The Screengrab : slate

Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Pre-Prepared Obituary

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The death of Brad Renfro last week threw newspapers into a bit of a tizzy; few, if any, had a prepared obituary on file for the actor, who was only twenty-five years old and was regarded as, in the words of reporter John Rogers, "a relatively minor celebrity." News outlets have traditionally kept obituaries ready and on file, just in case, but one company rep who spoke to Rogers, Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post, said that he "couldn't recall any on a person under thirty." There have always been cases of celebrities dying young, of course. But now there seem to be more people who are very young and very famous — or, at least, who seemed reasonable famous recently enough that their deaths still count as news. In some cases, there's also the question of just how well-prepared one should be in the case of an event that, to put it crassly, not everyone would regard as shocking if it were to happen. (Last summer, Kim Masters of Slate ran a quote from an anonymous staffer at the gossip-heavy E! cable channel saying, "People feel like [Lindsay Lohan] is going to die — and we're not helping.") Lou Ferrara of the Associated Press singles out the death of Anna Nicole Smith as a "wake-up call" to the industry, a judgement that sort of makes you wonder, perhaps with a shudder, how overblown the coverage of that singular event might have been if the media had been fully prepared for it.

The AP has now performed a bit of a wake-up call itself by acknowledging that it has gone ahead and prepared an obituary for Britney Spears — you know, just in case a piece of a malfunctioning satellite should stray into the Earth's orbit and land on her head while she's handing out alms to the poor. Being considered both famous and doomed enough that the AP needs to have your obituary on tap when, like Spears, you've barely just turned twenty-six may be the ultimate back-handed compliment of all time, but there are reasons why many news services may be reluctant to follow suit. Life is unpredictable — if you don't believe me, cut Iggy Pop in half and count his rings — and some spoilsports, such as Robert Downey, Jr., have been known to pretty much get themselves together after a prolonged spell out on the ledge. (For the record, we at the Screengrab love the shit out of both Mr. Downey and Mr. Pop and wish them nothing but the best. Nor do we harbor any but the tenderest of concerns for Ms. Lohan or Ms. Spears.) For Adam Bernstein, it's a time and manpower issue: "It takes a significant chunk of your time to do it," he says of obituary writing and maintenance, "and there are people who are incredibly more accomplished and in their 100s."

Slate's Movie Club Still Swinging

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Just when we think we’re completely burned out on year-end critic’s awards, list-making and assorted summations of What It All Means, along comes another installment of the Slate Movie Club to remind us how much fun it is to argue about this stuff. The annual roundtable of film pundits is always at its most entertaining when the gloves come off. The 2004 edition was particularly juicy, with original ringmaster David Edelstein and guests including A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Salon regular Stephanie Zacharek gleefully taking their shots at everyone’s favorite infuriating contrarian Armond White. (White’s style is accurately characterized by the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim as “entertainingly predicated on a bullying, unpredictable subjectivity.”)

The Movie Club’s heyday may have passed; Edelstein is long gone and big names like Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert are absent from this year’s roster. Still, current Slate critic Dana Stevens and guests Scott Foundas (L.A. Weekly), Nathan Lee (Village Voice) and Wesley Morris (Boston Globe) manage to keep it lively, kicking around such water cooler topics as the ending of No Country for Old Men, the attitude towards abortion in Knocked Up and Juno, and whether Southland Tales will ultimately be regarded as a masterpiece or a mess.

Woman Is the Straight Man of the World

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:30:00 GMT

You may remember that, back when the year's big comedy hit Knocked Up was in theaters, there was a minor outbreak of editorials and critical think pieces wondering if it erred in not having its heroine give more serious consideration to the possibility of getting an abortion. (Then again, maybe you don't remember that. We didn't mean to imply that you don't have a life or anything.) Now the movie is out on DVD, and as tempting as it might be to have that debate again, its star, Katherine Heigl, has opted to give us something new and exciting to argue about by telling a Vanity Fair interviewer that the movie that may help her to someday price herself out of network TV series work is "a little sexist." Her grounds for this charge are interesting, not least because they take some of the earlier comments made about the film and turn them on their head. When Knocked Up first appeared, some observers took the not unreasonable position that the hero and heroine might not be the best two people to be building a life together because she was a serious career person and he was an eternal adolescent and no-account slacker who, while maybe a fun date, could not be counted on over the long term. Heigl's translation of this goes: "It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys." He may be a big kid, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she wants to be regarded as a tight-ass. (Or, to use Heigl's exact term, "such a bitch.")

In discussing this argument, Meghan O'Rourke makes some good points, especially with regard to the greater level of metaphorical and comical imagination at work in the dialogue scenes between men (such as the Vegas hotel scene between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd) than in those moments where the women, Heigl and Leslie Mann as her sister, work out their feelings. There's a long Hollywood tradition of romantic comedy heroines who are kind of batty (such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby) and even sometimes sort of, well, slutty (such as Melanie Griffith in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild) loosening up tight-assed men, and I don't know that many men, watching those movies and identifying with Cary Grant or Jeff Daniels, felt bad about seeing themselves as needing to be made over; most of us are probably just smitten with the idea that some gorgeous woman would care enough to go to the trouble. There's a tiny amount of sanctimony in Knocked Up that makes itself felt in the rapid montage of Rogen entering responsible adult life in what seems to be less take that it takes some of us to get the cable company representative on the phone. If anything, Judd Apatow may be too sensitive to women's concerns; he's not as comfortable portraying them as ridiculous as he is with the men. Of course, the final word is that however these issues look on the op-ed page, in comedy, what people really appreciate is not seeing someone grow up and becoming worthy to raise a child with their partner but getting to laugh. A cold-eyed observer might wonder whether the moment Heigl sensed there was something "sexist" about the movie came not on the set but when she saw it with an audience and realized that nobody was laughing during her scenes. And a really cold-eyed observer might wonder if that's not as much the fault of the actress droning her dialogue as that of the writer-director who wrote it for her. It's not as if being tight-assed and funny is a problem for Leslie Mann.

Slate's New Holiday Classics

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Slate's writers offer a long and timely selection of "overlooked Christmas movies", including Yogi's First Christmas ("A surprisingly touching ode to ursine innocence"), Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!, Harold Ramis's venture into hard-boiled nihilism The Ice Harvest, and Abel Ferrara's beyond-belief 'R Xmas (in which a crooked undercover cop played by Ice-T intereferes with a young drug-dealing couple's feverish attempt to obtain a much-desired "Party Girl" doll for their daughter's Christmas stocking). At this point, alert ScreenGrab readers may have noticed a family resemblance to our own beloved "New Holiday Classics" feature, except that most of the movies in Slate's round-up are a lot more fun to write about than they are to watch. But Timothy Noah is to be saluted for mentioning the best Christmas morning scene ever caught on film: the one in The Thin Man where Nick Charles (William Powell), lounging in his PJ's, shoots the ornaments off the tree with the handy little air-pistol that Santa brought him. (Not coal? Santa must have a lax policy towards creeping alcoholism.) That movie also has what may be the best Christmas party scene on film, with all the guys Nick once put in the joint streaming into the Charles's hotel room to show there's no hard feelings. The biggest, plug-ugliest one of all is found drunkenly sobbing because "I want to call my Ma and wish her a happy Christmas." "Well, why don't you?" asks Nick. "I. . . I haven't got a dime." — Phil Nugent

YouTube Fight Club

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

In late fall and winter, as the weather turns cold and the Oscar bait drives all the decent action movies out of the multiplex, a young man's thoughts to staying indoors, watching idiots beat each up on homemade fight videos posted on YouTube. Carlo Rotella has the definitive connoisseur's guide to and meditation on this emerging art form. Rotella breaks down the sub-genres, offers helpful advice to aspiring filmmakers and battlers, and makes a heartfelt plea for better color commentary from those in the crowd: "'Damn, he just hit you,' a voice from the crowd will say as the opponents tear into each other. 'He just hit you again. He's beating your ass!' To whom is this commentary directed? Who benefits from it? Not the fighters. They already know who hit whom." His essay, liberally illustrated with clips, is also a fount of lessons that it would have done me some good to have learned before adolescence, such as this: "These guys likewise commit the double error of messing with the wrong opponent and being unready for a fast start. As a general rule, if you pick a fight with someone who immediately assumes a relaxed but erect shuffle-stepping stance with his hands up and his chin tucked and a blandly businesslike expression on his face, you have probably just answered the question of the day wrong. . ." — Phil Nugent

"Chuck Norris Doesn't Endorse, He Tells America How It's Gonna Be!"

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Iowa voters (and anyone with an Internet connection) have just begun seeing this campaign ad, in which Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reels off a few of the more family-friendly and less pretzel-twistingly surreal "Chuck Norris facts" while Norris sits beside him assuring potential voters that the Huckster will protect our Second Amendment rights and "put the IRS out of business." Taken strictly on an aesthetic level, and reminding everyone that any time we use that term in reference to political commercials we're grading on a curve, it's a smart piece of work. Discussing the ad in Slate, the site's "Trailhead" campaign blogger writes, "It's unclear to me why he would base his first Hawkeye State TV campaign on an outdated Internet meme that might not have trickled up to most caucus-goers," thus paradoxically implying that the "Norris facts" angle is all played-out, yet at the same time suggesting that it's too hip for the room. What may really matter is that in a contest where all the other Republican candidates have been concentrating on establishing their grim-manliness bona fides, Huckabee has unexpectedly demonstrated a sense of humor. What's more, he's dared to suggest there's something comical about macho icons, and maybe, by extension, something comical about a bunch of middle-aged rich white guys competing in a "Who Is Most Macho?" contest. Huckabee's delivery in the ad is pretty good, too; he doesn't ham it up, but unlike, say Richard Nixon, whose last words might well have been, "Explain to me again what I was doing on Laugh-In", he does make it clear that he gets the joke. If Huckabee gets anywhere in the primaries, it'll be because he manages to establish himself as the preferred candidate of religious conservatives, but if he builds on that base, it'll be because he manages, as George W. Bush did in 2000, to strike voters who might be inclined to see conservative holy-roller types as kind of scary as reassuringly normal. (How Bush ever pulled this off we still don't understand. Were we all drunk that year?) If nothing else, Huckabee has already pulled off a major comedy coup by inspiring the complaint, "Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy," to pass the lips of his rival Fred Thompson, currently running for president on the basis of his record as New York City's pretend District Attorney. — Phil Nugent