The Screengrab : sarah palin

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

HAYDEN CHILDS' GUILTY PLEASURES:

ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

I'm generally bad at guilty pleasures lists because I'm not really embarrassed about my taste in pop culture, bad or good. However, some more serious-minded movie critics might mock my love of these movies. So, for your pleasure, instead of just laughing them off, here's why I like these movies. Rock & Roll High School is a Roger Corman film starring P.J. Soles as the world's biggest Ramones fan, Riff Randall. It's directed by Allan Arkush, who went on to helm such thoughtful, profound movies as Heartbeeps and Caddyshack II. Mary Woronov, the former Velvet Underground/Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancer, plays the tyrannical Principal Togar. And the Ramones play the most awesome and beloved band in the world. In the real world, they were indeed awesome, but nowhere as beloved as this movie indicates, which is what we in the business call "a crying shame." Anyway, Principal Togar has boundary issues and enjoys burning albums and generally overstepping her authority. So when the Ramones arrive in town, all hell breaks loose at her school. There's a subplot about a pretty nerdy girl getting the dorky jock guy, but it's slight enough to pass by without sticking to memory. What's important: footage of The Ramones in their prime. And then the school explodes (spoiler!).

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973)

I seem to love this movie, which is a mostly indefensible horror-Western starring Clint Eastwood. See, this town's got some bad mojo because they paid some bad dudes to kill off a crusading sheriff and then they double-crossed the bad dudes. And now, a few years later, the bad dudes are getting out of prison. Who could have foreseen this? Since when have prison terms come to an end? So, Eastwood appears out of nowhere at the beginning of the movie and immediately starts killing men and raping women because he's a real man, not some namby-pamby liberal who doesn't kill and rape. Naturally, the townsfolk decide that this guy is the guy to help them beat the bad dudes (this is also the reasoning behind the PATRIOT Act), and they go along with his increasingly insane demands because... uh, I don't know. One guy balks and Eastwood kills him, too, so I guess they're scared or something. Eastwood's character is never named, and the end of the movie suggests that he is either a supernatural entity or a semi-famous celebrity with a high opinion of himself. The supernatural angle ought to be some comfort to the women he raped in town, because ghost-rapes don't count. Or so says Camille Paglia. In the swinging spirit of bad '70s movies, both of the women are really into him after he, y'know, violates them anyway. Progressive! So, yeah, this movie is indefensible. And pretty dumb. And yet I watch some of it every single time I catch it playing on TV, which is pretty much every third night. Does this make me a bad person? My religion of choice says yes. Another note: the Wikipedia page for the film includes a picture of Eastwood on his horse with the helpful subtitle, "The stranger on the white horse is symbolic." Thanks, Wikipedia! You're the best.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

Li'l Jimmy Stewart is a golden-hearted guy with a heart of gold. And I don't know if I mentioned it, but he's a guy. This movie takes place in the 1930s, and only white guys like Li'l Jimmy could be Senators in the 1930s. And most were! At least, those that didn't live in Hoovervilles. The upper crust, if you know what I mean. Our humble director Frank Capra believes the best of the common upper-crust man, or at least, he knows that people will pay good money to hear that they're better than those fat cats in Washington. So Li'l Jimmy (known as Mr. Smith in this movie) goes to Washington as a Senator. But those bad fat cats are up to something nefarious. Something to do with earmarks or bridges to unknown destinations or some fat-cat stuff like that. But they didn't count on Mr. Smith and his golden-hearted maverick ways! Although we don't know what party (Republican!) Mr. Smith is in (Republican!), he bucks the fat cats in a crazy, awe-inspiring filibuster. Yes, a filibuster! The parliamentary procedure whereby a legislator talks for an infinite number of hours about anything that strikes them. It's crazy and awe-inspiring, I say! And much better in montage than real time. Anyway, blah blah maverick blah. After 45 straight days of talking (while the awestruck galleries fill up with spectators, because what person in their right mind could resist an extremely privileged white guy talking about whatever comes to mind for hours upon hours? I get chills just thinking about it), Li'l Jimmy is turning into a broken shell of a man. But then! The indulgent Vice-President presiding over the Senate (or is he the Senate Majority Leader? I don't know. Or care.) smiles at him. And IT'S ON! Suddenly Boy Scout-proxies are trumpeting the news all over his state! And in the face of his waning blather, all the bad-guy fat-cats admit that their earmarks are no match for his mavericky ways and then they all cheer and elect Sarah Palin to be President. WOW! Someone give this movie an award!

Shoot, I forgot to say what I like about all this hokum. But I think the clip says it better than I could.

HOOPER (1978)

In the coveted Oscar category of Burt Reynolds Movies Involving Rocket Cars, there's little that can stand up to Hooper. Directed by former stuntman Hal Needham and starring Reynolds, Sally Field, Jan-Michael Vincent, Brian Keith, and Robert Klein, it's an attempt to recapture the successful hicksploitation (thanks for the term, Scott!) of the previous year's Smokey And The Bandit. Reynolds plays the greatest stuntman who's ever lived, who finds himself being pushed into an extensive stunt involving multiple explosions and the aforementioned rocket car. Despite the constant jokey macho bullshit in the movie, Hooper features a surprisingly tender and complex relationship between Reynolds and Field. And there's a lot of darkness in the depiction of the downside of stuntman life. Who would have guessed that constantly hurting yourself and risking danger could have potentially dire consequences? Not me.

SWEET TALKER (1991)

I've never actually seen this Aussie romantic comedy starring Karen Allen during her lost years, but the soundtrack was composed and performed by cult musician Richard Thompson. Coincidentally, I wrote a book about an album by Mr. Thompson and his ex-wife called Shoot Out The Lights and, seeing as how the holiday season is almost upon us, I thought I would mention it here. Self-promotion: the guiltiest pleasure of all!

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Unwatchable #63: “Alone in the Dark”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Of the many fine and noble reasons to take on this Unwatchable project (a paycheck, an outlet for repressed hostility, an excuse to put off watching Berlin Alexanderplatz), the chance to familiarize myself with the oeuvre of Uwe Boll certainly ranks…somewhere. We pick on him a lot here, so it seems only fair that I ensure it’s justified. The first Boll work we encountered was BloodRayne 2: Deliverance back at #77, and this was my conclusion: “I have to assume this is not close to Uwe Boll’s worst work, because it’s pretty much indistinguishable from any other straight-to-video genre junk.”

Alone in the Dark is probably a step closer to Boll’s worst work. Like BloodRayne 2 and most of the Boll filmography, its origins lie in the ancient Japanese art of the “videogame.” The movie begins with the longest expository crawl I have ever encountered. You could combine all the opening crawls from every episode of Star Wars, including the ones about galactic trade routes, and they wouldn’t add up to the length of this thing. So much back story, so little need for it. It has something to do with an ancient advanced race of Indians called the Abnaki, who opened the portal to the world of darkness and let all the booga-boogas out.

Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a former agent for Bureau 713, the government agency of paranormal investigations (Your tax dollars at work under the Bush administration!), is haunted by these whatsihoosies, both in his dreams and in his real life, where they have taken over the bodies of people who grew up in the same orphanage as he did. Along with his girlfriend, the brilliant anthropologist and museum curator Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), and the forces of Bureau 713, headed up by hothead Burke (Stephen Dorff), he must defeat these computer generated beasties before they do all the terrible, terrible things.

It’s basically a cross between a zombie movie and an Aliens ripoff, with a little dash of Indiana Jones, but it would all be instantly forgettable if not for the deranged casting. Much has been made of poor Tara Reid in her thick glasses and hair-in-a-bun, trying to act all smart and stuff. And it’s true, one does have difficulty maintaining a straight face when she talks about “decoding the pictograms” or mispronounces “New-FOUND-land.” It’s like watching a Sarah Palin interview, which is not an experience I’ve been anxious to relive quite yet. But let’s not be sexist here. Can we not agree that Slater makes an equally implausible genius investigator, and that Dorff is perhaps a little out of his depth as a leader of men? It’s as if the bus carrying the entire drama club plunged over an embankment, and the drama coach was forced to recast the school play with the head cheerleader, the backup quarterback and the guy who makes bongs in wood shop.

All things considered, though, Alone in the Dark is a mighty tedious cacaphony of automatic gunfire and bad special effects. I'm still waiting for Dr. Boll to impress me with some Ed Wood-grade lunacy. Don't let me down.

Previously on Unwatchable:
64. Angels’ Brigade
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam

The Barack Obama Film Festival

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Our British friends are delighted with America’s choice as new president, which hasn’t always been the case. (Who can forget the Daily Mirror headline from four years ago, “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?”) In fact, they’re already prepared with some advice for President-elect Obama, even if that advice is as seemingly unimportant as the five films he should watch before taking office.

As Xan Brooks notes in The Guardian, Obama’s favorite film is The Candidate. “Robert Redford's idealism harks back to a better day. That said, my team won't let me watch the end for some reason.” In case you’ve forgotten, Brooks reminds us the film “ends with Redford's hero unable to cope with his victory; so drained and compromised by the campaign that he loses sight of why he ran in the first place. ‘What do we do now?’ he murmurs, as the mob runs in to claim him.”

Brooks understands that Obama may not have a lot of couch time between now and January 20, but he does offer five movies for the incoming president’s consideration. They include The Grapes of Wrath (“an angry, humane account of the last Great Depression”) and Nashville (‘a warts-and-all celebration of the American melting-pot”) as well as the cautionary tale A Face in the Crowd. Maybe Sarah Palin can take some time over the next four years to check that one out.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

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

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

And Bob Hoskins As Joe The Plumber

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Well, we figured it was only a matter of time. I suppose we're just lucky it's the still somewhat respectable Los Angeles Times who's doing it, instead of, say, the New York Post, or worse yet, the National Review.

We're talking about casting the lead roles in the 2008 election, which, if it ends anything as crazily as it's played out so far, will be in theaters near you by around 2010 at the latest. (Of course, that depends on who wins. There may not be any theaters near you by 2010 if it's the G.O.P. candidate.) The Times has decided to put their best guesses to filling the big-screen roles of the candidates and their various First Ladies and Gentlemen, and their choices run the gamut from obvious (Tina Fey as Sarah Palin) to intriguing (James Caan as Joe Biden) to inexplicable (Paul Giamatti as John McCain?).

Will Smith as Barack Obama seems like a boringly safe choice; why not Don Cheadle, or our personal favorite pick, Anwan Glover? You gotta take risks sometimes, in casting no less so than in politics. What about you, Screengrab readers? Who would you cast as the 2008 contenders and their spouses?

Warners DVD Keeps John McCain Interview Under Lock and Key

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

SHIA LABEOUF

Like Sarah Palin (but far less scary and secessionist), “The Boof” was plucked from relative obscurity and forced down America’s collective throat despite a staggering lack of qualifications for a job that any number of people could do better. Unlike Palin, whose ascendancy was engineered for cynical political advantage, I have no idea why Hollywood in general (and Steven Spielberg in particular) picked LaBeouf as their Gen-Y A-List representative...but for now I guess we’re stuck with him (and since I already posted a longer rant on the subject back in April, I’ll leave it at that...at least until Stockholm decides he’s ready for his Nobel Peace Prize for, y’know, bein’all peaceful an’ shit).

ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'll grant you that this one is like shooting fish in a barrel – but if you're going to set a barrel of fish in front of me and hand me a gun, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's not as if I'm a lifelong Williams hater. I was there when he debuted as Mork from Ork on a 1978 episode of Happy Days; I even remember taping the show (on audio cassette – this was pre-VCR) and listening to it over and over. (This was perhaps the 374th dorkiest thing I did in 1978. Number 212 was dressing up as Mork for Halloween, although my mother did a fabulous job with the costume.) I had his comedy album, Reality, What a Concept, some of which I even understood. He was a fine Popeye, and although it's been many years since I've seen either The Survivors or Moscow on the Hudson, I remember liking them at the time. So when did it all go awry? Some would point to Dead Poets Society, and certainly the seeds of sentiment and sanctimony were planted there, but I would argue in favor of Awakenings, in which those seeds sprouted into the Sensitive Man Beard. Into the early '90s, Williams could still garner critical acclaim by hacking through the same eight voices he always uses in Aladdin, but after a sickly stretch including Jumanji, Jack, Father's Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man, defenders were harder to come by. (Somewhere in there he won an Oscar by breaking out the SMB again for Good Will Hunting, but I'd like to think a re-vote today would send it to Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights instead.) After a brief but failed flirtation with a "dark phase" (including One Hour Photo and Insomnia), Williams has returned to serving up his patented cocktail of shtick and schmaltz. By 2007's License to Wed, even he seemed to be tired of his own act.

EWAN McGREGOR

McGregor first attracted attention for his work in the films of director Danny Boyle, with whom he was supposed to have some Scottish, post-MTV Scorsese-and-De Niro thing going on. In Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, McGregor had the most prominent and sympathetic of the three main roles, alongside Kerry Fox, who made him her bitch, and Christopher Eccleston, who out-acted him into the next county. They followed that up with the much bigger hit Trainspotting, where Robert Carlyle swabbed the screen with him. The Boyle-McGregor partnership finally came to an acrimonious end when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, thus sparing McGregor the chance to have his clock cleaned by Tilda Swinton. (They also worked together on A Life Less Ordinary, another movie full of actors who might have easily stolen it from Ewan, except who would have wanted it?) On his own, McGregor has provided evidence of an adventurous spirit by agreeing to star in several of the most unpleasantly misconceived big projects of the last dozen years, including Peter Greenaway's pervy art exhibit The Pillow Book, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, and David Mackenzie's lyrical ode to post-coital depression, Young Adam. McGregor also acted and sang in Todd Haynes' glitter rock movie Velvet Goldmine, where his famous and often-exposed physique, while certainly hunky enough as the physiques of pampered, hard-drinking young Scottish actors go, looked a little marshmallowy for someone who was meant to be Iggy Pop; however, we like the suggestion brunted by some admiring reviewers that this made it easier to accept that he was really meant to be Iggy and Lou Reed. His most high-profile role since Trainspotting was, of course, that of the young Ob-wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Better actors than Ewan had trouble making their presence felt in those pictures, so it would be wrong to be too hard on him for that chapter of his career, though it does seem amazing that anyone could picture this guy someday turning into Alec Guinness. One hates to be too hard on McGregor for anything, really: unlike some names on this list, not to mention a whole lot of more talented people, he seems like a nice guy, and he's generally not painful to watch. It's just that, seeing him acting in a movie, you often find yourself staring at him and wondering where the rest of the donut went.

CLINT EASTWOOD

Sergio Leone, the director who made Eastwood a star with the Italian Western A Fistful of Dollars, once told an interviewer that, "When Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses," adding that he cast Clint after experiencing the same epiphany, except in reverse: watching Eastwood in action, "What I saw, simply, was a block of marble." The canny Leone would make some terrific pictures with that block of marble, and once the marble was established as the biggest international movie star in the world, he would go on to make a lot of other, shittier movies with a lot of lesser directors, a roll call that includes himself. During his peak years as a movie star, Eastwood established himself as the king of his thing: monolithic, inexpressive, yet implicitly self-righteous in his need to dish out retributive (and pre-emptive) violence to anyone who had it coming to him, which in most of those movies is anyone who's on-screen who he isn't fucking or who isn't played by an orangutan. Back in those days, the conventional wisdom on Eastwood was that it might be fun to watch him pistol whip people on screen, but that you wouldn't want to admit to being a fan if you were applying for a government job. But whatever you think of his earlier action hits, for the last couple of decades we've been sharing the planet with Clint the Auteur, the increasingly hard-to-listen-to, sinewy old guy with the glare of an Old Testament prophet and the voice of a rattlesnake's death rasp who keeps sliding behind the camera to direct a long string of ever more obvious movies with creaking joints that are invariably hailed as masterpieces by people who must need to get their eyeballs oiled. It's easy to think of other cases where it took the critics a while to catch up with an American original, but sometimes they do get it right the first time. John Huston -- who Clint impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart, something he had as much business attempting as Huston himself would have had playing Shirley Temple -- said in Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough, and there's a little of all three in Eastwood.

NICOLE KIDMAN

Between Dead Calm, the 1989 Australian thriller that was her first film released in the U.S., and her Hollywood debut the next year in Days of Thunder, Kidman's onscreen image seemed to lose ten years and at least that many brain cells. Her '90s screen partnership with her then-husband Tom Cruise, which also resulted in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut, was like some post-modern parody of the public marriage and tie-in movie career of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, itself no great moment in the history of human dignity. By the time it was over, any personality or expressive qualities that Kidman ever had were smothered in "glamour." If she's really a star, then she's a star of a very strange kind, with an odd, limited sort of appeal: she's had her greatest successes playing characters who the audience is meant to want to strangle (as in To Die For and Malice) or in movies where somebody already beat us to it: her best performance, by miles, was in the ghost story The Others, where she was completely convincing as a woman so tightly buttoned up and horribly repressed that she didn't even know she was dead. Since the divorce from Tom Cruise, in which she seemed to win official custody of the media and the industry's solicitous respect, she's picked her roles like a politician with a desire to cover as much ground as possible without offending anyone, and they've been a testament to the awfulness of her taste: jumping at the chance to miscast herself in Oscar-bait literary adaptations like The Hours, The Human Stain, and Cold Mountain while courting the groundlings in terribly misconceived remakes of The Stepford Wives, Invasion (as in "of the Body Snatchers"), and the TV series Bewitched. Having some arch, boring glamourpuss making movies for them seems to give studio heads a kick, at least for a while: in 2006, Kidman was the most highly paid actress in movies, even though a look at the returns on her films made it seem that she couldn't draw crows to a cornfield at sundown.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Dead-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed: Dubya in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Slate offers a timely rundown, in the form of a video slide show by Elbert Ventura, on the ways in which George W. Bush has been represented in movies and TV lo these last eight eventful years. I'll admit that I needed reminded that the decision to cast Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W. probably hit Timothy Bottoms pretty hard. For a brief moment there in the early 1970s, his roles in such pictures as Johnny Got His Gun, The Last Picture Show, The Paper Chase, and The White Dawn made it seem as if Bottoms was Hollywood's favorite sweet, slightly boring hippie lead, but when the wave of counterculture films rolled back into the oceans of time, Bottoms's career began to resemble a beached whale that had been out in the sun for a few days. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker cast him in That's My Bush!, their short-lived parody sitcom that treated life at the White House as a string of broadly played shenanigans accompanied by a shrieking laugh track. The show, which had already begun development under the provisional title Everybody Loves Al before the Supreme Court announced that it was recasting the lead role, wasn't exactly long on precisely targeted political satire: in one memorable episode, wacky high jinks ensued after Laura overheard George talking about his desire to have the family cat put to sleep because of the animal's foul, unhealthy odor and assumed he was talking about the pungent aroma of her gynecological region. (Odd to think that in the course of more than 190 episodes, I Love Lucy never went there.) But Bottoms managed to spin his Bush impression off into a cameo in the Crocodile Hunter movie and then a dramatic starring role in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime cable TV movie that was produced and written by professional "Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd. It was a stroke of casting both obvious and very weird, sort of as if Tina Fey were to star in a celebratory feature-length biopic about Sarah Palin. Of course, the difference between Bottoms in 2003 and Tina Fey now is that Fey has other career options.

DC 9/11 was first broadcast four days short of the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In other words, at a point (four months after the "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln) when many Americans felt that the Iraq War was won and concluded, and just as the actual Bush was warming up his re-election campaign. It's a very pure propaganda movie, with Bottoms playing a resolute, on-top-of-things commander in chief who explicitly connects the case against Saddam Hussein to the need to protect the nation from terrorism and to avenge the lives lost on 9/11. It's a measure of the national mood at that time that the film didn't arouse much in the way of head-shaking or tongue-clucking in the mainstream media. But as it became clear that the war wasn't going to be one of those little problems that can be wrapped up in the course of one man's eight years in offices--not this man, anyway--and support for it began to plummet, it became less common to see Bush depicted onscreen as a one-man Mount Rushmore. But the funny thing is that, even as Bush began to be portrayed as stupid and inept and gutless, he continued to be portrayed as, well, kind of sympathetic. The original media cartoon of Bush, as captured in the campaign-diary documentary Journeys with George (co-directed by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra), was that he was a dopey but lovable regular guy, who might as well be given the country to run, since everyone knew it wasn't that hard. Then, after a brief interlude in which Bush was portrayed in the media as a down-home cross between George Washington and Nick Fury, the earlier stereotype was reinstated, with the new fillip that being lovably dumb didn't qualify run to be leader of the free world--but how can you blame such a nice guy for that?

When the nice but dumb Bush made his comeback, it was in such movies as the global-warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which the sweetly dense president (Perry King), looking lost and frightened, politely asks his Cheneyesque vice president if there's anything he should do in response to the end of the world. The scene is a stand-in for the Bush administration's original answer to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, a scene that Oliver Stone declined to stage: what the hell happened between the time Bush set down that copy of The Pet Goat and the time he next showed his face on TV. (The Day After Tomorrow actually kills the Bush stand-in off quick, the better to shift the blame for everything that's gone wrong to the Cheney figure, played by Kenneth Welsh--to you Twin Peaks, the actor who played Windom Earle, the serial psychopath who tied Major Briggs to an archery target and failed to closely examine the fine print on his contract regarding his capacity to ask visitors to the Black Lodge for their souls.) For even softer treatment of Bush, you can turn to such "satires" as American Dreamz and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which portray Dubya as a friendly middle-aged frat boy who is either ignorant of the effects of his own policies or too cowed by his own advisers to take a stand--at least until some righteous weed and male bonding has had its effect.

In W., Stone, too, treats him as basically a nice, well-meaning guy hobbled by his inability to overcome his daddy issues. (And for good measure, he has James Cromwell playing the dithering, unfeeling Bush, Senior as a noble, aristocratic Rudy Vallee type whose greatest crime is to tear up when Bill Clinton hands him his ass at the polls.) It will irritate many Bush haters to see him continue to evade responsibility like this. On the other hand, it may be a sign that however lingering the effects of his presidency will be, Bush's personal mark on history may be slight and transient. After all, the modern president who still looms largest in the national imagination may be Richard Nixon, who is also the one who has turned up in the most movies behaving like a cross between Dracula and a James Bond villain. For that matter, movies of the last eight years have done less to hold Bush responsible for the effects of his presidency than '90s movies like Primary Colors, Wag the Dog, and Absolute Power did to hold Bill Clinton to task just for his inability to keep it in his pants. As Elbert Ventura points out, the meanest version of Bush to turn up onscreen is probably the American president played by Billy Bob Thornton in Love, Actually, who bullies the British prime minister--Hugh Grant playing a fantasy of Tony Blair as a likable lonely guy--until the P.M. catches him hitting on his own object of romantic desire, at which point he hitches up his britches and marches to the nearest bank of microphones to stand up to the little toad. In other words, to get an unsympathetic version of George W. Bush into a movie, you have to jump to another continent and give him Bill Clinton's zipper problem.

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "W."

In Other Blogs: Hangover Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You’ll have to excuse my disheveled appearance and fogginess of mind this morning, but the Red Sox made me drink a lot last night. Was that an amazing comeback or what? Am I right? Huh? Oh, right. Movies. Let us segue through this Beyond the Multiplex post on Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, as Andrew O’Hehir ponders his love for Madge and the obstacle in his way. “Does A-Rod possess the spiritual and/or aesthetic wealth that Madonna and I share? I say nay. He may not, for instance, recognize the precise odor of hipster familiarity surrounding Filth and Wisdom, which seems like a movie Jim Jarmusch might have started in 1991 and then abandoned because it wasn't going anywhere. Filth and Wisdom isn't laughable or embarrassing; instead it's rather sweet and 100 percent recycled, which might not be a bad way of describing its creator at this vulnerable time in her personal and professional life. It's a little bit Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a little bit John Waters, a little bit Darren Aronofsky, a little bit (God help us) Desperately Seeking Susan. It's dumb. I sort of liked it.”

At his new blog Hollywood & Fine, Marshall Fine disagrees. “The phrase ‘Madonna’s directorial debut’ does not so much trip off the tongue as sound like a punchline, which is appropriate in this case. Based on Filth and Wisdom, she hasn’t lost her knack for creating unwatchable cinema. Filth and Wisdom is a silly stew of phony profundity that will have you checking your watch almost as soon as the movie starts. Like Hiro on Heroes, Madonna has mastered the ability to make time stop – or, at least, crawl. Are we there yet? No, sorry, better settle in for a long slog.”

Did you know that the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent has a blog called, oddly enough, The Phil Nugent Experience? Not only is it the finest source of hilarious and insightful political coverage in all the Bronx, but occasionally Phil even writes about movies. What can I say – the man loves his job so much, he does it in his spare time. Here Phil defends the unloved Intolerable Cruelty. “For me, the Coens' fun machines tend to turn cold without a strong, magnetic performance at their center. The warming star power at this movie's core is generated by Clooney, who parodies his own image by magnifying his golden boy attractiveness to such a degree that the gap between it and the Miles's myopic, self-enthralled fatuousness becomes an amazing thing to behold. (It's much more entertaining than seeing him send up his image in Burn After Reading by having the other characters react to him as if he were the irresistable George Clooney even though he seems to be imitating Warren Oates.)”

It’s never too early for Halloween at Arbogast on Film, now in the midst of a month-long 31 Screams celebration. Today he looks at the original 1958 version of The Fly. “I'm not sure what to make of the flyman. As most of the dead scientist's intelligence was retained within his manfly brain, there obviously isn't much left for that of the flyman... who screams pitiably as he meets his doom. His voice is high-pitched - just within the range of human hearing - but his pleas are unmistakeable. ‘Help me,’ he cries out. ‘Help me.’ And as the spider draws closer, it sounds as if he is yelling ‘Go away... go away’ to the spider in childish desperation. And that's just it-- this scene horrifies, it cuts to the bone because it's like watching a child being murdered right in front of you.”

And finally, with W. arriving in theaters today, our good friends at Spill have reimagined Oliver Stone’s film as a Sarah Palin biopic:

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community<

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 4-10, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hi, folks. I'm Lance, the Screengrab's monkey intern, and I'll be handling the Highlight Reel this week. Frankly I asked for this opportunity to address you today because I'm simply sickened that a few bad apples have once again set back my community's efforts to be taken seriously. Folks, it's hard out here for a chimp. Yet we've got these bozos in Japan running around with bottles of Jager for a handful of magic beans. Now it's true that I'm not compensated monetarily here at Nerve, but that's because it's an internship, fer crying out loud! Soon I'll be an editor here, and I'll be able to put an end to insulting stuff like this Top 25 Leading Men list. I keep asking the Screengrabbers, where is the list of top leading monkeys? They keep saying they'll get around to it, but I see them laughing when they think I'm not around. Sure, they'll throw me a bone by reviewing Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood, but they treat it as a joke! Believe me, folks, there are statues of Cheeta where I come from.

Anyway, I guess I've got to pretend that some of the stuff these clowns wrote is worth reading, so here are your highlights of the week:

New Reviews: Ashes of Time Redux, Fireproof, An American Carol

When British Comics Attack: Simon Pegg vs. Ricky Gervais

Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals (ha ha, very funny)

Ozsploitation! Razorback (more like pigsploitation, if you ask me)

Special Election Year Report

Dylan in the Movies

How Not to Interview Faye Dunaway

Nick Nolte Does His Own Stunts

Fargo's Marge Grills Sarah Palin

Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Clarifies

Mark Wahlberg Talks To Animals

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Tina Fey's potentially game-changing impression of Sarah Palin has been the featured attraction on Saturday Night Live for the past three weeks, but since this is neither a TV blog nor (ostensibly) a political blog, let us turn our attention instead to bona fide movie star Mark Wahlberg...or, to be more specific, "Mark Wahlberg Talks To Animals," one of the highlights of this past weekend's unusually strong SNL, and another great moment for Andy Samberg, whose two second cameo in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is the latest evidence he's may be slowly building to a smart, impressive feature film career (Space Chimps and Hot Rod notwithstanding).

Maybe he's best in small doses (and I'll write more about Samberg's brilliant, surreal contributions to the history of SNL's short films in an upcoming post), but for now, enjoy or re-enjoy the previously untapped comic possibilities of Mark Wahlberg and a goat (and say hi to your mother for me)!

Video of the Day: Fargo’s Marge Grills Sarah Palin

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Ever since Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene with her speech at the Republican convention, cinephiles have noted a certain familiar quality to her folksy manner of speech. The sing-songy cadence, flat vowels and cheery-yet-hostile “you betchas” – we’ve heard all that before. It wasn’t from the mouth of an Alaskan hockey mom, but a pregnant police chief in Brainerd, Minnesota – Marge Gunderson (Oscar winner Frances McDormand) from Fargo. (Although Roger Ebert suggests there may be a more apt comparison from the same film: “But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman's logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn't have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, ‘M'am, I been cooperatin' with ya here.’”) For those of us who wouldn’t mind seeing Palin interrogated by the straight-shootin’ yet persistent Gunderson rather than Gwen Ifill, some enterprising YouTuber has given us our wish.

Unwatchable #66: “Jail Bait”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

At last, it’s Ed Wood! For months I’ve been dutifully trudging my way up this list of the 100 worst movies of all time, and somehow made it a third of the way through without encountering a single work by the man celebrated far and wide as the worst filmmaker ever. I suppose that makes sense, in that the most notorious Wood works – the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda – must be lurking near the top of the chart. It so happens that I’d never seen Wood’s second feature, Jail Bait, so this promised to be quite a treat. We’re huge jailbait fans here at the Screengrab…er, in the cinematic sense, that is.

Wood’s work is tough to rank on the Unwatchable scale, just because he’s usually at his most watchable when he’s at his worst. That is, his bizarre mix of enthusiasm and incompetence only soars when he goes completely off the deep end, as in Plan 9 or Bela Lugosi’s infamous “Home? I have no home” monologue from Bride of the Monster. Jail Bait is as shoddily constructed as you’d expect, but the goofy juice doesn’t really get flowing until the last ten minutes or so.

The story concerns handsome young doofus Don Gregor, son of the famed plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor. Instead of lounging around the house and spending his dad’s money, Don has taken to hanging out with low-rent mobster Vic Brady. One night the cops pick Don up for carrying a concealed weapon and his sister Marilyn has to bail him out. (Marilyn is played by Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller, who no doubt worked for free and gives a performance worth every penny.) Marilyn lectures Don that she won’t do so again: “That gun is jail bait!” Wait – the gun is jail bait? Oh, Edward D. Wood, Jr.! I see what you did there! You got me again.

Don doesn’t heed his sister’s warnings – instead, he goes ahead with Vic on a planned robbery and ends up killing a security guard in the process. Vic shoots a witness who survives and can identify both men. The cops (including a pre-Hercules Steve Reeves) go to Dr. Gregor and urge him to convince his son to turn himself in. Before Don can do so, Vic kills him. But how can Vic evade arrest himself? Simple! He’ll blackmail Dr. Gregor into performing plastic surgery on him, promising to return Don alive if the doc gives him a new, unrecognizable face.

Dr. Gregor is prepared to go along with the plan, until he pokes around Vic’s kitchen and finds his son’s corpse standing upright in the pantry. He gives Vic a new face, alright – spoiler alert! – but it’s the face of Don Gregor! The cops arrive on the scene to arrest him for murder, but Vic-with-Don’s-face flees and is gunned down, flopping face-first into the pool.

To be sure, many of the classic Wood virtues are on display here: the cardboard sets, the absurd mix of catatonic and scenery-devouring acting styles, the Sarah Palin dialogue (“I hope I’m happy to know ya.” “South America! The foreign countries! Where we’ll live like kings!”), the 71-minute running time padded out with 26 minutes worth of footage of cars pulling in and out of driveways. There’s even an utterly gratuitous shot of Steve Reeves putting on his shirt, and I haven’t even mentioned the inanely insistent zither score that will probably follow me to the gates of hell. I know it all sounds good, but it mostly plays like a dull episode of a ‘50s cop show. Only the big twist ending, with the unveiling of Vic’s new face (a scene that surely influenced Ed Wood director Tim Burton’s revelation of the Joker’s face in the 1989 Batman) reaches the heights of top-shelf Wood (or the lows of bottom-drawer Wood, depending on how you look at it).

Previously on Unwatchable:
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam
69. The Perfect Holiday (pending)
70. Epic Movie
71. Gigli