a colleague from the SNL days (where Novello, a staff writer, used to pop up in the guise of Father Guido Sarducci), to shape something specifically to what he saw as the true nature of his gifts. Of course, it must have also seemed like a good idea one night to check into the Chateau Marmont hotel and send out for speedballs.

Noble Rot is about Johnny Glorioso, the 30-year-old son of a Northern California winemaker whose wastrel tendencies have made him the despair of his family, though even the cops who hand him over to his father in the opening scenes can't do enough to stress how well-liked he is by everyone and what a lovable rapscallion he is. (They pay tribute to the fighting prowess that made it necessary for four cops to bring him down.) Dad has his own problems. The big wine contest is coming up, and his other son, the responsible one, can't board the plane because he's had an allergic reaction to some seafood. "I can't believe it," he laments. "I got on son who can't eat lobster, and one son that can't drink." He sits Johnny down and tells him that he has to take his brother's place, explaining the importance of the occasion in a speech that also serves as an explanation for the script's less-than-selling title. It seems that every once in a great while, a special grey fungus known as Botrytis cinerea infects grapes which, if they are picked at just the right point, can in turn yield a spectacular wine. Just to make sure we get it, the old man tells Johnny, the black sheep, that he has undying faith in him because he is "my noble rot--my blessing in disguise."

Johnny heads out for the East Coast and finds himself sitting next to Christine on the plane. She is a looker, but when she fails to be dazzled by his line of patter--she asks the flight attendant to find him another seat while he's sneaking a joint in the can--the viewer is clearly supposed to think, "What's her problem?" instead of, "Jesus, if the attendant hadn't found another corner to shove him into, I'd have jumped out in mid-air and taken my chances." Right away, one may pick up on a certain disconnect between how charming Belushi thinks his alter ego would have come across and what's on the page, because Johnny's supposedly funny, seductive conversation peaks with his testimonial in praise of the scintillating quality of the in-flight magazine (he's disappointed to learn that he has to catch a plane whenever he wants to check out the latest issue) and then levels out when he discovers that the movie they're showing is The Deer Hunter. (He's seen it before and thought there'd be more deer hunting in it.)

It turns out that Christine is involved in a diamond smuggling operation. (Her boss is one of those guys whose lines--"I won't involve your young friend anymore. He's served his purposes."--that you can't read without hearing the "MWAAHAHA!" at the end.) She involves Johnny in an elaborate push-pull relationship that is designed to throw off the people on her trail but also seems to speak volumes about the star and co-writer's woman issues. It's also around this point that you begin to notice that, for what's largely a con-game comedy with a character who's supposed to be a wild man in the role of the fall guy, Noble Rot is very short on narrative invention; not a hell of a lot actually happens. Christine keeps pulling Johnny close to her to keep his distracting presence in the game, then pushing him away and vanishing only to reappear, while he stands around with a big question mark over his head. Belushi must have thought that he was making Jay Sandrich's material "his" and making it edgier by making his character cruddier and ruder, and maybe he also sensed that Novello, with his gentle satiric wit, was the right person to reign him back from the going too far over the top and lending the movie some charm. But neither Novello (who would go on to publish the Laszlo Letters series, write and produce for SCTV, and lend his affable presence to many film, TV, and radio roles, but never did get a real screenplay credit or publish anything else with a real plot) nor he had the story sense to replace the scaffolding they were tearing down with a workable replacement.

In place of a story developing, there are several moments where Belushi would have gotten to assert what a wild and crazy guy he was (such as a throwaway moment in which he shows off his idea of a promotional gimmick for his long-suffering dad's winery: T-shirts with the words "GLORIOSO VINEYARDS" surrounded by a skull and lightning bolts). And how hip he is: Christine may be smart and sexy and better able to function smoothly in society than this coarse brute, but she says things like, "This is the 1980s--all you need is money," and she needs reminding who Keith Richards is. ("Yes, of course. Of the music group?") Considering that the Rolling Stones once hosted SNL, and that Robert De Niro, the star of The Deer Hunter, was a friend of Belushi's on the L.A. party scene--he dropped by Belushi's hotel room the night he died--some of the cultural references come across as bits of name-dropping trying to pass for inside jokes. (There are also scripted appearances by Orson Welles and Marvin Hamlisch, who gets to tickle the ivories in a party scene while some lucky bit player tells another, "He wrote The Sting, you know.") As in much of The Blues Brothers, Belushi seemed to be trying to fit into the '80s by claiming to be keeping the spirit of the '60s alive while making something that felt a little as if he and his buddies were trying to become the new Rat Pack.

Noble Rot ends with a final twist that leaves Johnny on top and Christine out in the cold. It's a looking-out-for-number-one conclusion that betrays audience expectations that Johnny will either get something real going with the girl (or any girl) or that he'll come through and win his family's wine the recognition that it deserves, and the fact that Belushi apparently saw it as a crowd-pleasing happy ending shows that he actually fit into the "all you need is money" 1980s better than he wanted to admit to himself. In the whole picture, there's one climactic scene where he gets to really Belushi it up: at the wine-testing, where a French judge overrules the impressed reactions of his fellow judges and bad mouths the Glorioso wine. ("Perhaps 'skunky' isn't the right word. Actually, it tastes more like the fur of a wet dog.") Johnny, of course, goes nuts--you can bet that a glass of wine gets emptied over somebody's head--and delivering a detailed condemnation of the judge that does not neglect to mention France's outstanding war debt. This rhymes with an earlier scene in which Johnny delivers a lengthy monologue describing the horrors of a visit he once made to France, where wandered into an eatery in hopes of getting a hamburger and was grossed out with an offer of head cheese. I don't know what would have happened with John Belushi's movie career if he'd lived longer, but if he'd made Noble Rot, I'm pretty sure that he never would have won a Légion d'honneur medal to clink against Jerry Lewis's.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding: in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

By the time Mike Judge’s half-brilliant Office Space gets around to its get-rich-quick scheme, its best moments are behind it. It starts out so well, with the story of a chronically bored office drone (Ron Livingston) who finds himself – after an accidental dose of post-hypnotic suggestion – completely incapable of giving a shit about his job. This is Office Space at its best, a note-perfect satire of cubicle life enlightened hugely by the appearance of a character who upends the whole idea of consequence and thus makes for some of the most viciously barbed gags of its day. Once it gets around to Livingston and his colleagues hatching a Superman III-inspired, computer-aided plan to steal millions by shaving half-pennies off of every transaction, it becomes more or less a goofy caper comedy, which, while well-executed, can’t hold a candle to its truly inspired first half. Still, as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s a classic, and damned if it doesn’t almost work. (LP)

HEAT (1995)

Heat famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on-screen – if only for one diner conversation and a climactic chase sequence – yet it’s Michael Mann’s direction that elevates this cat-and-mouse saga to near-greatness. The story revolves around the efforts of Pacino’s cop to catch De Niro’s crook, two kindred warriors on opposite sides of the law. Though this dynamic is, to put it mildly, hackneyed, Mann’s film is an energized, invigorated work that recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirs, which also focused on peerlessly cool lawmen and thieves whose dedication to customs, habits and ethical codes leaves them isolated. As the criminal struggling to reconcile personal desires for happiness with instincts that warn against being something he’s not, De Niro delivers his last great performance. Pacino’s trademark quiet-screaming overacting and a few too many narrative diversions prove occasionally aggravating, but De Niro’s superb turn helps offset these slight missteps, as does the thrilling in-broad-daylight centerpiece robbery that cements Heat’s status in the pantheon of heist films. (NS)

OCEAN’S 11, 12, 13… (1960, 2001, etc.)

The original 1960 Ocean’s 11’s best get-rich quick scheme didn’t take place onscreen; it was the Rat Pack’s all night, every night ring-a-ding-ding showcase at the Sands while shooting the film on location in Las Vegas. Sure, knocking over five casinos during a blackout on New Year’s Eve has a certain flair to it, but there’s nothing like working 22 hours a day for six straight weeks to really fatten the wallet. In 2001, a Frat Pack led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt staged their own Vegas heist, lifting $150 million from the Bellagio vault with the help of a Chinese acrobat, a Cockney explosives expert mysteriously played by Don Cheadle, and the always indispensible Elliott Gould. The remake took in even more than $150 million at the box office, which led to two further get-rich-quick schemes: the winky, self-referential Ocean’s 12, a sort of spiritual cousin to The Cannonball Run II, and Ocean’s 13, which proved once again that the death knell of a franchise sounds a lot like Al Pacino yelling. (SVD)

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Part of the point of John Huston's classic is that prospecting for gold isn't actually an easy or quick way to strike it rich at all, but once you've laid out for the tools and traveled all the way out into the middle of the Mexican desert and gotten used to the sight of Walter Huston jeering at you without his dentures, you're more than likely to stick with it until you've got something to show for it. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your paranoid, half-mad partner is going to be able to convince himself that you're plotting to steal his share of the "goods" so that he can feel justified in knocking you off and helping himself to your share. Whatever moral and practical defects can be found in Bogart's plan, it has to be said that he's a sage and a prince compared to the hippopotamus-toothed bandit played by the immortal Alfonso Bedoya, whose master plan involves decapitating Bogart and stealing his burros, after he's thrown away those saddlebags filled with the funny yellow powder that's weighing them down. (PN)

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

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

Robert De Niro on Serving His Father's Legacy

Phil Nugent — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

"He was handsome, very elegant," the painter Albert Kresch told reporter Christopher Turner. "Better looking than his son, a couple of inches taller and his hair was fairer. He was poetic in the Byronic sense." The good-looking booger in question was Kresch's fellow painter, Robert De Niro, Sr. De Niro died of cancer in 1993, the same year that his homelier son, Robert De Niro the actor, made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale. Since then, De Niro has carefully maintained his father's studio, described by Turner as "a time capsule of Fifties bohemia, a loft space presided over by an ornate birdcage and antique ski machine, every inch of wall covered in rugs, African masks, ex-votos, charcoal drawings and vibrant watercolours. A corridor flanked by storage racks crammed with richly coloured canvases leads into the studio itself (the space is two apartments knocked into one), a huge, bright room with three easels, on one of which is a fauvist landscape dated 1977. Tubes of coloured oil have exploded with age and ooze over a painting table where an army of brushes stands neatly to attention." "I try to keep it as much as possible as it was when he passed away,' De Niro says. "I wanted to keep it for his grandchildren, my kids. I wanted them to know what their grandfather did. I've taken pictures, documented everything, but I just try and hold on to it, to preserve everything as it was, as long as I can." He added, "Sometimes I just go there and sit."

A student of Hans Hofmann, De Niro, Sr. had his first solo show at Peggy Guggehheim's Art of This Century Gallery in 1946, when the artist wasn't yet 25 years old. His work was championed by such voices as Clement Greenberg and Frank O'Hara, who wrote in 1955 that De Niro was "one of the most original and powerful younger painters showing today, and each show of his is an event." De Niro married another painter, Virginia Admiral, in 1941; Robert, Jr. was born in 1943. The De Niros "moved in bohemian circles," as their son puts it. In fact, they became bit players in the published diaries of Anais Nin, who for awhile employed Virginia as a typist and ultimately roped the De Niros into what she called her "literary, snobbish house of prostitution-writing", churning out "erotica" for a private client who paid a dollar a page for fancy smut. Nin characteristically felt that her influence "liberated" Virgina, but Robert soon gave up writing porn to order, complaining that it was "very hard work" compared to painting or waiting tables.

De Niro's parents broke up before he was two years old. "As a kid I remember I'd visit him at his studio. We weren't living together, I was living with my mother, and it was nothing like his studio as you see it now. It was like a real studio, a total mess, and it stank of paint and turpentine." De Niro, who recalls that he frustrated his father's attempts to use him as a model because of his inability to sit still, says that his father moved from one place to the next in the Soho and Lower East Side areas "at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas. Often, he was the only tenant in the building." At the time De Niro was growing up, his father's brand of figurative expressionism wasn't hot anymore, and Robert, Sr. was once again doing odd jobs on the side to support himself; he spent some expatriate years in France, only to be brought home by his son at a time when the older man was suffering fits of depression and had experienced some kind of breakdown. In 1977, a Newsweek cover story on Robert, Jr. mentioned that the father's latest show included a note spelling out that the paintings were the work not of the famous young actor of that name but his father, and De Niro now acknowleges that his father had mixed feelings about his son surpassing him in fame and wordly success. The son is 65 now, six years younger than his father's age at the time of his death, and devoting a lot of time to preserving and showcasing the old man's work. His father's paintings are displayed in De Niro's Tribeca Grill restaurant and his new Greenwich Hotel, and he's involved in a legal dispute with Larry Salander, of the Salander-O'Reilly gallery, who gave his creditors five De Niro paintings after declaring bankruptcy last year. (The paintings were part of a retrospective that De Niro and his mother organized for the gallery.) "I wish I understood," De Niro says now, talking about his father's art, and how it was achieved. "I never asked him and he never explained it to me. I wish at the time I'd been a little more curious."

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Forget Christmas: for movie geeks, the period from New Year’s Eve to the third week in February is truly the most wonderful time of the year, from the endless Best of Lists and Golden Globes straight through the Saggies and Spirit Awards to the reddest carpet of all...Mama Oscar.

As per recently made-up tradition, the Screengrab will be live-blogging the Academy Awards this coming Sunday...and while we’re on the subject, can we please call a moratorium on bitching about the length of the show? Do sports fans cry every year about the length of the Super Bowl? Do they squeeze all the punt returns into a 65-second medley to streamline the running time? NO! If you’re a sports fan, you want the Super Bowl to last all day. And if you’re NOT a sports fan, then why the hell are you even watching? Just check out the highlights on the news and leave the rest of us in peace, ferchrissakes!

Sorry...just had to vent. And, if you think about it, strong opinions about trivial nonsense is pretty much the lifeblood of Oscar season. Arguments about who deserved to win and who got robbed have livened up the annual ceremony ever since Sunrise totally stole Best Unique and Artistic Production from Chang in 1928.

Sadly, our recent calls to reinstate the Best Unique and Artistic Production category have fallen on deaf ears (sorry, Synechdoche, New York), but there’s plenty more Oscar opining ahead as we here at the Screengrab salute (and condemn) THE BEST (AND WORST) BEST PICTURES OF ALL TIME!

THE BEST:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

This wasn't supposed to happen. While they might win the occasional token screenplay award (as they did for Fargo), the Coen Brothers were never going to be respectable and mainstream enough to take home the top Oscar honors. Perhaps emboldened by their belated coronation of Martin Scorsese, however, the Academy saw fit to award this dark, ultra-violent neo-noir with the coveted Best Picture prize. Maybe the literary pedigree helped – after all, even Oprah had given her seal of approval to Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel No Country for Old Men. The film is certainly the most faithful adaptation of the book imaginable, and yet it couldn't be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. Much of McCarthy's story unfolds through the sort of sardonic, deadpan dialogue that's always been right in the Coens' wheelhouse, and the more action-oriented scenes are rendered with such an uncanny grasp of McCarthy's evocative and precise geography, readers of the book may experience severe déjà vu. Javier Bardem, himself an Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor, is a uniquely malevolent presence as the killing machine Chigurh. While there are several suspense sequences destined for the Coens greatest hits reel (notably an attack dog's pursuit of Josh Brolin's doomed Marlboro Man into the Rio Grande, and a deadly game of 'musical rooms' at a rundown motel), in its final lyrical moments, No Country for Old Men transcends genre and lays waste to any notion of the Coens as the sniggering egghead pranksters of cinema.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)

In truth, The Last Emperor is kind of a silly movie: its take on China's 20th century political landscape is kind of vacuous and unenlightening, and it centers around an appropriately blank protagonist played by a totally undistinguished actor who seems to have been cast only because his last name, almost too conveniently, was "Lone." But it's also an apex of Bernardo Bertolucci's unhinged formalism (or, more accurately, of Vittorio Storaro's insane but effective color schemes), and as a lush, consistently gorgeous aesthetic exercise, it's pretty untoppable. If the Academy wanted pretty and inoffensively political, at least they got one out of two.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

Michael Cimino’s reputation was so tarnished by the epic financial and critical failure of 1980’s (unjustly vilified) Heaven’s Gate that it’s almost impossible to watch his preceding film, 1978’s The Deer Hunter, without thinking about the once-promising director’s impending fall from grace. Purely on its own merits, however, Cimino’s Best Picture winner holds up remarkably well as a marriage of New Hollywood authenticity and Old Hollywood scope, and as a portrait of not only the Vietnam War’s toll on those who fought it, but of war’s careless misuse of human life, the latter point epitomized by the iconic Russian Roulette finale involving Christopher Walken’s battle-scarred vet. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a haunting, melancholic loveliness that’s at odds with much of the material’s harrowing grimness, Cimino’s film (partially indebted to the work of Visconti) plays like a messy, sprawling novel, intimately evoking its characters’ Russian heritage and Pennsylvania steel town roots, poignantly utilizing rituals and ceremonies to express their bonds of love and friendship, and ably casting its tale as emblematic of America’s post-Vietnam moral and emotional disarray.

OLIVER! (1968)

This adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage musical version of Oliver Twist is one of those Oscar winners that isn't especially well-remembered these days and may be regarded as a fluky choice at best, which is unfair. It represents a late show of mastery by the great British director Carol Reed, who had suffered through a lousy decade since his last successful production, the 1959 Our Man in Havana. Working with a first-rate cast that includes Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and non-singing (thank God) Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Carol Reed managed to use the rather undistinguished musical as a way to create a stylized version of the Dickens story, utilizing the energy and wit of the performers and his own cinematic brio to compensate for the limitations of Bart's songs. The movie also has its place in history for marking the last moment when Hollywood felt comfortable declaring that an all-ages movie was the best of the year; the next year, the Best Picture award would go to the adults-only Midnight Cowboy.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

There’s a case to be made that David Lean’s early, more modestly sized efforts were superior to his later epics, though if the legendary auteur ultimately sacrificed emotional and dramatic tautness in favor of marathon distension, it occurred at some point after 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a peerless example of larger-than-life filmmaking. As the British military commander who, in a Japanese POW camp during WWII, spearheads the construction of a bridge that his British compatriots plan on destroying, Alec Guinness brilliantly personifies the destructive folly of pride. His army officer, determined to complete the bridge as a means of proving British cultural/political supremacy, is opposed by Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese colonel, driven to break his Western prisoners’ spirits and terrified that the British will humiliate his own men (and nation) by successfully completing their bridge-building task. Their one-on-one conflict is enlivened, rather than dwarfed, by Lean’s grand direction, culminating in a finale that’s memorable not just for its scale, but for the unforgettable look of sudden awareness, and regret, on Guinness’ face.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: You’ve Got to Be Focking With Me

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:15:00 GMT

Someone might describe the third installment in the Fockers series as “long-awaited,” but that someone would not be me. Nevertheless, Reuters is reporting that Little Fockers is on the fast track at Universal, with Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro and Owen Wilson all set to reprise their roles. “Jay Roach, who directed the first two films, will produce Fockers but not helm the picture. He's concentrating on the comic romp Dinner for Schmucks for DreamWorks.” Of course he is. Contenders for the director’s chair include Paul Weitz (About a Boy) and David Wain (Role Models).

Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher are running from Five Killers. “Film reteams Heigl with helmer Robert Luketic, who most recently directed the thesp in upcoming romantic comedy The Ugly Truth. Story kicks off when a woman meets the man of her dreams while on vacation. Married bliss is turned upside down when they discover that their neighbors may be assassins hired to kill them,” Variety reports.

The Michael Lewis baseball book Moneyball is already slated for the big screen, and now his football book The Blind Side is scheduled for adaptation with Sandra Bullock aboard. It “tells the true story of football player Michael Oher, who is projected to be one of the first players selected in this year's NFL draft,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Oher was a homeless black teen from a broken home who was taken in by a well-to-do white family that saw extraordinary promise in him. Oher, however, faced a new set of obstacles once in his new environment. Bullock will play Leigh Anne Touhy, the affluent matriarch of the conservative suburban household that takes in Oher.”

Related:
Soderbergh Plays Moneyball
Robert De Niro in "The Return of Rupert Pupkin"

Coming Soon: 55 Remakes!

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Almost every weekday morning we bring you news of a new, usually ill-advised remake in the Hollywood pipeline, but a site called Den of Geek has gone the extra mile by compiling a master list of 55 movies slated for the recycle bin. “Some are finished, some have only just been announced, and one or two are rumoured,” a brief intro warns, before diving into a pigpile of retreads and rip-offs. Here are just a few of them:

Fantastic Voyage – “The 1966 classic about a submarine that’s shrunk and injected into a man’s bloodstream to try and stop a potentially fatal blood clot is on director Roland Emmerich’s slate. Cormac and Marianne Wibberley – who wrote the National Treasure movies, among others – are on script duties.”

Meatballs – “The original: directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray. The proposed remake: potentially to be directed by John Whitesell, he who gave us Big Momma’s House 2 and Deck The Halls.” Wow, this could be even better than Meatballs 4.

Near Dark – “Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes company is behind the remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 vampire flick.” Clearly Bay will not stop until he has remade every horror movie, at which point he will begin remaking his own remakes.

Angel Heart – “The Robert De Niro/Mickey Rourke horror, originally directed by Alan Parker, has been picked up by the man who used to run New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca.” Our guess is that both De Niro and Rourke are available for the remake.

If you have a strong stomach, check out the full list here.

Morning Deal Report: Polanski and Belushi, Together at Last

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Apparently some sort of awards nominations were announced this morning. I think you can find the details elsewhere at the Screengrab.

Scorsese and De Niro. Hitchcock and Stewart. Polanski and…Belushi? JIM Belushi? Yes, it’s true, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Wilkinson and Jim Belushi have joined the cast of Roman Polanski's The Ghost, which begins filming in Berlin on Feb. 4. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan as a former British prime minister and Ewan McGregor as his ghostwriter.”

Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) will direct “The Spectacular Now, a coming-of-age dramedy based on Tim Tharp's book,” per Variety. "It's somewhere between Sideways, Catcher in the Rye and Ferris Bueller's Day Off," said producer Tom McNulty. Well, that narrows it down.

Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, is back on track following the shooting death of Ruffalo’s brother. “The story, written by Christopher Thornton, follows a paralyzed DJ, struggling to survive on the streets of L.A., who turns to faith healing and mysteriously develops the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself. The DJ then decides to cash in on his gift in exchange for his rock 'n' roll dreams,” per THR.

Related:
Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost
Movies We Missed: My Life Without Me (2003)

A Better Travis Bickle for a Better New Year, and Other Great "Resolutions" Movies

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Today is Twelfth Day, the traditional end to the Christmas season for those of us who need a few days for the hangover to die down before we can start thinking about taking down the lights and chucking the tree out the window. So it's not too late to start thinking about taping some New Year's resolutions to the door of the fridge. Not everyone agrees about how much point there is to making New Year's resolutions; the idea behind them is to make some changes that will make your life better, and the world does not lack for evidence that people don't change. But here at the Screengrab, we think about these thing the same way we think about everything else: as filtered through movies, which is why we don't work for a golfing blog. And in the movies, there is no shortage of evidence that people can change resolve to change their lives. For the better? Eh, sometimes it depends on whether you're living the life or just sitting in the dark, watching it.

THE MOVIE: Taxi Driver (1976)

THE RESOLVER: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)

THE RESOLUTION: In his own words: "I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight." He also decides to try a new hairstyle.

THE RESULTS: Having turned himself into an urban guerrilla soldier in order to assassinate a presidential candidate, Travis, with a little help from the Secret Service, decides to redirect his energies towards persuading a child prostitute to return to her family in the Midwest after re-decorating the walls of a hotel room and corridor with her pimp's brains. After a period of rest and recovery in the hospital, he returns to work, where he finds that the girl who dumped him on their first date after a disagreement over his taste in movies is sufficiently impressed by the change in him to show up, hanging around his cab with a faraway look in her eyes. Clearly a success, made all the more gratifying by the fact that his hair grew out while he was in a coma and the girl never saw him in his ill-considered new look.

THE MOVIE: The Shining (1980)

THE RESOLVER: Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson)

THE RESOLUTION: To use the time and isolation provided by his new winter job to really sit down and focus on getting some serious writing done. Also, if the masterpiece gets finished early, maybe spend some time examining his relationship with his wife and son.

THE RESULTS: Torrence's breakthrough experimental novel, consisting of 38,000 typographical variations on the same ten-word sentence, didn't make Oprah's Book Club, but both Harold Bloom and David Eggers think it was underrated at the time of its original publication. (Back then, many critics questioned whether it would have been published at all if not for the surrounding news stories about Torrence's untimely death and the events surrounding the break-up of his marriage. Certainly the fact that his agent was able to arrange a six-figure movie deal came as a big surprise.) On the face of it, weighing the good against the no so good, this would appear to be a moderate success. However, thinking long term, it should be noted that the ending of The Shining seems to hint that Jack has been this way before, which in turn may indicate that he'll be back. And when he does, with all the life experience he'll be packing, the next book is sure to be dynamite!

THE MOVIE: Torremolinos 73 (2003)

THE RESOLVER: Alfredo López (Javier Cámara)

THE RESOLUTION: To make a better life for himself and his wife, Carmen (Candela Peña), by becoming a pornographic filmmaker.

This Spanish comedy, which is, or should be, dear to the hearts of all good Nerve readers, is a weirdly charming tribute to the homier side of the sexual revolution and the porno chic era. Alfredo and Carmen aren't the hardened pros of Boogie Nights but budding entrepreneurs trying to ride their mom and pop operation into a higher level of the middle class, and they have amusingly mixed feelings about the discovery that Carmen has become an international porn star. Alfredo, who can't compete with his wife for the camera's attention, tries to compensate by letting his artistic pretensions develop, and the two manage to go out in glory with the bigger-budgeted art-porn flick of the title, which also makes it possible for Carmen to conceive a child with one of her studly co-stars, a develop that delights both Carmen and her loving but infertile husband. By going all the way with his resolution, the lucky Alfredo is able to express himself artistically, enrich himself and his family financially, and strengthen his marriage. Somewhere, Jack Torrence is seething.

THE MOVIE: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

THE RESOLVER: Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)

THE RESOLUTION: To end a long-standing and thoroughly enjoyed addiction to drugs, following an unfortunate incident involving a weekend in the woods spent burying a turquoise-faced Heather Graham.

THE RESULTS: Bob trades in a free-wheeling, exciting life as the unquestioned head of a "family" of doper-grifters and a marriage to one of the hottest women in the history of movies (Kelly Lynch) for a sorry, colorless nine-to-five existence and the random wild evening spent being lectured by William S. Burroughs. On the plus side, he is, at twenty-six, a healthy young man, freshly clean and sober, with his whole blooming life laid out ahead of him. On the down side, Max Perlich blows his brains out.

THE MOVIE: Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

THE RESOLVER: Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage)

THE RESOLUTION: To enjoy the exorbitant severance check that he has won as a result of his alcoholism by relocating to a city where the bars never close and drink himself to death

THE RESULTS: A spectacular success. Not only does Ben succeed in drinking himself to death, becoming so liquefied and benumbed that he is able to enjoy having broken glass embedded in every square inch of his naked back, but his glitteringly flamboyant self-destructiveness wins the heart of a fair hooker (Elisabeth Shue), one of those hard-edged but vulnerable blondes made all the more painfully alluring by the emotional and physical wear and tear of her unhappy experience. What's more, in his final scene, in a trope that would test H. P. Lovecraft's ability to suspend his disbelief, he was able to present her with a functioning erection, despite the fact that he was so drunk that his penis was the last remaining part of him that could still stand up. Though it will win us no awards from MADD for saying it, it must be admitted that Leaving Las Vegas makes a much stronger case for getting plowed than Drugstore Cowboy makes for cleaning up your act.

THE MOVIE: Lost in America (1985)

THE RESOLVER: David Howard (Albert Brooks)

THE RESOLUTION: To drop out of society, cash in their savings and the proceeds from the sale of their house to supply them with a $145,000 "nest egg", take to the road (with his wife, Linda, played by Julie Hagerty), and, in his own words: "Touch Indians, see the mountains and the prairies and all the rest of that song."

THE RESULTS: David starts out with a full head of steam but plows into a wall when he and the Missus stop in Vegas with plans to renew their marriage vows. Waking up to discover that Linda has hit the blackjack table and eaten into "the core of the nest egg"--and failing to persuade the casino boss (Garry Marshall) to give them back their money as a goodwill P.R. gesture--David flips out and becomes impossible to live with before settling down to try to start a new life in a trailer home, with Linda taking a job at a burger joint and David working as a crossing guard. After a day of this, he and Linda reconsider their devotion to their new identities as social dropouts and conclude that it would be better for David to return to the bosses he insulted and walked out on "and eat shit." On the most obvious level, it might seem that this resolution ended with a case of clear-cut, absolute failure. On the other hand, the simple fact of it is that most people are what they, deep down, prefer to be, and however much they might wish they were someone else, they don't change. Keeping that in mind, Lost in America can be seen as the story of someone who, in the course of about two weeks, gave it his best shot, found out that he wasn't cut out to be Walt Whitman--which means that he won't spend the rest of his life torturing himself with thoughts about the road not taken--and was able to return to his true path with a minimum of hurt and damage: no harm, no foul. Except that you have to wonder how David would feel right about now, given that he'd be about sixty, and would have spent the last several months watching his retirement fund turn to ash. If Brooks were up for a sequel, it might be scarier than whatever George Romero still has in him.

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

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

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

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Biopics have always blurred the line between fact and legend, a stylistic practice that both fueled and destroyed the career of Hunter S. Thompson, who (at his best) went beyond the bounds of traditional journalism by injecting himself into the stories he covered, amplifying the reality of his subject matter through wild exaggeration. But, as a certain lame duck American president can certainly attest, “truthiness” is a slippery slope, and Thompson eventually began to confuse himself with his journalistic doppleganger, Raoul Duke, the drug-addled party monster at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic adaptation of the college dorm room staple once considered unfilmable. While a “straight” biopic of the actual events of Thompson’s life would be fascinating (as long as Art Linson, director of the tedious Bill Murray fiasco Where the Buffalo Roam, had nothing to do with it), Gilliam instead captured the legend of Thompson/Duke and his infamous 1971 road trip to Sin City with his “attorney,” Dr. Gonzo (a funhouse mirror fictionalization of the Mexican-American political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta). Critics loathed the over-the-top depiction of Thompson’s hallucinated wonderland, yet despite an excess of shrieking in Benicio del Toro’s headache-inducing performance as Gonzo, Johnny Depp admirably captures both the real Thompson and his alter ego in an underrated performance. Plus, the movie’s a flat-out hoot: after howling through a near empty screening with fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, another audience member who’d ignored all the scathing reviews approached us to hazard the minority opinion, “Yeah! It was funny...right?”

RAGING BULL (1980)

Directors who specialized in noir – drawn as they were to doomed heroes and disorienting levels of moral ambiguity – loved to make films about boxers. Carnal, visceral creatures, they seemed particularly drawn to the sort of manipulative femme fatales the genre celebrated, and they played to the notion of destiny’s brute: they were men, after all, whose primary form of human communication was savage physical violence. Martin Scorsese, who brought the dynamic emotional energy of the ’70s and the gorgeous visual iconography and crushing sense of guilt and shame of Catholicism to the noir framework, clearly felt the same way, so it’s no coincidence that one of his greatest films is a breathtaking refinement of the old-school pug-centered crime drama. What makes Raging Bull such a shocker, then, is that it’s a true story: Jake LaMotta’s meteoric rise, brutal determination, mercurial mood swings, and destructive relationships with his wife, his family, and his God seem like the stuff of lurid, overblown pulp drama. Given the material they had to work with, it’s no wonder Scorsese and his collaborators created such a stunning, immediate film. While much is made of the admittedly astonishing physical transformation made by Robert DeNiro as his LaMotta slid from lean, hungry contender to fat, washed-up ex-champ, his emotional and psychological transformation is just as incredible, as the cocky, unstoppable self-confidence of the young man inexorably decays into the pitiful, indulgent self-loathing of age.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which may have served as a sort of apprenticeship for his directing, four years later, the moving screen biography of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Not only did he borrow heavily from Scorsese’s visual handiwork (notice the overhead camera angles, and the visual tonality that mixes elegiac near-silences with scenes of fiery violence), but he chose as his subject a public figure who shared more in common with Jake LaMotta than either of them would have cared to admit. Like LaMotta, Mishima’s story was so bizarre as to seem like the stuff of fiction: a weak young man who transformed himself through sheer willpower into a physically perfect bodybuilder; a barely closeted homosexual with poetic inclinations who married one of his country’s most famous female beauties and preached a gospel of rabid militarism; and a famous celebrity, considered the greatest writer of his generation, who ended his life in the most base possible manner, staging a would-be fascist revolution that ended with him clumsily committing suicide as the soldiers he hoped to inspire laughed at his grand ideals. Deftly blending intense psychological moments from Mishima’s life with gorgeous evocations of some of the most famous scenes in his fiction, Schrader creates a biopic that shows how much he learned from Scorsese – and how much he brought to the table himself.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

There were a million ways The Elephant Man could have gone wrong. (It’s easy to see how, in the innumerable one-joke parodies of it that sprang up in its wake.) A film about John Merrick, the terribly deformed Victorian-era man whose intelligence and perception transformed the lives of many who met him, could have been overly mawkish if taken too far in one direction, or grotesque and exploitative if taken too far in the other. Mel Brooks, who financed the film, knew this, and his first and best decision was to keep his name out of the production, realizing that audiences and critics would expect the film to be a joke if they thought it was coming from him. He took a major risk in hiring David Lynch to helm The Elephant Man, especially given Lynch’s penchant for unnerving surrealism, but Lynch was the best possible choice, and hit the necessary tone just right: he let Merrick’s appearance speak for itself, trusting John Hurt to communicate the agony of his mere existence as well as the man’s essential dignity. Lynch made the right decision to transfer his sense of the absurd and the bizarre onto Merrick’s surroundings, presenting us with a view of Victorian London as unsettling and alien as that of the world of Eraserhead, while putting Merrick in the position not of a monster, but of a man who did his best to be human in a world that would not allow him that role. The collaboration was so successful it’s a shame that the project Brooks next intended to do with Lynch – a surreal nightmare biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels set entirely inside the subject’s head - never got off the ground.

SAMURAI I: MUSASHI MIYAMOTO (1954)

When the historical figure you’re portraying in your biopic is less a human being than a character straight out of legend, you’ve got a lot of leeway in how you can portray him. There have been dozens of films in which legendary swordsman and duelist Miyamoto Musashi is the central figure, but the best of them all is director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. Though they’re best viewed as a whole, the first of the three movies is probably the strongest installment, telling the story of the epic figure from his humble beginnings to his utter transformation in the crucible of an unimaginably bloody battle. What Inagaki does right, and what distinguishes Musashi Miyamoto from the innumerable other films about the characters, is to strike a powerfully clear balance between historical storytelling and epic filmmaking; he is able, through solid storytelling and some highly inventive composition, to convey the sense that he is allowing us a glimpse of a real human figure who came from a particular time and place and ended up the way he did for discernable reasons, but he never lets go of the sweep and tension that remind us we’re watching a movie about a hero who is as much demigod as man. Of course, much of the credit must go to Toshirô Mifune, who gives the first of many towering performances in the lead role, yet Inagaki – rarely thought of as one of the first-rank Japanese directors of his day – does a fine job of sustaining the mood, tone, pace and look (abetted by some terrific EastmanColor cinematography by Jun Yasumoto) that distinguishes the whole trilogy. It’s as close to a definitive biopic as one can hope for when dealing with a legend.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Guy Peellaert, 1934-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, who died last week at 74, was a painter, comic strip artist, theatrical decorator, and photographer whose best-known work mixed a lurid Pop Art style with a mordant wit and the eye of a critical-minded pop culture addict. The 1972 book Rock Dreams, Peelaert's 1974 collaboration with the British critic and journalist Nik Cohn, cemented his legend in pop music circles for his ceramic-looking images: Phil Spector, fitted with headphones and sprawled on his bed as if cut off from the world in an isolation tank; Johnny Cash parting the prison-farm barbed wire with his fingers to stare out mulishly at the society that thought it had cast him aside forever; Ray Charles, supremely cool behind the wheel of a convertible with one arm around a smiling redhead; Mama Cass and Michelle Phillips, nude, sitting cross-legged in what seemed like a post-apocalyptic landscape, though it was probably just the Mohave. Peellaert also designed album covers, the most famous of which is probably his painting of David Bowie as a half-canine sideshow exhibit for Diamond Dogs. Peellaert guaranteed that the first pressings of the album would become instant collectors' items by originally making the critter's genitals plainly visible; in later editions, the Bowie-dog would be gelded by airbrush.

The work by Peellaert and Cohen (who would collaborate again on 1999's 20th-Century Dreams, populated by political and world historical figures) was meant to have the impact of a movie on paper, boiled down to a single haymaker of a still image. That may be why Peellaert never did a "Movie Dreams" book--it might have seemed redundant. But he did accept commissions to do art for movie posters, including Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, and Robert Bresson's L'Argent. His masterpiece in that field, though, was probably his portrait of a haunted Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle for the Taxi Driver poster, stepping away from his cab to explore a mysteriously deserted-looking New York street, as if a real rain had finally come and left him none the happier for it.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuaron)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since making his feature debut with 1991’s Solo con tu pareja, Alfonso Cuaron has become one of the world’s most acclaimed and distinctive filmmakers. That he has managed to do this is a credit not only to his talent but also his versatility. With a scant six features under his belt, he has managed to makes films both large and small, both light and dark, and in both English and Spanish. His breakthrough film A Little Princess is a lovely and underseen family film, and his instinctive feel for family-friendly entertainment helped him immeasurably on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, seen by many as the best big-screen Potter adventure to date. In between, he’s also managed to transcend the teenage sex film into transcendent cinema in Y Tu Mama Tambien, and crafted one of the most unique dystopian visions of the cinema in Children of Men.

But in the evaluation of Cuaron’s career to date, one film has gotten lost in the shuffle- 1998’s Great Expectations. A loose, lushly-mounted update of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, the film was released in 1998 in the dog days of February, in the wake of the Titanic juggernaut. Reviews were middling, and audience response was unenthusiastic. In the eyes of many Hollywood insiders, the project that should have been a stepping stone to Cuaron’s future as a big-name Hollywood filmmaker became a stumbling block that sent him tumbling back to Mexico to make his subsequent film. But while there’s no denying that the perception of Great Expectations didn’t help Cuaron’s career, the real question is here more simple- is the movie any good?

Having watched the film recently, I would maintain that it is, and certainly better than its reputation would suggest. That said, it’s hardly perfect. A number of critics took the film to task for being insufficiently faithful to Dickens, and certainly, Great Expectations didn’t benefit from being one of a rash of loose “re-imaginings” of classic novels that were in vogue during the mid- to late-nineties. But I found that the contemporary trappings suited the original story pretty well. More distracting was the way the screenplay, written by Mitch Glazer, pared down Dickens’ story to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Pip (now named Finn and played by Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow). In doing so, Glazer sketches over much of what makes the book really interesting, that story of a man who is carried along by destiny from one fascinating situation to another guided by two benefactors, one known to him (Miss Havisham), the other unseen. As a result, Great Expectations lacks much of the narrative interest that the novel had.

But if Cuaron’s film largely fails as Dickens, there’s plenty of other aspects to the film to enjoy. The majority of Dickens adaptations for film and television have emphasized the squalor and hardscrabble lifestyle of the period in which he wrote, but Cuaron’s style infuses the story with liberal amounts of magic realism, and the two are a surprisingly good fit. It helps that the film is set in two locations in the U.S. that are best suited for magic realism- the Gulf Coast of Florida (with its swamps and vegetation and distinctly Hispanic influence) and New York City. Look at the decaying manse of the film’s Miss Havisham character, here called Ms. Dinsmoor and played by Anne Bancroft. The home itself is based on the Alhambra in Spain, but everything is falling apart and overgrown, and the wedding party, still set out after three decades, is made all the more eerie by the Spanish moss that’s hanging from the trees. And the film’s version of New York is a city full of mysterious settings and endless possibilities, and Cuaron and regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make good use of the weather to reflect the tone of the film, with the sun shining warmly when Finn is content, and rain pouring or leaves falling when his emotional state has become tumultuous.

Likewise, the film is ideally cast to suit Cuaron’s style. At first glance, Ethan Hawke seems too lightweight to work in the lead role, and certainly to intone the wholly gratuitous narration. But consider that Dickens’ main characters usually tended to be observers through whom the reader could experience the adventures of the story, so in this way the casting makes perfect sense. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a perfectly fine Estella, pulling off both the coldness that results from her upbringing by Ms. Dinsmoor and the sadness that she’s ill-equipped to love Finn because of this. Anne Bancroft, always a marvelous ham, digs into the role of Ms. Dinsmoor with plenty of relish, and no small amount of wit (listen to her response when young Finn asks about her cat). Chris Cooper is affecting as Finn’s Uncle Joe, who for the boy only to be cast aside when Finn became a famous artist. And Robert DeNiro gives perhaps his last great performance in the small role of the prisoner Joe (Magwitch in the book), successfully playing the frightening prisoner early on, only to turn up again years later as a shadowy, eccentric figure in the hero’s life.

On balance, Great Expectations is fairly flawed but ultimately a worthwhile film. As narrative, it’s sometimes less than compelling, and it certainly isn’t successful as an adaptation. But it’s so visually enchanting and full of vivid supporting characters that it hardly matters. The film’s failings are those of the script and of the studio who tried to make the film more palatable to mainstream sensibilities (which explains the narration), while the stuff that works is almost entirely Cuaron’s. Despite its reputation, Great Expectations is an interesting entry on Cuaron’s filmography, and one that bears a second look in light of his more recent work. I suspect time will be kind to it.

Screengrab Review: "What Just Happened"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Recently, when we were preparing our list of the greatest leading men of all time, we had occasion to consider the latter days of Robert DeNiro. The closer you get to the present day, the uglier his career gets, and the more it appears he's just in it these days for the paychecks that will get him into the better restaurants. When I sat down for a viewing of his latest, What Just Happened, I wasn't expecting much, especially since his comic track record hasn't been stellar since Midnight Run. The fact that the film's author, Art Linson, is a friend of DeNiro's was also unpromising, since such nepotistic endeavors flatter the friendship over the art, and what's more, it's an inside-Hollywood movie, which has produced its share of great films, but more than its share of stinkers.

I won't say that it's a triumph for DeNiro, or even a return to form, but most of the movie's failings -- of which there aren't enough for me to call it bad -- are those of Barry Levinson's uninspired direction and a somewhat aimless and formless script. DeNiro doesn't turn in the kind of legendary performance he was once known for, but that's only because the script doesn't let him. In fact, his role as frazzled middle-aged movie producer Ben -- a stand-in for Linson -- is one of his finest in years: he never explodes only because he's too ineffectual and harried to aspire to an explosion. It's a tight, focused, and highly competent performance as a man nearing the end of his rope and no idea of what to do when he gets there, but because he's in such an absurd profession, and surrounded by such grandly dysfunctional people, that circumstance is understood -- by him and by us -- to be comic instead of tragic. It's a performance that won't remind anyone of Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin, but it should definitely remind them that DeNiro still has a few surprises left in him.

It's in this inherent unseriousness that the picture succeeds in its modest way. Everyone in the film carries on as if the fate of the world revolves around the decisions they make based on egomania, resentment and cowardice, and the laughs come from the fact that their utter irrelevance even in their own lives manages to create an aura of sustained menance and philosophical unease even as we see DeNiro haplessly trying to convince a self-satisfied auteur that audiences won't enjoy the brutal on-screen slaughter of a dog as much as he does. He's also assisted by a cast that, in the tradition of the better inside-baseball movies about movies, likewise are willing to take the piss, most especially John Turturro as his omniphobic agent and Bruce Willis, performing what appears to be an unbelievably heartless parody of Bruce Willis. What Just Happened isn't a great movie, but it's a good movie, and Robert DeNiro needs to get back to making more good movies. This one's a start.

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A Whole Lotta Walken Goin' On

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In the back and forth that finally resulted in last week's list of the Screengrab's favorite leading men [favorite leading ladies list is being compiled now, will your favorites make the cut!?], one name that never seemed to come up was that of Christopher Walken. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I know that one reason that Walken's name never passed my own lips was that...well, I hate to say that I am not worthy, but it's kind of like that. It's not even that Walken is such a great actor (though on many occasions he has proven himself to be just that) but that he's turned into such a strange mixture of artist, self-parodying comedian, cultural icon, and "X" the unknown: who wants to take on a subject that slippery? The answer to that last question turns out to be Patrick O'Sullivan, a San Francisco standup comic and creator of (in the words of Lisa Marks in the Guardian) "a partly scripted, partly improvised, partly biographical" Los Angeles stage show called All About Walken. O'Sullivan has his own measure of Walken's place in our world: "Here was a man doing big-budget movies, independent movies, music videos, Saturday Night Live - and standups were impersonating him. So all around there was this melding of Walken and pop culture. Not everyone knows his name, but they know his persona, from little kids who know what 'More cowbell!' means, to 65-year-olds who admired him in The Deer Hunter. He floats across it all."

The show grew out of O'Sullivan's experiences with his college pals trading impersonations of celebrities, a common enough experience that in his case somehow led to assembling a cast that includes two women and five men in a theater on Hollywood Boulevard doing Christopher Walken impressions. They also do impressions of other actors, including Woody Allen and Robert De Niro, recreating scenes from Walken's movies, as well as impressions of other actors, including Jennifer Tilly and Colin Farrell, doing their Christopher Walken impressions. They take suggestions from the audience, which, on the night that Marks caught the show, resulted in a missing scene from the Sex and the City movie in which Sarah Jessica Parker got to meet you-know-who. The show has been successful enough that it's scheduled to move to San Francisco, after which O'Sullivan hopes to take it to New York. O'Sullivan told Marks that Walken himself hasn't seen it yet, "But some of his family have, and also his agent, who thought it was fantastic. One time, one of the guys in the show was at the agent's office and had a speakerphone conversation with him ... as Christopher Walken. Walken told him he was very flattered." Anything that brightens Christopher Walken's day is all right with us, but there are other social considerations to take into account. "I've had many calls over the past two years that go something like this: 'Hi. I went to the show last week with my husband and now he will not stop impersonating Christopher Walken. I ask him to put the trash out and he answers as Walken. And I just want you to know that you're responsible for that.'"

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

15. AMITABH BACHCHAN (1942 - )

Devotees of Bollywood cinema won’t need any explanation for why Bachchan is included here. But for those of you who are scratching your heads, imagine a movie star with the brooding good looks of a young Al Pacino, combined with formidable gifts for goofy comedy and intense drama alike. Now imagine that this supposedly imaginary star is one hell of a dancer as well -- maybe not Fred Astaire, but with an infectious dance style nonetheless. Put those ingredients together and you’ve got Bachchan, who was the reigning superstar of Bollywood cinema in the late seventies and early eighties before being temporarily sidelined due to a stunt gone bad on the set of his movie Coolie. Bachchan -- known to fans as “Big B” -- began his career as the Mumbai film industry’s resident “Angry Young Man,” but quickly segued into more heroic roles in a string of hits that came at the end of the 1970s. With his imposing figure and deep baritone voice, Big B became best-known for what were called “masala movies” (such as the 1978 classic Don, featuring Big B in a dual role) that required the combination of comedy, drama, romance, action, and dancing that few actors could provide, but which Bachchan could pull off almost effortlessly. And he looked good doing it, too -- who else could not only keep his dignity, but actually look cool in that purple outfit and newsboy hat ensemble he sported in Amar Akbar Anthony? Since appearing on the scene in 1969, Big B has appeared in more than 175 movies, plus innumerable television appearances and a stint as host of India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, all of which have helped to make him one of Bollywood’s biggest names even today. Unlike many leading men of foreign descent, Big B never made the move to Hollywood. But then, he didn’t have to -- with his talent and charisma, Hollywood clearly needed Amitabh Bachchan more than he needed Hollywood.

14. ROBERT DENIRO (1943 - )

Like too many actors of his time, driven by personal quirks that become obsessions, freed from the harsh demands of the studio system, and spoiled by unthinkable wealth, Robert DeNiro seems to have decided to spend his waning years making everyone forget why he was once one of the greatest actors in the world. But even if he made the worst possible choices from now until his end – even, I daresay, if he pursued the career path of an Al Pacino – he would never do so much damage that he could unmake the reputation he built as a younger man. If the last 25 years on his résumé were wiped clean, he’d stand as one of the finest screen performers of his or any other generation. Never before had someone allowed their Method approach to so fully consume their very existence; while Marlon Brando was unable to use the teachings of Lee Strasburg to combat his own worldly appetites, DeNiro was able to mold and shape his appearance, his personality, his very essence as easily he did his mind. Though often typecast as playing gangsters and lowlifes, his special gift was to never play the same gangster lowlife twice. The bristling Johnny Boy of Mean Streets, eaten up by his own energy, is a world away from the quiet, calculating Vito Corleone of The Godfather Part II; both are entirely foreign to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, probably the most striking example of alienation in movie history; and none of those characters seem like they were played by the same actor – and could it have been only one actor? – who played Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. And as much as he seems to have set his career on coast, think of all that would be lost if his post-1983 film career were erased: as well as some nuanced explorations further into the territory of gangsters and tough guys, DeNiro has put in memorable appearances in Wag the Dog, We’re No Angels, Midnight Run, and Brazil, even risking a glorious failure (like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mad Dog and Glory or Cape Fear) when he sensed he could do something new with a role. DeNiro has a lot of bad to make up for, but my money is on his restlessness and intensity yielding at least one or two more incredible performances before his day is done.

13. GEORGE CLOONEY (1961 - )

Back in June, during a post comparing the original 1960 Ocean’s Eleven to its 2001 remake, I relayed a tale about the day my fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak hepped me to the fact that we had to start respecting the Cloon. The occasion was the 1998 release of Steven Soderbergh’s egregiously underrated Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight, in which Clooney evolved from the floppy-haired TV star of ER and wannabe nipple-suited matinee idol of Batman & Robin into a genuine movie star, the kind of old school Leading Man who brings class and gravity to the art of film acting while never taking it too seriously, the type of celebrity for whom tuxedos and red carpets were invented, a box office behemoth who brings A-list heat and polish to indie films and indie quality and depth to the mainstream. A cool cat, rat pack successor to Bogart, Sinatra and Nicholson, Clooney further infuriates the mere mortals among us by not only being talented, good-looking and socially active (serving recently as a United Nations “messenger of peace” AND a mediator between “the Suits” and his fellow creative types during the Writer’s Guild strike), but he also seems like a genuinely nice, relatively humble guy, making it impossible to even hate him despite our (okay, my) intensely seething jealousy.

12. JEAN GABIN (1904-1976)

One of the great pleasures of French cinema is the wide variety of noses among its leading men. For every relatively petite nose that you’ll find on the face of an Alain Delon or Benoit Magimel, there’s a Gerard Depardieu or Jean-Paul Belmondo. But the king of the generously be-schnozzed acteurs was the great Jean Gabin, leading light of the French films of the 1930s. Not being blessed with fashion-plate looks, Gabin’s appearance proved ideal for the scruffy proto-noir films that French filmmakers were making at the time, from the underworld figure of Pepe le Moko to the reformed criminal in Port of Shadows. Likewise, he was a great match for the sensibility of master filmmaker Jean Renoir, who cast him in roles as diverse as the pragmatic prisoner Marechal in Grand Illusion and the ill-fated sucker of a train engineer in La Bete Humaine. Gabin flirted with Hollywood stardom in 1942’s Moontide, but he was better-suited to his home country. Well into his fifties and sixties -- his nose more resplendent than ever -- he remained viable as a leading man, even romancing the young Jeanne Moreau in 1952’s Touchez Pas Au Grisbi. All the while, he was the epitome of big-screen cool even before the French New Wave came along to define it for us.

11. ROBERT MITCHUM (1917-1997)

If you were asked to guess which major American movie star had once served time on a chain gang, Mitchum might not necessarily be your first answer. On the other hand, maybe he would be, and you'd probably pitch his name out there before you thought to try mentioning Donald O'Connor or Steve Guttenberg. You might need a few more tries to guess that he was the one who wrote the oratorio that was performed at the Hollywood Bowl and cut the calypso record that made fun of Elvis Presley. Though he broke in by working in Westerns, Mitchum's sleepy-eyed, reptilian presence was made for film noir -- nobody, not even Bogart, looked more natural in a trenchcoat -- and he even carried some of the atmosphere of noir into projects set far from the rain-streaked city streets, most notably in his greatest role as the murderous preacher with the words "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed between his knuckles in Charles Laughton's hypnotic classic The Night of the Hunter. Part of Mitchum's myth, which he liked to keep alive through some of the most entertaining interviews ever given by a mortal man, is that the fatalistic manner of his characters in movies like Out of the Past was an emanation of his own truly not giving a shit, and people sometimes even point to the very great number of truly shitty movies he made to back up their theory that the man was the real, supremely indifferent thing: for them, if it turned out that Mitchum ever bothered to read one of his scripts before shooting began, it would spoil everything. I hate to burst their bubble, but if Mitchum hadn't been a committed, serious actor working his hardest at appearing so unconcerned, it's doubtful that Charles Laughton would have wanted him within a mile of the set of his directorial debut. (In fact, Laughton called Mitchum up personally when he was casting the film. The story goes that Laughton told Mitchum that he needed to fill the role of an unredeemed bastard, and that Mitchum replied, "Present.") Mitchum also had a softer side, which was best displayed in one of his finest but least-known films, The Sundowners, in which he plays an Australian sheep herder whose inability to live a settled existence is a source of torment to his wife (Deborah Kerr).

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

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

Morning Deal Report: Scorsese and De Niro Heard You Paint Houses

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Now that we’ve all finally recovered from the awesome reunion between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Righteous Kill (“He squints! He yells! Together they solve crimes!”), word comes down that De Niro and Martin Scorsese are teaming up for – are you sitting down? – a mob movie! Steve Zaillian will adapt I Heard You Paint Houses, the story of hitman Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran. “Pic’s title refers to mob slang for contract killings, and the resulting blood splatter on walls and floors,” Variety helpfully clarifies. “Book was written by Charles Brandt, who befriended Sheeran shortly before the latter’s death in 2003. Among the crimes Sheeran confessed to Brandt, according to the 2004 book, was the killing and dismemberment of Hoffa, carried out on orders from mob boss Russell Bufalino.” Yes, that would be Jimmy Hoffa. Call me a sucker, but I actually have some hope for this one.

What is the complete opposite of a Scorsese/De Niro mob movie? It’s a hard question to answer scientifically, but I’m going to have to go with a Yogi Bear and Boo Boo feature film. Yes, “Warner Bros. is taking a trip to Jellystone Park,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Surf’s Up director Ash Brannon is attached, and the movie will combine live-action with CG animation. I was always more of a Huckleberry Hound man myself.

Elsewhere in animation – or stop-motion claymation, to be specific – Philip Seymour Hoffman will lend his pipes to Mary and Max. “Pic looks at the unlikely pen-pal friendship between Mary, a chubby lonely 8-year-old girl in Melbourne, Australia, and Max, a 44-year-old, severely obese, Jewish man with Asperger's Syndrome living in New York,” per Variety. There is no truth to the rumors that Hoffman has gained 200 pounds for the role.

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Pacino and De Niro Punch the Clock
Scorsese to Direct Final Harry Potter Film

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And now, the war films that didn't quite make our official Top 25...

HONORABLE MENTION

LAND AND FREEDOM (1995)

Land and Freedom is Ken Loach at his most unabashedly leftist and over-earnest, but by Jove it is enjoyable! It certainly helps that unlike many other Ken Loach films, Land and Freedom is not set among pale, pudgy and poorly nourished people in some post-industrial British shithole. Well, it may start and end there, but no mind, that isn't what you will remember. The story quickly whisks you off to the heady days of the Spanish Civil War. A young English Socialist goes to Spain to fight the good fight and finds himself chanting "¡No Pasarán!" among the Catalonian hills amid leftist in-fighting galore, and plenty of sexy comrades who believe in free love. As icing on the cake, Ian Hart plays our hero (you may remember him as a young John Lennon in Back Beat — if you swing that way. No one does sullen English working class desperation with quite the same verve.

HAMBURGER HILL (1987)

This movie, directed by the British John Irvin from a script by James Carabatsos, who served with the First Air Calvary Division in Vietnam, is the plainest and most direct of all the 'Nam movies. It introduces you to the guys in a U.S. Army battalion and then documents the ten days they spend trying to carry out their orders to take an occupied hill that affords them minimal cover from the fire raining down. Although Hill shows some of the soldiers complaining about how unappreciated their efforts are back home, the film has no real political statement to make and no larger messages about the nature of warfare aside from the obvious ones, principally that the war looks a lot different to the officers who are off somewhere deciding which orders to give than it does to the guys on the ground who are staring up at the building about to collapse on top of them, and dying for a decision that makes no sense to you sucks. A lot of Vietnam movies have been made with the stated aim of providing a requiem for the people lost in that war; of all of them, this one gets that job done with the least fuss and confusion.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951)

This was the first war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, a World War II infantryman who would later tell interviewers how proud he was when a military representative complained to him that his movies would have no value as recruiting tools. Like his follow-up film, Fixed Bayonets, it's a Korean War picture that serves as a showcase for Gene Barry, a big, brusque galoot with a beady-eyed, unshaven mug who Fuller judged to be the ideal actor to play a grunt. (Suggestions from one studio that they enlarge the budget and try to reel in John Wayne sent Fuller swooning in horror.) With its garage-sale props, pissed-off acting, and quick bursts of chaotic action, it perfectly represents the mixture of cartoon, off-Broadway theater, whirligig violence and real anger that struck Fuller as the appropriate response to war. Spielberg later paid homage to the movie in the second Indiana Jones picture by giving Indy's child sidekick the same name (Short Round) that Fuller gave to the Korean kid who attaches himself to his hero.

WAG THE DOG (1997)

If you think this comedy about a political spin specialist (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman, doing his patented Robert Evans impression) helping to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal by stirring up public support for an attack on Albania isn't really a war movie, what channel have you been watching? At the time of its release, just as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was breaking, the movie seemed prescient, but David Mamet's script borrowed its basic idea from a novel, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, in which the president was George H. W. Bush and the phony war was the 1991 attack on Iraq; the novel depicted real-life Republican slimeball Lee Atwater literally handing over the worked-out plans for the war and its likely effect on the president's approval rating on his death bed, along with the advice -- which the White House failed to heed -- that George not get overexcited and be sure to save the plan until closer to the 1992 election so that it would do him some good. Mamet and company may have cost the project some of its edge by making it about a fictional president and a fictional war, thus rendering it more "universal." On the plus side, they did give us the image of Willie Nelson, hard at work on his new novelty propaganda song, trying his damndest to think up a rhyme for "Albania."

UNDER FIRE (1982) & WELCOME TO SARAJEVO (1997)

These two movies are both about white English-speaking reporters trying to cover violent trouble spots in remote corners of the world while having to grapple with their ethics about playing nonjudgemental observers of the horrors going on in front of their noses. (Oliver Stone's Salvador is in a similar mold except that James Woods' Richard Boyle, who by most official professional standards has the loosest ethics of any reporter imaginable, is so sure he knows what's right and what's wrong that he isn't troubled about a thing.) In Under Fire, the setting is Nicaragua in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The hero, a photographer played by Nick Nolte, agrees to help the rebels keep up morale by faking a photo "proving" that their dead leader is still alive. The politics of the movie flew in the face of the Reagan administration's policy that the Sandinista government was unacceptable and needed to be taken down by proxy warriors. The movie was, accordingly, buried, but the director, Roger Spottiswoode, and the writer, Ron Shelton, manage to achieve a clear-eyed view of all the competing forces propping up the Somoza dictatorship or trying to bring it down, including a fun-loving psycho of a professional mercenary (Ed Harris), a mysteriously well-connected Frenchman played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Richard Masur as Somoza's mealy-mouthed American flack, who's trying to turn things around with media spin while Somoza's soldiers are shooting down people in the street. In Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, which is set during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovia (and which was shot on location there while the ruins were still smoking), Stephen Dillane plays a British journalist who weighs the pros and cons of adopting a little girl and smuggling her out of the country. Challenging and involving, the movie is also blessed by one of Woody Harrelson's most entertaining wild man turns as a well-respected establishment TV journalist whose off-camera behavior in the field is pure double-live gonzo.

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

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

Morning Deal Report: Burning Diesel and Kerosene

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Coen Brothers have visited some strange places with their movies, but the top of the weekend box office charts may be the most unexpected of all. Yet there’s Burn After Reading, edging out Tyler Perry’s latest grotesquerie for the top spot with $19.4 million. I thought it was minor Coen myself, but that’s a discussion for another day. The Perry faithful turned out for the odious The Family That Preys to the tune of $18 million, and enough folks were curious to see De Niro and Pacino Together Again For The First Time to nudge Righteous Kill into third place with $16.5 million. Women did not turn out for The Women, which barely cracked the $10 million mark.

From the You’ve Gotta Be Shitting Me file comes news that another XXX sequel is in the works. Columbia Pictures is “in discussions with producer Joe Roth for a new version of XXX, one that would bring back Vin Diesel as star and Rob Cohen as director.” As you may recall, the last XXX sequel actually starred Ice Cube, but apparently Diesel’s pricetag has gone down. Then there’s this tidbit from Variety: “Diesel also bowed out of a starring role in the first sequel to The Fast and the Furious — 2 Fast 2 Furious — opting for a cameo in that pic. He skipped the third pic, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, but will reteam with original co-star Paul Walker in the franchise’s fourth go-round, Fast & Furious, which Universal will release June 12.” If there’s a fifth movie, they’ll just call it Fastious.

The Kerosene Cowboys are set to ride for director Mario Van Peebles. “Based on a novel by Randy Arrington, the tale follows the rough-riding and hard-living pilots of an elite Navy attack squadron,” says The Hollywood Reporter. Cam Gigandet, Shane West and Rachael Leigh Cook are set to star. I’ve never heard of two of those people, but I’m just passing the info along to those of you who have.

Related:
Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow
Freddy and the Furious Go to Cloverfield

Famous Last Words: Round 2, Week 3

Paul Clark — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It takes nearly four hours to get there, but plenty of you were able to make it all the way to the final line of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, the source of last week’s quiz. The line, of course, is Robert DeNiro’s conflicted final goodbye to an old friend, spoken just before the appearance of the most memorable garbage truck in movie history. It’s a hell of a moment, a perfect mournful capper to the great Leone’s great career, and a lovely reminder of how powerful DeNiro could be back when he was still trying. Congratulations to those who got it.

This week’s quote finds us resorting to all possible measures in an attempt to beat the summer heat. As I sit here with a rather alarming sunburn, the following lines don’t sound so bad to me:

“Where we’re goin’ it’s gonna get colder than hell.”
“Nah, it’s OK. I’m fine. Fine, I’m fine.”

As always, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 Eastern on Wednesday. For a reminder of the rules, click here. Good luck!

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

BOB’S COUNTRY BUNKER, THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

I’m not exactly sure where Bob’s Country Bunker is supposed to be. I lived in Chicago for 15 years, and there’s no place in the city even remotely that rowdy – not even on the South Side. The closest we got was the Hideout, and even they managed to keep the boisterous crowd placated without the aid of chicken wire. But if I’d ever managed to find Bob’s Country Bunker, I would have spent every night there, especially if it meant getting to see the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band play dubiously down-home versions of “Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man”. Bob’s Country Bunker may not have been the best place to play – their willingness to cut off the power of anyone without enough Hank Williams songs in their repertoire and their stingy no-comped-drinks-for-the-band policy can’t have made them many friends – but the mood was infectious, the waitstaff was brave even in the face of hundreds of pounds of flying broken glass, and the atmosphere was just perfect, all Nudie suits and unironic trucker hats. Plus, they had both kinds of music – country and western!

THE CHINK’S, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Another bar I never managed to track down in Chicago was the impolitically named Chink’s. (It had to be in Chicago, because everything David Mamet does takes place there, even when it’s explicitly stated that it doesn’t.) But maybe it’s for the best; it didn’t look like the most relaxing place in the world. Oh, sure, it was a quiet little dive with cheap tiki drinks, and the Chink made a mean egg roll, and the décor was decent enough – all mail-order-catalog Chinese and whorehouse-red light bulbs. It was the kind of people you met that would stress you out: let’s say you just go in for a nice cocktail to beat the murderous heat, as did Jonathan Pryce’s helpless James Lingk. The next thing you know, some desperate, flop-sweating real estate salesman, like Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma, has sat down next to you, given you some borderline terrifying spiel about how he sometimes takes a massive shit that feels like sleeping for twelve hours, and before he even finishes telling you it’s okay to fuck little girls, you’ve agreed to buy some overpriced condo in Arizona somewhere. Nope, a man can’t relax in a place like that...

...so instead, we’ll am-scray outta Big Windy and bar hop Back East to...

TONY’S PLACE, MEAN STREETS (1973)

Arriving for the night's festivities at the crimson-tinted neighborhood dive where he and all his buddies hang out, Robert De Niro makes a phenomenal entrance, with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing as he glides along the length of the bar in slow motion to meet the best friend (Harvey Keitel) whose face registers his approach as if it were a death sentence. Soon De Niro and Keitel are adjourning to the back room for a two-man improvisational jam session in which the English language gets slapped around a little, which barely prepares the viewer for the confrontations to come: between a punk on the make (Robert Carradine) and a target he corners in the men's room (David Carradine), between a returned military veteran (Harry Northrup) and his demons, and finally between De Niro's Johnny Boy and the affronted loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus), who has to deal with Johnny Boy's amused disbelief that Michael could have ever seriously imagined that he was ever going to get his loan repaid. The movie also features a visit to a rival joint, a pool haul where the guys get into the movie's famous brawl choreographed to "Please Mr. Postman," which feels like Our Gang hijinx compared to what goes on at the home front. It's about as good a vision as any movie's ever offered of a bunch of guys trying desperately to enjoy themselves in Hell...

...not unlike the Greenwich Village denizens of the next stop on our tour...

HARRY’S BAR, THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973)

Harry Hope's waterfront bar in The Iceman Cometh is the anti-Cheers, a place where all the regulars know each others' names, and have got each others' numbers, to boot. They're really regular, too; most of them haven't left the premises in ages, not even just to stick their heads out the door to confirm that the sky is still blue. These desperate lost souls are so hard up for some diversion that all they've got to look forward to is the semi-annual arrival of their favorite drunken traveling salesman, Hickey (played in the 1960 movie version by Jason Robards, in 1973 by Lee Marvin and later on stage by Kevin Spacey), in the hopes that maybe this time his dirty jokes will have funny endings. Woe to them, Hickey has just murdered his wife and is so impressed with himself for having finally taken an active approach to dealing with his problems that he wants to make all his washed-up friends shave, change their socks, and get back out into the world. Luckily, in his big monologue, Hickey reveals that he may have had less than pure motives for throttling the Missus and is hauled off by the cops, and Harry and company, relieved to discover that they've just been humoring a psycho, can return to their daily routine of talking about how they're going to turn their lives around the day after tomorrow, just as soon as they drain this keg. If the story were set in the present day, Hickey would be given his own daytime TV series and released into the custody of Oprah.

TREES LOUNGE, TREES LOUNGE (1996)

But don’t let all the big city neuroses and overpriced drinks get you down. Just a short stagger from Manhattan in neighboring Long Island, you’ll find a slightly less depressing breed of barfly whiling away the hours at Trees Lounge, the neighborhood haunt of Steve Buscemi’s hangdog hero Tommy Basilio in the beloved character actor’s writing/directing debut. This semi-autobiographical tale unspools in a parallel universe where Buscemi never got serious about the acting thing, but instead spent his entire life in the self-loathing stupor that defined his early twenties, driving an ice cream truck and bedding inappropriate women like Daniel Baldwin’s teenage daughter, Debbie (played by Chloë Sevigny in a wise-child performance we somehow forgot to mention in last week’s Jailbait Sweet 16). Yet, while sometimes grim, Buscemi’s gin-soaked world is never hopeless, thanks to healthy shots of gallows humor, a great soundtrack on the jukebox and a who’s-who of top-notch indie drinking companions like Debi Mazar, Mark Boone Junior, Rockets Redglare, Eszter Balint, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan and Samuel L. Jackson.

Who’s up for another round? The night is still young and Screengrab’s buying as the Pub Crawl continues through Boston, Europe and beyond in Part 3!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If we all hit puberty overnight on our 21st birthdays, American life would be a helluva lot less complicated. But, as the recent Miley Cyrus “back-gate” scandal revealed, teenage sexuality is a topic that America doesn’t want to think about, even as it just can't seem to stop thinking about it.

On the one hand, most of us had (or at least thought about) sex in high school...on the other hand, once we’re adults, we’re all supposed to conveniently forget our memories and fantasies of adolescent lust. On the one hand, sex education is viewed as promoting underage promiscuity...but on the other hand, abstinence-only education tends to lead to a lot of unwanted pregnancy, since teenagers somehow figure out how to have sex even without classroom lectures about condoms. On the one hand, innocent teachers, day care workers, 19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends and that 6-year-old boy who smacked a female classmate on the butt have all been branded for life as sexual offenders based on false or flimsy charges in hysterical witch hunts to “protect the children” at all costs...on the other hand, research indicates 20-25% of girls and 5-15% of boys in the U.S. experience some form of molestation at the hands of adults, the Catholic Church ignored its own institutional abuse scandals and the international sex trade in young flesh is thriving.

Clearly, we’re a little conflicted about the whole sex thing. Sure, we’re all shocked and disgusted by those creeps on To Catch A Predator...but somebody out there is watching Gossip Girl, sneaking peeks at Barely Legal magazine, lusting after Zac Efron and buying sexy cheerleader outfits from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue...and it’s not all just teens and predators. In fact, if we here at the Screengrab didn’t know better, we’d almost think Americans fetishize taboos instead of just being honest about them, leading to some pretty screwy behavior...AND the following list of films that reside in that dangerous grey area between sexual initiation and exploitation.

LOLITA (1962 & 1997)

Of course, no list of jailbait cinema would be complete without the grandmother of them all, or this previous Screengrab post on the screen adaptations of Nabokov's novel.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

The best joke in Martin Scorsese’s masterful meditation on violence and alienation is when Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is turned into a hero for ‘rescuing’ Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute by gunning down her pimps and johns; the best joke outside Taxi Driver is that a lot of critics actually believed Scorsese was being sincere in his depiction of the event. More than one film writer, including a few who should have know better, saw in the movie’s chaotic ending an endorsement of vigilantism, a baffling interpretation that came back to haunt Scorsese – who clearly couldn’t have been more taken aback by this turn of events – when realities like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the saga of subway shooter Bernard Goetz impinged on the fantasy of his film. The notion that Bickle is any kind of a hero is subverted at every turn: his diary is filled with racism and paranoia, his targeting of lowlifes and criminals only happens when he’s frustrated in his attempt to assassinate a politician; ordinary people can’t spend more than a few minutes in his presence without thinking he’s crazy; and even his targeting of Iris’ pimp (as with his targeting of presidential candidate Charles Palatine) is motivated as much by sexual jealousy as it is any kind of desire for justice. Travis is rightly appalled by the menu of sexual acts Iris will perform when read to him by the pimp Sport, and he does seem to have some genuine concern for her well-being, but he’s as oblivious to his own sexual desire for her as he is the impropriety of taking a date to a porno theater. Iris herself treats Bickle like he’s from another planet, and the film’s crowning irony comes at the end, when Travis, a marginalized psychotic only saved from suicide by a redemptive bloodbath and only saved from being a spree killer by his fortuitous choice of victim, receives a letter from Iris’ parents, filled with gratitude for having saved their daughter. It’s certain that if Travis ever took up the Steensmas’ invitation to visit them on their farm, they’d peg him for a maniac within seconds, but it’s the intricate chain of happenstance that turns a maniac into a hero which forms part of the genius of Taxi Driver – and totally upends Travis and Iris’ ‘relationship’ in a way no other jailbait movie has managed.

MANHATTAN (1979)

Woody Allen’s lovely, funny Manhattan is to movies about jailbait-chasing creeps what Citizen Kane is to, er, movies not about jailbait-chasing creeps. Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as Tracy, the high school paramour of Woody’s Isaac Davis, and the Wood-Man himself got a nod from the Academy for his light, adept screenplay. So successful was Manhattan as a breezy, skillful romantic comedy that hardly anyone got creeped out by the fact that Woody’s character was technically committing statutory rape; when he explained “She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father; can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father”, he wasn’t being grammatical, but he was at least being really funny and self-deprecating. Those were the qualities that let us overcome our moral compunctions about what was really happening in the movie, and ignore the fact that, when Isaac tries to convince Tracy not to go away for six months to act with a theater group, he’s actually trying to talk her out of leaving him just long enough to be legal when she comes back. It was all very amusing, and even redeeming when he makes the ‘mature’ decision to start seeing Diane Keaton’s Mary Wilkie instead. Of course, all good things must come to an end, and the plot of Manhattan, one of the few times a Hollywood movie allowed us to not be utterly skeezed out by a middle-aged man jumping into the sack with a 17-year-old, took on a whole different dimension when the Soon-Yi Previn scandal broke. The prospect of a real-life Woody, then in his mid-50s, carrying on an illicit affair with a girl barely in her 20s was, somehow, much less appealing and light than a fictional Woody carrying on with a teenage girl, and all the worse that he was still married and the girl was his adopted daughter. For moviegoers, the worst thing about the scandal is that it’s made Manhattan almost impossible to watch without feeling an edge of ickiness it hadn’t previously possessed.

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Jailbait all-star Thora Birch’s performance as Enid Coleslaw in Ghost World is well-played on a number of levels: as we showed in our Girl Geeks list a few weeks back, she appealed to audiences (especially the, uh, male members thereof) because of her intelligence, hipness, cynicism and what seemed to be a wisdom beyond her years. But the other edge of the blade was the fact that for all her toughness and sophistication, she was still a high school girl. She was vulnerable and emotionally fragile and bound to get herself into situations she couldn’t handle. When she first encounters Steve Buscemi’s sad-sack loser Seymour, she toys with him the way she does her bewildered peer Josh; but when she gets to know him, she discovers that he’s as bitter, resentful, and out of step with the mainstream world as she is. They begin to develop a deep friendship based on the things they mutually hate (hey, there are worse things on which to base a relationship), but the astonishing thing about the way things develop between Enid and Seymour is that it’s an almost total inversion of the normal jailbait romance. Almost from the beginning, we sense that somehow, the two are going to end up in bed together, but unlike in most such movies, where no matter how much the writers try to pretty it up with the language of love, it’s still a predatorial relationship where the man has all the power, in Ghost World, we feel just as sorry for Seymour as we do for Enid. They’re both out of their depth, and as much as we like them both and are glad they’ve found each other, we know it can only end in disaster and we almost beg them not to hook up. When they do, we can tell it’s the beginning of the end for Seymour – and sure enough, he disappears from the film soon after, leaving Enid more vulnerable than she’s ever been. Because of this sense of sadness and loss, it’s one of the truest portrayals of such relationships ever put on film.

INNOCENCE (2004)

One of the principal allures of cinema has always been the way it affords its audience a chance to peek in on activities that would normally go unseen. However, this sort of voyeurism can occasionally feel like a curse when it confronts people with images they aren’t comfortable seeing. So it is with Innocence, a strange yet somehow magical film about a remote boarding school for young girls. Sequestered from the world, the girls are free to live and play without a single male gaze being cast upon them, which makes for the movie’s most fascinating conundrum- by showing us this hidden world founded upon the girls not being seen, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic forces us to deal with the question of why we’re so uncomfortable seeing them this way. Hadzihalilovic (wife of Irreversible director Gaspar Noé) doesn’t shy away from some potentially controversial images- a group of prepubescent girls swimming, a bathing teenager staring at her still-developing nude body in the mirror- which played a large part in the film being dismissed by many critics as fodder for the raincoat crowd. Yet Hadzihalilovic knows exactly what she’s doing, and this becomes obvious in the film’s final reel when we discover that the girls’ dance lessons are designed to train them for nightly performances the school puts on for shadowy male benefactors. That this revelation coincides with the beginning of the girls’ sexual development is deliberate, as Hadzihalilovic suddenly re-introduces men back into the lives of the girls just at the time they would begin paying them serious attention. With this final twist of the knife, Innocence asks whether the loss of the girls’ innocence is merely part of nature, or if others force it upon them, and Hadzihalilovic wisely leaves it for us to decide.

THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

Luc Besson's violent fantasy about a hit man (Jean Reno) who takes in an orphaned twelve-year-old (Natalie Portman) and tutors her in the art of murder may go farther than any other commercial Hollywood movie in blatantly eroticizing a preteen girl. Other actresses not much older than Portman was here have played girls who aroused inappropriate feelings in older men; Portman, with her perfect little features set off by a Louise Brooks haircut and something around her neck that makes her look gift-wrapped, is treated as an object, or a pet, who first begs to be taken in by Leon the professional, and then (in a scene that was first cut from the American prints) begs him to make love to her. How did Besson get away with this? Partly by casting Jean Reno, who's a whiz at holding the camera while signaling that his pilot light has long since gone out, so you can feel confident that he'll stoically decline her entreaties. (Before she showed up, his best friend was a plant.) And partly by the black humor scenes of Leon teaching his little soul mate to become a killer, so that if you object to the film on moral grounds, you're liable to become dizzy from not being able to decide where to begin. It seems a little odd to complain about the unrequited, consensual pedophilia if you have no problems with the violence, but complaining about the violence just makes you feel like a square. The Professional is a truly outrageous movie, but it's extremely (and self-protectively) calculated in its outrageousness.

For more jailbait: Part Two, Part Three

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

Supply Side Film Criticism: How Travis Bickle Saved the Reagan Revolution

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.

Here's where it gets good. Although many remember Reagan as having been supernaturally unstoppable during the early years of his presidency, he was already facing major opposition, both in Congress and from the public at large, to parts of his economic plan. But then Hinckley showed up. "According to Mundell," writes the Financial Times of London, "the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed." On the basis of this development, Mindell doesn't think that the movie's historical economic importance can be overstated. "Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," he's said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5trn and $15trn of output to the US economy." At least we think it was indirect. Stay tuned for our next chapter, in which Oliver Stone arrives waving photos of Milton Friedman and Martin Scorsese performing script doctoring chores while crouching in the grassy knoll.

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews in Cinema (Part I)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.”

So says Seth Rogen’s full-time slacker Ben Stone at the start of 2007’s Knocked Up, heralding a recent shift in the pop culture persona of the Chosen People from neurotic schlimazels of the Woody Allen variety to bad-ass playas like Bana.

But, although the concept of “Jewish action star” is a relatively new phenomenon, film history is filled with tales of Hebrew heroes (and heavies), from ancient Egypt to modern Israel.

And thus, in tribute to the upcoming June 6th release of Adam Sandler’s meshuga Israeli commando/hair-stylist comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, we here at the Screengrab are proud to present...THE TOP 12 TOUGH JEWS OF CINEMA!!!!!

ERIC BANA AS AVNER IN MUNICH (2005)

Well, of course we had to start with this one. Bana’s Avner, a Mossad agent tasked with tracking down and executing the terrorists responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, isn’t a stone-cold, tough-as-nails killer like his fellow assassin Steve (a dead-eyed Daniel Craig). Not that he isn’t formidable in his own right, surviving explosions, raiding PLO compounds, dodging other assassins and negotiating tense Middle Eastern Mexican stand-offs. But Avner is more than a rage-fueled killing machine, leavening his combat skills with love of family and the mental toughness to question the wisdom of fighting violence and hatred with ever more violence and hatred. Plus, if we’re to believe the ill-conceived, much-maligned “climax” of the film, Bana’s character is tough enough to maintain his mojo during volcanic sex with his wife even while suffering vivid flashbacks of terrible murders he didn’t actually witness. Me, I usually just think of baseball.

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS DAVID JASON IN DEEP COVER (1992)

This anti-Drug War crime thriller supposedly stars Laurence Fishburne (as a fast-rising drug dealer who's actually an undercover cop), but the movie belongs to Goldblum as the lawyer for the local head (Gregory Sierra) of the drug cartel. His character embodies his culture's traditional pursuit of success through education and hard work, but he's also at least half crazed from envy of the thugs he keeps out of jail with his motormouthed brilliance. Their hair-trigger willingness to give in to their violent urges makes him feel unmanly and overcivilized. (Sierra insults Goldblum by calling him "bar mitzvah boy"; Goldblum, in turn, naively thinks he's paying Fishburne a compliment when he likens him to "some beautiful panther or jungle storm...a dangerous, magnificent beast.") After Sierra beats a man to death in front of Goldblum, he asks him if it's the first time he's ever seen a person die, and Goldblum responds with a dreamy monologue about witnessing a fatal accident when he was a kid at summer camp. He sounds as if he 's remembering his first kiss. Goldblum finally snaps, joins Fishburne in toppling Sierra in a bloody coup, and winds up decked out in black leather and slicked-back hair, machine-gunning Clarence Williams III as if in retaliation for The Mod Squad.

JAMES WOODS AS MAX AND ROBERT DE NIRO AS NOODLES IN ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

Sergio Leone's final film is an opium dream of a gangster epic starring De Niro and Woods as lifelong frenemies, two products of the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto of the tenement era who grow up to become kings of New York during the Depression years. Part of the tension of their love-hate relationship comes from the fact that they represent clashing approaches to getting the most out of life. Max, the Bugsy Siegel figure, is an unstoppable bullet of wordly ambition, a volatile schemer who won't hesitate to shoot or bitch slap anyone who gets in his way, questions his plans, or looks at him cross-eyed. For most of the film he seems to roll right over the more careful, romantic-spirited Noodles. He ultimately fakes his own death, so that he can disappear into a new life as a respectable, rich businessman (and marry the woman--Elizabeth McGovern--who's the unattainable love of Noodles' life), leaving his old pal broke and stranded with survivor's guilt for thirty-five years. But after Max has played out his string and summons the now-aged Noodles to put him out of his misery, telling him that he's "the only one I can accept it from", we see that Noodles, the mother hen, is one of those people who was born to be sixty, and that everything up to now in his life has been preparation for the moment when Max comes begging, and he says no. It's all been worth it just to get to the end of their lives so that he can say, "I told you so."

CHARLES BRONSON AS BRIG. GEN. DAN SHOMRON IN RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Though it may seem hard to believe now, there was a period of about ten years there where most of the Western world recognized the Israeli military as perhaps the last example of unfailing competence and dependable strength put at the service of a cause that was just--in a nutshell, the good guys. This glorious public relations phase began in the summer of 1967 with the Six-Day War and had its last great hurrah with the rescue mission to recover the hostages taken by Palestinian and German hijackers who sought refuge in Uganda. "Operation Entebbe", which happened to unfold in the early hours of July 4, 1976, as America was gearing up to celebrate its own Bicentennial, was such a movie-ready news event that it was dramatized in three separate movies that went into production practically overnight, including two films originally made for American TV and an Israeli feature that was directed by Menahem Golan, later of the notorious Golan-Globus Productions. The best of them, by miles, was Raid on Entebbe, directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and released to theaters internationally after premiering on NBC TV six months after the actual events. The cast, which was very classy A-list by seventies TV-film standards, included Peter Finch (who died a week after the original broadcast, and who won an Oscar for his performance in Network shortly thereafter) as Yitzhak Rabin and Yaphet Kotto as Idi Amin, but it's Bronson who gives it that all-important shot of testosterone. He doesn't really have that much to do except fill out a uniform and bark orders into his walkie-talkie, but the important thing is that it's Charles fucking Bronson in his Death Wish-era prime who's in charge of this mission, bestowing upon it his macho gravitas and leathery glamor. By comparison, the 1986 Delta Force had to try to squeeze whatever juice it could out of the combination of a past-his-prime Lee Marvin and an not-yet-ironic Chuck Norris on a rocket cycle.

LENA OLIN AS MASHA IN ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY (1989)

In this adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Olin is a house on fire as a ferociously sexy Holocaust survivor who's having an affair with Ron Silver as a Polish Jew who's been transplanted to New York after spending World War II hiding in a hayloft. (He's now married to the girl, once his servant, who loaned him the layloft.) Fear and guilt have made Silver so nervous that he's a spectral wreck, but her time in Hell has left Olin disinclined to care what anyone thinks of her and determined to take whatever she wants and apologize to nobody; when she finally kills herself, it's her final "fuck you" to a world that doesn't deserve to have somebody as hot as her livening it up. Honorable mention goes to Anjelica Huston as Silver's first wife, who he meets again in New York years after having assumed that she'd died in a concentration camp. His first words to her after they'be been reunited: "I... I didn't know you were alive!" Her smiling reply: "This you never knew."

WOODY ALLEN AS DAVID DOBEL IN ANYTHING ELSE (2003)

I was going to include Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Meyer Lansky in Bugsy here, but Kosher Nostra mobsters are well-represented elsewhere on the list, and since the Woodman was disparaged in the introduction as the personification of non-threatening Jew-hood, I figured it was only fair to mention his uncharacteristically empowered portrayal of gun-toting, windshield smashing, paranoid conspiracy theorist David Dobel in the underrated, unfairly maligned romantic tragedy, Anything Else. Like his work in the far superior Stardust Memories (which critics also hated), Allen’s performance here (as an unreliable mentor to the likeable, lovelorn Jason Biggs) is cranky and misanthropic, but also darkly funny and refreshingly prickly, with the courage of its own piss and vinegar convictions. Dobel may be just as much of a hard luck case as some of Allen’s previous incarnations, but this character would rather fight than mope, choosing anger over depression in his confrontations with the injustices of the world. Like his cool, successful Bizzaro World alter ego Nick Fifer in Paul Mazursky’s 1991 curiosity Scenes From A Mall, Dobel is the rare Allen character that strays from the comedian’s typical comfort zone to hint at the Tough Jew lurking just beneath the tsuris.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Werner Herzog’s Very Bad Idea

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Werner Herzog is remaking The Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. I can’t stop him.

According to Variety, “Nicolas Cage will star in an updated version of 1992's Bad Lieutenant with Werner Herzog directing, Edward R. Pressman producing and Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films financing.” How many red flags can you possibly cram into one sentence? First and foremost, Lerner is the schlockmeister behind the recent Al Pacino fiasco 88 Minutes and Pacino’s upcoming re-teaming with Robert De Niro, Righteous Kill, as well as the latest Rambo reboot. His slate of upcoming productions is crammed with remakes and sequels, including yet another Rambo, re-launchings of both Conan and Red Sonja, Undisputed 3 (there was an Undisputed 2?) and the long-anticipated-by-someone Poe biopic written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

He also produced The Wicker Man remake, which presumably is where Nicolas Cage comes into this. Well, I already knew Cage was shameless. I just want to know how Herzog got roped into the project. As described by Variety, the original 1992 Bad Lieutenant “followed the depraved New York police officer of the title, who was heavily involved in drugs, gambling, sex and stealing; the pic received an NC-17 rating.” That’s sort of putting it mildly. Love it or hate it, Lieutenant was an intensely personal vision from writer/director Abel Ferrera, with a truly out-on-a-limb performance from Harvey Keitel. It would hardly seem to be remake fodder, anymore than say, Eraserhead or Herzog’s own Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Would Herzog really be okay with Abel Ferrara remaking that? For all I know this project may have Ferrara’s blessing, and it’s not that I’m such a huge fan of his anyway, but something about this just reeks of crossing a line that ought not be crossed. This doesn’t help: “The new script's penned by Billy Finkelstein, a TV writer with credits on Murder One, Law & Order and NYPD Blue.”

Hopefully Herzog will have an announcement of his own soon. I’d love to know what he’s thinking.

List-o-Mania: “Ten Bad Dates with De Niro”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

You know we love our lists here at the Screengrab (tune in later this week for the 10 Greatest Colostomy Bags in Movie History), but even we bow before Richard T. Kelly, creator of Ten Bad Dates with De Niro. First Kelly edited the book of that name, subtitled A Book of Alternative Movie Lists. It’s chock full of great ideas for us to steal, from “The Mighty Apoplexies Of Pacino – Ten Scenes Where ‘Shouty Al’ Shows Up” to “Capital Offences – Ten Places You Wouldn't Expect To Find A Severed Head.” It’s also got some guest stars we haven’t been able to nab so far. Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) weighs in with “A Surprising Intimacy – Ten Films That Have Interesting Sensuality,” while the Coen Brothers offer up “Ripe For Remake - Five Films We’d Like To See Remade.” (Among their choices is Koyaanisqatsi: “We have not seen the original but suspect it could be interestingly remade with Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher.”)

The book was only the beginning, however – Ten Bad Dates with De Niro is also a blog, complete with daily lists! Well, that’s the claim anyway; in reality, the last list was posted on February 15th (10 Favorite Roy Scheider Roles). Still, there are some items of interest to be found. For instance, “Lights! Camera! Vomit! 10 Great Up-Chucks.” We can go along with Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life edging out The Exorcist, but I’m not sure we would have thought of Husbands: “John Cassavetes somehow ennobles on screen vomiting, thus making a mockery of the genre. Still he also manages to make it kind of funny.” Truly, this is the essence of cinema.