The Screengrab : sarah jessica parker

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

MIRANDA AND STEVE, SEX & THE CITY (2008)

So, you know that whole thing about how men and women are different? Well, here’s a good example: for women, last year’s big-screen adaptation of the beloved HBO estrogen-fest was a feel-good romantic comedy, while for many straight guys, it was nothing short of torture-porn. And no, I’m not talking about Kim Cattrall’s sex-positive female drag queen Samantha, who got all the best lines and looked pretty damn hot wearing nothing but sushi. And I’m certainly not talking about the sweet pairing of Kristin Davis’ ray-of-sunshine Charlotte and her frog-prince fellah, Harry (the closest thing in the Sex-iverse to a normal, healthy relationship...albeit one padded by Davis’ relentlessly cheery demeanor, perfect cheekbones and boundless Upper East Side gelt). I’m not even talking about SJP’s Carrie and Chris Noth’s Mr. Big, two gigantic pains in the butt who truly deserve each other. No, the couple that curdles my gonads even worse than Norman Bates and his mama in Psycho or Kathy Bates and James Caan in Misery is, yes, Steve and Miranda, that terrifying nightmare combo of pussy man and man-eating pussy. David Eigenberg’s Steve is every spineless masochist convinced that low self-esteem = sensitivity, while Cynthia Nixon’s endlessly miserable harridan Miranda is the sort of castrating, ball-busting career woman stereotype that men get branded as chauvinists for perpetuating and women (at least Sex & The City fans) somehow find empowering. After months of celibacy and endless abuse, Steve finally cheats on Miranda, who subsequently withholds even more sex and unleashes even more abuse in retaliation, until she finally deigns to forgive Steve at a meeting in the middle of the usually romantic Brooklyn Bridge. But my only thought as I watched Steve (through my fingers) approaching his awful, awful wife was, “NO, STEVE! NO!!! RUN AWAY!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!” But Steve didn’t listen. Characters in horror movies never do.

HARRY LIME & ANNA SCHMIDT, THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Technically, as poisonous as it is, this shouldn’t be listed as one of the most toxic romantic duos in screen history; it really needs to be considered as a romantic triangle. In brief: Holly Martins is Harry Lime’s best friend, and Anna Schmidt is Harry Lime’s best girl. Holly Martins begins to suspect that Harry Lime is not such a swell fellow after all – as, not coincidentally, he begins to suspect that Anna Schmidt would be better off with him, anyway. Holly learns that Harry is a heel, but Anna not only doesn’t rush into the tender and loving arms of the upstanding Holly – she doesn’t give him the least bit of play, and goes on loving Harry even after it becomes clear to everyone that Harry didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. There’s so much more to this amazing, groundbreaking noir film than that, but the impossibly frustrating relationship between the three people forever remains at the center of it: Harry’ selfish, caddish treatment of the people he claims to love; Anna’s impossible devotion to a man who loves her but never as much as he does himself; and Holly’s shock at the betrayal of his friend – and even greater shock at how Anna doesn’t react in the same way as he does to that betrayal. The Third Man is filled with moving, telling moments that portray both the depth and the damage of the relationship, from Harry doodling love notes to Anna in the window of a Ferris wheel to Anna’s heartbreaking long walk at the end. What makes it even more astonishing is that the movie accomplishes all this while never even showing us Harry and Anna in the same room together.

SID & NANCY, SID & NANCY (1986)

He was the immature, unstable bassist for chaotic punk pioneers The Sex Pistols. She was a shrill American obsessed with the band. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s love affair was one for the anarchic ages, a relationship forged by heroin and defined by violence and pathetic need. Ending in 1978 when Sid stabbed Nancy to death in New York City’s famed Chelsea hotel, followed a year later by his own fatal overdose while awaiting trial for her murder, their amour was of a blisteringly dysfunctional sort, and depicted by director Alex Cox with squalid, impassioned romanticism in 1986’s Sid & Nancy. Electrified by dual lead performances from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb that reek of grungy, rancid desperation, Cox’s love story is a magnetic spectacle of sordid self-immolation, a tale of love’s consuming, destructive potential which the director – capturing both the intoxicating fervor of Sid and Nancy’s mutual infatuation and the foulness of their junkie downfall – depicts with equal parts disgust, pity and compassion.

AOYAMA & ASAMI, AUDITION (1999)

A lonely widower with a young son, TV producer Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is convinced by a friend to stage phony auditions in the hopes of finding a new spouse. That process leads him to Asami (Eihi Shiina), a prim, dainty, mysterious beauty to whom he grows dreamily attached over the course of a few dates. As implied by a scene in which she waits patiently by the phone for Aoyama’s call, Asami isn’t exactly what she seems. And neither, it turns out, is Takeshi Miike’s film, commencing like a patient, thoughtful Yasujiro Ozu-inflected domestic-drama meditation on marriage, responsibility and social pressures, and then shifting gears to become something far more unnerving. None of the director’s subtle hints at forthcoming horrors quite prepare one for the stunningly disturbing finale, which not only involves the immediate end of Aoyama and Asami’s relationship, but – viciously building upon their romance’s unequal economic, social and gender dynamics – reveals the film to be a proto-feminist nightmare custom-engineered to scar the male psyche.

WALTER NEFF & PHYLLIS DIETRICHSON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

In noir, love and sexual desire are equally deadly, driving men (noble or corrupt) to throw caution to the wind and take risks that invariably spell their doom. A prototypical example of that recklessness is the case of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman whose routine life is plunged into deadly disarray by Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a platinum blonde beauty whose body goes vroom-vroom-vroom and whose eyes promise an early grave. When Phyllis asks Walter how she might take out a policy on her husband’s life without actually informing him about it, the agent balks, but such initial protestations are as sturdy as wisps of smoke, and it’s not long before the smitten Walter is knee-deep in a scheme to knock off Phyllis’ spouse and run away with her and the substantial insurance payout. As is customary in the doom-laden genre, however, all that awaits the couple is tragedy, Neff’s ignominious end a result of fate’s cruel hand and, just as fundamentally, a foolhardy romantic fantasy unattainable in a cold, indifferent world.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

According to conventional Hollywood wisdom (which, of course, is never wrong), movies about the moviemaking process are bad box office bets, since the subject is far too esoteric for mainstream audiences, too “inside” for Joe Multiplex. Never mind that Americans are obsessed with pop culture, with every other person in the nation either writing a screenplay, uploading their own mini-masterpieces to YouTube and/or tracking box office returns, buzzworthy coming attractions and day-to-day movie star minutiae in every form of media from Entertainment Tonight and our own humble website to CNN and Cigar Aficionado magazine. And never mind the fact that movies about movies are just as likely to succeed (Get Shorty, The Blair Witch Project...yes, The Blair Witch Project! They were making a movie, remember?) or fail (that awful Alec Baldwin/John Cusack movie I rented a few months ago about a fake movie financed by the FBI...ugh) as any other genre.

Naturally, as film geeks, we here at The Screengrab have always had a special place in our black little hearts for stories about the high-powered moguls and desperate hustlers drawn like doomed moths to the lights, cameras and especially action of the Dream Factory (in all its forms).

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be rushing out to see Ben Stiller’s latest comedy (about a group of spoiled actors who start off shooting a war film and wind up in a real shooting war), but the release of Tropic Thunder does give us a chance to reflect on past favorites from our favorite post-modern genre: movies about movies!

AMERICAN MOVIE (1999)

As Spinal Tap is to rock and roll, so American Movie is to the world of low-budget independent filmmaking. Detailing working class Wisconsinite Mark Borchardt's failed attempts to launch production of his dream project Northwestern and subsequent determination to complete the 35-minute horror film Coven, Movie is both hilarious and thoroughly moving. The pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking provide some of the most uproarious moments, such as a Coven scene in which Borchardt's character shoves his support group sponsor's head through a non-breakaway cabinet door, but the film's surprising emotional depth derives from Borchardt's relationships with his family and friends, including gentle burnout Mike Schank and the increasingly decrepit and fatalistic Uncle Bill. Schank's maniacal screeching during a sound effects dubbing session and Uncle Bill's repeated attempts to nail his single line of dialogue leave some doubt as to whether Borchardt will be able to pull off his project, but the finished product reveals flashes of wit and an eye for the sort of harsh, gloomy compositions he professes to admire (as well as some admittedly Ed Wood-level writing and acting). Last time we checked, Borchardt was still hoping to make Northwestern, but even if he never pulls it off, the essence of that dream project informs this documentary, investing it with an indomitable spirit and passion for life.

STATE AND MAIN (2000)

When David Mamet set his poison pen to a Hollywood satire, the result was far from the scathing warts-and-all expose one might expect from the author of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Instead, State and Main is a frothy, good-natured screwball comedy pitting the cast and crew of what appears to be an earnest period melodrama, The Old Mill, against the residents of their filming location, the quintessentially picturesque New England town of Waterford, Vermont. William H. Macy is the exasperated director, Alec Baldwin is the leading man with a weakness for underage girls, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is the screenwriter forced to rewrite his script when it turns out Waterford doesn't have an old mill after all. The usual course of events would have the simple but good-hearted natives teaching the soulless Hollywood invaders a lesson or two about small town values, but that's not what Mamet is up to here. He knows media-saturated America has reached the point where everyone's a show biz insider; thus a scraggly pair of diner denizens chew over Variety's weekend box office figures while the cook ponders the trajectory of Warner Bros. stock since 1985. Locals and La-La-landers alike get their fair share of jabs, but the tone is generally more affectionate than condescending or malicious.

THE STUNT MAN (1980)

Richard Rush's kinetic action comedy -- in which a possibly crazy Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) on the run from the law takes refuge among the crew on a location film shoot and discovers that, compared to a bunch of Hollywood professionals, he doesn't know from craziness -- features maybe the greatest depiction of a big-time movie director ever caught on film: Peter O'Toole as Eli Cross, a megalomaniac and a madman but not a bad guy. Eli, who's trying to keep the people working under him simultaneously entertained and cowed while doing whatever he can think of to inject some purifying "madness" into the stock World War I movie he's shooting, makes his entrance in a helicopter and is often perched seated on a crane, so that he can dip into the frame from on high; "If God could do the tricks we can do," he cackles, "He'd be a happy man!" As Rush's reward for having made one of the best movies about moviemaking, he got to watch as his picture became semi-legendary for the efforts of the studio to declare it unreleasable despite fawning reviews and solid business when they booked it into a West Coast theater for a weekend just to prove that it would bomb.

THE BIG PICTURE (1989)

This was the first feature film directed by Christopher Guest, but it's not a "mockumentary"; it's a scripted comedy starring Kevin Bacon as an eager, idealistic young director whose award-winning short film gets him snatched up by a big studio, which promises him carte blanche to make his first real movie. He goes straight into the shredder head first. Far superior to Guest's more recent For Your Consideration, it features a stellar rogue's gallery of Hollywood phonies, including J. T. Walsh and Tracy Brooks Swope as revolving-door studio heads, Teri Hatcher as a starlet looking for the right shark to hook onto, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a confused young would-be artist, and most amazing of all, Martin Short as a scumbag agent. With his frizzy 'do and lying eyes, he looks like a Hobbit who found the One Ring and pawned it for a ticket to L.A.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

"Sex and the City: The Movie" : A Nation Braces Itself

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Chicago columnist John Kass offers his male readers a a "Get Out of Watching the Sex and the City Movie Card, or Kass' SATC Absolvo Carta for short. The movie recently premiered in England, and Kass points to the comment that "a regular guy named Phil" left at the Times Online, as evidence of why such a thing is necessary: "I don't think SATC is just for girls. I am a reasonably well-adjusted bloke and I am looking forward to seeing the film with my girlfriend. I am then looking forward to poking my eyes out with red-hot pokers, burning my skin off, and rolling around in salt for a while." Kass, who seems confused about his role as an opinion journalist, writes that "It is the never-ending question to the never-ending story, why men would rather chop their toes off with a rusty hoe than walk across the street to see Sex and the City. Why? Tell me why." If I do, do I get your salary? Kass himself establishes that it has nothing to do with the desire to avoid seeing something awful, since he himself boasts of his ability to watch Random Harvest, a movie that I am confident is worse than Sex and the City will be, given that a scientific study once confirmed that it was worse than leprosy and the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina. He also never brings up what's really hard to take about the TV series and what is probably too deeply engrained as an irreplaceable part of the franchise to have been dumped from the movie: that goddamn narration. Someone who once watched half an episode during the Clinton administration and was surprised to learn that I was a faithful viewer up until the show's death rattle, when Mikhail Baryshnikov was brought on to demonstrate the shallow attractions and ultimately the deal-breaking downside of a dating an aging Russian roue', could only think to ask me if the narration had gotten any better. I immediately told him ye, which is what we in the critical studies department call a lie. The truth is, if you got into the show, the narration was just something you learned to make your peace with, like Gil Grissom's pre-credits one-liners on CSI. (In that particular case, "making one's peace" is of course defined as "putting one's hands over one's ears and going, 'La la la la, I can't hear you!'")

Since need to stand up and declare that the thought of seeing the Sex and the City is shared even by people who'd rather watch Random Harvest than eat lead paint, its roots causes must be less aesthetic than sociological. It probably has something to do with what people who claim to be nostalgic for bear attacks would call the feminization of our culture. Once upon a time, a man knew he was a man because he had savages to fight and untamed lands to conquer; now he has a soft life and a 401K, so he has to prove he's a man by shrieking in horror at the prospect of seeing Sarah Jessica Parker talk about shoes. (I myself am immune to this sort of thing, being the result of a way-failed experiment to attempt to raise the perfect man. My mother used to hit me with an electric cattle prod whenever I'd leave the toilet seat up.) The movie, which went over well with its target audience at the premiere and which has been dodging rumors of a death in the family--and let me just mention that if Charlotte and Harry aren't both alive and still married at the end, I will personally torch the theater--appears set to steamroller on, so people disinclined to share a planet with it might be forced to just suck it up and adapt. The real question may turn out to be, is the movie too much of an okay thing? In her last interview, the film critic Pauline Kael said that she kinda liked the show because it took material that was too played out to power a feature film anymore and showed that it could still be used to power an entertaining half-hour time killer on TV. The movie runs two hours and fifteen minutes and was made on a budget of 65 million dollars. That's killing time with a bazooka!

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

And now, The Screengrab’s predictions for the Top 5 box office disappointments and/or outright disastrous flops of Summer 2008!

(Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Bombs, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS AN IMAGINARY FANTASY DATE WITH MIKE MYERS AND/OR SARAH JESSICA PARKER!)

5. SEX AND THE CITY

I guess I shouldn't exactly say that I'm confident this movie will be a huge failure. More like I'm praying to any god that will listen that it will be. (LP)

What kind of sick, twisted, topsy-turvy world do we live in where the promised Deadwood TV movies have never materialized, yet Sex and the City gets the full-fledged big screen treatment? No sort of world for me, I know that much. As hard as it is for me to believe that anyone on the planet still cares about the sex lives of Sarah Jessica Parker and her pals, I'm sure there are a few fans left out there. But they'll all see this on the first weekend and then it will sink like a stone. (SV)

Yes, the show has a built-in fan base, but will it be enough? The fact is, this is opening the week after Indiana Jones, and there are many more women who will buy a ticket for Indy than there are men who'll pay to see Carrie and Company on the big screen. Perhaps an early-fall release would have been a better idea? (PC)

4. SPEED RACER

Who was this movie made for? Everyone's heard of the show, but who remembers it all that well? Looks too kiddish for most adults, and too hyperkinetic for the family audience. Factor in the film's release date- the second week in May, historically a bum weekend- and the outlook here isn't promising. (PC)

Dissenting Opinion: Intersecting that demographic sweet spot where NASCAR fans, nostalgic hipsters, Japanese animation buffs, and people with nothing better to do on a hot afternoon meet, this cartoon revival will score big, and drive up sales of Steve Albini records and pet monkeys. (LP)

3. THE HAPPENING

It's not happening anymore for M. Night Shyamalan, who has seen his stock drop from Hitchcock heir to 21st century Ed Wood with each successive release. (SV)

Five years ago, the M. Night Shyamalan name would have been enough to guarantee box office. However, after The Village and Lady In the Water, the studio is going to have to step up their game to recoup their investment here. And without a Bruce Willis in the lead role, it's going to be that much harder. (PC)

DISSENTING OPINION: While I am on record as a LeBeouf hater, I’m an ardent Shyamalan apologist. For me, even his stinkers are interesting (or at least amusing), and I’m apparently the only guy in America who actually enjoyed Lady In The Water enough to put it on my year-end Top Ten List. Oh, sure, it SEEMS like it’s going to bomb...but the SHOCKING TWIST ENDING is that, y’know, it might not be a TOTAL fiasco. (AO)

2. THE LOVE GURU

Is there anyone out there who doesn't think this looks like total shit? Mike Myers appears onscreen for the first time in five years, but let's not forget that his last leading-man role was- UGH- THE CAT IN THE HAT. (PC)

Coroners examining the bomb crater will have trouble separating the remains of The Love Guru from the remains of Heather Graham’s The Guru in an adjacent crater, and will thus bury them together in the Tomb of the Unseen Faux-Indian Musical Comedy. (AO)

1. THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Taking a movie, based on a very hard-sell Marvel character (whose entire existence is predicated on violence and stupidity), which was one of the few recent superhero movies to totally bomb and remaking it only a few years later with a much worse director? Now that's a formula for success! (LP)

Marvel Studios has gone out of their way to sell this film as a completely different creature than the last movie. But will people get the message? I think they underestimate how much people disliked the last Hulk, and it's going to take a lot of good press to make audiences believe they won't get fooled again. (PC)

By the way...does anyone else think a giant green ‘roid-ragin’ CGI depiction of Ed Norton is inherently hilarious? What’s next, Sean Penn as Martian Manhunter? (AO)

Memorandum Opinion: I don't want to say I'm rooting against The Incredible Hulk exactly, but as one of the few defenders of Ang Lee's version, I would feel some satisfaction if the presumably louder, faster, dumber sequel/remake/whatever-it-is met with an even worse box office fate. (SV)

DISHONORABLE MENTION:

HANCOCK

Recent presidential elections have shown us time and again that America has no tolerance for poor moral values, like this movie with 'cock' in the title and which features Will Smith, and yet does not have a single occurrence of the phrase "Aw hell naw". (LP)

GET SMART

The appeal of the old TV show -- a number of episodes of which were written by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry -- wasn't its spy satire; it was its smart, character-driven comedy. The movie looks to go for cheap retro thrills and ultra-broad laughs, and America's love affair with Steve Carrell may have peaked. (LP)

People like Steve Carell on TV, but after last summer's Evan Almighty, his box-office clout is pretty questionable. This uninspired-looking TV spinoff probably won't counter that. (PC)

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR

Does anyone still actually care? (PC)

WANTED/HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY

2008 is the summer of comic book movies, but there's such a thing as overkill. Without the name recognition of Batman or the marketing push of Iron Man, these will probably be lost in the shuffle. (PC)

**************

The above list reflects the combined, weighted picks of four of our resident Screengrab know-it-alls. Below, our original ballots:

Leonard Pierce

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2. The Incredible Hulk

3. Hancock

4. Get Smart

5. Sex and the City

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Happening

2. Sex and the City

3. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

4. The Love Guru

5. The Incredible Hulk

Paul Clark

1. Speed Racer

2. The Incredible Hulk

3. The Love Guru

4. Get Smart

5. Wanted/Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Andrew Osborne

1. The Love Guru

2. The Incredible Hulk

3. Speed Racer

4. Wall*E

5. Hancock

-- Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Smart Person Mark Poirier: How to Become a Hot Screenwriter Sort of by Accident

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

“I didn’t even start writing until I was in graduate school,” says Mark Poirier, “and it took me a really long time to call myself a writer. I thought it sounded pretentious.” Poirier, who has published two novels and two short story collections, says that he'd now best like to think of himself as a short story writer. But when he wrote the script for Smart People, a new movie starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Thomas Haden Church, what he mainly was, was hungry. Poirier had received the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship at Paramount Pictures, but “I kind of applied out of desperation, not out of any passion to write screenplays. I’d been teaching at Portland State, in Oregon, and my contract didn’t get renewed, and I was, like: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to eat?’ ” The movie, a story about a stalled, middle-aged academic (Quaid) in which, as its author puts it, "nothing really happens," didn't even begin as a movie. It "had been living in my head for a couple of years as the novel I was going to write next. And when I couldn’t think of anything to write for a screenplay, I figured, what the hell, let’s try this.”

Now Poirier, who studied writing at the Iowa Writers' Workship, and at John Hopkins, Georgetown, and Stanford Universities, is working on film treatments based on both of his published novels, as well as a story by Alice Munro and a novel by Douglas Copeland, among other projects. The suggestion that he may presently be closer to being a working screenwriter than anything else does make him wince. But a lot of people who've labored long and hard and struggled to make connections with the idea of being able to call themselves "screenwriters" with a straight face must wish that they could run him over with a semi. I don't care how professorial you are by nature, that ought to feel kind of good.

Don’t Bet the House on Casino Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The success of 21 at the box office ($46 million and counting) probably ensures a whole new wave of casino movies on the way – not to mention a new wave of would-be geniuses who think they can beat the system crowding the tables in Vegas. James Donaghy of The Guardian takes note of Hollywood’s addiction to games of chance. “If some ball-busting genie made Hollywood choose a vice then gambling would win every time. The movies are infatuated with risk-takers: the maverick, the hopeless optimist, the plucky underdog who beats the odds. Then there's the charming conman who breaks the bank at Caesars who never has to buy another drink as long as he lives.”

Sure, it all looks easy enough in 21, with its vastly oversimplified card-counting scenario. Sadly, it’s not that easy or Las Vegas would have closed down by now. “Any casino, of course, is a fool's paradise. A mechanical moneymaking machine designed with the precision and artistry of the watchmaker to separate mugs from their money. As you watch the croupiers, dealers and pit bosses you're watching an optical illusion of fairness. Statistically, the house has an edge… There is an entire industry dedicated to catching the cheats and the city of Las Vegas is a breeding ground for the bleeding edge of high-tech surveillance technology.”

That technology includes 3-D facial recognition software, which should theoretically limit the effectiveness of the fake nose worn by Matt Damon in Ocean’s 13 or the wigs worn by the 21 gang. But Richard Marcus, “the self-declared number one expert on casino cheating,” isn’t impressed. “"Facial recognition is an absolute zero. There's not one person alive who's ever been caught by facial recognition.” That’s not to say he’s a big fan of 21 or the real-life MIT blackjack team on which the movie is based. He’s met two of the members, and “neither one would ever have had the slightest chance of joining one of my casino cheating teams.”

Donaghy concludes with “Four key movie gambling blags” (“blag” being British slang for con or scam, dontcha know), taking a gratuitously mean swipe at Sarah Jessica Parker in his take on Honeymoon in Vegas: “In a brilliant twist on an old classic, James Caan fixes a card game against Nicolas Cage so he can win something totally worthless - Sarah Jessica Parker. Much hilarity ensues (in the minds of the scriptwriters) as Cage tries to win back the thinking man's Mister Ed.” Oof. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas indeed.