The Screengrab : roland emmerich

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: Joss Whedon in the Woods

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Joss Whedon is producing The Cabin the Woods, to be written and directed by Cloverfield screenwriter Drew Goddard, and two actors are aboard for the trip. “"It's really just your basic typecasting: When you need two actors to run through the woods in low-cut nighties, you immediately think of Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford,” Goddard tells The Hollywood Reporter. Little is known about the story, except that it “provides a new twist on a classic scenario -- in this case the young-people-stranded-in-the-woods horror trope.” The new twist: the young people are OLD!

Michael Imperioli’s directorial debut opens the Rotterdam Film Festival today – and no, it’s not Cleaver. The Hungry Ghosts “recounts the crossed destinies of a group of isolated New Yorkers, all in search of happiness,” Variety reports. Imperioli’s Sopranos co-stars Steve Schirippa and Sharon Angela are in the cast and expected to be on hand in Rotterdam.

2012 has been delayed. The movie, not the year – we’re pretty sure 2012 will still immediately follow 2011 if all goes well. Sony is pushing back Roland Emmerich’s latest apocalypse from July 10 to November 13, “the same date the studio used to launch the previous two James Bond pics.”

Related:
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!
Video of the Day: Wonder Woman '67

Trailer Review: 2012 (Teaser)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Say what you will about his movies, but Roland Emmerich’s work has always made for awesome teasers. Remember the image of the White House getting zapped in Independence Day, the museum bit in the Godzilla teaser, or the frozen-over New York skyline of Day After Tomorrow? Quite frankly, I thought this teaser for Emmerich’s latest disaster epic 2012 was his best yet. Of course, much of this has to do with it being a cheeky homage to one of Screengrab’s all-time favorites, the classic teaser for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I knew I was in for a treat when I heard Wendy Carlos’ music from the teaser, accompanying the giant wave that crashes over the mountains (!). But when the monastery floats away just like the couch in the Shining teaser, I had to chuckle- I was the only one in the theatre doing so, but what the hell. Had I contributed to this week's list, I would have declared Emmerich’s disaster movies to be some of my guilty pleasures, and I’m primed for 2012 to be one as well.

America The Dissonant: Seven Movies That Send Mixed Messages About U.S.

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Last week, because it was the 4th of July and because we’re such red-blooded, flag-lapel-pin-wearing patriots, we here at the Screengrab celebrated some of our all-time favorite Pro-America movies. And the week before that, because we’re also dirty rotten elitist commie pinkos, we focused on movies that dared to criticize the American Empire. And now, to complete our nationalist trifecta, we examine a third type of film: movies that are designed to make the U.S. look kick-ass, but actually wind up making us look kinda lame-ass.

THE PATRIOT (2000)

That great American Roland Emmerich first treated us to his overblown brand of Fourth of July fireworks in Independence Day, but that little-seen arthouse curiosity is covered later in the list. In The Patriot, Emmerich jumps back in time a couple hundred years to show us the true meaning of Independence Day. Which is, of course, the kicking of major British ass. Mel Gibson plays a wealthy southern landowner with no slaves who goes all Mad Max 1776 when the redcoats burn down his house and kill various members of his family. Arming his two youngest boys with rifles and himself with as many guns, knives and hatchets as he can carry, Gibson sets out to liberate his oldest son from the Brits who have seized him. The ensuing slaughter is shockingly savage for a summer popcorn flick, and for a moment you think the movie might actually be interested in exploring some areas of moral ambiguity. The moment passes. Emmerich isn't interested in any of the actual root causes of the Revolution; this world-changing event serves as mere window-dressing for a routine revenge thriller – an excuse for some flag-waving rah-rah to jack up the stakes and make The Patriot seem like it's about something.

COBRA (1986)

A perennial plank in every political campaign is law & order; no matter how low the statistics actually get, voters rank crime as one of their top concerns in every public opinion poll. Unfortunately, the law & order platform usually has an ugly side, and this movie couldn’t have been a more jaw-dropping cautionary tale about the dangers of a brutally empowered police force if it was actually trying to be. In 1986, post-Rambo and at the peak of his popularity, Sylvester Stallone starred in and wrote the screenplay to Cobra, in which he played the black-clad, submachinegun-toting police officer Marion Cobretti, opposing a shadowy outfit called the New Order, who you might think wanted to play gloomy, depressing post-punk songs at everyone in America, but in fact were even worse: they wanted to overthrow democracy and institute the rule of the strong over the weak. Deciding to beat them at their own game, Cobretti simply cruises around Los Angeles, dressed like a gay Nazi biker and, dispensing with democratic fripperies like due process and prohibitions against cruelty, simply massacres every criminal unlucky enough to wander into his sights. Torturing, burning, gutting, and gunning down dozens of people throughout the course of the movie, Stallone managed to alienate even some of his die-hard fans: while the movie made decent money and temporarily knocked Top Gun out of the #1 slot, a decent number of filmgoers as well as critics found its vision of law & order America as a place where the cops acted as little more than roving death squads pretty repugnant.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola, debuting Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival, famously said, “My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam.” And like Vietnam, it is something too sprawling, too massive, too chaotic and complicated to be assessed in a few simple sentences. At turns it seems heartily pro-war and virulently anti-war; it conveys the insanity of the entire interventionist approach while still seeming to lay the blame on soft, coddled grunts and incompetent civilians. This inherent contradiction isn’t just circumstantial: it arises from the fundamental clash of worldviews between the director and the screenwriter. John Milius, the writer of the original script, meant it to be simultaneously a rebuke to what he perceived as the weakness and unrealistic expectations of anti-war protestors and a celebration of the virtues of the warrior spirit. Much of this approach survives in the finished film, especially in the diffident portrayal of Colonel Kurtz, who at times seems more heroic than insane. Meanwhile, director Francis Ford Coppola meant for Apocalypse Now to be a straightforward adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, with American anti-Communism taking the place of Belgian colonialism and Kurtz portrayed as a murderous madman. In the end, the movie, meant by one of its creators to be a celebration of the American intervention in Vietnam and another to be a condemnation of same, attains a terrifyingly uneasy balance between the two. After the torturous production of the movie had finished, Coppola said, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” Much the same could be said about America in Vietnam.

RED DAWN (1984)

And speaking of John Milius...the aforementioned screenwriter directed this Reagan-era blood-wet dream (based on a story co-written with Kevin Reynolds) about a Russian invasion of Middle America (or, as many conservatives prefer to think of it, America), complete with terrifying imagery of the Golden Arches obscured by Soviet paratroopers...oh, the humanity! How evil are Milius’ commies? So evil that, shortly after landing in a field outside a high school in Calumet, Colorado, their very first order of business is to machine-gun an unarmed black teacher (nice touch, John) who wanders outside to see what’s going on. Because, y’know, that’s how commies roll: no algebra for you, capitalist pig-dogs! Forget attacking military bases or other strategic targets: this U.S.S.R. knows the best way to cripple Yankee morale is to cut off our access to fast food and varsity sports! Fortunately, the popular jocks of Calumet High know where to find guns and ammo in bulk, and before you can say “Second Amendment,” their one-time football team, the Wolverines, has transformed into a crack guerilla group of...um...insurgents, willing to engage in extreme acts of ultra-violence to drive the foreign superpower from their land. Probably best not to think too deeply about how the story would be different if the town under siege were, say, Tikrit, or if the Colorado teenagers with easy access to automatic weapons were nerds instead of jocks and the high school was in neighboring Columbine. In Milius’ world, the good guys are joyless, soulless killing machines, the bad guys are joyless, soulless killing machines in different uniforms (and, thus, bad) and violence is the only answer. WOLVERINES!!!!!!

THE CAINE MUTINY (1954)

The film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s wildly popular 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny was a mess. Wouk had been contracted to write the screenplay himself, but was fired after turning in a script that was over four hours long; difficulties in casting plagued the production, which also went highly overbudget; and director Edward Dmytryk felt that Columbia Pictures kept too tight a rein on him and didn’t let him make the movie he wanted to make. In addition, there was a great deal of political pressure on the production; in order to secure the Navy’s cooperation in making the picture, the studio had given all sorts of assurances that no one would be made to look bad, and with anti-Communist fever sweeping Hollywood and the American public much less certain about the Korean War than it had been about WWII, everyone was walking on glass to make sure the story, about a mutiny aboard a minesweeping ship commanded by the unstable, paranoid Captain Queeg, didn’t come across as too anti-military. All of these factors and more contributed to the uncomfortable ending of the film: after the mutineers are acquitted by a court-martial tribunal following a dramatic meltdown on the stand by Queeg himself, their defense attorney turns on them, calling them goldbrickers, cowards and gutless wonders. He saves most of his rancor for the cynical intellectual Lt. Keefer, who he accuses of having masterminded the entire situation just because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. The whole thing ends up ringing rather hollow, both dramatically and philosophically, and defuses the rest of the movie’s far more interesting conflict (one’s duty in wartime balanced against the malfeasance of one’s commanding officer) for a simple-minded pasty, sneaky egghead vs. upstanding macho man one. For a movie that sets itself the task of questioning the meaning of honor and duty to end up claiming it’s better to follow a deranged lunatic into battle than listen to some smart-ass college boy does no service to the military tradition it goes to such lengths to protect.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Appropriately enough, I first saw this movie on July 4th weekend, in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was killing time waiting for the Olympic Village to be finished. There wasn't much to do, so to get out of the heat until the Braves game started, I ducked into a theater that was screening this Roland Emmerich atrocity. What stuck with me over the years isn't so much its incompetence or its bombast – it's really no worse than any number of other alien-invasion flicks, and it's been outdone dozens of times since then in sheer alienating volume – but its coldhearted determination to ruthlessly exploit every noxious Hollywood stereotype in existence. In a movie which purports to be patriotic, from its name right down to its 'fightin' president' character, it instead turns out to be jingoistic, as the nations of the world are helpless to do a thing against marauding extraterrestrials until the good-hearted Yanks do what they've done since the Great War: pull their foreign fat out of the fire. Aside from the horrendous stereotypes embodied in the main cast (including Will Smith as a wisecracking fighter pilot, Randy Quaid as a crazy kook no one believes, Vivica Fox as a hooker with a heart of gold, Margaret Colin as a bitchy career woman, Brent Spiner as a misguided intellectual, Harvey Fierstein as a mincing queen, and Judd Hirsch as a Jewish caricature so odiferous its only competition comes from Julius Streicher cartoons), there's also the astonishing montages that occur when the alien motherships are disabled: African tribesmen hoot and holler, waving spears (!) around and looking as if they accidentally left home without the bones in their noses, and gibberish-spouting, kaffiyeh-clad Arabs ululating mindlessly, unable to even make themselves understood until a helpful white man gets on the blower to explain the situation to his American brethren. What purports to be a feel-good action blockbuster, more than ten years later, now plays like a cartoon of the invincible ignorance of American foreign policy.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

In the Year of Our Lord 1994, there was no middle ground in America: you were either Pro-Gump or Pulp-ist. You either looked at life as a box of chocolates or as an overpriced Martin & Lewis milkshake. And if you were the kind of gal who dressed as Mrs. Mia Wallace with a hypo full of adrenalin sticking out of your breastplate or the kind of guy who dressed like Jules or Vincent in a skinny tie and black suit jacket that year for Halloween, then you probably weren’t all that surprised when the groundbreaking instant classic Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Oscar to the revisionist history of the sixties and seventies where all the peace-loving hippies were fools and dupes who never accomplished anything but their own self-destruction and the good-natured dimwit who accepts the status quo at face value is rewarded with happiness and, of course, obscene wealth. Unlike Being There, which used Peter Sellers’ blank-slate gardener, Chance, to satirize the willful, self-reflexive gullibility of the American people, Robert Zemeckis’ insidiously reactionary comedy pretends to celebrate simple American values while actually championing the type of anti-intellectual, head-in-the-sand, cross-your-fingers-and-hope-you-win-the-lottery malaise that led to eight years of the recent Voldemort administration and (egad) the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Related Stories: America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S., America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S.

Morning Deal Report: Dueling Sherlocks

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As if Guy Ritchie didn’t have enough problems, what with the gossip sheets running wild with rumors that A-Rod is shtupping his wife. Now it turns out that his Sherlock Holmes feature will face competition from Borat himself. Per Variety, Columbia Pictures has announced “an untitled comedy that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as master detective Sherlock Holmes and Will Ferrell as Watson, his crime-solving partner.” According to Columbia president Matt Tolmach, this re-teaming of the Talladega Nights stars is a sure-fire knee-slapper. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh…having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious." Thank you for speaking frankly, Mr. Tolmach. Of course, this is not the first time rival productions involving the same iconic character have gone head-to-head, as we recall from the great Robin Hood war of the '90s. But then, that was a war nobody won.

The cast of Roland Emmerich’s latest rendition of the end of the world is coming together. Triple threat Thomas McCarthy, who most recently wrote and directed The Visitor, will join John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Danny Glover in Emmerich’s 2012. “As an actor, I've never worked on anything with this scale before, and I always go see these movies,” McCarthy tells the Hollywood Reporter. “This does have a big budget and I do make more money, which is nice, but I know if you take a job like this just for the money, you'll be miserable.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to Nicolas Cage.

Meanwhile, the French hit Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks) is being remade not only in America (Will Smith will star for Warner Bros.) but in Italy. Variety describes it as a “heart-warmer about a postal worker forced to relocate to a small town in the north where he can't understand the patois, the food or the many quirks.” We’ll wait for the Portuguese version.

Related:

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

DVD Digest for June 24, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings the release of several new Criterions, the latest DVD from a blogosphere favorite, and a box-set tribute to a late, great British director.

For many DVD fans, this is the week that Criterion releases Anthony Mann’s The Furies and Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain in stories. But while both of these titles are certainly worthy, the new DVD that most interests me this week is actually Zeitgeist’s Derek Jarman Glitterbox, containing four of the maverick filmmaker’s works. The best-known title in the box is his 1986 film Caravaggio, which features early performances from Sean Bean and Jarman friend/frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton. But also justifying the price are 1993’s Wittgenstein and 1985’s The Angelic Conversation, the latter of which is only available in the box set. Finally, there’s the strange case of Blue, Jarman’s final film, also included here. While watching a film that consists entirely of a blue background accompanied by various voiceovers and sound effects, it’s nonetheless a must for Jarman fans, or even those who are curious about his life. Made as he was losing his eyesight due to AIDS-related illness, Blue is almost certainly the closest Jarman came to making a cinematic confession. You may not watch it again and again, but it demands to be seen at least once, and thanks to DVD, now everyone has that opportunity. Of course, if you’re looking for a more upbeat gay-friendly DVD, there’s always Xanadu: Magical Music Edition (Universal).

This week’s most noteworthy new release comes to us from our friends at Benten Films, Matthias Gleisner’s The Free Will. A prizewinner at the 2007 Berlinale, The Free Will tells the story of a convicted sex offender who finds himself struggling with life following his release from prison. The first foreign-language release from Benten, the DVD also includes a commentary by Gleisner and star/co-writer Jürgen Vogel, along with the film’s original theatrical trailer and a new essay on the film by critic David Fear. As always, it’s good to see what the Benten boys (Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis) have in store for us, and The Free Will should be no exception.

Other notable recent releases coming to DVD this week include Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which features both French- and English-dubbed versions; Martin McDonagh’s agreeably salty In Bruges (Universal); Ryan Reynolds romancing a trio of hotties in Definitely, Maybe (Universal); Roland Emmerich’s latest assault on storytelling coherence and subtlety 10,000 B.C. (Warner, also Blu-Ray); The Spiderwick Chronicles (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), Hollywood’s latest failed attempt to create a new Potter-like franchise; John Sayles’ barely-released Honeydripper (Universal); and the strident Ferris Bueller wannabe Charlie Bartlett (MGM).

Finally… like surfing? Own a Blu-Ray player? Then we’ve got good news for you, as Step Into Liquid (Lionsgate) receives a Blu-Ray only release this week. Otherwise, if you’re looking for non-recent releases on Blu-Ray this week, I’m afraid you’re rather stuck.

1949 vs. 2012: John Woo/Roland Emmerich Deathmatch!

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It’s deal-making time on the Croisette in Cannes, and while some deals are more ill-advised than others, we’ve rounded up a few notables worthy of mention.

John Woo is set to direct 1949, which we are assured is not a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 1941. Variety reports it is a “big budget romancer that will crank up as soon as he has finished his epic Red Cliff.” A Chinese-language epic “based on true events at the end of WWII and the final years of the Chinese Civil War, pic will star Chang Chen and Korea's Song Hye-kyo.”

Leap ahead 63 years and you’ll find Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Once again, Variety is on the case, reporting that John Cusack and Redbelt’s Chiwetel Ejiofor will star in the apocalyptic thriller, “whose title refers to the end days of human civilization as foretold by the ancient Mayan calendar. Story kicks off with a global cataclysm, which brings an end to the world as we know it, and chronicles the heroic struggle of the survivors.” Emmerich has already ended the world once, of course, with The Day After Tomorrow. We’re beginning to think he has issues.

And what the hell, since we’re already plundering Variety for this post, we might as well pass on the news that Steve Buscemi is joining the cast of Youth in Revolt, playing the father of Michael Cera in the film based on a novel by C.D. Payne. “Cera plays teenager Nick Twisp, who meets the girl of his dreams on a family vacation and destroys the trip trying to be with her.”

Roland Emmerich: Not a Big Wim Wenders Fan

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Say what you will about the 10,000 B.C. director (and we have), but at least the man knows his station in the movie universe. “I'm making movies for the masses,” says Roland Emmerich in a recent interview with The Guardian. “These movies are expensive. A lot of people have to see it, like it and come back. If you start making movies for film critics, you've lost.”

If there’s one thing nobody has ever accused Emmerich of doing, it’s making movies for film critics. But of course, everyone is a critic, including Emmerich’s own mother, who did not particularly care for the director’s breakthrough hit, Universal Soldier. “She was just upset with me that there was so much blood in it - and she was right…I can't say that I like it. But I'm comfortable with it now. When you're not loved by the critics, it's very hard for anyone to say anything good about your movie.”

Although he was a film student in Germany during the heyday of Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Emmerich doesn’t pretend the New German Cinema was ever an influence on his work (and again, it’s not like anyone is saying otherwise). “Everybody is always so careful about these things. I mean, I'm good friends with Wim Wenders, but it doesn't mean I have to like his movies. Some of them, I like. Most of them, I find boring. And I would tell him that to his face.” We’re still awaiting Wenders’ thoughts on The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow.

Still, even though he’s always loved the big-budget Hollywood blockbusters that are his bread and butter today, Emmerich would appreciate a little credit for following his own path. “Emmerich has yet to make a sequel or tackle a popular comic-book franchise, preferring instead to collaborate with other writers on his own ideas,” Guardian writer Steven Goldman insists, apparently forgetting that Godzilla was rampaging through Tokyo before Emmerich was born. “Rather than presenting himself as a director for hire, he has increasingly sought to maintain creative control over his own fare by selling his scripts at auction.” You see that, Hollywood? Roland Emmerich doesn’t need your big, dumb ideas! He has plenty of big, dumb ideas of his own!

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The new release 10,000 B.C. revives a genre that some of us thought was long past reviving, the dawn-of-man cave people melodrama. The new movie's director, Roland Emmerich, is a technophile size freak who probably thinks that the latest developments in computer animation and other special effects make it a great time to visualize a chaotic, untamed planet overrun with strange forms of wildlife threatening actors who are modeling proposed hair styles for Rob Zombie — though my recollection is that, in the past, the whole point of these movies was to showcase a rising performer (such as Victor Mature, star of the 1940 One Million B.C., or Raquel Welch, star of its 1966 remake) who seems made to be photographed wearing a loincloth. Anyway, this genre received its knockout blow more than twenty-five years ago, in Caveman, filmed in Mexico by the director Carl Gottlieb, who also co-wrote the script with Rudy DeLuca. Gottlieb is a well-travelled show business jack-of-all-trades whose career includes a stint with the '60s improv-comedy troupe the Committee, various acting gigs, and partial authorship of the script of Jaws (as well as full authorship of its making-of book). Gottlieb made his film directing debut with the 1977 Steve Martin short The Absent-Minded Waiter, but Caveman was his first time behind the camera on a feature film. It remains his only feature, maybe because he's yet to find a project that might count as a worthy follow-up to directing a cast, all speaking "prehistoric" gibberish, that included Ringo Starr, John Matuszak, and a stoned Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ringo plays Atouk, the sad-sack misfit of a tribe of cave folk led by — or, rather, bullied and pushed around by — Tonda, played by the towering, fiercely bearded Matuszak. Atouk graduates from loser to outcast when he enrages Tonda by lusting after the big guy's lady, Barbara Bach. (This was the movie where Ringo and Bach met. They were married before it was released to theaters, and in a month they'll be celebrating their twenty-seventh anniversary. Tip your hats, people.) The resourceful Ringo takes advantage of his new freedom to assemble his own rival tribe, which includes Dennis Quaid, Carl Lumbly, the great Jack Gilford and, as Gilford's daughter and Ringo's eventual love interest, a very charming, pre-Cheers Shelley Long. He also discovers fire, music, advanced weaponry, and the pleasures of standing upright. (He proceeds to convert his friends, grabbing them from behind as if administering the Heimlich maneuver and yanking their spines straight to the accompaniment of a terrific cracking noise.) The whole thing has a playful, friendly quality, and the good guys are pretty close to irresistable. The bad guys are no slouches themselves; the late Matuszak gets to demonstrate an all-out slapstick aplomb that Hollywood seldom bothered to tap during his acting career, and Bach, strutting about in her fur bikini, was accurately described by one reviewer, Michael Sragow, as looking like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life. Mixed in among the people are a quartet of stop-motion dinosaurs, including the aforementioned T-rex, who are very ready for their close-ups. Will 10,000 B.C. reveal that its makers have learned anything from Ringo and company? It remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that if Roland Emmerich understood anything about the appeal of stop-motion dinosaurs, he never would have made Godzilla.

Video of the Day: We'll See Your Ten Thousand And Raise You a Million

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Roland Emmerich's new movie, 10,000 B.C., opens wide this Friday, and advance reports are... well, advance reports are that it stinks on ice age. Maybe it's because of the script and production problems Emmerich has been complaining about to anyone who will listen, or maybe it's the no-name cast, or maybe it's that Roland Emmerich is a giant hack who can't figure out how to make a movie where he can't blow things up with a fighter jet. But whatever the case, the only interesting thing about the movie so far is the hilariously overwrought internet message board debates it's spawned between atheists offended by the use of the term "B.C." and Christians offended by the portrayal of human evolution.

However, even if the movie turns out to be a colossal dud, it likely won't be as rotten as its spiritual forebear, 1966's epically stupid One Million Years B.C. In cast you've never seen it, we've thoughtfully provided you with the trailer, below. Thrill as caveman Tumak defeats a giant box turtle! Scream as the cave tribes are threatened by stock footage of a volcano and a barrage of styrofoam boulders! Ogle as Raquel Welch, already squandering her superstar status, stomps around in a leather bikini! The fact that Emmerich is rehashing this trash is pretty suggestive proof that maybe evolution really is a big sham after all.

Jurassic Classics: Ringo Starr Demands a Recount

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Much as it pains us to admit this, the Screengrab is not the only online source of movie lists. Certainly we're the best, but occasionally someone else on the world wide Interweb will take a crack at it. With the release of Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC looming, MSNBC's Christopher Bahn has assembled a list of 11 great prehistoric flicks.

Right off the bat, we've got to call shenanigans on Bahn's inclusion of Land of the Lost. While it's true that Will Ferrell is about to begin shooting a big-screen remake of said property (will his '70s obsession never end?), the fact remains that Land of the Lost is a television show. Not only that, but it contains Sleestaks. Now, granted, we haven't done a great deal of research on prehistoric times, but while we're willing to accept cavemen living side-by-side with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, we're fairly confident there is no existing fossil record of Sleestaks. Therefore, Land of the Lost is disqualified.

We're willing to accept the rest of the list — although including Clan of the Cave Bear certainly pushes the definition of "great" to its limits — but there is one tragic omission we cannot overlook. It is, of course, 1981's Caveman, starring Ringo Starr, Shelley Long and a boyish Dennis Quaid. Watch this scene, depicting the creation of music in painstaking historical detail, and we think you'll agree.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 1

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

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

THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971)

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

JUNIOR (1994)

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

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)

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

FLATLINERS (1990)

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

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

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

DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

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

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2!

Trailer Review: 10000 BC

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Roland Emmerich makes noisy crap that's entertaining when it isn't being too noisy and crappy. Take, for example, Independence Day. Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum firing a nuclear missile into a spaceship the size of the moon and screaming "PEACE!" is awesome, but Emmerich ruins the moment with a screen full of yelling Randy Quaid heads ten minutes later. 10,000 B.C., unlike Emmerich's other movies, is Quaid-less all around, so it's off to a promising start. But this trailer is odd. It looks like Mel Gibson trying to remake Stargate. And why are all these cavemen so pretty? Only one movie is allowed to have pretty cavemen, and that's Encino Man. — John Constantine