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

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

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

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

The Guy With The Exploding Head, SCANNERS (1981)

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

John Hurt in ALIEN (1979)

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

John Cassavettes in THE FURY (1978)

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

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

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

JAMES CAGNEY IN WHITE HEAT (1949)

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

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

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

Movieguide, Wall Street Journal Detect Anti-Communist Trend at Box Office; Iron Man Praised for His Faith in the Free Market

Phil Nugent — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

In an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, a publication that often inspires readers to compare what's in its highly esteemed, award-winning news coverage to what's being professed on its op-ed page and come to the conclusion that somebody's nuts, has published an analysis of the state of the movie business by Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, and someone named Tom Snyder, who I'm guessing is neither the late, much-missed host of the Tomorrow show not the guy who did Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, but really, who the hell knows anymore? If there's one thing I've picked up on in the course of doing this job, it's that life's full of surprises, put it that way. Anyway, Baehr is a big wheel with Movieguide, a family-values organization that promotes better living through morally correct movies or something. Part of his op-ed amounts to a press release announcing that Movieguide recently "held its 17th Annual Faith & Values Awards ceremony", where they saluted such entertainments as Fireproof, "which received a $100,000 Epiphany Prize for the Most Inspiring Movie of 2008, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation." Even more valuable was the information we released in our Report to the Entertainment Industry, a detailed survey of what kinds of movies made money last year, and why. Regular readers of the Screengrab will immediately recall that we did our best to cover the Fireproof experience, because we, too, want to "help families who want to find movies and TV shows that stay within the perimeters of biblical principles", to use Baehr's pithy phrasing, and because opportunities to update readers on the state of Kirk Cameron's career don't come along every day. But the most exciting news to come out of this year's Movieguide report on the state of the art is that Baehr and company have figured out how to keep the entertainment industry solvent in these perilous times. (If you can keep Kirk Cameron solvent, you can do anything.) "With media conglomerates, from Time Warner to Disney to News Corp., reporting big losses," write Baehr and Snyder, "few can afford to ignore proven recipes for box-office success. And when it comes to movies, what succeeds is capitalism, patriotism, faith and values...Once again, family-friendly, uplifting and inspiring movies drew far more viewers in 2008 than films with themes of despair, or leftist political agendas. Sex, drugs and antireligious themes were not automatic sellers, either. Among the 25 top-grossing movies alone, 14 out of 25 had strong or very strong Christian, redemptive and moral content, and nearly all had at least some such content."

These results are based on a close examination of "more than 250 major films from Hollywood studios and independents for their social, political, philosophical, moral and religious content. When all the information -- categorized by dozens of criteria -- is in a database, we calculate which movies took in the most money at the theatrical box office in America and Canada in 2008." We have no doubt that the good people at Movieguide have gone about their work with great devotion and seriousness of intent. But in their efforts to connect with the money changers of Hollywood, they may have come too close to embracing that time-honored but morally dubious practice known as Hollywood accounting. For instance, Movieguide makes a point of claiming that movies with "anti-Communist" messages made a hell of a lot more money this past year than the usual flood of high-profile commercial releases that nakedly proselytize for Communism. If you spend any of your time listening to the right nationally broadcast conniption fits, you will of course agree that, barely ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of a Communist takeover of the West is a major issue, one that demands that filmmakers take sides. And as Movieguide sees it, Americans would much rather see anti-Communist movies. As proof, it offers a list of what it terms anti-Communist message movies--An American Carol, Fly Me to the Moon, City of Ember, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull--and notes that, as a group, they "averaged $71.8 million at the 2008 box office in America and Canada." Compare that to the group's list of pro-Communist propaganda movies--Che, Gonzo, The Children of Huang Shi, Trumbo and Vicky Cristina Barcelona--which "averaged a measly $7.9 million in 2008." However, as Jim Emerson points out at his great film blog Scanners, the "average" $71.8 million figure for the anti-Commie films seems to have been arrived at by spreading the wealth around and giving An American Carol and City of Ember, which cost, respectively, $20 million and $55 million, and which each took in about $7 million, some of the credit for Indiana Jones's $317 million gross. (I confess to never having heard of Fly Me to the Moon before. Turns out it's a Belgian-made 3-D animated feature that cost $25 million and had a domestic gross of $12 million, though it managed to make enough worldwide to cover its costs.) By contrast, the standout film on the "pro-Communist" side of the roster, Vicky Christina Barcelona, was made for somewhere between $15 and $20 million and has grossed more than $85 million worldwide. Many people, some of whom invested in An American Carol, would say that this counts as profitable, but apparently Movieguide feels there is a special kind of math that is "within the perimeters of biblical principles" and another kind that is not.

Then there is the problem of how Movieguide defines its terms. A certain round peg-square hole quality can be felt. For instance, why is City of Ember, a children's fantasy film in which the corrupt mayor (Bill Murray) of a dying city is seen stockpiling canned goods for his own selfish use while the people he is meant to be governing do without, specifically "anti-Communist"? Movieguide simply says that it must be because it's a movie in which "a tyrant steals from the people", which could just as easily (and just as weirdly) justify calling it a veiled attack on Boss Tweed. Similarly, in what way is Vicki Christina Barcelona pro-Communist? It is true that it features a character who identifies as a political leftist, and it is true that although this character's life is a self-destructive mess, at no point is there a scene where he is struck by lightning. Similarly, the basically apolitical (and largely unseen) The Children of Huang Shi, which is set in China during the Japanese invasion, features a swaggering, charismatic Communist Chinese guerrilla fighter played by Chow Yun-Fat. Put all this together, and you might be forced to conclude that Movieguide thinks that it's a dangerous political act to ever have a Communist character played by somebody hot. But then you remember that they approve of Cate Blanchett's Commie dominatrix with Louise Brooks bangs and that theory gets shot to hell.

The politics of Movieguide and the Journal's op-ed page are no secret, but if you'd never heard of either one, you wouldn't have any trouble guessing what they are from their attitudes towards certain movies. These are people who, faced with an admiring portrait of a genuine hero like Milk, only see the "licentious content"; who think that the documentary Gonzo must be pro-Communist because its hero, Hunter S. Thompson, didn't approve of the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon; who see the humanistic, one-world attitudes of The Visitor as an expression of "anti-Americanism." (These are also people with so little sense of history that their list of liberal-minded dirty movies includes an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited; that noise you are hearing is the sound of Evelyn Waugh trying to claw his way out of his coffin so that he can get his hands around their throats.) Risible as all this is, it's also kind of annoying, because this is a time when a changing economic reality might make it possible, and desirable, to have a real discussion about the morality of the movie culture, and how that culture might enhance its own profitability by addressing people's actual concerns on a real-world level instead of wasting more and more money on thinner and tawdrier fantasies. So it's frustrating to see more of these silly circle jerks whose sole purpose is to give the jerkers a chance to claim solidarity with what they think is the core of the mainstream culture and cite its "success", whether that success is real or imaginary, as evidence that tomorrow belongs to them. Among the other movies that Movieguide sees as on their side is the animated feature Bolt, which is about a dog that has spent its life performing in a TV show and bounds out into the real world believing that it actually has super powers, and which is said to embody "such moral values as loyalty, sacrifice and doing the right thing," values that you might think transcend politics but that Movieguide identifies as constituting specifically "conservative content". I guess if you think that An American Carol provides a blueprint for financial success, it's only natural that your idea of a moral example would be a delusional dog on a power trip.

Take Five: Psychics

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz. It's hard to figure out why: It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist; it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson. Maybe people are confused by the premise: in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician. We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe. Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country. For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic. One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart. Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there: few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.

SCANNERS (1981)

There's nothing subtle or ambiguous, on the other hand, about David Cronenberg's early sci-fi terror masterpiece. Before his transition to an artist of the decay and dysfunction of the body in modern classics like The Fly, Cronenberg's obsession was the abuse and alteration of the mind -- and as he showed in movies like Altered States, The Brood and Videodrome, an unhinged mind could do a vast amount of damage. Nowhere is this given a sharper point than in his cult classic Scanners, which works pretty much like HIghlander except with exploding heads instead of sword decapitations. As shadowy corporations struggle to control the massive psionic powers of a handful of people, we witness the battle firsthand through the activities of a highly game cast which includes mopey Stephen Lack, sinister Michael Ironside, and hammy Patrick McGoohan. Scanners also features one of our favorite taglines ever: "There are four billion people on Earth. 237 are scanners. And they are winning." Choice!

THE FURY (1978)

After having wet his beak in the unhinged-psychic game with a now-legendary film adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (see, there's king again), Brian De Palma warmed to the subject and cranked out a modest but highly energetic (and entertaining) teen-psychics-in-trouble picture called The Fury. Featuring Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens as the two fresh-faced kids who have to worry about blowing up a city block instead of needing to pick up some Clearasil, the plot revolves around their being sent to a government research lab where their overseers must walk a thin line between making sure their prize specimens don't get away and make them happy enough that they don't turn their considerable powers on their masters. Playing almost like a trial run of some of David Cronenberg's laer stuff, The Fury is bounding with energy (and not just of the psychic variety), and its B-movie plot is highly abetted by the top-notch cast, including a wildly overaheated Kirk Douglas as Stevens' father and a gravely understated John Cassavetes as one of the government flunkies.

AKIRA (1988)

As any teenager -- including the ones on this list -- can tell you, being young is no picnic. Your body starts to change, girls don't like you and you can't figure out why, you start feeling sick and alienated for no reason, and before you know it, you're hanging out with a bunch of nogoodniks in a biker gang. But if you start to develop horrific psychic powers, ones that can kill your friends, turn you into a grotesque monster, and even level the entire city of Toyko with the power of a nuclear bomb? Well, that, brother, as a very wise man once said, is when your heartaches really begin. Katsuhiro Otomo's groundbreaking animated feature, based on his own graphic novel series, featured stellar animation, top-shelf voice acting, creepy effects, a complex but not incomprehensible storyline (it turns out, to no one's real surprise, that a nefarious military intelligence project is behind poor Akira's transformation into a psionic monstrosity), and some great effects at the movie's unforgettable end all helped open up western markets to both anime and manga, transforming the world of comics and film forever.

INVINCIBLE (2001)

Anyone can make a movie about deranged psychics who threaten the lives of their loved ones. Leave it to Werner Herzog to up the ante by making a movie about a deranged psychic in the employ of the Nazi party who enlists a Jewish strongman to help him put on a carnival show about Siegfried, the legendary Aryan hero of myth. It's this kind of intensely focussed eccentricity, and reckless disregard for making sense, that seperates the men like Herzog from the boys. This was Herzog's first narrative feature after a prolonged stretch of making documentaries, and while it's not nearly in the same league as movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, it's still got his knack for breathtaking imagery and his gift for illustrating the mad inner lives of obsessives in spades. The psychic in question in Invincible is Erik Jan Hanussen, the doomed faux-Dane who, for a while, operated as Hitler's personal clairvoyant until falling out of favor with Der Fuhrer's inner circle and getting himself assassinated. His story is also told in the relatively straightforward biopic Hanussen (1988), but that movie can't compete with Tim Roth's giddy performance or Herzog's fiery direction.

Critics Make Lists, Give Awards, Close Book on '07

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

It's nearing the end of the moviegoing year, and you know what that means- a heaping portion of top ten lists and awards from critics around the country. We here at Screengrab plan to post our best-of-2007 lists over the next week or so, but until that happens there are plenty of other year-in-review pieces all over the Internet that should tide you over. We won't link to every one of them here, but you can find two of our favorites after the break.

First off, there's the Critics' Poll over at Indiewire. Indiewire polled 106 critics for this survey of the best cinematic achievements of 2007, with participants including quite a few very cool critics, such as former Screengrab editor Bilge Ebiri, Screengrab contributor Vadim Rizov, and Nerve.com critic Mike D'Angelo. The Critics' Poll also does away with a longstanding awards tradition by refusing to separate awards by gender- the acting categories are simply "Best Performance" and "Best Supporting Performance." Best of all, there's plenty of commentary from the participating critics, providing plenty of fun for all you inveterate list junkies out there. You know who you are.

But for the more visually-oriented among you, deliverance has arrived in the form of Jim Emerson. Not content with simply banging out a list, Jim has cut together a short video of shots from his top ten movies of 2007, and invites everyone to try to guess the movies in question. As most of the shots Jim includes feature architecture rather than actors, this is harder than it sounds. I was able to identify 9 out of 10- see how you fare over at Jim's blog, Scanners.

The Goriest Year-End List of 2007

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:15:00 GMT

Chicago film critic Jim Emerson has published the first part of his 2007 Exploding Head Awards on his blog, Scanners (not to be confused with Nerve's blog, Scanner). It's far more entertaining than most year-end lists, but we did notice a great deal of repetition. Let's run down exactly what makes Jim's head explode, shall we?

No Country For Old Men made Jim's head explode no less than 13 times. If you were sitting next to him for that one, your shirt definitely needed to be dry-cleaned.

Judd Apatow and friends caused 10 cranial eruptions: 7 for Superbad, 3 for Knocked Up.

Juno appears 3 times, meaning it caused Jim severe hemorrhaging, but he recovered.

Persepolis, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Zodiac, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, Ratatouille and Southland Tales each show up twice. They all gave Jim nasty nosebleeds. Check out the full list, if only to see the winners in such fabulous categories as "Best performance by an inanimate object", "Most cringe-worthy lines" and " Best Supporting Crotch."

FILM GEEK EXTRA: Can you identify the exploding head pictured? (Hint: Not Jim Emerson's.) — Gwynne Watkins