The Screengrab : samuel l. jackson

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A lot of my friends have been going through break-ups and divorces lately, which means they’ve probably also been hearing that old familiar friends/family/Facebook folk wisdom about how the end of a relationship is like a death, which must be properly mourned.

And, given that we're down to our next-to-last Thursday list before getting dumped for some younger, sexier blogs by Nerve, your pals here at the Screengrab, having moved beyond denial, anger and bargaining, figured we oughta tackle grief -- well, grief and “holy shit, did you see that guy’s head explode? How frickin' cool was that?” -- with THE SCREENGRAB’S FAVORITE DEATH SCENES OF ALL TIME, including...

The Guy With The Exploding Head, SCANNERS (1981)

Holy shit! How frickin' cool was that? I remember first seeing the aforementioned Exploding Head Guy during one of the montage sequences of the 1984 theatrical clip show Terror in the Aisles (a horror film comprised entirely of classic moments from other horror films, kind of like the Scary Movie franchise without the dick jokes). Later, I saw David Cronenberg’s Scanners in its entirety, although the only thing I really remember about it now is the scene above, where renegade telepath Darryl Revok (B-Movie Hall of Fame villain extraordinaire Michael Ironside) totally blows that bald dude’s skull apart -- with his mind! -- in one of the most memorable death scenes in cinematic history...second only, I suppose, to John Hurt’s demise in Alien (below) for its shock value imagery. In a way, then, it’s sad to realize that, in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and the recent wave of torture porn cinema, the image of a bloody cranium bursting like a ripe watermelon is now considered tame enough to show as a sight gag on The Daily Show. (AO)

John Hurt in ALIEN (1979)

Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) goes to investigate an abandoned spaceship. He finds a chamber full of eggs. One of the eggs hatches, releasing a creature that latches onto his face, knocking him unconscious. His fellow crew members take him back to their ship, where they watch over him until the creature lets go and he awakens, seemingly okay. Then, during a meal, Kane gets violently ill, and a screeching, phallic monster bursts out of his chest cavity...in the process terrifying a generation, immediately elevating Alien above the majority of its contemporary peers, and providing one of the most horrific birth-rape images in the annals of cinema. (NS)

John Cassavettes in THE FURY (1978)

Some men just make you want to get to the point, big-time. Cassavettes is of course legendary as the man who, some say, created the independent American film movement -- but he earned his rent as an actor in other people's movies, and as an actor, he made his strongest impact in man-you-love-to-hate roles. The one that everyone probably remembers best is Guy, the hungry New York actor who pimped his wife out to Satan, a gesture that his character here -- Childress, a top-secret government operative with a dead arm and deader eyes -- would sniff at as the move of a rank amateur. Childress lays waste to most of the cast of Brian De Palma's visually lush horror thriller, only to meet his match in a telekinetic teenager who must share her director's movie-geek interests and black sense of humor, since what she has planned for him is actually a choice parody of the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. (PN)

Robert Shaw in JAWS (1975) & Samuel L. Jackson in DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)

Hitchcock used to talk about the difference between suspense and surprise in terms of a bomb under the kitchen table. If it suddenly goes off in the midst of a breakfast conversation, you have a moment of surprise. But if you keep cutting to the bomb ticking away while your characters sip their coffee and chomp their bacon…well, now you have suspense. Hitchcock’s thesis can also be applied to movies in which characters are eaten by sharks. (Hitch didn’t mention farce, although that’s a third option.) In Jaws, we have Quint, the old man of the sea, a man seemingly destined to be eaten by sharks ever since he escaped that fate after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the end of World War II. He goes kicking and screaming, sliding down the deck, reaching for a hand that can pull him to safety…suspense! In Deep Blue Sea, we have Samuel L. Jackson giving one of those action movie “rouse the troops” speeches. Just at the moment we’re sure he’s going to lead his team to victory over the shark menace…surprise! (SVD)

JAMES CAGNEY IN WHITE HEAT (1949)

From the first time you get a look at Jimmy Cagney’s unhinged, short-tempered gangster Cody Jarrett, you know he’s not going to end well. Cody is ruthless, bloodthirsty and marginally sane, and like Hamlet, he likes his mother…a lot. When Ma Jarrett (who’s just as crooked and crazy as her boy Cody) finally catches a bullet in the back, he goes completely off the rails and turns from a colorful, hot-headed gangster to one of the most murderous psychotics in the history of crime dramas. Finally betrayed by an undercover cop posing as a trusted member of his gang, Cody’s end comes when he desperately scrambles up the side of a gas storage tank. Fighting it out through a hail of bullets and a cloud of tear gas, he spits death at the cops below, refusing to go out without a fight, but the end seems near when the police snitch catches him with a couple of sniper shots. Even then, he’s got a bloody-minded determination to go out on his own terms: he recklessly fires his pistol into the gas tank, and just before it goes up in a huge, fiery explosion, he screams a defiant echo of the toast he used to raise to his late mother: “Top of the world!” (LP)

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

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

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Endings and (especially) middles are hard, but there’s something liberating about the instant rush and hit-the-ground momentum of beginnings, which is why so many great (and even not-so-great) directors are often inspired to make big, bold “HERE I AM!” statements in the first few minutes of films that frequently can’t compete with their own opening sequences. But Spike Lee, after two previous good-but-not-great at-bats with She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze, finally knocked one out of the park with Do The Right Thing, which exploded onto movie screens with the sex-and-violence one-two punch of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” and Rosie Perez’s fly-girl attack during the opening credits, then jolted audiences again with an alarm clock and the fast-talking “WAKE UP!” morning rap of Samuel L. Jackson’s dee-jay Mister Señor Love Daddy, who keeps the pace and sets the scene, letting us know in no uncertain terms that it’s HOT and about to get hotter as Lee takes us on a tour of his beloved Bed-Stuy neighborhood, introducing us in quick succession to most of the major players in a world as instantly distinctive as John Ford’s Monument Valley...or even Woody Allen’s Manhattan. (AO)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Rarely has a film’s initial moments set the forthcoming tone as immediately and evocatively as those of Apocalypse Now with its protracted shot of the Vietnamese jungle. From silence comes the sound of helicopter blades, then the airborne choppers themselves, and then the sparse electric guitar notes of The Doors’ “The End.” When Jim Morrison’s voice croons “This is the end” and bursts of napalm decimate the lush forest, the film fully enters into the realm of the hallucinatory, with Francis Ford Coppola’s pan through the smoke and fire soon integrating the superimposed image of Martin Sheen’s upside-down face, his head on a pillow facing a ceiling fan. Dream and reality coalesce in a woozy, hazy blend of longing, fear and self-inflicted violence (symbolized by a gun lying beside Sheen on the bed) that result, per the Lizard King, in “a wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane.” Table-setters don’t get much more exquisite than this. (NS)

BARBARELLA (1968)

This is more of an excuse for showing Jane Fonda naked than anything else, but the same could be said of the entire movie. An astronaut clad in a rather community theatre-looking metallic space suit floats weightlessly above a yellow shag carpet. Elevator muzak plays in the background and piece by piece, the suit comes off, revealing the astronaut to be a comely blonde, naked beneath the suit. Soon we have Barbarella floating around with her ass in the air to the tones of 1960s muzak. Cute and sexy for sure, but also disturbingly fetus-like. (SCS)

LA DOLCE VITA (1960)

La Dolce Vita has its fair share of famous scenes. The opening in which Jesus dangles from a helicopter flying low over Rome beats Anita Ekberg in the fountain by a mile. Fellini knows that any good opening needs to be odd and enjoyable besides hinting at what's to come. Here we have religion, sexy rich women, poor street boys, modern technology and ruins. And Paparazzo taking photos of it all while Marcello Mastroianni's character quietly eggs him on. (SCS)

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Much is made of the final scene, where the movie's hero/anti-hero, the racist Ethan Edwards, cannot enter the embrace of the household, and the door slowly shuts on him. The opening scene is a mirror of the end, with Ethan's sister-in-law Martha opening the door and walking from the cool shade of the house into the harsh light of Monument Valley, relocated from Utah to Texas for the purposes of the film. Ethan is riding his horse in through the desert, still a ways off although closer than anything else in the huge landscape. The camera's journey from the dark interior to the brilliant and tremendous exterior emphasizes just how small the ranch is. Ethan's visit is his first in many years, and although the film doesn't say a word about it, it is clear that while his sleazy exploits are one reason he has stayed away for so long, his love for Martha is the primary cause. The whole of the plot revolves around that unspoken love. If you look for it, you can see it from the first moment Martha's face becomes visible, all of the concern and ambiguity that she cannot speak. Unspoken truths are at the heart of The Searchers, and in the gulf between what is said and what is meant is the real history of this country. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Hayden Childs

Morning Deal Report: Keira Knightley Never Lets Me Go

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Are the Jonas Brothers already over? Hey, I'm not hatin' on them, I’m just pointing out that Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience failed to knock Tyler Perry off the top box office perch. Madea Goes to Jail took in $16.5 million, while the brothers had to settle for $12.7 million, a far cry from their expected box office domination. On the strength of its Best Picture win, Slumdog Millionaire jumped up to the third spot, taking in $12.2 million over the weekend.

One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek (whose finest work remains the video for Johnny Cash’s Hurt) will next tackle the sci-fi thriller Never Let Me Go, starring Keira Knightley. “Story revolves around a trio who grew up in a boarding school with no contact or knowledge of the outside world until they discover they are clones grown for the sole purpose of organ donation,” Variety reports. This movie used to be called The Island, and no one asked to see it again.

Can I interest you in a movie called Rape: A Love Story? Not so much? What if I were to tell you it stars Maria Bello, Abigail Breslin and Samuel L. Jackson? Still no takers? “Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novella published in 2003, story centers on a mother (Bello) recovering from a brutal gang rape who is stalked by the perpetrators but is protected by a sympathetic cop (Jackson). Breslin will play the woman’s12-year-old daughter, who witnesses the attack.”

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Morning Deal Report: NeverEnding Story Still Not Ending

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Warner Bros. is rebooting The NeverEnding Story, thus bringing it another step closer to living up to its title. “The new pic -- which original producer Dieter Geissler also will produce and Sarah Schechter and Jesse Ehrman will oversee for Warners -- will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first pic,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Yeah, that’s what remakes are usually all about – nuance.

Unlikely as it might sound, Dollhouse star Eliza Dushka is bringing a Robert Mapplethorpe biopic to the big screen. “Dushku has secured the exclusive rights and the full cooperation from Mapplethorpe's estate and has enlisted two-time Sundance grand jury prize winner and indie darling Ondi Timoner (DIG!) to helm the film, which is titled The Perfect Moment,” Variety reports.

Nick Fury fans, rejoice. Samuel L. Jackson has inked a deal to play the Marvel character for years to come. “The actor, who just weeks ago was seemingly on the outs with the studio over reprising his role as Nick Fury, agent of spy outfit S.H.I.E.L.D., has signed an unprecedented nine-picture deal to play the character in a series of Marvel movies,” THR reports. “The movies include Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, The Avengers and its sequels. Also on the table is the possibility of toplining a S.H.I.E.L.D. movie, which is in development.”

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DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Scarlett Johansson Blows. Her Nose! Blows Her Nose!

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Does it seem like we’re picking on Scarlett Johansson lately? Well, better to pick on her than to pick her nose! Or maybe not. “NBC announced Wednesday that the tissue The Spirit star used to blow her nose during her latest appearance on the Tonight Show—relief from the cold she caught from costar Samuel L. Jackson, she says—will be put up for auction tomorrow on eBay, with all proceeds going to the food-gathering charity USA Harvest,” according to E! Online.

This raises several questions. First: she caught a cold from Samuel L. Jackson? Exactly how did that happen? Does Ryan Reynolds know about this? Secondly, if she’s really serious about helping out this food-gathering charity, can’t she do a little better than her used snotrag? It seems to me that used panties might be a more lucrative auction item. I mean, not that I’d bid on them. Heavens no. But one of you weirdoes might.

Here’s the Tonight Show clip featuring the dainty Miss Scarlett honking up a loogie.

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Morning Deal Report: Sam Mendes Meets the Preacher

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 75-issue Preacher comic book by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon seemed like an ideal fit for HBO, which has struggled to launch a new buzz series since stalwarts like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Deadwood went dark. The projected series fell through earlier this year, however, and it didn’t take long for Columbia Pictures to secure the rights for a feature film version. Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road) will direct the supernatural tale, his second graphic novel adaptation following Road to Perdition, which…kind of sucked.

Samuel L. Jackson will play Sho'nuff, the Shogun of Harlem, in a remake of 1985’s The Last Dragon. “The updated plot will be along the same lines of the original, centering on young martial arts student Leroy Green in his quest through the streets of New York to achieve the highest level of martial arts accomplishment, known as the Last Dragon,” says The Hollywood Reporter, which several times refers to the original as a “cult classic.” Can’t say I ever joined that particular cult.

Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington will star in Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic action movie from the Hughes Brothers. “revolves around a lone warrior (Washington) who must fight to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption. Oldman has been set to portray the despot of a small makeshift town who's determined to take possession of the book Eli's guarding,” Variety reports.

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Take Five: Bad Cops

Morning Deal Report: Nicolas Cage's Dark Knight

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Your weekend box office champ was Lakeview Terrace, with Samuel L. Jackson scaring up $15.6 million. Yes, Neil LaBute fans, this is the director’s biggest haul ever – beating out even The Wicker Man! Other than that, business was slow at the ticket counters, with Burn After Reading dropping to second place with $11.3 million, and My Best Friend’s Girl at third with a meager $8.3 million – good news for all of us hoping for Dane Cook to be banished from show business. Sadly, the romantic comedy that’s actually kind of funny, Ghost Town, took in even less: only $5.2 million. I guess this means American prefers Dane Cook to Ricky Gervais, which is…ominous, to say the least.

Nicolas Cage will reteam with Gone in 60 Seconds director Dominic Sena for Season of the Witch. “Cage plays a 14th century knight transporting a girl suspected of being the witch behind the Black Plague,” says The Hollywood Reporter. “His compatriots help him bring the girl to an abbey of monks trained in exorcising demons.” It’s a supernatural thriller – like The Wicker Man! (Are you sensing a pattern here?)

Title of the week honors go to Muchas Gracias, Bob Oppenheimer, a period drama picked up by Miramax. Per THR, “The film centers on an American serviceman in the 1960s who is sent on an appeasement mission to a fishing town in Spain after a U.S. military plane crash results in the accidental detonation of four hydrogen bombs; in addition to his role with the locals, the serviceman also embarks on a relationship.” Hey, sorry about all the radiation! Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?

Related:
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Wicker Man (Neil LaBute)
Abel Ferrara Would Like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage to Please Die in a Fire

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

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Take Five: The Arab Movie Hall of Shame

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The hotly anticipated release of Towelhead, the controversial Alan Ball adaptation of Alicia Erian's well-received coming of age novel about a young Arab-American girl, gives me a chance to finally feature one of my all-time favorite subjects in a Friday Take Five: the horrendous stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films. Naturally, I'll be hitting the theaters bright and early this weekend to get my ticket to Towelhead; my hopes are high that it will do a small part to reverse the dismally one-dimensional portrayal of Arabs in cinema since the invention of the medium. (It would have been nice if they could have gotten an actual Arab-American actress to play the lead, but that's a rant for another day.) One of Thomas Edison's very first moving pictures portrayed a seductive odalisque, and ever since then, Arabs have been portrayed on screen as one of what Mazin Q'umsiyeh of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee calls "the three Bs": belly dancers, billionaires, or bombers. Since the late 1970s, when blacks made it known they were a bit tired of being Hollywood's favorite punching bag, Arabs have been killed on screen at a pace that far outstrips the slaughter of Indians in movie Westerns, and with a very few exceptions (sala'am, Tony Shalhoub), if you're an Arab in the movie business, if you don't play a terrorist, you don't work. So I'm off to the multiplex, hoping that Towelhead can start to clean up the mess made by movies like these.

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Although it's one of the most beloved comedies of the '80s, Back to the Future didn't win a lot of friends in the Arab-American community for its mindless portrayal of north African terrorists. Typically, the Arab villains are portrayed as both sinister (gunning down poor old Doc Brown and, in so doing, teaching a whole generation of American kids to hiss at the swarthy bearded kaffiyeah-wearing dirtbags) and incompetent (so dumb that it took them the whole movie to figure out that they'd been sold a "shiny bomb casing filled with pinball machine parts). Worse still, that's not even the movie's biggest ethnic crime: there's that whole business of whitebread Michael J. Fox teaching black people about rock 'n' roll...

THE HITMAN (1991)

Unsurprisingly from someone who's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary conservative, Chuck Norris has a special place in the Arab-bashing Hall of Fame; while he's probably killed more Asians on screen, it hasn't been from lack of trying to slaughter Arabs by the score. Already deserving of a hot kebab enema for his role in the Delta Force movies, Norris upped the ante considerably by appearing in this muddled gangster/terrorist picture, where he delivers one of the most racist scenes in history: confronting a group of Arab scumbags in a restaurant, he calls them "camel jockeys", spits out their food and calls it "shit", and then proceeds to slam their heads into the table after mocking their claim that Allah will protect them. Now that's good xenophobia!

IRON EAGLE (1986)

There's nothing special about this mid-'80s blow-'em-up, largely remembered today as a third-rate knockoff of Top Gun featuring some surprisingly homoerotic interaction between Lou Gossett Jr. and some wind-blown creature named Jason Gedrick. However, in many ways, it served as a blueprint for how to portray Arabs in a Hollywood movie: 1. If you have to show them at all, they should be howling, dirty-looking maniacs. 2. They all hate America and want to kill us. No reason need be given. 3. All of them are named Ali, Muhammed or Mustafa. 4. There is no particular need to even mention what country they are from -- they're all the same. 5. By the end of the movie, they should all be dead. See how easy that is? Now go make your own movies, cowboy?

THE BLACK STALLION (1979)

A well-liked children's movie based on a beloved novel, The Black Stallion is a particular disappointment because its racist depiction of Arabs gets in the way of an otherwise fine movie with some good performances and breathtaking cinematography. The movie's evil Arabs mistreat the titular stallion and then steal the boy hero's lifejacket at knifepoint (!) to save themselves; the portrayal is especially galling and cruel because in almost all Arab countries, horses are extremely well-treated and respected. In fact, the Arabian stallion the filmmakers originally hoped to use in the lead role didn't end up in the movie; its Egyptian owners were too afraid the animal would be mistreated or abused.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (2000)

Named by the ADC as "probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs in Hollywood", this grotesque William Friedkin actioner piles on the prejudice until your eyes practically roll out of your head. It starts off with hardboiled Marine Samuel L. Jackson facing down a crowd of angry protesters in Yemen (a particularly odd choice, since Yemen is a U.S. ally and the only true democracy on the Arabian peninsula) who are rioting for no reason that is ever adequately explained. Jackson's men gun down the rampaging Arabs (who die in a horribly gory mess, and are portrayed as freakish, almost inhuman monsters); when he's brought to trial for misconduct after slaughtering 83 people, a craven, politically correct diplomat finds videotaped evidence that the Arabs (naturally) attacked first, and destroys the tape lest America's standing in the Arab world be jeopardized. (A few years later, this would seem especially hilarious.) Best of all, in one scene, we are shown that nearly every one of the allegedly innocent Arabs are packing major firepower -- including a five-year-old crippled girl! Kill 'em all, SamJack, and let God sort 'em out.

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Screengrab Fall Preview: Leonard Pierce's Picks

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

So,my fellow Screengrabbers have thrown down the gauntlet, and once again, I gotta clean it up. What movies am I really looking forward to this fall? Burn After Reading, The Road and Synedoche, New York, among others. But thanks to the quirky rules we set up just to get on each other's nerves, we're trying not to repeat ourselves, so I've chosen to focus on a few films that have gone unmentioned by my beloved associates.

Of course, there's plenty to look forward to in theaters this fall above what's on my top three list below. The indie film about an Arab-American teenager's crisis of conscience, Towelhead; the wide release of the clever Assassination of a High School President; the American big-screen debut of Wong Kar-Wei's breathtaking Ashes of Time; and the mainstream debut of the sparkling Lily Rabe in the otherwise uninteresting What Just Happened are all enough to put your butt in a padded theater chair if you're a film fan. But beyond that, there's the movies I'm most -- and least -- looking forward to, beneath the cut.

3 UP

Milk: The story of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California history, would be compelling enough, but with the sporadically brilliant Gus Van Sant behind the camera and three terrific actors playing the key roles (Sean Penn as Milk, the always-compelling Victor Garber as Mayor George Moscone, and Josh Brolin as the homophobic ex-cop who becomes their assassin), this is one I'm going to look forward to until its opening night.

Miracle at St. Anna: Will this World War II epic be directed by the good Spike Lee or the bad Spike Lee? A pointless feud with Clint Eastwood during production suggests the latter, but the screenplay (by the book's author), a cast mixing young newcomers with skilled veterans, and the fact that Spike's movies are never less than interesting even when they're not great pull me towards the former and ensure I'll be in line to see this come Christmas.

Lakeview Terrace: Much like Spike Lee, Neil LaBute can deliver precise hits and broad misses. But this story about racial tension in Los Angeles is right in his wheelhouse, with its themes of hidden anger, authority abused and real ugliness burbling under residential bliss. And a menacing Samuel L. Jackson is a good Sammuel L. Jackson, as Grand Theft Auto fans can testify.

3 DOWN

Beverly Hills Chihuahua: It's a tiny little CGI dog! Who hobnobs with the rich and famous! In Hollywood! And it's got...attitide! And sass! If you need me, I'll be over here in the corner, killing myself.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist: From the asinine title to the 'gosh-isn't-New-York-uniquely-wonderful' feel to the promise of a soundtrack filled with precious tunes by indistinguishable groups of mildly sad white people to the calculated air of cuteness to the presence of one-note Hollywood darling Michael Cera, there's pretty much nothing about this movie that doesn't make me want to punch somebody.

Punisher: War Zone: Sick of superhero movies? Waiting for a real stinker to come out so that everyone will just shut up about them already? This oughtta do it.

WILD CARD

The Spirit: In the world of comics, Frank Miller -- in recent years, at least -- has developed a reputation as an exquisitely skilled artist, a craftsman nonpariel, but also a man who increasingly takes less and less care with this plots and stories, which grow ever more abstract and nonsensical as his art gets better. Which one will show up behind the camera for The Spirit? I'm afraid it'll be both, but there's no denying the appeal of the project, so I'll be taking a chance.

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Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Frank Miller Gets Into the Spirit at Comic-Con

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:04:00 GMT

Frank Miller, writes Kevin Scanlon in The New York Times, "exudes comics cred." This week, Miller will be at the opening of the San Diego Comic-Con International, where comics professionals will be honored with the presentation of the annual Eisner Awards, named for the legendary writer-artist Will Eisner. According to Scanlan, "few outside fandom have any idea" who Eisner-- who died three years ago at the age of 87, though he seemed to have been around for much longer than that and to have been active in his field for most of that time--was, and I will take his word for it, since I've spent most of my life in the company of people, myself not excepted, who were more likely to be able to recite Eisner's bibliography chapter and verse than to know how to add fractions. As the creator of the urban detective strip The Spirit (and, later, one of the first producers of a "graphic novel"), Eisner was always hailed for his "cinematic" style, his way of bringing the mood and feel of an action-packed film noir to the four-color page. So was Miller, when he first made a splash with his own take on the crime comic disguised as a superhero comic, Daredevil. (It was to humor those publishers who thought that a comics hero had to be a costumed crimefighter that Eisner drew two horizontal lines across the Spirit's face and called that a mask.) However, Eisner, who spent the last thirty years of his life trying to make a case, through his own work, for the artistic validity of comics, never made the leap to actual filmmaking. Miller did, when he collaborated with Robert Rodriguez on the 2005 big-screen version of Miller' Sin City. At that time, Rodriguez would up resigning from the Directors' Guild after they refused to let him share full credit with this uncredentialed, pen-wielding upstart. Several million dollars at the box office later--both from Sin City and the movie version of Miller's 300, a movie that is its look, and whose look was transferred complete and intact from the paper version-- Miller had little difficulty getting the go-ahead for his first solo directing project, and that project is The Spirit.

Another connection between Eisner and Miller is that, having made their names telling stories in a medium over which they had more or less complete control, neither readily took to Hollywood's free-and-easy approach to intellectual property, or its dismissive attitude towards whoever does the writing. Miller, whose Daredevil comics and origin reboot Batman: Year One are drenched in the spare imagery and dark, tilted shadows of basement-budget noir, and whose Dark Knight miniseries gave the world an older, crustier Batman recast in the mold of a Clint Eastwood hero, first dallied with Hollywood in the late 1980s, when he worked as a screenwriter on some RoboCop sequels. That experience sent him screaming back to his drawing board unti Robert Rodriguez showed up at his door, on bended knee. Now Miller is in the driver's seat, and out there selling his baby. (Also at Comic-Con this year are the movie's star, Gabriel Macht, and co-star Samuel L. Jackson. (Those who know the comic will be either relieved or sorely disappointed to learn that Mr. Jackson does not play the classic strip's most prominent African-American character, Ebony White, the Spirit's biggest male fan, and a constant source of embarrassment to contemporary readers: in keeping with the standards of the time, Ebony looked like a blob of ink with big rubber lips. He is not featured in the movie, having been cast into P.C. oblivion to keep the cast of Bob Clampett's Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs company.) As for Eisner, he fought to maintain control of his characters rather than score a payday by selling them off to the movies, and reportedly had to be talked in off the ledge after seeing a 1980s TV movie allegedly based on The Spirit. Producer Michael Uslan pitched the idea of a Spirit movie to Miller, and recalls that at the suggestion, "Frank looked at me like I was out of my mind. He said: ‘Touch the work of the master? How could I do that?’ About 10 minutes later he tapped me on my shoulder and said, ‘I can’t let anyone else touch it.’ ” Early trailers for the movie have done their best to make it look like Sin Cty 2--which is coming, and which Miller hopes will ultimately be the second film in a trilogy--but Eisner's world was very different than the bleak, monochrome vision reflected in the recent Miller comics that have made it to the movies, and Miller knows that. “The only ways [Sin City and The Spirit] resemble each other," Miller says, "are the ways that I learned from Will Eisner: the use of black and white, certainly the rapturous approach to women.” Visually, Sin City, with its hyperbolic black and white design, certainly represented some kind of apotheosis of such performers as Rosario Dawson, Carla Gugino, Jessica Alba, and Jaime King, and the cast of The Spirit includes King, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, upcoming Bond girl Stana Vatic, Sarah Paulsen (as the daughter of Police Commissioner Dolan, which means that in this company, she's the closest thing to the girl next door), and the future Mrs. Ryan Reynolds. So, you know, let the rapture begin.

Trailer Review, Comic-Con Special: The Spirit Teaser #2

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:15:00 GMT

Unlike Watchmen, I’m not especially familiar with the source material for this one. But I like this teaser’s, uh, spirit. Instead of summing up the plot of the upcoming movie, it puts its gallery of beauties front and center, as well as the title character’s weakness for them. If there’s one thing Frank Miller learned from his stint co-directing Sin City, it’s the necessity of filling up a comic-book movie with gorgeous women, and he certainly did a bang-up job here. I’m still not sure about the rest of the movie- by the time Samuel L. Jackson shows up in an SS uniform, I’d long since stopped trying to figure out the story. But if nothing else, this should be a treat for the eyes, and since it’s getting released right in the thick of Oscar season, that might be all it needs to be.

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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

Trailer Review: Lakeview Terrace

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With his past few films, director Neil LaBute has been trying to inject the truth-telling misanthropy of his early work with a genre template. But while his Wicker Man remake was risible, Lakeview Terrace looks to be a more successful attempt on his part. While violent onscreen cops are nothing new- and Samuel L. Jackson has by now played a cop more times than Dennis Farina- more interesting is the current of racism that we see in his character. All too often in movies, it's the white characters who object to mixed marriages and relationships, while the minorities nod their heads in approval at the progress we've made in society. Yet at a time when many minorities are proud of their racial identities, things are rarely that simple. So Lakeview Terrace could be fairly interesting for this reason, adding spice to what looks to be a fairly routine thriller in the Unlawful Entry vein.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) & Vincent Vega (John Travolta), PULP FICTION (1994)

For all the talk about the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking, his resurrection and reanimation of ‘70s pop culture, and the way he redefined the crime drama for a postmodern generation, there’s a profound misunderstanding of why his two most famous creations – the black-suited hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega – are so enjoyable to watch. It’s not the hip pseudo-philosophical dialogue; it’s not the bad-ass speechifying; it’s not even the rapport between Samuel L. Jackson and born-again-hard John Travolta that makes Jules & Vincent so downright charming. No, what really makes them work is that Tarantino manages to do what no one else had ever done: he transformed the story of two murderous assassins into an engaging workplace comedy. When you get right down to it, Jules & Vincent are just two working stiffs whose job happens to be a tad idiosyncratic. When they’re not filling some rip-off artist full of hot lead, they’re just like any two likeable jerks at the office or factory of your choice: they swap vacation stories, they get annoyed at each other’s long-established social tics, they blame each other for workplace fuckups, they laugh at each others’ jokes, they eat junk food together at break time, and they drive around aimlessly between jobs trying to think of something to do, whether it’s fall in love with the wrong girl or have a profound religious awakening. For all the goofy trappings, from the automatic weapons to the mysteriously glowing box to the wallet that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER, we relate so strongly to Jules & Vincent because, despite their bloody way of making a living, we recognize in them the comfortable familiarity of workplace ritual. If anyone tells me that their scenes with Harvey Keitel’s Mr. Wolfe are anything but extremely well-done sitcom detritus, we'll call them a liar to their face.

Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) & Pluto (Michael Beach), ONE FALSE MOVE (1992)

One of the scariest of the many scary moments in Carl Franklin's modern backwoods noir (which Thornton co-wrote) comes when the intelligent and more calculating member of the duo, Pluto, instructs the more volatile Ray not to flip out when they're stopped by a highway cop: "We don't want to kill him if we don't have to." Ray takes Pluto's advice on this one because he understands that Pluto is smarter than he is; it's not as if the idea that there might be reasons not to simply kill someone who poses an inconvenience to him is something he understands on any deeper emotional level. Both men are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep them free and on the move, and to pick up a little scratch on the side as they go, and both are useful to the other, though it's Pluto's genius for sizing up a situation and deciding that it's time to wipe somebody out that keeps them free and on the move for as long as they are. The fact that they're a biracial team adds sauce to the mix, even as the redneck live wire (with the black girlfriend from the South) and his cucumber-cool partner resist the urge to ever acknowledge it.

Sappensly (Robert Webber) & Quill (Gig Young), BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

If Fante and Mingo had lived to middle age, smartened up their wardrobes, and gone freelance, they might have ended up like these guys. Alfredo Garcia, a bizarre modern Western with white men in suits, equipped with planes, cars, and machine guns, tearing around Mexico in search of a guy's rotting melon that has a million dollar bounty on it, is the director Sam Peckinpah's scurviest film, a response to Hollywood's refusal to let him make the kind of movies he wanted to make, and Sappensly and Quill are probably meant as his fuck-you note to the studio executives he regarded as no better than manicured hyenas, gutless wonders, amoral killers. Peckinpah always had conflicted feelings about his characters and everything else he put on screen, and there's an unexpected, and unexpectedly affecting moment, when Quill is killed; Sappinsly looks at his body, utters his name in a voice cracking with grief, and then turns his gun on the movie's hero (Warren Oates) in what may be a desperate need to lash out at a world in which he's suddenly found himself alone or what may be a gunman's (successful) bid for suicide, forcing Oates to put him out of his misery. It's the closest thing to a moment of warm feeling in the movie.

Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) & Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

Neither of these guys looks like much of a threat; in fact one of them looks like the love child of David Crosby and Gallagher. (Putter Smith, who made his film debut as Mr. Kidd, made only a couple of other films and is actually best known as a jazz bassist. Bruce Glover played one of Jack Nicholson's "associates" in Chinatown but may now be best known as Crispin Glover's father.) Yet they manage to achieve memorability just on the basis of their archness, and for serving as the James Bond series' concession to the value of teamwork. Oddjob or Jaws would probably beat the shit out of either of them if one tried to sit at next to him in the villains' commissary, but so long as they stick together, respect must be paid: you never know what one of them might be up to behind your back while you're throttling the other. As for the homoerotic element alluded to elsewhere in this feature, it's there for sure, but it's best to not dwell on it, and not just because nobody wants to picture these guys kissing. (And make no mistake about it, we don't just mean that nobody wants to picture them kissing each other.) For all its charms, the Bond series has seldom been out front in terms of images of social progress, and the close-up of Mr. Wint appearing to leer pleasurably as Sean Connery literally shoves a bomb up his ass is not 007's proudest moment.

Eric (Eric Deulen) & Alex (Alex Frost), ELEPHANT (2003)

Standing in marked contrast to most of the murderous duos on this list are the teenage killers in Gus Van Sant’s impenetrable, elegiac evocation of the Columbine massacre, Elephant. Though one of them shares a name with the real-life Colorado school shooters, it’s not by design; like most of the characters in the film, actor Eric Deulen lends his name to his creation. Alex (played by the revoltingly compelling Alex Frost) is the dominant member of the twosome, plotting the massacre during class and delivering its terrifying final lines, but unlike most big-screen killer combos, there’s nothing flashy, clever or even wickedly likable about Eric & Alex. Though their actions are, in the end, far more costly in human lives than other big-screen killers, they are meant to be neither nightmarish horror-film bad-asses or appealing anti-heroes. In keeping with the tone of this wonderful, frightening film, they are ciphers: we know little more about them when the movie ends than we did when it began, and it’s easy to see that Van Sant made the movie not to explicate Columbine, but to mock our pretense that Columbine was explicable. A number of viewers detected an element of homophobia in the scene where the two kiss in a shared shower, but Van Sant no more suggests that repressed homosexuality is to blame for the boys’ rampage than video games, social isolation, or any one of a dozen red herrings he throws out. We greedily devour every one, so hungry are we for some hint, any hint that such a horrid, pointless waste of human life must have an explanation, any explanation. But in the end, we are left only with a lot of bodies and a pair of enigmas. That’s murder for you.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

Review: Jumper

Peter Smith — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:15:00 GMT

Editor's note: Starting this week, Nerve Film Lounge reviews and interviews will be folded into Screengrab.

Here's the score: Jumpers are people that can teleport. Bet you'd like to know how — well, too bad. Paladins are people who have been trying to kill Jumpers "since medieval times." Why? Couldn't tell you. Samuel L. Jackson says that, "Only God should have the power to be in all places." He usually says it as he unwraps a giant knife from some dusty cloth before stabbing a Jumper. I don't know if that's the Paladin motto or something. Jumper, as a movie, doesn't really tell you too much. It doesn't do much of anything, for that matter. Director Doug Liman opens the movie opens by having Hayden "Little Annie" Christensen talking about all the cool stuff he's done teleporting about the world that morning. We don't actually see Christensen doing these things, which might've helped engage us right off the bat. But Jumper tells instead of shows — and then, about a third of the way through, stops doing either.

It's a shame. The world is an exciting place, and watching people who can go anywhere in a flash should be the basis for a beautiful spectacle. Jumper doesn't show you the world though. Christensen and the movie's one other jumper, the wooden Griffin, tend to return to the same locales over and over. The Sphinx is a neat setting twice, but six times? The characters don't fare much better than the settings. Christensen's high-school love Millie (Rachel Bilson) doesn't even speak much — she just tends to look bewildered and nods a lot — and Jackson isn't particularly threatening or empathetic, since we never find out why he hates those damn Jumpers so much. I'd say that Liman missed a great opportunity with Jumper, but it feels like he did the best he could with a script about nothing. So congratulations are due to writers David Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg, who've managed to write — amazingly — the worst scenes Hayden Christensen and Samuel Jackson have ever shared. — John Constantine

The Movie Moment: Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This afternoon, Spike Lee will be awarded the Wexner Prize by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The festivities include a month-long retrospective of Lee’s work, which enabled me to finally see Do the Right Thing on the big screen. I was too young to see the film in theatres on its first release, but I’ve watched it dozens of times on VHS and DVD in the intervening years. Lee's masterpiece has been one of my favorite films for a long time, but it never had nearly as much of an effect on me as it did on this most recent viewing. As much as any widescreen epic or special-effects spectacular, Do the Right Thing practically demands to be seen on the big screen.

One important element of the film that can’t be fully appreciated at home is the way Lee re-creates the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in which the film takes place. In Do the Right Thing, this isn’t simply the backdrop for the story, but a vibrant place. Lee presents a flurry of human activity, both seen and heard, and he’ll sometimes foreground characters in one scene only to put them in the background in the next. Lee’s Bed-Stuy always feels like a place where people really live. But as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy asks, “are we gonna live together? Together, are we gonna live?”

On the hot summer day during which most of Do the Right Thing’s action occurs, the answer to Love Daddy’s question is in doubt. With so many people living on top of each other, there’s already plenty of tension in the air. There’s friction between the African-Americans and the Puerto Ricans who live in Bed-Stuy. Nobody seems happy about gentrification, personified by the Celtics-loving Clifton (John Savage). And there’s some lingering resentment towards the local business owners, a Korean family that has recently opened a convenience store, and even Sal (Danny Aiello), who for years has run the pizzeria with his sons and employs the film’s audience surrogate Mookie (played by Lee himself) as a delivery boy.

Meanwhile, smaller bits of tension pile up on top of each other. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) makes a stink about the “American-Italians only” pictures on Sal’s Wall of Fame. Sal’s son Pino (John Turturro) can’t keep his racist tendencies in check, and occasionally rails against the neighborhood and its residents. Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) Public Enemy-blasting boom box antagonizes many of those he meets, especially Sal. And then there’s the NYPD, who occasionally drive through, casting suspicious eyes in everyone. Lee shoots many of these moments at tilted angles to create unease in the audience, and the tilts grow ever more extreme as the film progresses. All the while, Lee is saying that these conflicts are a reality in our country, and all it takes is one small spark to make them explode, as they do in Do the Right Thing’s climactic sequence, in which Radio Raheem is killed by the cops and Sal’s store is burned to the ground.

Yet watching the film again, amid all the violence, I was drawn more than ever to its most empathetic character, an elderly seen-it-all drunk called Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis. Da Mayor is the most ubiquitous supporting player in the film, often hovering over the action when he’s not actively taking part in it. Several times in the film, he’s disrespected by others, but he’s kind to everyone. Even as the tension at Sal’s comes to a head, Da Mayor calls for a peaceful resolution, and eventually he leads Sal and sons away from the rioting to (relative) safety.

Most moving of all are his scenes with Mother Sister, played by Ruby Dee, Davis’ real-life wife. At first, Mother Sister puts him down, proclaiming him “a drunk fool.” Their early scenes together are shot at the same severe angles as the other arguments in the film. But after Da Mayor brings Mother Sister some flowers as a peace offering, the shot composition of their scenes changes. As the sun begins to set, Mother Sister thanks him for saving a young boy, and from this scene onward, their conversations are shot with a level frame, indicating that the friction between these two has given way to a deeper understanding for each other. As if to punctuate his point, the shot of Da Mayor reacting to Mother Sister’s thanks is framed with a streetlight in the background, and as his face brightens, the light flickers on.

At the time of its release, many critics interpreted Do the Right Thing as an attempt to incite racially-motivated violence. Perhaps they were confused with the film’s final quotations, one from Dr. Martin Luther King advocating understanding, the other from Malcolm X arguing about the intelligence of violence in self-defense. But it’s clear to me that Lee sees them as two sides of the same coin: empathize if you can, fight back if you must. Now more than ever, the film plays less as a incitement to violence than to empathy, as set forth in Dr. King’s quote:

“[Violence] is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding… It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.”

Throughout the film, characters are so intent on shouting each other down that they won’t step back and listen, and this as much as the sweltering heat finally leads to the climactic tragedies. It’s for this reason- among many, many others- that Do the Right Thing remains the crowning work of Spike Lee’s fascinating career, and one of the greatest and most important American films ever made. And that, to once again quote Love Daddy, is the quintessential truth, Ruth.

Links to previous Movie Moment posts can be found by clicking here.

Cream of the Pre-Oscar Crop: The 3rd Annual Oscar Symposium

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

With the recent rumblings that the WGA strike may soon be coming to a close, the attention of movie-lovers worldwide has turning back where it historically belongs this time of year — Oscar speculation! Now that it's looking like Oscar Night™ will have all of the glitz that we've grown to expect, those in the know can once again attempt to predict who will go home with a golden statuette, and who will be marooned in their seats or possibly even swearing to themselves within camera-range, a la Samuel L. Jackson in 1995.

Online Oscar speculation tends to be a hit-and-miss affair- plenty of self-appointed experts, but very little in the way of in-depth analysis. Thank goodness for The Film Experience's 3rd Annual Oscar Symposium, traditionally the cream of the crop for pre-Oscar discussion. Hosted as always by self-professed Oscar obsessive Nathaniel Rogers, this year's Symposium asembles a Murderer's Row of talent from the cinema blogosphere, including MSN's Kim Morgan, Nick Davis of Nick's Flick Picks, prognosticator extraordinaire Sasha Stone of Awards Daily, and longtime Screengrab favorite Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

Whereas most of these affairs tend to devolve into a lot of armchair quarterbacking, what sets the Symposium apart is that the participants aren't afraid to voice their personal opinions on the nominees. Already in its first day of discussion, the parties involved have debated the relative merits of the Best Actor nominees, with Cozzalio taking the road less traveled by championing George Clooney's understated turn in Michael Clayton over the ferocious critics' favorite, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Best of all, the relaxed format of the Symposium affords everyone ample opportunities to put forth their opinions in detail, which in these days of blurb-happy "entertainment news" is a most welcome corrective.

The Film Experience's 3rd Annual Oscar Symposium will be continuing through February 7.

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!

Morning Deal Report: This Film Is Not Approved By Barry Bonds

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Frequent sports-movie screenwriter Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, Tin Cup) is adapting the Barry Bonds expose Game of Shadows for HBO. Possible title: Don't Get a Big Head.

New Line signs a deal with Samuel L. Jackson and what do they do with it? They put him in a movie called Man Who Rocks the Cradle, as a "kid whisperer."

The Wayans brothers are back! Aren't you happy? And they're. . . adapting The Munsters?

— Peter Smith

Trailer Roundup: Jumper, P.S. I Love You, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Jumper

Okay, looks like there’s two ways this could go — entertaining silly or dumb silly. But either way, chances are pretty good that it’ll get silly, which is fine with me since too many big-budget action movies take themselves way too seriously. But then, how do you play a movie about guys who teleport (or "jump") with a completely straight face? The one thing that has me a little uneasy about Jumper is the presence of Hayden Christensen in the lead role. Sure, he’s attractive and in good shape, but when you’re casting the role of a self-centered guy who uses his super-power for his own benefit, you should probably cast someone who possesses more edge and sexual danger than a Ken doll. Jamie Bell, on the other hand, looks to be having a lot of fun, and at the very least the trailer seems to promise the Christensen vs. Samuel L. Jackson battle that was denied to them when they were playing Mannequin Skywalker and Mace Windu.

P.S.: I Love You

Now that Hilary Swank has won two Best Actress Oscars for the two good movies she's made to date, Hollywood seems committed to turning her into a major movie star, despite the fact that she’s not especially likable or charismatic. So after the inspirational-teacher drama Freedom Writers and the supernatural horror of The Reaping earlier this year, she's ready to unleash her inner Meg Ryan with P.S. I Love You. It would be one thing if this was merely sappy-looking, but the problems I have with this movie run a whole lot deeper. Like it or not, pop culture does influence our dreams and fantasies, and the idea of a movie in which a young woman's dead husband has penned a series of letters to help the woman he loves move forward after his death strikes me as more than a little dishonest. Most widowed spouses have to deal with a mountain of unfinished business and unanswered questions following the death of their loved ones, without the benefit of magical posthumous missives to guide them every step of the way. Some move on, some don’t, but they must learn to do it on their own. Besides, what fatal disease affords its victim plenty of time and energy to formulate an intricate plan to be carried out after his death? Wouldn’t he have been busy, y'know, suffering?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Normally, I dislike trailers for foreign-language films that avoid showing any subtitles. But in this case I’d say it was the right choice, since Diving Bell is the latest film from artist-director Julian Schnabel, whose films emphasize visual flair over memorable dialogue. There’s no mention of Schnabel until the very end of the trailer — strange considering that by all accounts he's hardly the self-effacing type — but between the unique imagery and the portrait of a tragic artist, there’s no mistaking who was behind the camera. And it’s nice to see Matthieu Amalric in a meaty, high-profile role like this. I know it’s been said before, but when a filmmaker decides to make The Roman Polanski Story, Amalric's really the only logical choice for the lead role.

— Paul Clark