The Screengrab : sean connery

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Nick Nolte in WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN? (1978)

You could argue that this isn't technically a death scene, since Nolte's character doesn't die on-camera; in his last scene as Hicks, the Marine turned heroin courier, he's walking along the train tracks in the desert heat, determined to hold up his end of the agreement to meet his partners somewhere down the line, despite the fact that he's bullet-riddled and bleeding to death. He staggers along, alternately wincing in pain and performing old basic-training drill session games like a man fighting off sleep, and the next time we see him, he's dead. But seldom has an actor thrown himself with greater conviction and physical force into the act of dying. Nolte was in the best shape of his life -- Veronica Geng wrote that his body "was burned down to pure will" -- and especially well-equipped to seem alive enough to fully communicate the cost of a man's death. When he finally goes down, it's as if a whole species had been wiped out for good. (PN)

Bruno S in STROSZEK (1977)

Werner Herzog himself doesn't even know what the dancing chicken is a metaphor for. Perhaps Ian Curtis thought he knew. Even as Bruno S tries to lift himself out of life, he finds himself only circling up and down, while his truck winds around until it explodes, and they can't stop the dancing chicken. (HC)

Sean Connery in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

John Huston's long-delayed version of the Kipling story -- he'd originally planned to use Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable in the roles played here, magnificently, by Michael Caine and Sean Connery -- has a childlike desire to believe in adventure-book heroism that is shaded by an old man's wry awareness that violence and conquest are never purely heroic, and that while futile gestures can seem stirring and beautiful, they're also, well, futile. Connery goes out in glory here, as he would a dozen years later in The Untouchables, and a word should be said for his and Caine's sidekick, Saeed Jaffrey, whose last scene would bring Gunga Din out of the grave, saluting. (PN)

James Caan in THE GODFATHER (1972) & John Cazale in THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

Once upon a time, Michael Corleone had two brothers. A small army took one away from him. The other one he had to take care of himself. Here again we have the dichotomy between quiet death scenes and big, loud ones, and it's no surprise that Sonny, who for all his faults is the white-hot life force in The Godfather, an uncontainable live wire surrounded by people older or meeker or more icily calculating, goes out big. Perhaps more haunting is the death of John Cazale's Fredo, who goes out like an already flickering candle hit by the breeze, or like an afterthought. Sitting in a little boat and about to feel his brains emerging from the front of his head, he bows his head to pray -- and while it could be that he senses what's coming, it would be totally in character if he just wanted to catch a fish. (PN)

Slim Pickens in PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

Sam Peckinpah's elegy for the West is also an elegy for a disappearing generation of character actors. When James Coburn requests that old sheriff Slim Pickens accompany him to a shoot-out with outlaw L. Q. Jones, Pickens replies that he's gotten to a place where he doesn't do much of anything "unless there's a piece of gold attached." He then loads his gun and returns the money that Coburn's just thrown to him, thus establishing himself as one of those Peckinpah characters who mainly talks so that he can have the thrill of contradicting himself. (Jones, who goes out with shaving cream on his face, shot down while executing a comic heartbreaker of a wobbly-legged attempt at a heroic last charge, is another: "Us old boys oughtn't to be doin' this to each other," he complains to Coburn, while the two of them enthusiastically go about doing it to each other.) Fatally ventilated, Pickens, followed by his no-nonsense wife and deputy (Katy Jurado), staggers to the side of the river to die. His head slowly moves from side to side, so that it isn't clear what he's looking at, but from the expression on his face, you'd pay a lot to see whatever he's seeing. (PN)

HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1967)

Kubrick has a reputation as a cold bastard, but it's a terrible, moving moment when the only character in 2001 who seems to have a past, some intellect, and an emotional life bites the dust, out there in the iciness of space where there's no one he can turn to for help. You will be remembered, HAL 9000. (PN)

Vera Clouzot in LES DIABOLIQUES (1955)

I should start by mentioning that the above clip will spoil the greatest shock of this shocking movie. All of the tension in the prior 97 minutes comes to a sudden, heartstopping moment. I've seen this movie many times, and have yet to breathe during it. Be wary. (HC)

Alec Guinness in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949)

This one offers quality in bulk, because Guinness plays eight characters -- the members of the D'ascoyne family, each of whom has to be eradicated by the social-climbing antihero (Dennis Price) so that he will have no obstacles standing between himself and the dukedom he means to inherit. It's hard to single out a favorite, but we'll confess to a special affection for the one that Price doesn't have to take out himself: Admiral Lord Horatio D'ascoyne, who dies as "a result of a naval disaster which arose from a combination of natural obstinacy and a certain confusion of mind." (PN)

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Worst Movies Ever (Part Two...plus 5 honorable mention bad movie haikus!)

6. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)

Long ago I was happy and carefree, way back when Roberto Benigni was the sorta-annoying Italian guy from those Jim Jarmusch movies. He made funny jokes, I made funny jokes, everything was good, see? But now that happiness is gone forever. The day that I saw Life Is Beautiful, my love - strike that, let’s say “tolerance” - of Benigni became a tearful nightmare. You could call it the day the clown cried. See, the premise of the movie is that Benigni is trying to convince his child that the Nazi concentration camp they are in is all a big, jokey game. Actually, that's only the second half of the movie. The first half is about Benigni trying to woo his lady through a bunch of wacky pratfalls. The second half is Benigni making light of the Holocaust through wacky pratfalls. It's the craziest genocide of a people ever! You'll laugh, cry, puke in horror, and never be able to watch Down By Law again!

7. HAPPINESS (1998)

This was the least repellent clip from this film that I could find. Todd Solondz thinks that he’s the most misanthropic man in movies, but his misanthropy is as meaningless as Natural Born Killers' satire because it has no center. It's one thing to be a misanthrope because you are deeply disappointed in humanity (as with, say, Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Michel Houellebecq), but it's a completely different thing to strive towards misanthropy just because...what? Because deep down, we're all just using each other, right? We're all just biding time until we can rape children, right? We're all just waiting for the numbness of age and indifference to envelope us, right? We're all just wanting to get our own rocks off and to hell with everyone else, right? Beneath contempt.

8. IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone’s just waiting for the right moment to stab you in the back. A nation of creeps. Fuck you, LaBute.

9. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING (1991)

"$34 million? They must have had a limousine every time they went to the john!" Ah, Roger Ebert, you slay me. Most of the movies on my list are repulsive due to their content rather than the complete incompetence of the filmmakers. This one is both! It makes no damn sense, looks like shit, cost the studio a ton of money, and stars Sean Connery! I had seen bad movies before, but this was the first really bad movie that I ever saw where I literally couldn't understand how it had come to be. For that, it'll always have a special place in my heart.

10. THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995)

Dimwitted Irish guys from Long Island who fuck around while women swoon all over them? Sign me up! They're going to talk about life and love and pseudo-profound heavy stuff like that, all with the same bada-bing inflection? Whoa nelly! They'll all learn to believe in love again? Warms the ol' cockles of the heart, it does, faith and begorrah! And boy howdy, that Ed Burns is dreamy, isn't he? Whoever made this movie sure thinks so! (HC)

Bonus 5, in haiku:

American Beauty (1999)

Suburbs: repression,
Sadness, revelation. Then
You're shot by a queer.

Armageddon (1998)

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Shazam! Whizz! Bang! Crash! Ba-donk!
Kablooey! KaBLAM!

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Oh, Robin Williams,
Bearded man with life lessons,
You ruined poetry.

You've Got Mail (1998)

Bloody thoughts! Only
One way to quell: watch The Shop
Around The Corner.

Memento (2000)

Start here. Smart conceit
Hides lacuna at the heart
Of story. Start here.

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

Contributor, Haikuist: Hayden Childs

Many Happy Returns, and a Couple of Not-So-Happy Ones: Vin Diesel and the Movie Brotherhood of Those Who Have Come Crawling Back

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It actually wasn't that long ago that Vin Diesel was being touted as a potentially major, breakout star, capable of both carrying a commercial genre movie (Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious) and lending a hand to more nuanced dramatic roles (Boiler Room). It probably feels like a long enough time ago to Diesel, which presumably accounts for his presence in the new Fast & Furious. In 2003, Diesel explained his absence from the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious by saying that he had one foot in three movies--Pitch Black, a lively little B movie that led to the far more expensive sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, and the extreme-007 movie XXX, as well as The Fast and the Furious--with serious franchise potential, and rather then spread himself too thin, he had to decide which two were likeliest to be the most successful in the long term. Five years after Riddick belly-flopped and the failure of the XXX sequel, in which Diesel wound up being replaced by Ice Cube, it's no small wonder that he wants a do-over. (In between the two Fast/Furious films co-starring Diesel and Paul Walker, there was a Diesel-free sequel starring Walker and a Walker-free third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to which Diesel contributed a cameo. The new movie basically reconstitutes the cast of the first film--reuniting Diesel with Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster--making it somewhere between a remake, a sequel, and a "reboot.") Given the dismissive, somewhat lordly attitude that the amply franchised Diesel once showed towards the role of hot-car king Dominic Toretto, it would only make sense for him to have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, given the reception that Diesel has gotten for the movies he's made since XXX and Riddick--The Pacifier, Find Me Guilty, and the disowned-by-its-own-director Babylon A.D.--he might just be happy to be somewhere he's wanted.

He can, at least, take comfort in knowing that he's not the only movie actor ever to take stock of his own career and concluded that his best move might be to hit the "reset" button. In fact, he's practically part of a long tradition:

Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau

Sellers was set on the path to living legend status in England by his work on The Goon Show, and his appearances in such British comedies as I'm All Right, Jack, The Smallest Show on Earth, The Wrong Arm of the Law, and Only Two Can Play and the Stanley Kubrick films Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) made him a favorite in the United States with the art-house audience. But it was his creation of the bumbling French police detective Clouseau in Blake Edwards's 1963 The Pink Panther that put him across with the mass audience. In that movie, Sellers was a supporting player to the top-billed David Niven, and he only landed the role because Peter Ustinov dropped out days before he was to begin filming. But so much of the movie's enormous success was so clearly the result of the slapstick aplomb that Sellers brought to his thinly written part that Edwards brought him back to star as Clouseau in 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Although this was the movie that introduced the actors and characters who would become the standard Clouseau supporting cast--including Herbert Lom as Clouseau's seething, tic-ridden boss Dreyfus (who would here establish a pattern of trying to kill Clouseau after the detective's incompetence had driven him to hysterical madness) and Bert Kwouk as Clouseau's houseboy Kato--the script was actually based on a Broadway play that had in turn been based on a French play by Marcel Archard, called L'Idiot. The screenwriters, Edwards and William Peter Blatty, simply inserted the Clouseau character into the comic-murder mystery set-up, and allowed Sellers to go to town with it. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is that, by casting the delectable Elke Sommer as a ditsy heroine in need of a savior--she plays a woman who's been falsely accused of murder--Edwards actually managed to turn Clouseau into a romantic hero while intensifying his physical and mental incompetence.

A Shot in the Dark, the only Clouseau film that doesn't have the character's name or a reference to the Pink Panther in the title, was probably the funniest of all the Edwards-Sellers collaborations(including the non-Clouseau The Party), and perhaps they should have folded Clouseau up and filed him away after that. So far as Sellers was concerned at the time, that's just what they were going to do, and when United Artists wanted to bring the character back in 1968, they had to make do with Alan Arkin for the ill-fated Inspector Clouseau. But by 1975, Sellers had suffered through an unrelenting string of flops that he later described as "my bad patch", and Edwards had gone down in flames with the big-budget disaster Darling Lili (1970) and a string of smaller but no more successful films. They paddled back to safe land with the 1975 The Return of the Pink Panther, in which Sellers adopted the costume style that Arkin had used in his one turn as the character and introduced the rubbery, incomprehensible accent that some French critics would never forgive him for. Sellers would dutifuly report for work on The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and then The Curse of the Pink Panther (1978), only those with calloused eyeballs could fail to see that this accomplished actor wasn't exactly thrilled to be going through the same old paces again and again. The prodigiously imaginative Sellers was trapped in a role that had gotten smaller over time; no longer a layered if farcical character, the Clousesu of the later films is simply a dolt who is consistently wrong about everything and keeps falling over things yet somehow manages to end in triumph. Yet Sellers was also a famously insecure man who seems to have decided that only as Clouseau could he still star in hit movies. When Sellers died in the summer of 1980, just months after racking up an Academy Award nomination and a Time magazine cover story for his starring role in Being There, he was preparing to reprise the role yet again for The Romance of the Pink Panther. Edwards, who seemed ready to sap the tree until the whole forest was gone, managed to squeeze out one last Sellers-as-Clouseau film--Trail of the Pink Panther, released two years after Sellers's death--using old clips and previously unseen footage, before moving on to such dubious replacements as Ted Wass and Robert Benigni.

Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates

The role of Norman Bates, motel manager, taxidermist, and mother's boy, took Perkins's movie career to another level, but it also got him typecast playing villains and loonies, which became more of a problem as the gifted, intelligent actor's style became more mannered and self-consciously neurosthenic over the years. His leading man days seemed to be over for good when Universal Pictures declared its interest in making a sequel to Psycho with Perkins reprising his role. Directed by the late Richard Franklin (Road Games, Cloak & Dagger), the movie had no input from Robert Bloch, who created the character or Norman in his original novel (and who cashed in on the publicity by writing his own Psycho II novel), nor from Joseph Stefano, who adapted it for the screenplay, and Alfred Hitchcock had been dead for two years. Perkins himself turned down the offer when it was first presented to him, but then, after it became clear that the studio intended to go ahead with or without him, but with another actor playing Norman, he began to feel proprietorial about his best-known role. When you consider that the movie was always going to be something of a travesty, the finished product isn't that awful. In the most effective moments, Franklin had the grace to play the violent set pieces--which include a climactic scene involving a woman who identifies herself as Norman's real mother and a well-timed blow to the head with a shovel--as black slapstick comedy, treating what everyone in the audience knows about Norman's past and his proclivities as a shared dirty joke.

The movie was given a handsome promotional campaign that aimed to tap into nostalgic fans of the original while also reaching out to younger moviegoers who were advised that Norman Bates was the granddaddy of such slasher-movie icons as the boogeymen of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the end, Psycho II, the movie whose title suggested a Saturday Night Live spoof, was a big enough hit that the studio wanted more. And once Perkins had played Norman again, he couldn't seem to get him out of his system. He not only agreed to return for Psycho III (1986), but he also signed on to use it as his movie directing debut. Pyscho III, which began with a sequence that almost could have passed as the opening of Vertigo II and ended with Norman once again headed for the nutbin, was in turn followed by Psycho IV: The Beginning, a 1990 cable TV film, written by Joseph Stefano, in which Perkins co-starred with E.T.'s playmate, Henry Thomas, as the young Norman, and Olivia Hussey, twenty-two yeara after she'd starred in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, as Norman's mother. The film ended with the birth of Norman's son, who may or may not carry the hereditary psycho-killer gene, setting up the potential for a "Norman, Jr." franchise that has yet to be realized. Perkins died in 1992, six years before Gus Van Sant's official (and infamous) "shot-by-shot" remake starring a glassy-eyed and miscast Vince Vaughan as Norman.

Sean Connery/James Bond

Connery renounced and returned to the role that made him a star on two separate occasions. After Connery sat out On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the sixth film in the official Bond franchise, United artists lured him back for the 1971 Diamonds Are Forever with a deal that included a wheelbarrow full of money and the studio's agreeing to finance The Offense, a movie Connery wanted to make with director Sidney Lumet. Connery's performance in Diamonds is probably the best-acted Bond of his career, but so much of what surrounded him in the movie was tacky and played-out that he must have left the set feeling confirmed in his decision to leave the role of Bond to whoever wanted him. So it was a shock when it as announced, thirteen years later, that the now 53-year-old Connery had agreed to return the role. Hitting the interview circuit, Connery coyly insisted that he'd always said that he'd be happy to do another Bond film if he was presented with a wow of a script, and he also hinted that the new movie would make great, subversive use of his advanced age.

In fact, the new film Never Say Never Again, had its roots not in a brilliant screenplay with a daring new take on the character but in the conclusion of a legal battle between the producer Kevin McClory and the producers of the Bond franchise, which left McClory with the remake rights to Thunderball. The resulting film is mostly a tired action flick that looks as if the director, Irvin Kershner (whose 1966 A Fine Madness boasts one of the best of Connery's early performances), hadn't recharged since his previous job, The Empire Strikes Back. Connery moves through it gamely, despite being subjected to such indignities as an ill-fitting hairpiece and a glaring edit where you can see him disappear from the frame and a stunt double reappear in his place. Under the circumstances, he seems understandably happy to leave the film to be stolen by the actors playing the villains, Klaus Maria Brandaeur and Barbara Carrera. Originally, plans were announced to release the movie in the summer so that it could go head to head against the latest "real" Bond movie starring Roger Moore, Octopussy. In the end, the studio blinked, and Never Say Never Again opened later in the fall. Despite its lack of sparkle, it was a huge hit. At this stage in his career, four years away from his Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables, Connery was pretty much bulletproof, and his decision to break his vow, and his having so little to show for it, did his reputation no real harm. Presumably he walked away feeling that the project was worth doing so long as it had succeeded in its real mission--i.e., to give the Bond franchise owners who he felt had underpaid him throughout the '60s a little agita.

Not all unexpected reunions in movies are between actors and characters. Some are between actors and directors, such as the infamously difficult relationship between Henry Hathaway and Dennis Hopper. Early in Hopper's career, Hathaway cast him in his 1958 Western From Hell to Texas. Then in 1966, he used him again in the John Wayne picture The Sons of Katie Elder. In a story that became legendary after Hopper repeated it again to interviewers during his post-Blue Velvet comeback, Hopper was reluctant to give a particular line reading that the director was insistent on, so Hathaway had Hopper do take after take until the broken actor finally did just as he was told--after which Hathaway declared his intention to have the already shaky actor driven out of the business. Three years later, Hathaway hired Hopper for a small but memorable part in True Grit, the movie that would win Wayne an Academy Award for Best Actor. Hopper has speculated that Hathaway decided to make this magnanimous gesture because Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Margaret Sullavan and the producer Leland Hayward, and thought that the young man deserved to be given the chance to support his new family. If anything like that did go through Hathaway's mind, the joke was on him: Hopper had been using his time off from banging on casting office doors to get his own directorial debut made. The movie, Easy Rider, which made it clear that there was a wide audience for a "youth cinema" that identified itself as part of the counterculture, was released in the summer of 1969, the same time that True Grit was playing to audiences who saw it as an antidote to new-fangled ideas and strobe-happy trip sequences. Both movies established themselves as zeitgeist hits and cleaned up, but Hopper and Hayward's marriage wouldn't survive to the end of that year.

Screengrab Presents The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:30:00 GMT

The Best:

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Forget best comic book movies...Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Dan Clowes’ cool blue-black graphic novel (distilled from the bizarre alt-comic Eightball) is one of the best movies of ANY genre to emerge in the past decade. While most of the films on this list are super-powered adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, Ghost World is a dead-on portrayal of life as it really is for many American teens (as well as the aging misfits some of them...okay, some of us...grow into). Recent high school grads Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson, peaking early in her best role ever) slouch through a dystopic Los Angeles, floating on attitude to keep from drowning in a world of suck...add cranky Steve Buscemi as a hapless, lonely object of affection and you've got a near-perfect black comedy about alienation and the slow death of individualism in America, from the blissful escapism of Enid's private "Jaan Pehechan Ho" Bollywood dance party curtain raiser to her bitter, existential fade-out on a literal road to nowhere.

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

By the time the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies came around, no one was seriously questioning the idea that a movie based on a comic book could actually be good. But nobody suspected how good until they’d managed to live through The Dark Knight. Nolan and his brother Jonathan tried to cram a huge amount of story into the movie’s heavy running time, but while it didn’t always work out – the Two-Face plot sagged a bit at the end, and there were moments that would have been better placed in a lesser movie – it justified its length and left you wishing there was even more. A great deal of attention is heaped on Heath Ledger’s terrifying, hypnotic (and Oscar-winning) performance as the Joker, and rightly so; but there’s so much more to the movie than that. The Nolans are always willing to sidestep the traditional conflicts of superhero stories and introduce powerful shades of moral ambiguity, which comes across in spades in The Dark Knight; and while Batman himself is left alone and lost at the edge of right and wrong, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon provides the movie’s true moral center. And, given the numerous ways it manages to transcend simplistic blockbuster-movie tropes, it’s also an amazing-looking movie, with brutal fights, set pieces, and that rarest of things, an exciting and interesting chase scene, all of which helped make it one of the most successful motion pictures in the history of the world.

The Worst:

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I understand why Nic Cage took the lead role in Ghost Rider. It’s because Nic Cage is a hack who will pretty much do anything for money, as evidenced by, oh, let’s say Bangkok Dangerous or any other movie he’s made in the last half-decade. He’s also a major comic book geek (his son’s name is Kal-El, for Christ’s sake), and he probably sized up the script, counted the number of zeroes after the initial digit, realized he’d be performing most of the movie under layers of CGI anyway, and went shopping for a new boat. What’s less easy to understand is why anyone bothered to make Ghost Rider in the first place. The character was always pretty absurd, even by the bong-rattled standards of the 1970s Marvel Bullpen that produced him: a motorcycle stunt rider who gets possessed by the Devil and fights crime for some reason. He was never really that popular, even by the standards of juveniles who find that description totally bad-ass, and was mostly remembered until this movie came out as the only character based on a tattoo to star in his own title. Still, in the right hands, a decent movie could have been made of Ghost Rider, but the right hands are not those of the disgraceful Mark Steven Johnson. The biggest mystery of all is why anyone in Hollywood would give this guy a job doing anything after he made the horrible Daredevil and wrote the even more horrible Elektra, and yet, here he is again, screwing up another comic book character. The sole consolation of Ghost Rider is that nobody appears to have seen it, so maybe my bad memories of it are just a nightmare.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

This big-budget belly flop marked a true historic moment in the twinned histories of both movies and comics; never before had a major studio release been widely criticized for having dumbed-down a comic book. The illustrator Kevin O'Neill gave a deliciously perverse period look to Alan Moore's parodic adventure serial about a Victorian era Super Friends team comprised of Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula's old flame, Mina Harker. The director, Stephen Norrington, began work on the project by casting Sean Connery as Quartermain, apparently a sadistic act designed to get fans' hopes up by giving a false impression that he knew what he was doing. Elsewhere, Norrington and his screenwriter, James Dale Robinson (a comics scribe best known for his work on DC's Starman and the miniseries The Golden Age), coarsened and blunted the comic's sly edge, altering its characters for the worse (such as in the wrong call of making Mina Harker explicitly vampiric, even though the starchy proto-feminist of the comic was much more intimidating than any mere bloodsucker) and added new personnel, including a twentyish Tom Sawyer, presumably intended as a sop to the American market, and Dorian Gray, apparently included so that Norrington could hire, and then not fire, Stuart Townsend, just to show that he was stupider than Peter Jackson. The movie provided news for gossip columnists throughout its production, thanks to the battles between Connery and the director. When it was finally over, Connery announced that the experience had inspired him to retire from acting, and it didn't do anybody else's career any favors either.

THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT (1974)

Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, an adults-only feature animation based on a Robert Crumb character, helped attract Crumb's work a lot of attention, and the cartoonist has been bitching about it ever since; he can be seen early in the documentary Crumb complaining about how Bakshi browbeat him into giving him the rights and then debased his work. Bakshi's film wasn't very good, but the sequel, which he had nothing to do with, makes Bakshi's work look like the second coming of Winsor McKay. Most of the film, which includes Fritz's encounters with Hitler and various stereotypical mid-'70s "street" characters, settles for being ugly-looking and obnoxious, but it goes for broke in the last section, a mess of racist and anti-Semitic cariactures in which President Henry Kissinger sends Fritz on a mission to New Jersey, which has fallen under black rule and changed its name to "New Africa." If the actual Crumb's work was twice as offensive as his most hard-assed detractors claim that it is, and not funny or aesthetically pleasing at all, it would still be better than this.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NATASHA LYONNE

As a jailbait Jewish American Princess with the voice and delivery of a wised-up, middle-aged dame, Natasha Lyonne was the tough-tender soul of the priceless coming-of-age dramedy Slums of Beverly Hills and the best thing about the first two American Pie movies (well, aside from Alyson Hannigan, I mean). She even managed to bring a surprising amount of relatable dignity to her role as a bulimic escaped convict on the lam (and in love) with a psychopathic gal pal in what otherwise might have been the even campier and trashier Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby. Actresses frequently complain about the dearth of good roles for women in film, but in her too-brief above-the-radar career, Lyonne’s bright, bemused persona made even underwritten roles compelling, the clear mark of a comeback-worthy talent. Bland contemporaries like Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are considered A-list, but I’d rather hear Lyonne read the back of an Oxycontin bottle out loud for two hours than watch Good Luck Chuck or Bride Wars. Unfortunately, booze, heroin and other substances have derailed Lyonne’s life and career in recent years, leading to hospitalizations and legal troubles (one involving threats of dog molestation...even Lyonne’s criminal record is fascinating)! But if Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke can make it back from self-inflicted career immolation, here’s hoping Lyonne’s recent stint on Broadway (in the play Two Thousand Years) and busy upcoming film slate (including, according to the Internet Movie Database, projects called Goyband, Heterosexuals, Jelly, Outrage and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle) are good signs that Lyonne has cleaned up her act, quit the dog molestation and will soon return to us in some decent roles (though, to be honest, the fact she’s co-starring with Michael Madsen in Outrage is less than comforting).

KATHLEEN TURNER

Following a scorching debut in the neo-noir Body Heat in 1981, Kathleen Turner – who was already in her late 20s when she made her big-screen debut – did as much as she could to establish herself as more than just a great body, a pretty face, and one of the screen’s sexiest voices. She soon established herself as a versatile and engaging actress, and had a strong career in the 1980s, but Hollywood is notoriously unforgiving of the reality of aging, and she began a slow decline in the 1990s. A combination of personal tragedy, ill health and the general lack of good roles offered to women over forty in Hollywood have caused her to be nearly invisible in the last decade or so, but she’s remained busy on the Broadway stage, and some reports of her savagely controlled performance as Martha in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? suggest that she may have plenty of surprises left in her. If given the chance – and if she has the inclination – Turner could still have a late-period career like that of one of her idols, Katherine Hepburn. Time will tell.

WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

Okay, this one’s probably a bit much to hope for, considering that the man is eighty years old and not in the best condition in the world. But we’ve always believed that William Peter Blatty – best known as the author of the jillion-selling religious thriller The Exorcist – was a great filmmaker trapped inside a good novelist’s body. When he couldn’t find anyone interested in making a big-screen adaptation of his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, he decided to do it himself, with no formal training as a filmmaker – and the result was the astounding The Ninth Configuration, a genuine cult classic and one of the most surprising directorial debuts of all time. Likewise, when he became understandably unsatisfied with the direction the Exorcist franchise was taking after the rotten Exorcist 2: The Heretic, he took matters into his own hands again with The Exorcist III. And while that’s a deeply flawed film, it’s at least an imaginative one, with terrific glimpses of mood and tone that suggest the kind of thing its director might be capable of with more money and a better cast and crew. Blatty probably has neither the time nor the desire to make another movie, but as both a writer and a director, he’s shown more than once that he’s got greatness in him, and if he never has a Sidney Lumet moment and directs a great movie at the age of 83, we’ll at least always wonder what might have been.

GENE HACKMAN, SEAN CONNERY & WARREN BEATTY

When considering the later careers of many of cinema's most beloved actors, it's difficult to say which is worse -- taking role after role in a string of unworthy projects just to keep busy, or turning your back on acting altogether. In the case of the three actors listed above, we suppose it's understandable that after decades in the business, they would want to put acting aside and enjoy a nice retirement, and given the work they've done, we certainly don't begrudge them that choice. However, it's their most recent films that make us question their decisions. Hackman, always the busiest of the three, usually appeared in several movies a year prior to his decision to retire from acting after starring in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport -- Lord knows that playing second banana to Ray Romano might sour us on acting too. Connery, on the other hand, was still capable of carrying a movie well into his seventies, a gift which, alas, was usually squandered on subpar projects like Finding Forrester and his most recent film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And Beatty, never the most prolific actor to begin with, has been absent from screens since 2001's noxious Town & Country. While Hackman has busied himself writing books and doing voiceover work for Lowe's and Oppenheimer Funds, Connery and Beatty have been content to rest on their laurels and turn down project after project -- Connery declined to reprise his role in the latest Indiana Jones (yet another disappointing aspect of the film), whereas Beatty memorably bowed out of Kill Bill in favor of David Carradine. Still, hope springs eternal. As long as they're still alive and healthy, there will be the possibility that one can't-miss role will come along to lure these guys out of retirement for one final hurrah. After all, they deserve some time for themselves, but they also deserve to take one last triumphant lap before retiring for good.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

Thursday Poll for November 27, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, we continued our Bond-fest with the eternal question, “who was the best 007?” But much like the Vesper martinis that Daniel Craig’s Bond enjoys so much, this quiz came with a twist- Sean Connery wasn’t one of the candidates, a choice we made with the goal of keeping the poll competitive. However, you had other plans, with Craig (if nothing else, the first Bond since Connery who could convincingly kick some serious villain ass) bringing home a cool 56% of the vote. Trailing him by a wide margin was the #2 choice, Roger Moore, with 19%, followed by Pierce Brosnan with 13%. As usual, the unloved Messrs. Lazenby and Dalton brought up the rear with a mere 6% apiece. And while we received a number of write-in votes for unofficial Bonds ranging from Corey Burton to Operation Kid Brother’s Neil Connery, I was a little disappointed that nobody chose my favorite fake Bond, the diminutive Weng Weng in For Your Height Only.

This week, we move from high-octane action to high-caffeine spectacle by spotlighting the one and only Baz Luhrmann, whose latest film, Australia, was released yesterday. Whether his films leave you dumb with wonderment or simply dumbfounded, it’s hard to find a movie lover who doesn’t have an opinion on the guy. So, what’s your favorite Luhrmann film?

What is your favorite Baz Luhrmann film? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is opening. Have a spectacular spectacular Thanksgiving, and we’ll see you next week!

Yesterday's Hits, 007 Edition: Thunderball (1965, Terence Young) and Moonraker (1979, Lewis Gilbert)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Quantum of Solace was released in U.S. theatres a week ago today, but I’m still jonesing for that old Bond feeling. Perhaps it was the decidedly un-007-like style of the latest movie in the series, but I for one found myself missing some of the reliable, even cheesy, touches of the old installments. So for this week’s column, I decided to look back at two of the biggest hits of the series to date, one starring Sean Connery (Thunderball), and one starring Roger Moore (Moonraker), thereby making this my first Yesterday’s Hits double feature to date.

At first glance, the two movies wouldn’t seem to go that well together, but a closer look finds a number of similarities beyond the usual Bond clichés. For one thing, both films were the top-grossing Bond titles for their respective stars. In addition, each was the fourth film in which they appeared. Both movies were a great deal more expensive than the films that preceded them. And by some strange coincidence, both movies build to action scenes in which dozens of characters are seen floating- in Thunderball’s case, the scene is underwater, whereas in Moonraker, they’re in space. But perhaps most importantly, neither film is especially well-regarded by devotees of the series. In last week’s list of the best and worst Bond movies of all time, Moonraker was voted the second-worst of the series, while Thunderball was the only “official” Connery title that didn’t get mentioned as one of the best.

Following the smash international success of Goldfinger, it was clear that moviegoing audiences couldn’t get enough of Ian Fleming’s super-spy. So production was quickly begun on the biggest Bond adventure yet, a $9 million spectacular called Thunderball that would once again star the suave, wry Scot Sean Connery. With the Bond formula more or less established from the previous three adventures, it was more or less guaranteed that Thunderball would be an even bigger hit than its predecessor. However, it ended up doing so well at the box-office that it remained the highest-grossing Bond adventure for nearly fifteen years.

The movie that would eventually dethrone it was, of course, Moonraker. Released only two years after Star Wars changed the face of blockbusters, the film was EON Productions’ attempt to cash in on the space opera craze- after all, what locale is more exotic than space? Moore was no Connery, but by 1979 he’d been accepted as Connery’s successor, and placing him against the backdrop of the so-called final frontier was a winning proposition. Despite mostly negative reviews, Moonraker raked in the money, the already tempting deal sweetened by the return of fan-favorite Jaws, played by the one and only Richard Kiel. Moonraker had the highest gross of any Bond movie until Pierce Brosnan assumed the role.

So, do they still work? As it turns out, Thunderball holds up pretty darn well, Moonraker… eh, not so much.

Coming so soon after two nearly perfect examples of the Bond formula done right, Thunderball’s flaws must have seemed especially glaring to fans of the series. Much of the supporting cast is bland and forgettable, with the most egregious offender being Claudine Auger as the principal Bond girl, Domino. In addition, a good deal of the wit that distinguished the previous entries in the series was cast aside here in favor of expensive action sequences. But with action sequences as good as the ones in Thunderball, it seems churlish to complain. Especially great is the extended underwater fight/shootout that comes at the end of the film, in which Bond and dozens of agents take on Largo (Adolfo Celi) and his henchmen for minutes on end, without a shred of dialogue. This scene remains a high-water mark of the series- no pun intended, of course.

And then, there was Connery, still the overwhelming favorite of 007 fans everywhere. By now firmly established in the role, Connery was able to inhabit the character with an easy authority, so much that his successors have all been measured against him. What’s surprising here is that he was actually able to find some new wrinkles to the character even after three previous performances in the role. By this point in the series, Bond has begun to show a little more self-awareness about the demands of his job. There’s an early scene in which Bond has to leave on his mission, and one of his conquests runs after him and asks him to write to her, and all he does is give a stiff little smile and say to himself, “another time, another place.” He also had room for ambiguous gestures, as in the scene where Largo’s agent Fiona (Luciana Paluzzi) gets shot. Does Bond intentionally use her as a shield to save himself, or does it just happen that way? Connery never lets on one way or the other, and the character is more fascinating as a result.

By contrast, there was no room for ambiguity in Roger Moore’s conception of Bond. Moore’s version of 007 was less a hard-nosed secret agent who got his hands dirty than the archetypal “gentleman spy” as a straight-up hero. As a result, his performances were entertaining enough, but didn’t make the character particularly interesting. Also uninteresting here is Lois Chiles as Dr. Holly Goodhead (yeah, I know), another in a line of interchangeable pretty faces who were uneasily shoehorned into doctor roles in Bond movies. With two uncompelling leads, my attention quickly shifted to the villainous Drax, played by the great Michael Lonsdale with the perpetually annoyed bearing of a man who’d prefer not to trifle in the affairs of lesser intellects. With better material, Lonsdale could have made for one of the series’ best baddies, but he’s still pretty darn good.

And then there’s Jaws. I’ve always been a fan of the Jaws character, both in concept and execution. After all, here’s someone who has a limited number of job prospects- for an indestructible giant with metallic teeth, I’m guessing “hired killer” pays quite a bit better than “nightclub bouncer,” with greater travel opportunities to boot. But in spite of these limitations, Jaws makes the best of the hand he's been dealt, and it’s hard to hate the guy even when he’s beating the hell from Bond. Plus Kiel, with hardly a line of spoken dialogue, gives Jaws personality to spare, and it’s nice to see him finally get his own little romantic subplot in the story, even if it’s marred by a cheeseball music cue.

But all in all, Moonraker is pretty shoddy goods. James Bond travels from one exotic locale to another trying to save the world, but there’s no urgency to it, and the formula had become so comfortable that the filmmakers didn’t dare diverge from it (Quantum of Solace has precisely the opposite issue- it diverges from the formula so much it barely feels like Bond). Consequently, it comes off less as a thriller than an inconsequential romp, with such silly scenes as Bond’s Venetian gondola turning into a hovercraft, complete with a bird doing a double-take. Even the once-ballyhooed outer-space scenes look dated and cheesy nowadays. Moonraker might have gone over well with the audiences of the time, but it just doesn’t work today. Thunderball, on the other hand, is still pretty great.

In Other Blogs, Starring Roger Ebert as The Phantom

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Forget the four decades of movie reviewing, Pulitzer or no. Roger Ebert was clearly put on this earth to blog. His latest entry is a freewheeling reminiscence of his longtime sparring with Gene Siskel as well as a good-humored analysis of his physical appearance, then and now. “What does it feel like to resemble the Phantom of the Opera? You learn to live with it. I've never concerned myself overmuch about how I looked. I got a lot of practice at indifference during my years as the Michelin Man. Yes, years before I acquired my present problems, I was not merely fat, but was universally known as ‘the fat one,’ to distinguish me from ‘the thin one,’ who was Gene Siskel, who was not all that thin, but try telling that to Gene: ‘Spoken like the gifted Haystacks Calhoun tribute artist that you are.’”

Andrew O’Hehir goes Beyond the Multiplex to contemplate the cult of WALL-E. “Like all contemporary parents, I love Pixar, because its movies ingratiate themselves to adults without condescending to children…On the other hand: WTF? WALL-E is a cartoon, dammit. It's a pretty good cartoon, one that blends together a lot of half-baked themes from more serious works of film and literature into a clever pastiche flavored for today's kidult tastes. I liked it fine, and the overreaction in some quarters is not Pixar's or Stanton's fault. But don't insult our intelligence by claiming that it's the best movie of the year or the best animated film ever made or a masterpiece or a mantelpiece. It might be the third-best Pixar movie of the decade. Which, hey, is not nothing.”

Over at The House Next Door, Dan Callahan considers the early work of Carole Lombard. “Even worse than White Woman is Bolero (1934), where Lombard has to try to act and even dance with the wooden George Raft. It’s a dull movie, but it does boast a defining moment for Lombard: she strips down to her slip again, and Raft dares her to dance something for him. Lombard’s face lights up, as if she’s thinking, ‘What the hell,’ (or ‘What the fuck,’ since she was addicted to longshoreman language). She stomps across the screen in her slip and stockings, while Raft and everyone in the audience thinks, ‘This woman must be one of the best lays in the world.’”

At The Auteurs, Glen Kenny wonders whatever happened to James Bond’s sense of humor. “In Dr. No, Connery's Bond was suave and very chilly, his wit exceptionally mordant—as exemplified in the famous kiss-off ‘You've had your six.’ Bond's a little looser in From Russia With Love, and by Goldfinger he's letting the bon-mots fly, from his explanation as to why that brandy is disappointing to his very square observation about how to best listen to the Beatles. But that's not to say that Bond isn't pissed off at the murder of Jill Masterson—he is, and plenty. Here is where the genius of Connery's characterization registers most strongly. Andrew Sarris pegged Connery as a superb physical actor after his purposeful shipboard stride to rescue a near-drowned Tippie Hedren in Hitchcock's Marnie. If, facially and verbally, Connery's Bond gives the impression of a smart cynic, his body language—his bearing, the way he walks, and more—tells a different, more purposeful, story. It's safe to say that no subsequent Bond man, no matter how gifted an actor, ever tried to play that kind of double game.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog offers the 10 Most Accessible Foreign Films of the Last Ten Years, including Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. “The running time of 3 hrs. 43 min. probably seems like a deterrent, but this Bollywood film really does feel a lot shorter than it is. Really. And anyway its compelling story of an underdog cricket team is familiar enough that you don’t have to pay too much attention if you don’t have the time — though it will be difficult to let your attention stray except for during some of the less-adequately translated musical numbers that aren’t so significant or relatable to most Western viewers. Just think of this film as your typical Hollywood sports movie, except instead of the final game being quickly highlighted in the last 30 minutes, it’s seemingly depicted in its entirety for more than an hour.”

Thursday Poll for November 20, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

With the U.S. release of Quantum of Solace last weekend, Bond-mania was in full swing, and for last week’s poll we couldn’t help but play along. We asked you to select your favorite from the Screengrab list of the Top 5 Bond Movies, and the favorite of our readers was the third 007 adventure, 1964’s Goldfinger. Taking in 38% of the vote, the Connery classic outpaced the competition, followed by my two personal favorites From Russia With Love and the ever-underloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (I go back and forth as to which I prefer), with 31% and 15% respectively. Bringing up the rear were Connery’s first and last official Bond movies, Dr. No and Diamonds Are Forever.

We’re still reeling from Warner Bros.’ move of the latest Harry Potter movie to next summer, which left us without an excuse to run a Potter-themed poll this week. So in a pinch, we found ourselves turning once again to Bond. By now, it’s become so widely-accepted that Sean Connery is the quintessential Bond that it’s gotten downright unfair to the other actors who’ve donned the tux. But without Connery in the mix, things get much more interesting, and more competitive. So, we ask you- who’s your favorite Bond actor not named Sean Connery?

Which of these guys made the best 007? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open for you to make a case for your favorite, or just in case you want to write in “Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond” or Barry Nelson for all you smartass classic TV fans. See you next week!

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

4. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969)

Okay, stop laughing. Yes, we realize this is the one with George Lazenby. But have you actually watched this lately? It holds up a whole hell of a lot better than most Bond movies, including some of Connery’s classics. But while Lazenby doesn’t have the same 007 magic as Connery did, fortunately the movie realizes this and makes it work to its advantage. By the time he hung up the tux for the first time, Connery was beginning to look a little too superhuman, so OHMSS begins with the new Bond getting a serious beatdown and quipping, “this never would’ve happened to the other guy.” From there, the movie gets really interesting, as the more vulnerable 007 is sent on one of the character’s best-written adventures to date, leading him to a remote Alpine clinic that could have been inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain if not for the bevy of nubile patients found therein. Likewise, the film contains its share of spectacular stunts, with special mention going to an impressive ski chase. But while Bond’s lustiness and flair for action are fully intact, OHMSS sees him do something he hadn’t done onscreen before -- fall in love. But then, with the object of his affections played by Diana Rigg, who could blame him? This revelation of Bond’s romantic side makes this installment more human than most, giving its hero a greater emotional stake in his mission, capped by a shocker of an ending that the series has yet to top. It’s tempting to wonder whether the film would’ve worked even better with Connery, but no matter -- even with a former Australian underwear model, it’s still bloody great.

3. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

For a long time, From Russia with Love – the second 007 movie – was considered the best. It later fell into a long battle with Goldfinger, and nowadays it’s often surpassed even for second place by some critics. It’s hard to see why: From Russia with Love is a roaring, energetic success from first frame to last. It cranks up everything from the first movie – the action scenes are wilder, the sexy scenes are sexier, the dialogue is wittier, and most of all the villains are top-shelf foes worthy of Bond. The opening scene is a killer, a fake-out that still packs a punch even after you know what’s coming, and it introduces all of the bad guys that make From Russia so juicy: the chess grandmaster Alexi Kronsteen, who hatches the movie’s plot; the vicious torturer Rosa Klebb (played by opera singer Lotte Lenya, slumming divinely); the brutal defector/assassin Red Grant, played by a stone-faced Robert Shaw; and, as the bait, Tatiana Romanova – played by Daniela Bianchi, one of the most gorgeous Bond girls. There’s also the usual dynamite set-pieces (including a raucous fight at a gypsy camp) and memorable weapons (Klebb’s poisoned shoe-blades), and one of the most enjoyable endings of any Bond movie. And it was JFK’s favorite!

2. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

This begins with a terrific sequence showing Bond on the warpath, tracking down Blofeld so that he can pay him back for having killed Tracy (Diana Rigg), who Bond wooed and wed in the previous installment, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It also marked Connery's okay-but-just-this-once return to the series after sitting out OHMSS, and he plays this pre-title section with the controlled fury of a man who just missed out on his chance to get paid nine figures to make out with Diana Rigg. This is also the movie that proved that, no matter how many gadgets and goils are in place, it matters who plays the lead role. In a lot of ways, Diamonds is subpar Bond: it was the first film in the series made without the participation of Peter R. Hunt, who as editor and second unit director was integral to the look and feel of the action sequences on the earlier films, and who left after taking over as director on OHMSS, and the car chases and beatings lack the fluid aesthetic charge they once had. (At some points, they rival the Las Vegas setting itself for sheer tackiness.) But Connery, at forty-one, was just hitting his stride as an actor after almost ten years as a movie star, and he endows Bond with an ironic awareness and some vulnerability that are beautiful to see. It's probably the best performance he, or anyone else, ever gave in the part.

1. GOLDFINGER (1964)

The third James Bond film is close to being a consensus pick as the favorite. It was the first one to be considered a blockbuster success, making back its then-hefty $3 million budget in record time, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s really the first 007 adventure that has every single element of Bond greatness in place. It begins with the unforgettable theme song, performed by Shirley Bassey; it features a memorable villain in Gert Fröbe’s meaty precious metals enthusiast Auric Goldfinger, and one of the best henchmen of all time in Harold Sakata’s Oddjob, whose razor-brimmed fedora set the tone for future gimmick weapons. It had a clever plot, a solid script, lots of great action set-pieces, and a memorable deathtrap for Sean Connery’s 007, who must bluff his way out of being castrated by an industrial laser. Honor Blackman, fresh off The Avengers, plays Pussy Galore, one of the few Bond girls who aren’t total pushovers, and there’s lots of fun action from M and Q, as well as the full introduction of Bond’s tricked-out Aston Martin. Why is Goldfinger the best? Simple: it’s the quintessential Bond movie, containing everything a Bond movie should have in perfect order.

HONORABLE MENTION:

And finally...three Bond films that were disqualified from Best and Worst consideration for being close but not exactly actual Bond films at all...

OK CONNERY (1967); FFOLKES (1980); THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (2001)

Any association with a role like James Bond can result in an actor being typecast, but sometimes it's up to the actor to decide what to do with that. By 1980, Roger Moore was all but hermetically sealed in the role of 007, so much so that his only way to take a paid vacation was to accept the lead in a lame action-adventure movie, ffolkes, that was marketed to theaters with an ad campaign that tried to sell it as a Bond movie in all but name. The funny thing is that Moore latched onto the movie as a chance to escape Bond; the title character, a nautical-rescue-mission specialist who is prevailed upon by the British government to prevent Anthony Perkins from blowing up an oil rig, is an "eccentric" brainiac more in the Sherlock Holmes mode of antisocial superheroes, with a full beard and a pathological distaste for the fairer sex. The film didn't get much play, but Moore is said to prefer it to any of his Bond films.

The Tailor of Panama, directed by John Boorman and based on a John le Carre novel, provided Pierce Brosnan with a more direct route to giving his most iconic role an extended middle finger. Brosnan plays a horny total cynic of a secret agent whose compulsive womanizing inspires his bosses to ship him off to Panama to get him out of their hair. Incapable of behaving myself, Brosnan hires a tailor (Geoffrey Rush) to slip him information about his powerful clients; Rush, who can't find out anything but needs the money Brosnan is offering him, begins cooking up wild tales that Brosnan, who couldn't care less if they were true, is happy to send back to the home office. Between the two of them, they almost create an international crisis that is narrowly averted when the moviemakers had their budget slashed.

The booby prize in the Almost-Bond Sweepstakes goes to a 1967 movie that is alternately known as OK Connery, Operation Kid Brother, and Operation Double 007 -- that last being the title under which it was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Made at a time when Sean Connery was already inching away from the role that had made him a star, this semi-spoof stars Connery's non-actor brother Neil as the little brother of an unidentified master secret agent who is unavailable for an important assignment. For the benefit of those very slow to get the point, any point, producer Dario Sabatello hired Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell, the "M" and Miss Moneypenny of the regular Bond series, as well as Daniela Bianchi, of From Russia with Love, Adolfo Celi (who basically reprises his villainous role from Thunderball), and Anthony Dawson, who played a minor baddie in Dr. No and whose hands played the hands of Blofeld in a couple of later films. The role didn't led to much, though in 1984, Neil did contribute a cameo to a Hong Kong 007 spoof, directed by Tsui Hark, whose cast also included Richard ("Jaws") Kiel and Harold ("Oddjob") Sakata.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

8. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)

One of the biggest hits and best-received films in the series, and deservedly so, even though it's now underrated, partly because of the sequence in which Sean Connery, as Bond, is supposed to pass for Japanese by means of eye makeup and a modified Beatles wig. Actually, the location shooting is a pretty good commercial for Japan, and in Connery's last appearance as Bond before his first official retirement from the role, his relationship with the Bond girls is sweeter-spirited than ever before. Roald Dahl did the script, which has some nifty lines, and Little Nellie may be the niftiest of Bond's gadgets to date. This is the first in the so-called "Blofeld" trilogy and the first film that lets us get an actual good look at the SPECTRE uber-baddie. Here, he is played by Donald Pleasance with a scar, an accent, and a pussycat; only the pussycat would be adopted by any of the actors who would pick up the role in the films to come.

7. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

Although some felt it went too far over the top with its invisible car and ice palace and whatnot, Die Another Day, after three bland and disappointing efforts by Pierce Brosnan, was not only the best James Bond picture in years at the time of its release, but also a reminder of how much fun Hollywood blockbusters can be when they're smart, cool and light on their feet. Filled with clever 40th Anniversary references to past 007 adventures, Brosnan’s special agent swansong featured no bimbo nuclear physicists, but rather a taut, ripping yarn with some dark, topical undertones (a North Korean villain, the capture and brutal imprisonment of our hero in the opening minutes of the film, a bizarre opening title sequence featuring sexy girls and, uh, “enhanced interrogation” techniques), as well as a pretty cool old-school evil henchman (the diamond-faced Mr. Kil!), the best Moneypenny scene ever, a wicked pissah ice field car chase (with not one but two fully-loaded, weapon-packed spy cars) and a creepy CGI character that looked unnervingly like Madonna. (As for Halle Berry’s performance as Jinx, well...let’s just say it fell somewhere between Oscar-worthy and Denise Richards.)

6. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981)

Arguably the best 007 movie of the Roger Moore era (and, this being the Screengrab, there probably will be plenty of argument), For Your Eyes Only scores on numerous counts: (1) not the best theme song ever, but certainly more hummable and memorable than, say, “Tomorrow Never Dies” or “You Know My Name” (Huh? What? Exactly!) (2) but definitely one of the best chase scenes ever, featuring skis and motorcycles on a bobsled track (!!!!) (3) the pre-credits death of Blofeld! (4) a relatively coherent, relatively un-winky storyline, including perfectly respectable performances by Topol, Julian Glover and Carole Bouquet as the lethal, crossbow-wielding Bond babe Melina Havelock (5) again...crossbows!!! (6) a breathtaking ascent up a pants-shittingly scary mountain followed by one of the all-time great bad guy fortress battles (7) an uncharacteristically ambiguous ending where Bond doesn’t exactly lose but doesn’t exactly win either, and finally (8) for all the abuse he gets for being old and cheesy and not Sean Connery, Moore was nevertheless the James Bond of my formative moviegoing years -– my Bond -– and these, in my opinion, were his finest two hours.

5. DR. NO (1962)

The first James Bond movie. (Though the first screen version of Bond appears in a 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, in which Barry Nelson, as "Jimmy Bond", goes up against Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre -- part of it can be found on the DVD of the 1967 Casino Royale adaptation. The TV show was supposed to be the first of a series of small-screen productions for which Ian Fleming actually whipped up a number of original story outlines, but nothing came of it.) Looking at Dr. No today, it's remarkable how many of the key personnel were in place from the start: the director, Terence Young (who also did From Russia with Love and Thunderball, and, more importantly, the editor Peter R. Hunt and the production designer Ken Adam, the composer John Barry, Bernard Lee as M and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny, and of course the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli. (They would produce the films jointly until 1975, when Saltzman dropped out; after Broccoli died in 1996, his daughter Barabara took over the franchise.) The screenplay is credited to Richard Maibaum, who would work on another dozen Bond movies as well as another lavish Cubby Broccoli production based on Ian Fleming material, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (The script reportedly also included significant contributions from the playwight-screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, who asked that his name not be included in the credits. Oddly enough, he had no problem with his name being included in the credits of the 1967 Casino Royale.) The movie also introduced several of the gimmicks and gambits that would define the series, not the least of which was the way it managed to simultaneously stroke and defuse the audience's Cold War tensions by introducing the sinister organization, SPECTRE, which, it was explained, was always trying to start some shit between the East and the West; presumably, if James Bond could ever wipe these bozos out once and for all, the East and the West could just ignore each other while quietly going about their business. The list of potential screen Bonds reportedly considered is said to have included Cary Grant, James Mason, David Niven (later the star of Casino Royale), and a twenty-eight-year-old male model named Peter Anthony who was selected the winner of a talent contest the producers threw for the sake of the publicity, and also maybe because they didn't have any better ideas. Sean Connery, who could just barely act at this stage of his career, is said to have given an audition that wowed the filmmakers, not with his technique or talent but rather with an undefinable but undeniable quality that clearly marked him as having been put on this Earth to play the part. Another look at the movie suggests that the quality might be defined thusly: he radiated the insolent, arrogant confidence that Bond was supposed to have by virtue of his class and superior breeding, yet at the same time was such a rough hewn bruiser of a male animal that the sheer power of his presence beat the snobbery out of that conception. And he looked good in a tux. The movie also starred the twenty-six-year-old Swiss actress Ursula Andress as the shell-collecting, knife-wielding heroine Honey Ryder, and here the filmmakers' genius may show through even more than it does in the casting of Connery. At the time, Andress' English was in such a sorry state that she required dubbing by two other women, Nikki van der Zyl to provide her speaking voice, and Diana Coupland for her singing. Clearly, it was worth it to get that iconic image of Andress emerging from the surf like Venus reporting for duty on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover shoot. As Matthew Barney, who cast Andress in his 1997 Cremaster 5, has said, that scene represented the birth of a new kind of female sex symbol, doll-faced and curvaceous but in an athletic, physically assertive way. That's why there may be no better way of appreciating the seismic effect that the Bond films had on the culture at large than to go back and read some of the original reviews of Dr. No and goggle at how many (male) critics expressed their bewilderment at why that awful butch creature had been allowed into the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

MIchael Crichton, 1942-2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Michael Crichton, who died of throat cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, started out as a prodigy and developed into something like a smoothly functioning assembly line of marketable concepts. Crichton, who graduated from Harvard in 1964 and obtained an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969, published his first novels under the name "John Lange", starting with Odds On in 1966; he also published the thriller A Case of Need (which would be filmed, in 1972, by Blake Edwards under the title The Carey Treatment) in 1968 under the psuedonym "Jeffrey Hudson" and co-wrote the countercultural action comedy Dealing (1970) with his brother Douglas, which they published under the name "Michael Douglas." (It too was made into a movie in 1972.) Under his own name, Crichton published Five Patients (1970), a nonfiction account of his medical experiences, as well as the sci-fi thrillers The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, both of which were also quickly snapped up by Hollywood. Not surprisingly, Crichton, by all reports a bit of a control freak and no shrinking violet, soon decided to get more involved, in a hands on way, with what the movies were doing to his books, and he launched his own directing career with Pursuit, a 1972 TV-movie based on a John Lange novel. A year later, he made his feature directing debut with Westworld, an ingenious sci-fi movie about a futuristic amusement park where average joes can pay to inhabit robot-infested, pasteboard versions of the wild west, medieval times, and ancient Rome and live out their sleaziest, movie-inspired daydreams. The movie, which featured Yul Brynner as a sinister robot version of his own character from The Magnificent Seven, demonstrated just how far Crichton could go in powering a movie with his own cleverness. It also dropped an early hint that he might not have the most flattering opinion of the mass audience he'd decided to pitch his work at.

Crichton would also direct the medical thriller Coma with Genevieve Bujold in 1978 and, in 1979, adapt an elegantly staged version of his 1975 novel The Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery as a Victorian super-thief. In the 1980s, his pace slowed considerably. He Between 1980 and 1989 he published only two novels, Congo and Sphere, that were not well received, as well as a couple of non-fiction books, including a follow-up to Five Patients and an introductory guide to computers. He also wrote and directed a couple more sci-fi movies, Looker (1981) and Runaway (1984), and directed a forgotten-on-impact Burt Reynolds movie, Physical Evidence (1989), which would remain his last credit as a director. (He reportedly came out of retirement to do some uncredited reshoots on John McTiernan's 1999 The Thirteenth Warrior, which was based on his 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead.) But his 1990 novel Jurassic Park relaunched Crichton as an idea man, a master of high concept with a knack for latching onto hot-button issues and molding them into audience-friendly gimmicks ranging from rampaging, resurrected dinosaurs to his illustrating the issue of sexual harassment by having, in the movie made from his novel Disclosure, Demi Moore terrifying Michael Douglas (the real one this time) with her mechanical-career-woman sexual avidity. (To some degree, Crichton never really stopped writing for robots.) Crichton's genius reputation in Hollywood was solidified by his work as creator-writer on the TV series ER, which made George Clooney a star and provided work for every other English-speaking actor within reach of a SAG card, proving to be a lot harder to kill than dinosaurs. Out of deference to the newsmagazine-cover-worthy success of his second act, Hollywood once again fast-tracked everything by Crichton they could get their hands on, including not only his Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World, Timeline and Rising Sun (which enlivened his chilly technocrat image by lending it an arresting undercurrent of deranged, crackpot xenophobia) but earlier, dodgier novels that had been lying dormant for years. (He also produced and co-wrote the 1996 Twister.) His last work to appear in his lifetime was his 2006 novel Next. It generated headlines when it appeared that Crichton had avenged himself on a journalist who had attacked a previous Crichton novel, State of Fear, for its dismissive attitude towards global warming by giving the man's name to a fictional character who was a child molester.

Joanna Lumley Remembers: When Edina Met James Bond

Phil Nugent — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It turns out that Joanna Lumley has a peculiar habit of dropping in on long-running spy-adventure franchises at strange moments in their histories. She stood in for Diana Rigg/Honor Blackman/Linda Thorson in the mid-1970s TV series The New Avengers, a retread of the classic 1960s show that also featured an extra, young male cast member (Gareth Hunt) so that he could handle any chores that might tax Patrick McNee's delicate heart rate. And in 1969, when she was 22, she appeared in the first James Bond film not starring Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. For those of you who may have trouble keeping one movie's world-domination plot straight from another's, that's the one where Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas with his earlobes pinned back, takes over a clinic in the Swiss alps and "cures" a bunch of girls of their allergies by hypnosis. In the process, he also turns them into unwitting time-release bombs in a biological-terrorism scheme as part of his plot to force the world's powers to grant him amnesty for all his past crimes and the right to be addressed as "Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp" by anyone who can get the words out with a straight face. Lumley played one of these girls. "I was sent to meet Harry Saltzman, the American who co-produced the Bond films with Cubby Broccoli, in South Audley Street," she recalls. "It was a very hot day. The lift had broken. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce, after lunch, and since his office was on the top floor, I had to follow him up the stairs. At the top, he was so out of breath he was almost speechless. He just managed to say, 'Ya have da part'. I said thank you, and went away again. I often wondered why he hadn’t told me in the lobby downstairs."

Lumley's role was not large; her character is called simply "The English Girl", and she only has a couple of lines, one of them being the immortal "Oh goody, egg nog on Christmas Eve, just like we have at home.” ("I said quietly that we don’t have an eggnog tradition in Britain, but it was an American film so I had to say the line anyway. I felt like a traitor.") She didn't even get to go to bed with Bond, which is just as well, since the actress who did had to deliver a breathless post-coital monologue on the bother of having an allegery to chickens when your family operates a chicken farm. (Has it never occurred to you, Elspeth dear, that your allergy is your body's way of telling you something? Damn it, you're a beautiful girl, now kick the dust of that chicken farm off your penny loafers and get out into the big wide world and enjoy life! Sorry, where was I?) Still, Lumley is proud to be associated with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, because "the Bond film aficionados put it in the top three ever made, if not at the very top." Just because Lumley knows some off-the-wall Bond aficionados does not make their judgement incorrect. On Her Majesty's has most of the elements of a superior Bond movie, including thrilling wintry chase scenes (the film was directed by Peter R. Hunt, whose whiplash action editing was an essential part of the first wave of Bond films), an unusually classy romantic soundtrack number performed by Louis Armstrong, and a top-flight supporting cast that includes Diana Rigg as the woman who would (briefly) be Mrs. Bond, Gabriele Ferzetti as her way-cool gangster dad (who gets to punch her out before delivering the line, "Hey, you spare-a da rod and you spoil-a da child!"), and Ilse Steppat as Blofeld's female-tank sidekick. If the movie is actually underrated a bit, it's because of the presence, or rather the lack of same, of George Lazenby, the colorless Australian male model who got to stand in for Connery while he was in the bathroom for four years. According to Lumley, there were also "grim garlic-related stories" of the difficulties between Rigg and Lazenby, and I'd love to know whether this is supposed to be a veiled accusation that one of the leads is a vampire or just an indirect way of hinting that somebody's breath was not ideally suited to the kissing scenes. There's also an adorable recollection of how producer "Cubby Broccoli would come on set and say 'Is everybody happy? Is anything going wrong?' He often had his little daughter with him, who used to talk during filming but no one was allowed to say 'shush'. That was Barbara Broccoli, who now runs the film franchise." My guess is that today she could strip and do interpretive dance just out of camera range and nobody would say shit, either.

Related Stories: The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs

DVD Digest for October 21, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a Japanese master gets the Eclipse treatment, and the first wave of 007 Blu-Rays hits the shelves.

DVD of the Week: To those who are getting acquainted with Japanese cinema, the three biggest names to know have long been Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. But while the first two directors have been getting the DVD treatment for years, only a handful of Mizoguchi’s best-known films (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) have been released on DVD. This week, Eclipse is taking steps to rectify this, by gathering four of the master’s greatest achievements in a lovely box set. Entitled Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women, the box set includes four of Mizoguchi’s finest and most poetic films about the plight of Japanese courtesans and geishas, a subject to which he’d return numerous times throughout his career. Two of the inclusions are pre-war titles- Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion- while the others came after World War II, those being 1948’s Women of the Night and his final feature, Street of Shame. One of the most interesting aspects of the box set is seeing the differences between how he observes his subjects pre-WWII and post-WWII. As for the films’ other (considerable) pleasures, I’ll leave those for you to discover.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD are headed up by two Universal releases which costar Liv Tyler, The Incredible Hulk (Universal, also Blu-Ray) and The Strangers (Universal, also Blu-Ray). But those more adventurous viewers out there shouldn’t require much persuading to watch Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first feature made outside of Asia, Flight of the Red Ballooni (Genius), starring the ever-enchanting Juliette Binoche. Also of note: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Universal), and Anaconda 3: Offspring (Sony).

On the classics front, Warner will be releasing two new DVD sets of Looney Tunes favorites: Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 6 and Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection Volume 6. And Criterion will be represented this week with their new DVD pressing of Missing. Finally, James Bond is back with new “Collector’s Editions” of both versions of Casino Royale- both the late-sixties lark (MGM) and the lean, mean 2006 take on the story (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings the latest box set for the seemingly deathless animated phenomenon, Family Guy Volume 6 (Fox). Or if you’re looking for something less oppressively “hip”, today also brings a handful of old-school series: The Incredible Hulk: The Complete Series (Universal), The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Complete Series (Warner), and The Outer Limits: The Complete Series (Fox).

Finally, the big Blu-Ray only news this week is the release of the first six MGM-made James Bond titles in the format. James Bond Blu-Ray Box Set Volume 1 (Fox/MGM) includes Dr. No, Live and Let Die, and Die Another Day, while Volume 2 (Fox/MGM) contains From Russia With Love, Thunderball, and For Your Eyes Only. I suppose we’ll have to wait for volume 3 to get more of Connery’s classics, but it should prove worth the wait. Also this week, the bloody trio of Diary of the Dead (Weinstein), Halloween (2007) (Weinstein), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Paramount).

Yesterday's Hits: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Reynolds)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a hit?: As with other oft-filmed tales like Dracula and The Three Musketeers, every era seems to get the Robin Hood it deserves. The silent era got Douglas Fairbanks, in a role that highlighted his formidable athleticism. In the 1930s came The Adventures of Robin Hood (still the version to beat), in which Errol Flynn turned the classic hero into a dashing rogue. The elegiac seventies brought Robin and Marian, which starred Sean Connery as an older and somewhat sadder version of the character. And by the early 1990s, Robin had morphed into the sensitive-hunk archetype that was in vogue at the time, played by one of its biggest stars, Kevin Costner.

In addition to making adjustments to the title character to suit the era, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves also added some politically correct touches, including making Marian more fierce and less of a damsel, as well as keeping with the recent tendency to include a Moorish character in Robin’s Merry Men. Likewise, director Kevin Reynolds was able to juice up the action scenes using then-advanced special effects, including the famous shot in which the camera mimics the point of view of an arrow shot from Robin’s bow. And a full-out marketing blitz ensured that the film appealed to a wide audience, from kids who might be experiencing the story onscreen for the first time to adults who grew up on the older versions but were curious to see a new take on the tale. The strategy worked, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves became the second-highest-grossing blockbuster of 1991, bringing in $160 million in the United States alone and another $225 million internationally.

What happened?: Audiences flocked to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but even on its original release, the movie was plagued by a good amount of negative buzz. For one thing, there was the issue of Kevin Costner’s accent- he begins the film attempting a British accent, but within the first reel it disappears altogether, and neither of these solutions proved especially pleasing to audiences. But a bigger problem was that the film was more violent than its advertising had led audiences to believe. Warner Bros. had pre-sold the film to the family audience with such promotions as children’s toys and a breakfast cereal that was heavily advertised during Saturday morning cartoons. But when parents took their kids to the film, they were faced by such scenes as a man’s hand being severed, a number of people getting burned alive, the possible hanging of a young boy, and the attempted rape of Marian by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Both of these factors, combined with the film’s middling critical reception, helped the keep the film from enduring in the public’s esteem.

Does Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves still work?: Not very well. There’s a popular adage that a blockbuster is only as good as its villain, but Prince of Thieves put that wisdom to the test. This isn’t to say that Alan Rickman isn’t a blast as the Sheriff of Nottingham. But while Rickman- who was given more or less full creative control of the character as a condition of taking the part- makes a sneering, perfectly odious bad guy, he’s so committed to making Nottingham evil that he ends up overwhelming the story. A little of Rickman’s Nottingham goes a long way, but Reynolds structures the story like a cross-cutting tennis match, volleying scenes back and forth between Robin Hood’s antics and Nottingham’s over-the-top reactions to them.

Not helping matters is Costner’s performance, in which his accent issues were the least of his troubles. More damaging is Costner’s laid-back persona, which makes Robin Hood feel something less than heroic despite his good lucks and gift with a bow. In his salad days, Costner’s appeal was that he felt like a working-class everyguy, like a character from a Bruce Springsteen song personified. But when called upon to play a leader of men, Costner doesn’t have what it takes. This quality also makes it difficult to buy Robin’s past as a spoiled rich kid, which is mentioned at several occasions in the film. Perhaps Mel Gibson, who turned down the role before Costner signed on, could have pulled off the character as written, while making him more charismatic and entertaining besides.

But then, entertainment value is in relatively short supply in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The high spirits one normally associates with Robin Hood is largely absent from this telling of the story, replaced by- well, not much of anything. The Merry Men aren’t merry enough, Will Scarlet (Christian Slater) is too bogged down with a secret resentment for Robin Hood to function as a full-fledged character, and Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) has no chemistry whatsoever with Robin, thereby making their romantic subplot less inevitable than obligatory. Practically the only good guy who makes much of an impression is Azeem (Morgan Freeman), the Moor who bound himself to Robin after Robin saved his life. And the battle sequences, ambitious and violent as they are, are neither exciting nor especially clever. In short, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves isn’t much fun. And really, shouldn’t a Robin Hood movie at least be fun?

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

10. SIDNEY POITIER (1927 - )

Poitier's breakthrough as the first African-American actor fully recognized as a leading man and star secured him a permanent place in the cultural history of the movies, but his status as a major actor and one of the great talents of his day may have eroded a little. In part this is because a lot of the movies he starred in were high-minded tosh that have dated very badly, not least because of the perceived need to present Poitier's characters as being superhuman and even morally superior to whites, the thinking being that a black man wouldn't be worth building a movie around if he were merely human. But just as Jackie Robinson had to play baseball extraordinarily well to earn his place on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Poitier's enormous talent that made most of his movies watchable at all. Even in something like To Sir, With Love, his powerful presence and banked fires seems informed by the mixture of intelligence and anger that made him stand out as the student worth saving in the juvenile-delinquency melodrama The Blackboard Jungle. It would be nice to report that, as the sixties gave way to the seventies and opportunities began to open up for black artists, Poitier was able to drop the black messiah act and take more challenging, morally complicated parts, but instead, he seemed to accept the idea that "Sidney Poitier" was a fixed concept that had no place in the era of Super Fly and Shaft. (In one of his 1971 movies, Brother John, his mistreated black Southerner character turned out to really be Jesus.) Poitier withdrew from the center of the film world, concentrating on directing and appearing in light comedies, aimed at the underserved African-American family audience, in which he played tightass straight man to such co-stars as Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby. Them after a long layoff, he turned up acting again in such movies as Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, and Sneakers. He didn't look as if he'd aged much and he could still command the screen, but the new scripts sucked about as much as the old ones had. He appears to have been effectively retired for the last decade or so.

9. DENZEL WASHINGTON (1954 - )

For a long time, Denzel Washington seemed content to play it safe. He looked good in a military uniform (Glory, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire) or a detective's plain clothes (Devil in a Blue Dress, Fallen, The Bone Collector), and his career strategy appeared to be "If Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it," which is admirable in the sense that he clearly never wanted to be pigeonholed as The Black Guy in Hollywood's eyes. There are limitations to this approach, though, and eventually folks start to notice that, for example, in Philadelphia you're the lawyer, not the guy dying of AIDS, and they start to wonder if your career is just going to be one tailored suit after another. (To be sure, many a leading man has built a career on just that.) Of course, you run the risk of upsetting a whole other contingent of your fans when you finally say what the hell, I'm gonna have some fun playing the baddest cop in Los Angeles – especially when that's the role that finally wins you the Best Actor award on Oscar night. All these complaints seem petty now; Washington blew the roof off the joint in Training Day and ever since then, he's been livelier in his straight roles (Inside Man, Deja Vu) and more willing to sprinkle the occasional bad dude (American Gangster) in with the noble characters (The Great Debaters). So hey, maybe he knew he was doing all along.

8. JAMES DEAN (1931-1955)

It’s inconceivable that a career like James Dean’s could happen again. History and circumstance prohibit it; the mere fact of his existence proscribes it. When the blazingly handsome Indiana farmboy blazed out of existence so spectacularly on Route 466, he took with him the possibility of anyone ever repeating his singular, spectacular career. It was not merely the circumstance of his death that made him a legend; plenty of actors had died young before, and plenty would die young after. But so stunning was his rise to the top, and so distinct was his personality both on and off the screen, that no one since would carry into death the legendary quality that makes his a name to conjure with, a shorthand for infinite possibility fatefully snuffed. The closest modern-day analogue, for example, is Heath Ledger – but the young Australian was four years older than Dean at the time of his own death, and had an astonishing sixteen more screen roles. That’s one of the qualities that makes Dean such a towering figure in Hollywood: even ignoring his brooding personality, his smoldering good looks, his pioneering, emotional Method performances, his controversial personal life, and his restless and rebellious off-screen persona, it is staggering to consider that James Dean, as iconic an actor as can be imagined, made only three films in his entire life. Of course, had he lived, he likely would have been instrumental in tarnishing his own fiery purity, but…well, he didn’t live, did he?

7. SEAN CONNERY (1930 - )

Connery became a star because, at a point where his animal presence was enough to hold the camera but his acting was still at the beginner's stage, he became James Bond. What's amazing is that he's still so strongly associated with the role even though he's long since developed not just a strong body of work but a strong screen image that's pretty far from the over-accessorized pretty boy stud of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. In fact, by the time of his last "real" Bond movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever (not counting the 1983 rehash Never Say Never Again), his Bond was starting to look more human and fleshy and fallible, never more comfortably in his skin than in a throwaway moment where he gets to apologize to a rat for his body odor. By then, he had given impressive, full-bodied performances in such mid-60s films as The Hill and A Fine Madness, and was known to delight in opportunities to strip off his hair pieces and indulge in his taste for extravagant and weird facial hair choices. One thing that never changed much, whether he was playing an Irish-American cop in The Untouchables or a beefcake messiah assassin circa 2400 A.D. in the visually opulent, brain-damaged Zardoz, was his voice, and that was probably a right call: after purring his way through his first couple of appearancs as 007, Connery had developed one of those voices that makes almost any line seem worth hearing at least once. The Scottish music machine that he calls a larynx may have as much as his strapping form and experienced manliness to do with his status as probably the longest-reigning A-list sex symbol in the history of movies, an iconic musk dispenser who was able to convincingly get younger actresses ranging from Tia Carrere to Catherine Zeta Jones to respond to his first call at an age where most former Mr. Universe contestants have to ring three times just to get the nurse. The odd bit of voice work aside, he has been officially retired since 2003, having cited his experiences during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with having convinced him that he'd gotten too old for that shit.

6. JIMMY STEWART (1908-1997)

Over the years, there have been as many "young Jimmy Stewarts" in movies as there have been "new Dylans" in music. That alone would probably be enough to qualify the real deal for this list, but what's most interesting about Stewart the actor is how far off the mark most such comparisons are. They're usually intended to evoke an aw-shucks, American as apple pie appeal, and certainly that's part of the story with Stewart -- the stand-up, virtuous hero of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Glenn Miller Story and The Spirit of St. Louis, the man of decency who would age into the stammering sentimentalist reading weepy odes to his dead dog on The Tonight Show -- but such shorthand doesn't take into account the disturbed, obsessive Stewart of Vertigo and the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, notably The Naked Spur. (And despite its status as a perennial holiday favorite, he's not exactly a ray of sunshine in It's a Wonderful Life, either.) His Boy Scout qualities made him an icon, but like David Lynch – the man Mel Brooks called "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" – it's his darker impulses that made him an artist.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Improving “Moby Dick”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:45:00 GMT

That sound you just heard was Herman Melville rolling over in his grave. Wanted director Timur Bekmanbetov will direct a (you guessed it) reimagining of Moby Dick for Universal Pictures, and there are some absolutely fabulous lines from this Variety report that I must quote at length. Screenwriters Adam Cooper and Bill Collage “revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain. This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.” Wow, sounds great so far! “This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story,” says Cooper. Please just tell me they’re keeping Queequeg.

Speaking of great American authors, the love story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayme will come to the screen as The Beautiful and the Damned, to be directed by Nick Cassavettes. Although no actor has been announced for the male lead, The Hollywood Reporter has Keira Knightley in talks to play Zelda.

Shane Black will follow up 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Cold Warrior. According to Variety, the story “revolves around a spy from the Cold War era who comes out of retirement to team with a younger agent from the new school to confront a domestic terrorism threat orchestrated by Russia.” Time to lure Sean Connery out of retirement?

Related:
Keira Knightley's Last Night
Sean Connery's Life an Open Book

Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: July 26-August 1, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The weekend is here and you could probably find something to do outside, like go to the beach or the dog track, but we both know it’s way too hot out there. For your own safety, I implore you to stay home, crank up the air conditioner and relax with a fruity drink and the finest Screengrab posts of the week.

You know us, always finding diamonds in the dung, like the Top Ten Great Scenes From Not-So-Great Movies (Parts One, Two and Three)

We got up close and personal with Sean Connery and Melissa Leo, but kept a safe distance from Shigeo Tokuda, the Godzilla of geriatric porn.

We bucked the trends and chose to pay some attention to that arthouse curiosity The Dark Knight – including the top 10 reasons it isn’t as good as you think and the foolish editorials comparing Batman and Bush.

We wondered who was goofier – Jon Voight or George Lucas? Then we wondered why Tim Burton had to remake Planet of the Apes.

We looked back to Around the World in 80 Days and ahead to Body of Lies, W and the next Harry Potter.

We checked out the Venice Film Festival lineup (not to mention Anne Hathaway)

And some would say we nuked the fridge.

Sean Connery's Life an Open Book

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

William Langley reports that "The huge print run of what is being optimistically described as Sir Sean Connery's autobiography is sitting in a warehouse awaiting release on the actor's 78th birthday next month." From his coronation as James Bond in the 1962 Dr. No to his possible swan song as Alan Quartermain in the 2003 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Connery was able to develop from a stud bodybuilder into a respected actor of rare power and daring, while maintaining his status as a leading international star (and sex symbol) for a remarkable four decades. His memoir is probably the most eagerly anticipated actor's autobiography since Marlon Brando's 1995 Songs My Mother Taught Me--and anyone who braved the gassy depths of the Brando book will recognize that as a shaky reference point at best. Since making good on his threat to stay retired from acting after the Extraordinary Gentlemen debacle (a project that Connery reportedly took on after deciding that he didn't understand it, and remembering that he'd turned down roles in The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings because he hadn't understood them), Connery has had plenty of time to strip-mine his memories, but what no one knows yet is whether or not he's had the inclination to do any serious digging. Langley notes that "In 2003 he pulled out of a project with author Meg Henderson, a personal friend, for a co-written book of memoirs. Two years later he withdrew from a seven-figure deal with the biographer Hunter Davies. A subsequent project with Canongate, a prominent Edinburgh publishing house, collapsed when the two parties 'failed to see eye-to-eye' on the book's content...The head of Canongate, Jamie Byng, said: 'Sean has got a great storytelling instinct. There was some beautiful Angela's Ashes-type stuff about growing up in Edinburgh, but ultimately we couldn't agree on what the book should be, and how we could move it on.'"

Connery's publisher says that the forthcoming time, Being a Scot, "fuses Connery's own experiences, including his acting career, with his efforts to track down what Scots have given to the world in art, science, and sport." This loose, baggy description really does make it sound like Songs My Mother Taught Me with a burr. Connery once said that he wasn't inclined to discuss his life "because I realized I was going to be spending the rest of my life trying to correct the inaccuracies, and I can't be bothered." With his book completed and ready for market, he may only now be realizing that the "inaccuracies", or at least other people's side of things, will be bobbing to the surface whether he declines comment or not. Just last week, he had to suffer the indignity of responding to claims by Diane Cilento--once a fine, fiery actress (Hombre, The Wicker Man) before her own retirement in the 1980s, and Connery's first wife, from 1962 to 1973--that he had verbally abused and financially deprived their son, Jason. "Sean has a problem about relationships," said Cilento, "as everyone around him knows." For his part, Connery responded by calling his ex-wife "insane" and adding, "“I haven’t seen the woman in 37 years and she knows nothing about me or my life now. Diane can’t move on from the break up of our marriage and I have already had to contend with her accusations about me being violent towards her. Now the lies seem to be getting even more vicious, and, what is worse, she is dragging our son into it." For more juicy stuff, you can wait another month and read the book. Maybe.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

Despite a pretty decent theme song, The World Is Not Enough hardly qualifies as a great film (or even a particularly great Bond film), but it earns a spot on this list for one perfect scene. Desmond Llewelyn first appeared as the cranky go-to guy for state-of-the-art British spy paraphernalia in 1963’s From Russia With Love and returned in every subsequent 007 installment (except for 1973’s Live and Let Die) thereafter, outlasting Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton before finally teaming with Pierce Brosnan for three late ‘90s adventures. In his final big screen appearance, the aging Q is seen schooling his protégé (and eventual replacement) R, played by John Cleese, before disappearing from view with the classic exit line, “Never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan.” Sadly, Llewelyn died shortly after the production wrapped, not of old age (he was 85), but in a car crash, on his way home to his beloved wife of 61 years after dinner with a friend...not, as my dad pointed out, the worst way to go, especially after spending your life as a beloved cinema icon (who once said he’d play his signature role “as long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn't").

Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (1996)

Most of Robert Mitchum's contemporaries from the Golden Age made their onscreen farewells as frail shadows of their former selves (as we'll explore in-depth next week). Not Big Bad Bob. There could be no greater contrast between the classic Hollywood tough guys and the man-children of today's cinema than Mitchum's brief scene with Johnny Depp near the beginning of Dead Man. Even pushing 80, Mitchum looks like he could snap Depp in half like a breadstick. As John Dickinson, owner of a steelworks in the Old West town of Machine, Mitchum has a mane of white hair, an ever-present shotgun, and a life-sized self-portrait lurking behind him as if he is already in the process of passing into legend. When he hires a band of bounty hunters to track down Depp's William Blake, he can hardly bring himself to acknowledge their existence, instead addressing his initial remarks to the stuffed grizzly bear mounted in the corner of his office. It's as if he can only relate to the one other larger than life creature in the room.

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977)

Born in 1977, the legendary great director and provocateur Luis Bunuel cashed out with this minor classic, in which the rage and audience-baiting tricks of his early work seemed to have been replaced by a serene but sly playfulness. He gives the impression here that he's just enjoying the company of one of his favorite actors (Fernando Rey) and a couple of beautiful women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) as he uses them to jauntily illustrate his story about a gentleman who is driven half mad with frustration by a young woman who alternately invites and repels his advances. (The women is played by both of the lead actresses; a great deal of ink has been spent by critics speculating on what this device means, though it could have been something as simple as Bouquet having quit or been fired from the production and Bunuel deciding that he didn't feel like reshooting her scenes.) Having enjoyed one final round of good reviews and hossanahs, Bunuel settled in for a few years of drinking, studying insects, and working on his autobiography, My Last Sigh, which appeared not long before his death in 1983.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Three

When Good Directors Go Bad: Rising Sun (1993, Philip Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, I try not to get hung up on whether a movie is commercial. While it’s undeniable that films that are intended for a large audience have to satisfy a different set of expectations than those that aren’t, I generally do my best to consider the movie based on how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. However, it’s undeniable that some filmmakers have sensibilities that are well-suited to commercial filmmaking, and others who don’t. Some of our best filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese) are even able to move back and forth between big-budget filmmaking and more personal work. Others have a harder time with it. One director who falls into the latter category is Philip Kaufman, and nowhere is this more apparent than his 1993 film Rising Sun.

Rising Sun was based on a novel by Michael Crichton, whose work was experiencing a surge in popularity in the early nineties. Crichton’s novel combined the ever-popular murder mystery genre with the then-current topic of Japanese encroachment on the American business market. Rising Sun wasn’t one of Crichton’s best novels, but there was potential there for an interesting film, and the choice of Kaufman to direct was inspired. Kaufman had been working for almost three decades, directing eccentric twists on popular genre films like 1972’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But his best-known work came in the 1980s, with his rich adaptations of tricky works of literature including The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.

It’s clear from Kaufman’s pedigree that Fox was looking for a classy, A-list adaptation of Crichton’s bestseller. However, I’m not sure classy was the way to go with Rising Sun. This is a story that incorporates such elements as boardroom intrigue, high-tech surveillance, the Japanese “shadow world” of Los Angeles, and a woman who gets off on being asphyxiated. Yet Kaufman directs the film like it’s high drama. The result is lifeless and inert. And if there’s one thing you don’t want in a movie where a character eats sushi off a woman’s bare breasts (with a nipple/sake chaser), it’s inertia.

But if Rising Sun is a washout as a guilty-pleasure entertainment, it’s just as uncompelling as an exposé of Japanese culture. When it was first published, Crichton’s novel drew fire from Japanese-American groups for its portrayal of their business culture as being ruthless and conniving. But even when I saw the film back in 1993, most of the more shocking details seemed pretty quaint. Granted, some of the more supposedly anti-Asian elements were toned down for the movie, but no matter which form it took, Rising Sun had surprisingly little insight into Japanese culture that hadn’t been expressed in a more interesting way elsewhere.

Which leaves us only with the murder mystery, which offers few surprises. Early in the film, Sean Connery’s wise Capt. John Connor tells Wesley Snipes’ Lt. Web Smith, “When something seems too good to be true, then it’s not true.” Not particularly sage advice, but apparently advice that was heeded by Kaufman, Crichton, and co-screenwriter Michael Backes. Why else would they waste almost an hour setting up an obvious decoy villain? Once it becomes clear that the film is content to cycle through every twist and turn we expect from it- the fake villain, the heroes getting thrown off the case, the ugly revelations about their pasts, the emergence of the real villain, and so on- all that’s left is counting down the minutes between “surprise” revelations. And at 129 minutes, that’s a lot of counting.

Kaufman has always had a knack for casting, and in 1993, a movie top-lined by Connery and Snipes still qualified as an A-list production. For his part, Snipes is pretty solid in the film. I’ve long believed Snipes to be undervalued as an actor, due first to his career long being mired in forgettable action fare, then more recently because of his legal problems. Web Smith isn’t a great part- certainly not as flashy as his supporting role in Mo’ Better Blues- but he does all he can with a character who’s essentially playing straight man to Connery. I especially like his slow burn moments, when he tries desperately to maintain his cool in the middle of confounding and/or ridiculous circumstances. Crichton objected to Fox’s casting of Snipes in a role that was written as white man, but I think that it works here, giving the film a complicated yet sympathetic lead in a way that grounds the story.

Connery, on the other hand, is content to coast through the film, propelled largely by his own presence. Crichton famously wrote the role of John Connor especially the Scots legend, but both the character and the performance are something of a dud. Connery’s role consists primarily of being right all the time and deigning to offer advice to those less enlightened than he. Unfortunately, this arrogance extends to the performance itself, with Connery (who also executive-produced) putting forth no more effort than necessary to earn his pay.

What’s more, Kaufman and Crichton take every opportunity they can to underline exactly how wise Connor is, most notably by pitting him against vulgar anti-Japanese Lt. Graham (Harvey Keitel), who refers to the Japanese as “nips” and decries their presence in this country. Unfortunately for the film, Keitel’s live-wire performance upstages Connery’s self-important one, with Keitel getting almost all of the best lines (my favorite being his declining of an offer of sushi: “no thanks. If I get a craving for mercury, I’ll eat a thermometer”).

When I look at Kaufman’s filmography, I can’t help but marvel at some of the novels he’s adapted for the screen. After all, here’s a guy who has successfully adapted some near-unadaptable material, including books by Tom Wolfe and Milan Kundera. Who would have thought it would be Michael Crichton who would defeat him? But just because Crichton’s books seemingly adapt themselves doesn’t mean that Kaufman was the right director for the job. As a director who specialized in literate fare, scenes like the one in which Wesley Snipes is attacked in the middle of a raid by an irate nude woman just aren’t in his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, Rising Sun was the beginning of a downturn in Kaufman’s career, leading first to the respectfully yet hardly enthusiastically-received Quills seven years later, then another misguided commercial project, Twisted, in 2004. Hopefully, one of his announced upcoming projects- perhaps his proposed Nicholas Ray film Interrupted- will get him back on track.

Why Sean Connery Never Discovered Joan Collins's Naked Body Painted Gold, and Other Dubious Claims

Phil Nugent — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

As part of its recognition of the centennial of Ian Fleming, the Telegraph had a bright idea — they turned to professional vixen Joan Collins to share her expert opinion on the evolution of Bond movies, which she never had anything to do with and which she'd never heard about until, "shortly after Anthony Newley and I became engaged, we were strolling around Harrod's when we heard a familiar Scottish burr hailing us. It was Sean Connery, who'd just been signed up to play the super-agent in Dr No. 'Congratulations,' Tony said. 'You'll be great, and I'm sure this film's going to be wonderful.' 'Oh, it'll be just another job,' Sean shrugged. 'Then I'll be waiting for the phone to ring again as usual.'...We hadn't the slightest inkling that Dr. No would be the first of a film series that was destined to become the most popular of all time and that would catapult Sean Connery to stardom." I was really hoping that the next sentence would be, "Otherwise, I'd have dumped Anthony Newley on the pavement like a hot turd and, batting my eyes at Sean, asked if he'd like to go look for the nearest linen closet," but it looks as if we'll have to chalk that up to a golden opportunity missed.

The article--which is a classic of its weird kind, as the reader follows Collins as she charts her efforts to connect herself somehow to as many dips and turns in the franchise as she can manage--establishes many a missed opportunity in Joan's and 007's shared universe. Collins turned down the Shirley Eaton role in Goldfinger because she didn't like the idea of lying around on the set with her body painted, which would indeed seem to be a deal-breaker. Her shot at appearing in the notorious rogue Bond spoof Casino Royale went down the tubes when her doctor "informed me I was in fact enceinte," which extensive on-line research has confirmed means "pregnant," no lower than eight on my list of guesses. She did feel vindicated when Timothy Dalton landed the role of Bond, because she had just been shouted down in her efforts to have him cast as her romantic partner in a TV project because the mummies in charge of the studio felt he lacked sex appeal. Here they were daring to contradict Joan in one department where she claims expert status. "Sean Connery had what's known as 'it'. I can't explain it: it's not just sex appeal, but a certain something about men that makes women go weak at the knees, and a certain something about women that makes men drool, and it's an absolute prerequisite if you're going to go anywhere in this fickle business." (Seen Anthony Newley lately?) It is Joan's informed opinion that of all the Bonds, Pierce Brosnan came closest to getting the role at precisely the right time in his life to serve as "the physical embodiment" of the character. Collins does mention that she heard that Fleming was keen on James Mason for the part--which is a new one on us, but maybe she just needed an excuse to include her story about Mason and the "small rickety plane, going through turbulence that threatened our breakfast to a repeat appearance. While Steven Boyd and I slung down copious rum punches, getting plastered to kill our fear, I noticed James Mason calmly reading his Times. 'James,' I said. 'Aren't you terrified? It's so bumpy we could crash!' Without even glancing up, James replied in his mellifluously reassuring voice, 'Oh, no my dear, I'm never frightened in planes. I fly so much, what is there to be anxious about? They're perfectly safe,' and he continued reading his paper. That's when I noticed his paper was upside down."

In Other Blogs: Kill-Face Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week we began with the shuttering of In the Company of Glenn, former Premiere editor Glenn Kenny’s shop on movie blog row. As it turns out, Kenny has wasted no time in opening up in a new location: Some Came Running, named after the Rat Pack movie you need to see right now if you never have. “I'll be posting like mad shortly, as this blog will be one of possibly several outlets for which I'll be covering Cannes. The reorganization of staff at Premiere coming at this particular time put even more of a whammy on my head than it might have otherwise, but I thought I'd best get myself out there anyway. Stay in the game, as it were (Jeff Wells will be proud of me, I trust), although what I'd like more than anything at the moment is a bit of a rest…First, though, I post to thank everyone who rang in with compliments, concern, and coverage in the wake of my termination. I felt a little like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral...except far more moved, and incredibly grateful.”

The PopMatters blog Short Ends and a Leader offers a manifesto of sorts, an Open Letter to the Online Critic. “The time is now. It’s our moment to put up or forever shut up. Print is dying, there’s no two ways about it, and those left rummaging for readership are turning to the old fashioned wire services for their rote, by the book copy. As a community, we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to shine, to show that we are just as legitimate as the men and women who dictated filmic fashion for the last 60 years. New technology may mean a new way of communication, but frankly, we’re doing a piss poor job of getting our point across - that is, when we can come up with a cogent and coherent argument to begin with. It’s time to cast off the amateurish aura given off by what many of us do and recognize the role we will play in the next decade.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir asks what would happen if Austin Powers were French and funny – and then answers his own question. “Let me direct you to the hit French comedy OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, featuring explosively weird Gallic comic Jean Dujardin as its eponymous super-spy, an unhinged cross-Channel cousin of Sean Connery's 007. (In his original, more straight-faced incarnation, OSS 117 was the hero of more than 250 French pulp novels and several 1950s and '60s films.) Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives OSS 117 its edge.”

At the House Next Door, Sarah D. Bunting revisits Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and concludes that it works better with the sound off. “A first-time watcher of The Outsiders could easily follow and appreciate the plot without having to listen to the dialogue; everything is telegraphed visually, whether by the director and cinematographer (here, and on Rumble Fish, Stephen H. Burum) or by the actors. This will probably come as a relief to those of you who would maybe like to watch it again, but remember the dialogue as embarrassingly earnest, which it is. In fact, it's as sugary and purple as an Easter Peep, and while Coppola's fidelity to the source material is quite striking in some ways (more on that later), the blame for lines like the oft (and correctly) pilloried ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’ lies squarely with S.E. Hinton's original. ‘Let's do it for Johnny, maaaaan,’ ‘Sure, little buddy, we ain't gonna fight no more’—they land like balloons filled with ricotta.”

And finally, here’s a gallery of “kill faces” courtesy of Arbogast on Film, guaranteed to get your Friday off to a rip-roaring start.

Indiana Jones 5: Marauders of the Bronze Hip Replacement

John Constantine — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:43:00 GMT

Can you smell it, Screengrabbers? The summer blockbuster season approaches and it is filled with heretofore unknown riches! Respected actors playing gaudy superheroes, neon fantasias about cars that spit on the physical laws of nature, and George Lucas humping the leg of nostalgia one final time. Maybe not though! USA Today has a hot new interview with that spry upstart star of hits like Witness, Harrison Ford, and Calista Flockhart’s boytoy says he’s down for more whip cracking.

Actually, there’s not even a full quote from Ford about it. Just this sentence in the article: “He also might consider a fifth installment of Indiana Jones, though he hopes it wouldn't take twenty years to pull together.” Not nearly as interesting as you might hope, I know. The rest of the interview is pretty average slice of life stuff. Sorry about that. Here, let me make it up to you! Here are some pictures of wacky Japanese Indiana Jones toys coming out with the flick!

That mini-Sean Connery is ADORABLE!

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

St. Patrick's Day Video Special: Singing Irishmen

Paul Clark — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hollywood's treatment with the Irish hasn't always been especially positive. The shelves of your local blockbuster are filled with drunken, racist, head-busting Irish cops and psychopathic IRA operatives, to say nothing of the proliferation of Leprechaun movies, both in and out of the 'Hood. The flip side to these stereotypes is the comparatively benign singing Irishman, a whimsical soul with a song in his heart even when it isn't on his lips. In honor of St. Patrick's Day, here's a short history of the Irish on screen in musical form- green beer optional.

First up is Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Disney's 1959 Ireland-set family adventure. Nearly half a century on, the film is an innocuous charmer, but the most thought-provoking thing about it is the casting of a young Sean "Scotland Forever" Connery as the Irish romantic lead. If you ever wanted to hear Connery sing, here's your chance, as he regales us with "Pretty Irish Girl."

Next up is the trailer for Finian's Rainbow, a movie that's notable both as a late-period Fred Astaire vehicle and an early film from Francis Ford Coppola. Rainbow was Astaire's last big-screen musical, and he's a lot of fun in the title role opposite a pair of very sixties costars, Petula Clark and Tommy Steele. The movie itself suffers from some of the bloat common to roadshow musicals of the day, but it's still solid entertainment.

Skipping ahead a few decades, here's a performance of that classic Irish folk song "Mustang Sally" as performed by The Commitments, taken from the Alan Parker film of the same name. Naturally, this is a far cry from the singing leprechauns and folksy charm of the previous videos, but it's entertaining in its own right. Whatever happened to lead singer Andrew Strong? Judging by his performance in the film, the guy's got some seriously shiny pipes. Also, see if you can spot future Once star Glen Hansard.

Finally, no St. Paddy's day would be complete without this rendition of "Danny Boy" performed by a trio that requires no introduction. Enjoy!

David Watkin, 1925-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Cinematographer David Watkin has died of cancer at the age of 82, at his home in Brighton, England. Watkin developed his skills after joining the Southern Railway Film Unit as an assistant in 1948. He branched into work on TV commercials in the early 1960s, where he met the director Richard Lester. Lester hired him to shoot his 1965 film The Knack and subsequently worked with him on Help!, How I Won the War, The Bed Sitting Room and Cuba. In those movies Watkins demonstrated a mastery of a wide range of styles, ranging from the cinema-verite vaudeville of Lester's Beatles films to the Godardisms of How I Won the War, but their best work together may well have been in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its companion piece The Four Musketeers (shot at the same time as the first film but released separately a year later) and the 1976 Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the middle-aged Robin Hood and Maid Marian. In those movies, Watkin, famous for his mastery of soft light, somehow achieved a romantic period look while incorporating his director's love of slapstick and visual clutter.

Watkin, who wrote two books of autobiography, Why Is There Only One Word for Thesaurus, which came out in 1998, and Was Clara Schumann a Fag Hag?, which was published only recently. Watkin always strove to give the impression that he was just a guy who knew how to work a camera who made his living shooting movies and who had a whole other compartment of his life devoted to the things he really cared about. But if he saw himself as a mere technician, he was deeply committed to his craft, and was constantly experimenting and extending the reach of the technology he worked with. (He invented a system of lights that made it easier for cinematographers to get better, soft effects during night shoots. Watkin, who was aparently a bit of a camp, was known to friends and co-workers by the nickname "Wendy", and the lighting system he devised became known as "the Wendy Light.") Besides his work with Lester, Watkins's proudest professional moments included Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Chariots of Fire (1981), Yentl (1983), and Out of Africa (1985), for which he won an Academy Award. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Society of Cinematographers in 2004.

The Rep Report (February 7--14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Over the course of a remarkably long career, Sidney Lumet has taken a crack at directing just about every kind of movie, while making a certain kind of film — the high-energy, acting-centered New York melodrama — his own. Last year he enjoyed a bit of a comeback with his 44th feature film, Before the Devil Know You're Dead, so the career retrospective at the Film Forum that kicks off this Friday with the 1976 Network couldn't be more timely. Highlights include Long Day's Journey into Night starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, the greatest production of Eugene O'Neill ever caught on film and the high point of Lumet's sideline as a TV-trained specialist in filming plays; The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes, and The Offense, all of which feature powerfully charged performances by Sean Connery, an actor who Lumet was prescient in seeing as having the potential to be more than James Bond; and of course the two "based on a true story" films co-starring Al Pacino and the city of New York, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, which had such an impact that Lumet and his star could have practically taken out a copyright on Fun City in the seventies. Also, from 1939: One Percent of a Nation, a little-seen, independently produced New York film that includes the only record of the director's work as an actor. (He was fifteen at the time.) On Monday, February 11, the director will appear in person to discuss his career in "An Evening with Sidney Lumet", to be moderated by historian Foster Hirsch.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 10, the Museum of the Moving Image will host "A Tribute to St. Clair Bourne", in honor of the documentary filmmaker, who died last December. The critic Armond White, film and literary scholar Clyde Taylor, Black Enterprise columnist George Alexander, and journalist and poet Esther Iverem will discuss the filmmaker's career and show clips of his work.

PORTLAND: The 31st Annual International Portland Film Festival opens Thursday, February 7 and runs through the 23rd, offering more than two weeks worth of jam-packed programming of feature films and shorts from around the world, in the city that Scott Favor and Bob Pigeon were proud to call home.