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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Digest for December 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the big studios continue to roll out their summer releases, and the holiday DVD cash grab continues.

DVD of the Week: While it certainly isn’t the most revered movie getting a DVD release this week, I’d say that the new Criterion Collection edition of Sam Fuller’s White Dog is almost certainly the biggest DVD news. A controversial indictment of violence and racism, Fuller’s adaptation of Romain Gary’s story was withheld from theatrical release in 1982 due to its subject matter and violence, which essentially killed Fuller’s career in the U.S. Now, after more than a quarter of a century, White Dog is finally getting a home video release for the first time, in Fuller’s original “uncut” version. Criterion has included a handful of special features on this DVD, but really- isn’t the fact that the film is out there for everyone to see enough?

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the second installment of the C.S. Lewis-penned fantasy series; James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie in Wanted (Universal, also Blu-Ray); Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly’s sibling rivalry writ large in Step Brothers (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mulder and Scully’s return to the big screen in The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Ice Cube in The Longshots (Weinstein Company), a film by Fred Durst; and Bam Margera Presents: Where the #$&% Is Santa? (Warner, also Blu-Ray), a title I’d say speaks for itself.

Aside from White Dog, the highlights of the week’s classics on DVD are: The Day The Earth Stood Still Special Edition (Fox, also Blu-Ray), a tie-in with the upcoming remake, featuring numerous new extras; and Casablanca Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which is basically the same old edition in a snazzy new package.

Only one major TV on DVD release, but it’s a doozy: Saturday Night Live: The Complete Fourth Season (Universal).

Finally, plenty of Blu-Ray only releases this week. There’s Mike Myers telling the same half dozen jokes again and again in Austin Powers Collection (Warner)! The Christmas mayhem double feature of Home Alone (Fox) and Jingle All the Way (Fox)! A double dose of Luc Besson with La Femme Nikita (Sony) and Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Sony)! The first installment of the would-be X-Files movie franchise, The X-Files: Fight the Future (Fox), coincidentally released the same day as the DVD of the second movie! And finally, the perennial IMDb favorite and TNT standby, The Shawshank Redemption (Sony)!

Video of the Day: John Belushi's Screen Test

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Closing in on what would have been John Belushi's 60th birthday, debates rage about whether he was really a brilliant comic whose career was cut tragically short before he had time to become great, or just a talented comedian who died before he had a chance to embarrass himself. We lean towards the former argument, and this clip gives you an idea why.

By the time this brief clip for what was then being called The Saturday Night Show was recorded, the then 26-year-old Belushi didn't have to try out for anything -- he was already a lock to make the cast. But it still captures him at the pinnacle of his clowning, mocking the whole idea of screen tests: he starts out doing a few absurd "warm-up" exercises, then goes on to riff a gross improvisation on live television, and heads into a goofy parody of Marlon Brandon's own screen test for The Godfather -- a movie that was then only a few years old.

Snake Plissken Meets Chewbacca

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So, I didn’t intend this to become a series, but here it is: my THIRD post about supercool and nerdy Star Wars shit I’ve stumbled across on YouTube while looking for other Screengrab stuff.

This time around: Plissken.

Remember that SNL skit where they had funny fake auditions for Star Wars from the likes of Christopher Walken, Richard Dreyfuss and Walter Matthau? (If not, just click above!)

Anyway, today’s gift from the magical land of YouTube is the real Kurt Russell (!) auditioning for the role of Han Solo (!!!!), side by side with a clip from Harrison Ford’s audition.

Did Lucas make the right decision? You decide! (And then, y’know, keep it to yourself, so Lucas won’t get the bright idea to go digitally replace Ford with Russell in some new updated Special Edition first trilogy release.)

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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)!

David Spade: The Real Love Guru

Phil Nugent — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Did you have a guy in high school who always seemed to effortlessly attract all the girls you were interested in, and you never could figure out why? I had a guy like that, and I'd just like to take a moment to mention that I recently had a very enjoyable conversation with one of my relatives who still lives in the old country who called to ask if I still remembered that guy, and to let me know that the indictments are expected to be handed down any minute now. Turns out I had it pretty easy next to J. R. Moehringer, who in the current issue of Los Angeles magazine reveals that, in his high school class, that guy was David Spade, the former Saturday Night Live waste of space whose movie career includes the Chris Farley team-up Tommy Boy (which Moehringer, in exchange for lord knows how much money, calls "much loved") and his own star vehicle Joe Dirt, which up to September 10, 2001, was probably the single worst thing to happen in the twenty-first century. "We graduated together in May 1982," he writes, "and even back then, when we were pubescent boys, I knew Spade was the greatest ladies’ man of all time. He was voted Most Artistic, but the entire student body at Saguaro High School knew he was the campus Casanova, a walking stalk of catnip for every cheerleader and homecoming queen. I can still close my eyes and see Spade in a burst of vivid colors—royal blue Ocean Pacific shorts, black-and-white-checked Vans, beige puka shell necklace. I can see him flying across the gray quad on his skateboard, pirouetting around the caramel-legged girls in their short shorts and miniskirts, making them swoon and tee-hee and sigh his name." Moehringer's article is a profile of his own teenage pal, with a special angle: the author's desperate desire to crack the secret of Spade's appeal to women. (He also breaks the news that Spade may be plotting a sequel to Joe Dirt, to be called Joe Dirtier.) Moehringer, who is not afraid to make controversial, near-surreal claims, such as his insistence that Spade does not look "elfin", was at one point moved to turn to no less an authority on what turns on hot women than Courtney Cox Arquette. Well, says Bruce Springsteen's old dance partner, women like men who are funny. Maybe they do, but what's that got to do with David Spade? (At this point, it would probably be a good idea to remember who she's married to.)

"After graduation I continued to watch from afar as Spade cut a fearsome swath through society’s cheerleaders and homecoming queens—i.e., models and actresses. Now and then I would read in a magazine about his latest romantic conquest, and I’d turn to whoever happened to be sitting beside me at whichever bar. See this guy? I’d say, flourishing the magazine. I went to high school with this guy, and this guy is the greatest ladies’ man of all time." According to Moehringer's scoreboard, Spade's appearances in the gossip pages with Heather Locklear, Krista Allen, Julie Bowen, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sara Foster, Teri Hatcher, Gena Lee Nolin, and Kristy Swanson officially trump the record of his nearest competitor, Justin Timberlake, who gets surprisingly little for having not only introduced Britney Spears to the art of love but having apparently driven her mad with grief from their breakup. In the tone of someone who really means it but would appreciate it if you'd assume that he's kidding if he sounds too ridiculous, Moehringer describes his failed attempts to probe Spade for his great secret; the closest Spade actually comes to giving it up comes when he concedes, "The more they don’t know—helps." In the end, it may be best if the great secret dies with him. Moehringer begins to see Spade in Byronic terms as a man, like Casanova in his final days, hounded by his own legend and his inability to persuade these women to back up off him for a minute. "A short time later I read in the gossip magazines that he’d spent the weekend with Jennifer Aniston. Weeks after that I saw a photo of Spade walking on a floury white beach with a stunning Australian actress named Nicky Whelan. He didn’t look happy. He looked tired, as if the white sand were quicksand...A man should be consistent, reliable, take care not to be a flaky show-off asshole. But all that virtue won’t make him a virtuoso unless he also possesses that ineffable something, that intangible quality, which eludes description, which can’t be shared any more than it can be explained. Whatever it is, Spade has it, and it might be getting stronger as he gets older, which is his curse as well as his blessing." The Screengrab is honored to bestow upon this article its coveted Parker Tyler Memorial Award for Weird-Ass Read of the Week.

Saying Goodbye to Bernie Brillstein

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the Ghostbusters films. In 1990, he joined forces with producer Brad Grey. As packagers of talent, their TV credits would include The Larry Sanders Show, The Dana Carvey Show, NewsRadio, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, The Steve Harvey Show, Primetime Glick, and the Tea Leone vehicle The Naked Truth, which would go some way to balancing out the fact that Brillstein also had a hand in Alf. (Once you've made a few bucks off puppets, it's hard to go cold turkey.) He also wrote a book called Where Did I Go Right?

On Monday, clients and well-wishers got together for a memorial service honoring Brillstein, and from the sound of it, it was a suitable testimonial to a man who sounds a lot like Santa Claus if Santa would have cut your throat with a broken bottle if it were, you know, in the best interests of the talent. Describing the action, Michael Cieply reports that "Martin Short, master of ceremonies for the event at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, set the tone when he described a man who had no enemies and always spoke well of others. 'It would be so much easier tonight,' Mr. Short said, 'if we were memorializing someone like that.'” Getting into the spirit of things, Jon Lovitz "got in his own jab at a former manager when he prayed, 'Why, why, why couldn’t it have been Marc Gurvitz?' Mr. Short, on taking back the stage, noted that the well-tanned but still portly Mr. Lovitz did not look bad 'for someone who let himself go.'”

Unwatchable #84: "It’s Pat"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:00:00 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.

When we looked at Hobgoblins the other day, I mentioned that it might be possible to construct a Bottom 100 list made up entirely of Gremlins ripoffs. Now it occurs to me that you could probably do the same with Saturday Night Live spinoffs, a thought that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. What horrors await me further up the list? Coneheads? Superstar? A Night at the Roxbury? But after watching It’s Pat, my mind was put at ease. For there to be another SNL movie on the list, it would have to be worse than It’s Pat, and science has proven this to be impossible.

By “science” I mean “me sitting through all 77 minutes of It’s Pat.” Now, 77 minutes may not sound like long to you, but let’s remember that all time is relative. A 77-minute James Bond movie would probably zip on by, but for a movie based on a sketch that wore out its welcome thirty seconds into its first of many iterations, it’s 4620 seconds of pure torture. Surely you remember Julia Sweeney’s beloved Pat character – the tight curls and bushy unibrow, the thick-rimmed glasses, the western shirt and khaki slacks clinging tightly to a blobby physique. And you remember the one and only joke about Pat: Is she a he or is he a she? Nobody knows!

The premise was so thin that the true joke of the sketch quickly became: Can you believe we’re doing this fucking Pat sketch again? So it’s no wonder that the 1994 feature film version became a punch line long before it was given its belated, limited…I hate to even call it a “release”. More of a parole, really. Anyone in their right mind would rather watch 77 minutes worth of surveillance footage of writers Jim Emerson, Stephen Hibbert and Sweeney trying to cobble the script together. “Okay, I’ve got it! Pat falls down the stairs and cries, ‘I’ve crushed my nuts!’ But it turns out – Pat has a pocketful of walnuts! And now they’re crushed!” “That’s good, but I’ve got you beat. We see Pat’s equally androgynous lover Chris (Dave Foley in a unisex bob and colorful assortment of muumuus) with his hand in her lap, or her hand in his lap, or whatever, and Chris says ‘I love to stroke your pussy.’ But –get this – Pat has a cat in his or her lap!” And so it goes, until you’re half-convinced you’re watching some sort of experimental anti-comedy.

To the extent that I’ve spent any time thinking about it, I guess I’ve always figured Pat for a dude, but of course, it makes no difference. Either way, Pat is perhaps the most repulsive character ever to headline a comedy. Self-absorbed, rude, oblivious, and gross beyond human measure, this is no one you want to spend your valuable time with – man, woman or otherwise. It represents a career low point for everyone involved, including former SNL regular Charles “One Season” Rocket and cult band Ween, who seem only mildly embarrassed. Really, the only funny thing about the movie is its German title: Was ist Pat? Now that’s comedy.

Previously on Unwatchable:
85. Battlefield Earth
86. Hobgoblins
87. The Sidehackers
88. College Road Trip (pending)
89. Bloodlust!

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?

Hot Mama

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Over in the Village Voice, Julia Wallace pens the first of what's likely to be many, many profiles of suddenly ubiquitous comic actress Amy Poehler. Poehler, who went from being featured in almost any comedy show worth watching in the early 2000s to everyone's favorite pal-around comedienne in recent years, is co-starring with Saturday Night Live co-star and inexplicable It Girl Tina Fey in the embarrassingly titled but promising Baby Mama, debuting this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her career has taken an odd turn, to say the least, and Wallace thinks she stands poised to make the transition from well-liked 'alternative comedian' to the most famous Hollywood Amy not named Ryan, Archer or Adams.

It's a pretty funny interview on its own merits -- with her improv background and a decade of experience, Poehler's always been one of the more able interviews in terms of coming up with spur-of-the-moment laughs -- but it gets especially enlightening when she decides to let a few glimpses of seriousness sneak into her jokey answers. Baby Mama has gotten a decent amount of attention for its focus on class issues and the difficulty of raising children from a financial standpoint; Poehler describes the film as a comedy version of Reds. Likewise, when Wallace tries to draw her out on the issue of making a career as a leading lady who specialized in comedy, using Christopher Hitchens' now-ancient "women aren't funny" essay as bait, Poehler won't bite: "I think that story's an old story. Same thing with 'SNL is a boy's club...they're all just kind of lazy headlines to me." But she does wax effusive about Baby Mama's status as that rarest of beasts, a female buddy comedy. "It's exactly what we were going for. We wanted it to be as much Wedding Crashers as it was Working Girl -- something that felt just like two buddies having a fun time. It was us getting to do comedy in a way that didn't necessarily have to be specific to 'lady comedy'. Not that I even know what that is, since I am a lady."

The Summer of Downey

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen. The scale of Downey's talent was no secret by the time he starred in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, but the Oscar nomination he got for that performance made it "official." Attenborough has been quoted as referring to Downey as "a little Brat Pack gadfly" with no formal training but a willingness to "work his arse off," a neat way of giving himself credit for his star's performance. With regard to his lack of "formal training," Downey, talking to Rebecca Winters Keegan, recalls "hanging around and smoking weed in the stairways with my friends who had just gotten back from class. They'd tell me the exercises. It seemed like inevitably they wound up screaming and crying—screaming at each other and crying at what was screamed. I would just call that Thanksgiving."

Back in 2001, NPR's All Things Considered set aside two whole minutes of precious airtime to allow something called Stephen Lynch--it wrote for the Orange County Register, and I'm sure it's mama is proud of it--to take note of Downey's then-latest brushes with the law and the rehab centers and insist that Downey's reputation as a tragically misguided bullet of talent was inflated by the supposed glamour of his messy personal life. As an actor, Lynch declared, "He wasn't"--note the use of the past tense--"that good." What had this keen observer been smoking? One of the surprises of the recent interviews with Downey is the unexpected but not illogical connection he now draws between his triumph in Chaplin and the tabloid slide downhill. He tells Winters Keegan that he knew that he had "just knocked one out of the park", a feeling that carried an expectation that everything about his life was about to change. When everything didn't, it led to "this huge anticlimactic thing that basically took on different shades of awe, wonder, acceptance, bitterness or disassociation for the next—-what year is it?—-17 years. There was this kind of lull, and I never really found any momentum to focus my creative energy after that, so pretty expectable things happened." Cut to a few years down the line, and Downey was capable of accepting a recurring role on Ally McBeal for his next comeback, and further capable of getting himself written out of the series when his comeback was followed by more tabloid headlines, this time involving an arrest "in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume". What's striking about Downey's rough patch is that, even with his troubles, he was a dependable hire in terms of getting the role done; there are very few duff performances in his resume--one of them is in U.S. Marshals, a sequel to The Fugitive that he credited with pushing him once more over the edge, because, he once said in an interview with Mike Figgis, he wasn't in the best psychic condition to spend a few weeks running around playing "Johnny Handgun"--and he was assured of some kind of comeback every time he gave a performance that was widely seen. No one less stupid than Stephen Lynch--a select group that includes Mel Gibson and a dog I used to have that was killed trying to shake hands with an eighteen-wheeler--could fail to detect how much talent was there. The problem, in an industry where there are insurance forms to fill out, was getting someone to hire him at all.

Downey has said that he wanted to star in Iron Man in part so that he'd be in the kind of movie he could take his son to, but then, he said the same thing about U.S. Marshals. He's also said that he was tired of making movies that nobody sees, and it's bracing to hear someone intimate that he might regret having been in A Scanner Darkly or Zodiac, or at least that he'd be happier if they'd done better business. Elsewhere, Downey has cited Johnny Depp's success in a series of films based on a Disney theme park ride--"If Depp is on a Slurpee, I want to be on a Slurpee"--in a tone that seems to suggest that they amounted to giving him a kind of permission to headline a franchise for Marvel Comics. The fact is, both Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man point up what it is that, in a world where the media is as obsessed with box-office numbers as the studios, just what a Johnny Depp or a Robert Downey, Jr. might someday find himself being forced to prove. Nobody who's been paying attention can be in doubt about Downey's being a major actor; what he has to show, if he wants to have the power in terms of freedom and the options he must crave, is that he's a movie star. Which doesn't just mean the ability to command the screen or even the additional ability to put asses in seats but the control to show up and do the press junket and repeat the necessary drivel to reporters over and over without throwing a vase at somebody's head. And, yes, to look right on a Slurpee.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

APT PUPIL

Bryan Singer's adaptation was not the first version of this Stephen King novella. In 1987, British Director Alan Bridges had Nicol Williamson and Ricky Schroder in the leads of this story concerning a teenager discovering his elderly neighbor's Nazi past. Unfortunately, the film ran over budget and with ten days of filming left, the financing ran out and the film shut down. Accounts vary of just how much was left to shoot. Stephen King had reportedly seen a 3/4 rough cut and commented it was "really good" while the writers, Ken and Jim Wheat, reported seeing an assemblage of forty minutes' worth of footage. By the time financing was found to complete the shoot a year later, Schroder had grown too too old to continue in his role and there was no way to finish the film short of a full re-shoot. To date, the footage has never been shown to the public, though if there's ever a special edition of Bryan Singer's version, one hopes that the director would be able to snag the rights to include Alan Bridge's version as a bonus feature.

IN GOD'S HANDS

It is a tragic fact that many early feature films have been lost forever due to negligence and poor preservation. What's horrifying is to find out that even in the 21st Century, an entire feature film can be lost due to an accident, especially when its not the new Eddie Murphy comedy but it comes from someone like filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan. In God's Hands was produced by Stephen Soderbergh's Section Eight outfit and starred Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a couple who've lost their child. Unfortunately, the entire camera negative of the film was damaged, causing it to be lost. I'm still stunned that someone on the film didn't realize something was wrong after the first few days of shooting just by checking the rushes, but the damage had been done. Kerrigan, who bounced back with Keane, has expressed no interest in trying to re-shoot In God's Hands. This is one of those cases that could be used as a backhanded argument for abandoning film to shoot digital.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER

This British animation has the distinction of having had the longest production phase ever. Renowned animator Richard Williams started the project in 1965, animating it part time and financing the project through the odd commercial jobs and work on other films, such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the credit sequences on some of the "Pink Panther" films. After endearing himself to the powers that be by serving as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams was finally able to get financing to complete the film, but a variety of factors resulted in its being taken away from him by Mirimax and handed over to television animator Fred Calvert. Despite numerous promises from various parties to try and complete the film according to Williams's original design, this probably won't be happening anytime soon. The original workprint of the film can be found on YouTube. The "completed" bastardisation edition can be bought from your local Blockbuster Bargain bucket, hidden under a couple hundred copies of Norbit.

MY BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY

Unofficially considered by those in the know as Quentin Tarentino's directorial debut, this is a far cry from Reservoir Dogs. Shot on Super 16mm over a few years, the completed 70-minute cut was lost in a fire, and so what survives is about 30-40 minutes of rough footage. Is it watchable? It has certainly has had a cult following grow around it, and despite its technical issues, it is in, IMHO, a far more enjoyable time waster than Death Proof.

ARRIVE ALIVE

Jeremiah Chechik is one unlucky man. His second film was supposed to be a comedy featuring Willem Dafoe as a hotel manager who falls for Joan Cusack as one of the guests. It was co-written by National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live veteran and self-styled "dangerous comedian" Michael O'Donoghue and produced by Art Linson. Unfortunately after two weeks of shooting, Linson pulled the plug and wrote off a couple of million dollars. Why? Apparently, it was due to Dafoe's performance, an attempt to bring "edge" to a romantic-comedy leading-man part that Linson, in his book A Pound of Flesh, described as "terrifying". Chechik managed to bounce back with Benny & Joon before his career was nearly destroyed with The Avengers, one of those productions where 50% of the production ended up on the cutting room floor.

QUE VIVA MEXICO

This was to be Sergei Eisenstein's first film made outside Russia, co-produced by renowned American novelist, Upton Sinclair. Unfortunately, after cost-overruns and other problems, Eisenstein was summoned back to the Soviet Union by Stalin (who can refuse an invitation like that?) leaving behind over 200,000 feet of unedited footage. Despite promises to send the footage to the USSR for the director to edit, this never came to pass, and instead several different edited versions of the film have appeared under different titles over the years, most of them falling into obscurity. None of the versions come close to what Eisenstein may have wanted but the film is still inspiring people to take a shot at it. (This YouTube clip is a trailer to promote the latest attempt at a restoration from Lutz Becker).

--Phil Nugent; Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.

Tom Cruise Parodies Somebody Else for a Change

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Some good news, finally, for Tom Cruise: his cameo in Tropic Thunder brought down the house at an industry screening of the summer comedy. It's a time-honored show business tradition for stars who have encountered image problems to get back in their fans' good graces by showing that they have a sense of humor about themselves, though it doesn't always work, as Sylvester Stallone found out with Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. Cruise's deep-inside turn, in which he dons a fat suit to play "a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools" apparently works like gangbusters, especially among those who recognize it as a bitch slap at Sumner Redstone, the Paramount executive who cut his studio's ties to Cruise after speculation began building in Hollywood that the star's increasing reputation as a geek show on wheels might be killing his box office appeal. It also sounds as if the cameo might be enough of a live wire to entertain viewers in the heartland who managed to enjoy Shrek without knowing that the sort-statured, bullying royal villain was widely seen as Jeffrey Katzenberg's way of telling Michael Eisner, thanks for the memories.

As for the movie's director-star, Ben Stiller, he was reportedly unhappy when pictures of Cruise in costume made it onto the Internet and spoiled the surprise, but by now he may welcome the buzz about Cruise for giving people something to write about his movie that doesn't involve Robert Downey, Jr.'s appearance in blackface. (One more time, he's not playing a black man, he's playing numbskull actor who thinks he can give a straight dramatic performance as a black man in blackface. I think it sounds like a promising joke myself, but I often get these things wrong. For what it's worth, the New York Times reports that the consensus after the screening was that, between the two of them, Downey and Cruise are easily the best things in the movie.) Cruise and Redstone are said to have recently patched up their differences. It remains to be seen whether this latest development will compel Redstone to demand his records back, but if Cruise is doing favors for Ben Stiller, he must find it hard to stay mad at anybody, given the ruthless impression of him that Stiller used to do on Saturday Night Live and his own sketch comedy TV show. In fact, this isn't the first time the two have worked together; witness this clip, which dates from a time (oh, it seems so long ago) when Cruise's image was still so straight-laced and boringly normal that he could get away with calling somebody else a weirdo--though if you watch it all the way to the end, you can see a sign of the emergence of the scary freak we've come to know and love, maniacal laugh and all.

Trailer Review: Meet Dave

Paul Clark — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's a pretty hard and fast rule that if a trailer includes a bit of the hero strutting down the street to "Staying Alive" and movie being advertised isn't Saturday Night Fever, the movie is almost certain to be terrible. But then, why should we expect any more from Eddie Murphy? It's sad to see what's happened to the guy- Murphy was as funny as anyone ever was on SNL, but he has an spooky talent for gravitating toward crap that, given his popularity, he should have the clout to avoid. The premise for Meet Dave had real potential, but if the trailer is any clue then it's merely one bit of forced schtick after another. Even the title reeks of dumbing-down, as the movie was originally called Starship Dave until it was decided that the audience couldn't handle multisyllabic words. About the best thing I can say is that Murphy doesn't appear to engage in any ethnic humor here, unless of course he's the one made up to look like Elizabeth Banks. A possibility which, truth be told, I wouldn't rule out at this point. It would certainly explain the character's attraction to Murphy, come to think of it.

Forgotten Films: "Penn & Teller Get Killed" (1989)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In the last few days, we have seen the director Arthur Penn honored by the air of celebration attending the special two-disc DVD of his greatest film, Bonnie and Clyde. We have also seen the suffering caused by the comedian-magician Penn Jillette's attempt to dance with the stars. Weirdly enough, there actually is a connection between these two, besides the fact that one of them insists on wearing the other's last name as his own first name. The last theatrical feature directed by Arthur Penn turns out to have been Penn & Teller Get Killed, which was the first, and will in all likelihood remain the only, movie vehicle starring Penn and his silent partner, Teller. It is not readily apparent who thought it would be a good idea to have these people work together, but maybe it had something to do with Arthur Penn's reputation for finding new ways to show violence on screen, a propensity that included a willingness to use it for darkly comic effects. As you might have guessed from the title, Penn & Teller Get Killed has a morbid edge to it that links it to the unsettling, neo-carny vibe that the duo sought to achieve in their celebrated stage act in the 1980s. (The movie, which Penn & Teller wrote, was actually made in the mid-80s, when the two were frequent guest attractions on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman, but ended up sitting on the shelf for a few years before being giving a flyspeck of a theatrical release.) It opens with a talk-show segment in which Penn proffers a jive invitation to any psychos in the audience to stalk and try to kill him, to liven things up. This sets in motion the kind of events you'd expect it to. It also serves as a cue for such menaces to society as the playwright Christopher Durang and the character villain specialist David Patrick Kelly to drop by for a paycheck. (There's also a brief performance as a thug by a hungry-looking, pre-fame Tom Sizemore, as well as a charming turn by the late Caitlin Clarke, who's probably best known to moviegoers as the heroine of the 1981 Dragonslayer.)

The movie's best scene is its opening, which depicts the act that Penn & Teller do on that talk show. They strap on gravity boots and hang upside down from a bar, while the camerawork makes it appear to those watching at home that they're right-side up. Then they proceed to whip out playing cards and other objects, so that when they let gravity do its work, it looks on TV as if the stuff is flying upwards. This actually duplicates a trick that Penn & Teller once did on SNL; when they actually did it on TV, to the accompaniment of a braying studio audience, it just looked weird to the home viewers who had no way of being in on the joke, and they must have relished the opportunity that the movie gave them to try it again, and the extra layer of point of view that the movie adds — showing the movie audience what's going on, while showing TV viewers scratching their heads — makes it work brilliantly. Unfortunately, once the plot-setting apparatus is done and out of the way, the movie flatlines quickly. It doesn't really have a plot so much as a series of pranks that the characters play on each other, and though it's meant to work as a series of pranks on the audience, after you've noticed the pattern you settle in and start to wait to find out what's really going on in whatever scene you're watching. So not only is it not funny or surprising when the reveals come, but you spend most of the movie feeling that you're smarter than the people onscreen. It does have its fascinaton, though: it's a cerebral, overconceptualized misfire, which isn't what you expect from a bad vehicle for a couple of hot comedians — more Cabin Boy than Corky Romano, I guess. (It's also arguably a more interesting and honorable failure than the previous couple of pictures that Arthur Penn had directed, Target and Dead of Winter.) So should you give it a look sometime, if you ever get the chance? Perhaps luckily for you and me both, the odds of your ever getting the chance are distant enough to almost make that a moot point.

Splat! Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Returns

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The news that Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, best known as the "Ask a Ninja" guys, are working on a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, is confounding on many levels. It's not that the guys in question are overreaching, God knows. They have proven their ability to be amusing for thirty-second bursts, which is more than can be said for the makers of their source material. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which came out as drive-in fodder (made on a budget of less than $100,000) back in 1978, has already spawned three sequels (the first of which, the 1988 Return of the Killer Tomatoes, is semi-infamous for featuring a young, deeply humiliated George Clooney), an animated TV show, and a video game based on the cartoon series. Why does this unfortunate creation refuse to die? A clue can be found in this remark about the original by Nichols (who is co-writing the script of the remake with Sarine, who is set to direct): "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is the masterwork of a generation. We can only aspire to recapture that magic." Since it is not possible for a sentient being to think that Tomatoes is in some way good, he must be making a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to how bad it is, the idea being that it's so bad it's good. This is really at the core of the cult reputation that Tomatoes has built up over the years: many people are under the impression that it's one of those rare examples of a serious movie so freakishly bad that it's surreal and hilarious.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Tomatoes is a comedy; it's supposed to be funny. The fact that it is incompetently made to an embarrassing degree, and that it is in fact not funny, does not qualify it for consideration as a bad movie on the same magical level as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster, Blood Freak, They Saved Hitler's Brain, or even Battlefield Earth. The fact that the movie has had any life at all since 1978 is based on its having often been unfairly bracketed with these anti-classics, which is to say that it's all based on a terrible misunderstanding. The movie is a cult classic in the minds of people who break up over the title because they assume that the filmmakers meant it to be taken seriously. But whereas the work of Ed Wood and Phil Tucker has the authentic fascination of a vision reflecting, as Tim Burton once put it, "someone's strange mind", Tomatoes is reflective of what wouldn't pass muster during the last ten minutes of Saturday Night Live. Place it alongside the real thing and the difference is obvious: I once attended a daylong "World's Worst Movies" festival where Tomatoes was included on the schedule and it cleared the room of an audience that had gleefully sat through The Beast of Yucca Flats and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. If you can't maintain integrity in the field of really bad movies, where can you maintain it?

Christopher Walken Wigs Out

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Every year, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals selects a man and a woman to publically humiliate in recognition of their years of selfless hard work devoted to enriching America's traditional role as the entertainment capital of our galaxy. A couple of weeks ago, it was Charlize Theron's turn to show what a good sport she is, and this past weekend, America's most beloved living song and dance man, Christopher Walken, hit the campus to show the enthusiastic youngsters how it's done. According to BBC News, the star of The Deer Hunter, King of New York, and The Country Bears "sang a tune from the musical Hairspray during the performance and took part in a sketch involving cow-bells, which parodied an earlier appearance of his on the US TV show Saturday Night Live. He said he was 'amazed and thrilled' to receive his prize, although he joked: 'I hope nobody's watching.'" Not much more to this one, really, but there was no way in hell we weren't going to find an excuse to post this photo.

“Freaky Little People”: The Coens Burn On

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

The red carpet continues to roll out for Joel and Ethan Coen en route to Oscar night. On January 27th, the brothers convened in Hollywood for a three-part Q &A on the crafts of No Country for Old Men, moderated by Spike Jonze. On the first panel, dedicated to cinematography, the Coens were joined by Roger Deakins, who has lensed all of their movies since 1991’s Barton Fink. They discuss the Coens’ detailed storyboards, their shorthand manner of communication, and the difficulty of shooting the early morning sequence in which Josh Brolin's Moss is discovered at the crime scene and chased into the Rio Grande, which was pieced together from footage that could only be shot within a few minutes of dawn and dusk. The second panel shifts focus to sound editing and mixing, with Oscar nominees Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland sitting in, and the third covers production design with Jess Gonchor. Although moderator Jonze often comes off like a character from a Saturday Night Live sketch about a nervous high school AV club president, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the Coens’ working methods, and all of it can be viewed on the No Country website.

Not content to rest on their laurels, however, the brothers are already looking ahead. In an interview with the L.A. Times, the Coens dismiss the idea that an Oscar coronation will turn them into the grand old men of cinema. “Our movies are too outside of the mainstream," says Joel. “This is the biggest-grossing movie we've ever had. [No Country has grossed over $50 million at the box office, the first Coen movie to cross that mark.] And even at that, it doesn't approach the kind of business and influence, in terms of people's perception of American culture, that big, Hollywood studio movies do.” Or as Ethan puts it, “We ain't leadin' anything, buddy.”

Next up for the brothers is Burn After Reading, a sort of spy tale written specifically for a ground of actors the Coens wanted to work with, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovitch. “All the characters in Burn After Reading are numskulls,” says Joel, “which Malkovich had no problem with; Clooney has never had a problem with…Brad was initially taken aback. He's very funny in the movie. He grew to love it as much as George does. Each character is dumber than the next. But they're all lovable.”

Other irons in the fire include Hail, Caesar!, described by Joel as the third part of the George Clooney “Numskull Trilogy," and A Serious Man, “about a Jewish community in the Midwest in 1967.” Joel describes the latter as “a domestic drama.” Sure. And Fargo was a true story.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance, Part 6

Peter Smith — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Has Billy Crudup ever successfully portrayed an ordinary human being? There's something vaguely otherworldly about the guy — a guileless quality that makes him best suited for playing befuddled innocents, like the childlike heroin addict Fuckhead in Jesus' Son. Pretty Bird, the directorial debut of equally oddball actor Paul Schneider (All the Pretty Girls), finds Crudup in full-on Ed Wood mode as a gladhanding entrepreneur who persuades a buddy with a large savings account (David Hornsby) and an unemployed aerospace engineer (Paul Giamatti) to help him build a futuristic "rocket belt." For a while, Crudup's deliberately stilted line readings and panoply of quizzical expressions are amusing enough to carry the film, especially given Giamatti's apoplectic support and a typically stonefaced comic turn from SNL's Kristen Wiig. Thing is, though, Schneider based his screenplay on a true story, one that takes a surprisingly dark turn. Major characters wind up dead, kidnapped and imprisoned. And yet the film's tone never really wavers from goofball geniality. Schneider presents us with a gaggle of one-dimensional caricatures, then expects us to actually care about what happens to them; as the disjunction between style and content grows wider and wider, the actors' antics — Crudup's in particular — start to feel laborious. File this one under Fascinating Failure, and mark Schneider down as a talented eccentric who needs someone a little more grounded, à la David Gordon Green, to prevent him from escaping Earth's atmosphere.

Home Video Is Where the Heart Is

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

2007 was a pretty good year for moviegoing, but it may have been an even better one for DVDs. Even the acrimonious racket over the format battles couldn't obscure the almost steady flood of eye-catching product issued on shiny steel discs. For starters, a number of the most exciting new movies of the last twelve months were released in especially fine, often two-disc editions, including Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Host, and Knocked Up in its "unrated, expanded" form. But there's also been a treasure trove of oldies and oddities of every kind, sure to be of interest to anyone who was lucky enough to score a gift certificate or two over the holidays.

CAREER RETROSPECTIVES: While boxes devoted to stars have become a popular scam designed to lump together various heapings scooped from the bottom of the barrel (the "Marlon Brando Collection" is a five-disc set dominated by such least-loved Brando films Teahouse of the August Moon, The Formula, and the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty), a number of director-themed boxes make it possible to have an affordable, one-stop film festival at home. The smartly chosen Viva Pedro--The Almodovar Collection skips past the auteur's tickling juvenelia to the full-blown operatic dementia of his most accomplished '80s work (Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), then bypasses his confused mid-career slump to rejoin him at the mature pitch represented by Live Flesh and All About My Mother. The Documentaries of Louis Malle, a six-disc set released by Criterion through its Eclipse division, is an invaluable compilation of nonfiction films, including his multi-part Phantom India series, by a great director whose reputation may be imperilled by his confounding versatility. In theatrical releases, 2007 was the year that Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep finally breathed pure air, and New Yorker Video/ Milestone is to be congratulated for rising to the occasion and constructing an instant and invaluable box by combining Sheep with Burnett's short films and second feature, My Brother's Wedding, to create Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection. The second volume of The Films of Kenneth Anger captures the cream of Anger's trend-setting experimental shorts, from the 1964 Scorpio Rising to 1981'a Lucifer Rising. For those who crave that kind of transgressive trippiness unpolluted by talent or taste, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky is definitely one of the archeological finds of the year, finally making El Topo and its runtier cousins safe for home viewing. Personally, I kind of think that Jodorowsky was always a con man who hogged the magic mushrooms at the buffet table, but maybe that's why nobody ever invited me to do the midnight programming at the Elgin.

ANIMATION: Is there any pleasure more sublimely twenty-first geeky than trancing out in front of the home entertainment system watching classic 'toons? This year saw the release of a much appreciated fifth volume of Looney Tunes--Golden Collection, but the real shocker may be Popeye the Sailor, 1933-1938: Vol. 1, which rescued a trove of the Fleischer brothers' best from years of rights problems and cheapo videotapes. Then there's Tex Avery's Droopy--The Complete Theatrical Collection, which if anything may be a bit too complete; it contains seven cartoons that Avery purists will shun because they were made by other hands, but they all star the dog who, from the looks of it, spent his screen career stoically suffering for his art. Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika is a four-disc set that will make a perfect May Day present for your old Socialist friend from college who still hasn't gotten over it. Last but not least, there's The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. One: 1934-1936. Technically, the Three Stooges weren't really cartoon characters, but the films are a lot easier to watch if you pretend that they were.

TELEVISION: Yes, you can still watch TV on your TV, and thanks to a few hardy corporations you can even pay for the privilege. Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition performs a notable feat by finally getting the first season (AKA "the good one"), including the feature-length pilot, and the second season (AKA "the not-so-much one") season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's prime time phenom in print and available at the same point in history. Clare Danes fans will be almost as grateful for My So-Called Life: The Complete Series, though some of us would trade all its extras for one bonus scene of the heroine seeing through that smarmy little nimrod Jordan Catalano and leaving him carless in the park stripped to his underwear. That wouldn't have come as any more of a shock than the timely arrival in stores of Saturday Night Live--The Second Season, AKA "Bill Murray: The Pre-Wes Anderson Years, Volume 1." Yes, Virginia, they do still make new TV shows, and of the current series now on DVD, 30 Rock--Season 1 seems particularly well shaped to reward repeat viewings. As show biz self-satire goes, it's not as great as The Larry Sanders Show, but as a DVD it may be less infuriating an artifact than Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show. Here's a series that fully deserves the every-episode-plus-ephemera Twin Peaks treatment, but instead, what do we get? Four discs, consisting of 23 episodes, some of which are already available on the first-season DVD that was first issued back in 2001 and is still in print, plus eight hours of extras that are sort of interesting the first time you watch them and then automatically turn into space that could have been taken up by close to thirty additional episodes. Garry Shandling, if you're reading this, or David Duchovny, if you're reading this and you still have Garry's naumber and can give him a message: It's not right, man. It's just not right. Do you really care this much less about your career legacy than Popeye does!?

SMORGASBORD: Many companies have taken to vaccuuming up odds and ends of film history and boxing them according to genre and sub-genre and even attitude, with results that are fun to contemplate even if you'd rather not shell out something in the high two figures to have them on the shelf. Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, the latest, four-disc set in the series compiled from the American Archives, is a remarkable collection of topical studies, including Cecil B. DeMille's 1928 feature The Godless Girl. Now on its fourth box set, the Film Noir Classic Collection has gone from showcasing movies you'd seen already to movies you'd read about to movies you dimly remember not bothering to stay up to watch after you read about them in the late-night TV listings. As such, it is a veritable overstuffed closet of discoveries waiting to be made, a place to see such actors as Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Sterling Hayden, and Ricardo Montalban strut their stuff, and to listen to the commentary tracks and give such cool-headed enthusiasts as James Ellroy, Eddie Muller, and Richard Schickel a chance to convince you why you should be watching this stuff. The Cult Camp Classics series slaps together everything from early Sergio Leone (The Colossus of Rhodes) and very late Joan Crawford (Trog), complete with mostly excellent commentary tracks, across four multi-disc boxes divided into such categories as "Women in Peril" and "Terrorized Travelers." The Welcome to the Grindhouse series of double-bill single discs are the most attractive of several packaging jobs that use the supposedly magical word "grindhouse" to offer an excuse to watch movies that Trog crosses the street to avoid be seen with in public.

CRITERION: Still the bestest with the mostest. This year they graced the shelves with dreamy new editions of Breathless, Mala Noche, Two-Lane Blacktop, Days of Heaven, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

DRAGON DYNASTY: Specialists, and the new kid on the block. For years, Harvey Weinstein stormed the festivals, greedily buying up rights to Asian action films, and then lost them in the back of the freezer. This new label, started by the Weinstein Company in association with Genius Products, looks to make amends by issuing such pictures as Jackie Chan's Police Story films, John Woo's Hard-Boiled, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, and other action classics including the beyond-canonical 36th Chamber of Shaolin on DVD in deluxe packages far superior to any treatment they've received in the West before now. Indeed, the DVDs are so beautiful that only a churl could think to point out that it's about damn time. It's about damn time.