The Screengrab : stacy keach

Ozsploitation! “Roadgames” (1981)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

Richard Franklin’s Roadgames is like Rear Window on wheels. I wish I could take credit for that observation, but I cribbed it from the director himself. Franklin is a self-proclaimed Hitchcock buff; he directed Psycho II, but Roadgames is actually the more Hitchcockian achievement – a zesty soufflé of humor, action, suspense and a dollop of ambiguity. (I stole “soufflé” from Franklin, too – what can I say, the man is an astute appraiser of his own work.) It’s such a fun little flick, I have no idea why I’d never seen it before now.

Stacy Keach reveals a playful side that has eluded me until now as truck driver (or “truckie” as those whimsical Aussies call him) Patrick Quid. Driving a load of pork across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth, Quid has no one to talk to except his dingo Boswell. He manages to amuse himself nonetheless, playing harmonica and inventing stories about his fellow travelers of the only highway around. (Because there’s no other route across the continent, he’s always catching up to the same vehicles he’s seen at diners and gas stations along the way.) He’s particular intrigued by a man driving a green van, who he spots poking around a motel garbage dumpster in the wee hours of the morning.

We know something Quid doesn’t, as we’ve already seen this man put on a pair of racing gloves and strangle a naked woman in his motel room. Quid’s suspicions are heightened by a radio broadcast warning of a serial killer in the area. Although regulations forbid him from picking up hitchhikers, he can’t resist. His first passenger, a chatty middle-aged woman, soon develops her own suspicions about Quid. His second, attractive young Pamela (Jamie Lee Curtis), proves to be his match in the realm of serial killer theorizing. As they close in on the mystery man in the van, however, she may turn out to be his next victim.

The long road across the Nullarbor is marked by spectacular scenery, small pockets of civilization and a gaggle of oddball characters. Aside from a brief campfire interlude, Franklin keeps the pedal to the metal; memorable set pieces include a game of chicken between Quid and an inexplicably aggressive motorist hauling a boat trailer, as well as the finale in which truck, van and police car all converge in very tight quarters. Curtis, who was still the Queen of Scream at this point in her career, is fine in what turns out to be a fairly small part, but this is Keach’s show all the way – it may be his liveliest, most charismatic performance. As Hitchcock riffs go, I’ll take this one over most of the De Palma catalogue any day.

Previously on Ozsploitation!:
Long Weekend
Turkey Shoot

Famous Last Words: Round 2, Week 9

Paul Clark — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I could almost hear the joyful noise coming from my Screengrab colleague Leonard Pierce due to my selection of last week’s Famous Last Words quote. The line came from William Peter Blatty’s irresistibly nutzoid The Ninth Configuration, a favorite of Leonard’s that he takes every opportunity he can to shoehorn into our weekly lists (of course, I’m one to talk, given the disproportionate number of Brian DePalma films that get included). Sadly, very few of the Screengrab readers appear to share Leonard’s enthusiasm for Blatty’s directorial debut, and that’s a shame. Based on Blatty’s novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the film boasts a memorably intense lead performance by Stacy Keach, as well as a killer supporting cast headed by That Guy! extraordinaire Scott Wilson, who gives his all to memorably unhinged dialogue like “the man in the moon tried to fuck my sister!” If you haven’t seen it, Leonard and I both urge you to give it a look. Congrats to the few who got it.

This week’s quote comes from a film that’s about 180 degrees removed from The Ninth Configuration. Here’s the quote:

“Oh, if only you could have recognized what was always yours… could have found what was never lost…”

Name the film. Remember, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 PM Eastern on Wednesday. Good luck!

Taverns on the Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine example of the way lazy, excessive reliance on ridiculous CGI (and CGI monkeys) can ruin an otherwise passable movie. And there’s no finer argument for the good ol’ fashioned non-CGI pleasures of real world filmmaking than the Nepalese bar sequence in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. To recap: winsome badass Karen Allen (oh, Hollywood, HOW did you ever let her get away?) drinks a yak-herder under the table, then her flaky ex-boyfriend shows up while she’s all full o’ rotgut and she slaps him in the face and sends him on his way. And THEN, creepy Nazi torturer Toht (a.k.a. Mr. Melty-Face) shows up with a bunch of evil minions and things really get interesting. What follows is a master class in cinematic action, pacing, camera placement, stuntwork, pyrotechnics, performance and editing...all without a bluescreen (or hangover) in sight.

ON_LINE (2002)

Okay, so maybe I’m biased, given that I co-wrote this one (with director Jed Weintrob), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the scene in this under-the-radar internet sex comedy where neurotic shut-in John (Josh Hamilton) goes to an odious, overpriced Manhattan nightclub on a disastrous double-date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), the wild cybersex enthusiast he picked up on the internet, his oversexed roommate, Moe (Harold Perrineau, Jr.) and Moe’s pill-popping, manic-depressive girlfriend (Isabel Gillies). But don’t take my word for it: in a Salon review that (almost but not quite) made up for any number of really quite nasty reviews of the film, the extremely cultured and discerning Andrew O'Hehir summed up the appeal of the scene thusly: “John's nightclub internal monologue, as he watches Jordan dance and reflects on how hot she is, how shallow he is for thinking that and how little chance he has of actually getting in her pants in the off-line world, is probably the movie's high point.” Thanks, Mr. O’Hehir...I couldn’ t have said it better myself!

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Before that dastardly Hedley Lamar (played with nefarious gusto by the late Harvey Korman) decided to run the railroad through it, the hamlet of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had everything an Old West town needed: a church, a hoosegow for when Mongo came to town, and proximity to the Hollywood Hills. And, of course, it had its own saloon. But unlike most of the filthy, rowdy joints in the history of westerns, this particular saloon was always kept nice and clean, thanks to the stewardship of the unfortunately named Anal Johnson. All that came to an end, however, with the arrival of the Teutonic songbird Lili von Shtupp, played with Dietrichian élan by the Oscar-nominated Madeline Kahn. Lili’s world-weary act, sweet set of curves, and foul-mouthed stage patter (“Why don’t you get your friggin’ feet off the stage?”) brings every rough rider in the county, but it’s her love of that delicious schnitzengruben that leads Lamar to hire her to seduce and abandon Bart, the new sheriff in town. In one of the most memorable scenes ever set in an Old West saloon, Lili sighs out “I’m Tired” before being carried off, James Brown-style, by her backup dancers and deposited in the arms of Sheriff Bart – who, it turns out, has more schnitzengruben than she can handle.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

It’s a scene we’ve watch play out a million times in a million action movies: a nameless bar in the middle of nowhere is taken over by a generic group of bikers, who wreak havoc in the place until they push the wrong guy just a little bit too far. But William Peter Blatty’s disturbing cult hit The Ninth Configuration is no typical action movie, and the bar fight won’t play out in a typical way. The set-up to the scene is more complex than it seems: mentally disturbed former astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), disillusioned that sensitive psychiatrist Col. Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) has turned out to be a blood-soaked Marine Corps commando, escapes from an asylum and seeks refuge in liquor at the nameless biker bar. A combination of booze, despair and a smart mouth enrages the boss bikers (the unstable brute Stanley and the cunning, sadistic Richard, played by the gaunt, devil-faced Richard Lynch), who abuse Cutshaw until Kane arrives to rescue him. Kane, who has forsaken violence and taken up the mantle of the caring, well-meaning shrink in order to bury his own murderous past, attempts to come to a peaceful resolution, but finally he can take no more. The scene that follows is one of the most stunning bar fights every captured on film – although to call it a fight ignores what truly happens: Kane utterly annihilates the biker gang in a matter of seconds, killing a number of them. It’s an astonishing scene, and even more astonishing is the fact that it’s not even the climax of The Ninth Configuration.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

In an audio commentary track recorded for the French Connection DVD, Gene Hackman described Eddie Egan, the real-life model for Hackman's obsessed narc "Popeye" Doyle, as having been "flippant" to a degree that he'd never encountered before in a human being. It's easy to imagine the conversation among the patrons of the Harlem bar that Popeye raids after he's stormed in and out like a hurricane: "That fellow was certainly flippant, wasn't he? I'm a fervent supporter of our boys in blue, but speaking as an amateur observer of the law enforcement process, I can't help feeling that some of that flippancy was unwarranted! Here, help me tie off this tourniquet?" The raid, which is actually a cover for a meeting in the men's room between Popeye and an informant, establishes Popeye's adversarial relationship to the city's civilian population, his casual racism, and the gleefully sadistic tinge to his brutality. (Obliged to rough up his informant so that no one will suspect the guy is a rat, Popeye asks him, "Where do you want it?" The man thinks about it for a second and points to his right cheek, and Popeye slugs him on his left. The blow looks hard enough to crack the guy's jaw, but this is Popeye when he's just playing.) In a recent interview in Reason, Ed Burns, the twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department turned TV writer whose HBO series The Wire dismantled the logic behind the nation's "war on drugs", called the scene "iconic" and blamed it for instilling the wrong mindset in a generation of cops by "put[ting] out the idea of this guy who cracks heads," Popeye set police work back by reinforcing the idea that cops should act like swaggering badasses instead of establishing a functional relationship with their communities. So if you're a fan of The Wire -- a not uncommon condition among Screengrab writers -- then give it up for Popeye Doyle; without him, The Wire might not have been necessary.

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Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

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No, But I've Read the Movie: THE KILLER INSIDE ME

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Jim Thompson was tailor-made for Hollywood success. He worked there for some time, and found early success with no less august a personage than Stanley Kubrick; he worked on the screenplay for Kubrick's terrific late-period noir The Killing and wrote the stunning war movie Paths of Glory in its entirety. Later on, a number of very fine films would be made from his novels, including two different versions of The Getaway of differing success, as well as The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and Coup de Torchon, Bertrand Tavernier's masterful adaptation of his Pop. 1280. Thompson's books carried a bleak criminal sensibility that was perfect for the noir era, and he wrote terrific, snappy dialogue that sounds great coming out of actors who have a feel for his work. Due to a combination of bad luck (many of his projects were prematurely scuttled by studio interference or money problems), politics (he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era due to his leftist leanings), and his own personal demons (he was plagued by alcoholism and innumerable other issues), Thompson never became the motion picture legend he could have been. Though critics have rediscovered his work, previously relegated to pulp status, and he's undergoing a similar reassessment to Raymond Chandler, many of his best books remain unadopted for the big screen. That's a shame, but not as bad as the fact that what's arguably his greatest accomplishment -- the nasty but near-perfect noir novel The Killer Inside Me -- actually did get made into a movie, but a movie that's been almost entirely forgotten, and with good reason.

With The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson created one of the most chilling portraits of pure psychotic evil ever committed to paper, but it's not just a bloody thrill-ride trash novel the way that serial killer novels developed in later years. Lou Ford, the novel's main character, is a man of surprising depth, and Thompson's unfolding of the character is a psychological portrait that transcends its pulp origins and becomes something worthy of Dostoevsky. Ford is the sheriff in a small mining town in Montana, trusted by everyone; he's such a folksy character, straight out of cowboy art, that even his fellow townsfolk, hearing the endless cliches and banal observations he spouts, think of him as somewhat simple-minded. But Lou Ford has a secret: a twisted mind and a history of dark childhood abuses by his physician father have turned him into a monster. He's far more intelligent than he lets on, putting up his stupidity as a show to allay suspicion from his grim hobbies. As he puts it, "When things get a little rough, I go out and kill a fewpeople, that's all." In fact, part of his downfall is that he assumes everyone else is as stupid as they think he is. Ford is under no illusions about his future: he describes himself as "waiting to be split down the middle", the inevitable result of the double life he's committed to lead. But in the meantime, a lot of people are going to get hurt by the man Lou Ford is, and the man people think he is. In 1976, Western veteran Burt Kennedy (Welcome to Hard Times, Support Your Local Sheriff) brought Thompson's greatest novel to the screen.

WHAT IT HAD: Any adaptation of The Killer Inside Me lives and dies by the man who plays Lou Ford, and the movie version at least succeeded on that point. As Ford, Stacy Keach is terrific; he presents a clear understanding of the character and plays him well at every turn. When Lou Ford is called upon to be folksy and corny, Keach plays it well without ever hamming it up; and when Lou Ford's dark side needs to come out, Keach is fantastic, displaying his character's psychotic tendencies in an understated, subtle, almost tender way that perfectly suits the role. A few of the supporting cast stand out as well, particularly Keenan Wynn and Don Stroud; they're not up to Keach's level, but they provide a nice veteran anchor to the cast. While the script (by Robert Chamblee and Hollywood gadabout Edward Mann) isn't stellar, it at least does its best to preserve some of Thompson's best dialogue.

WHAT IT LACKED: The Killer Inside Me is, to be perfectly honest, a grade-Z production. It's not an exploitation flick -- in fact, a little more gore and sex probably would have pepped it up a bit -- but just from looking at it, you can tell it was made on the cheap. Its production values are substandard and at times the whole thing plays like a bad TV movie. Few of the supporting roles, most especially Susan Tyrell as Keach's foil and romantic interest, are up to snuff, and the plethora of half-assed acting diminishes his performance. It's not clear whether it was just timidity or a eye towards the ratings that kept the writers and director from fully embracing the brutal violence of the book, but it leads to some crucial scenes being left out or soft-pedaled. And while Kennedy's direction is competent, it's never any more than that, and it's sometimes less. Overall, the entire film has a lackluster, patched-together quality; it never coheres into the elegant and vicious thing that is the book.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Nope. It's a testament to how unsuccessful the movie is that it's most widely available in DVD format on a double-feature disc with another forgotten thriller from the '70s. As a resume item, it didn't do much for anyone's career, and while it's not a terrible film, its pleasures -- largely, Keach's performance and some choice bits of Thompson's dialogue -- are few and far between. Even if a remastered edition were available that sheds the crappy digital transfer and overall poor visual quality, it's not as if there's much to watch. It's a project worth revisiting; in the hands of a skilled director with a feel for noir and an affinity for Thompson's gorgeous, nihilistic prose, this book could make a great movie, especially today when an antihero like Lou Ford could really resonate with Tarantino-hardened moviegoers. There's a fine film waiting to be made out of The Killer Inside Me, but unfortunately, this isn't it.

Take Five: Weed

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We were going to call this Take Five "Buddha", and then, like, totally blow your mind by not including Kundun, but frankly, we're just too, you know, we're too, uh...what were we talking about? Oh, right! That weed! The chronic! Sweet Mary Jane! A favorite in Hollywood for so many years that it doesn't even seem like a vice to some people (remember Tom Hagen warning the movie producer in The Godfather that one of his stars was about to 'graduate' from marijuana to cocaine), it was a while before social pressures eased up enough to portray herb in anything but the most hysterical terms. How far we've come, bros! Today, only a few scant days after 4/20 (the national stoner's holiday), we can each of us get nicely toasted and ditch work early for a matinee of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which posits that even our Commander-in-Chief enjoys a good bong hit now and again. The noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success contained a plot point that expected us to believe that a jazz musician -- and a white one, at that! -- might see his career ruined by the mere possession of the devil weed, while the new Kal Penn/John Cho vehicle implies that toking up on a regular basis is the best career move you can make. Here's five more films that deal with the sweet leaf in all its hazy glory.

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

This absurd scare-flick is typical of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s; it's only exceptional in that it's exceptionally over-the-top in its woozy narrative, lurid dialogue, and bizarrely sensationalistic vision of what marijuana will do to you. (Apparently, it turns you into a murderer or a sex fiend instead of a lazy Xbox-addicted dolt.) Directed by French-born Louis Gasnier (whose other major claim to fame was the Perils of Pauline serial), it's unintentionally hilarious to the degree that it's been reissued endlessly in every format imaginable for new generations of potheads to giggle at. In fact, for a film that did poor business, featured no stars, and is incompetently made at every level, it very well may be that Reefer Madness is the most-watched film of the 1930s. Ah, irony.

CHEECH & CHONG'S UP IN SMOKE (1978)

You simply can't talk about dope movies without mentioning Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, the guys who turned them from a taboo into a franchise. Although it's easy to condemn the boys for how quickly their on-screen efforts turned into dogshit (I'm still reeling from The Corsican Brothers), those only familiar with how bad things eventually got might want to go back and give their motion picture debut another look. It's not great art or anything, and Lou Adler's direction is strictly syndicated sitcom level, but it's got a number of genuinely funny moments, some hilarious dialogue, some swell celebrity cameos from Tom Skerritt and Stacy Keach, and all in all, it's exactly what a stoner comedy shoud be: a good-natured, consequence-free thumb in the nose to petty authority. Good afternoon viewing for a baked summer day.

THE BIG LEBOWKSI (1998)

It's downright shocking that such a successful dopehead comedy was made by the Coen Brothers. While I certainly can't speak to their own habits of indulgence or not, their filmmaking is incredibly tight and unbelievably disciplined, exactly the opposite of most art created by the Cheeba-American community. And yet along comes The Big Lebowski: a movie that, aside from being an unbelievably funny comedy and an eerily precise if cleverly disguised Raymond Chandler detective story, is probably the most perfect stoner flick ever made. The Dude is the ultimate slacker hero, lighting a J when he gets bored listening to the title character rattle on about hard work and responsibility, as well as the roach-butt of many a joke, as he smashes up his much-abused car after dropping a maggot on his pants while driving.

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004)

Of course, we can't praise the sometimes subtle, sometimes anvil-heavy stoner comedy of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay without mentioning its predecessor, a hugely successful cult flick that came out of nowhere and captured the public imagination in just the right way with its combination of gregarious dope jokes and over-the-top grossout comedy. It launched the careers of appealing leads Kal Penn and John Cho; it proved that you can make a successful buddy picture without a white guy; and best of all, it was funny as hell and forced beloved/reviled mini-hamburger chain White Castle to acknowledge its existence with an extreme line-toeing ad campaign that tried to capitalize on the movie's success without explicitly avowing the truth: that White Castle is the preferred 3AM nosh joint for the seriously blunted.

SUPER HIGH ME (2007)

Explicitly lifted from Morgan Spurlock's anti-McDonald's stunt documentary Super Size Me, and based on little more than a two-minute comedy routine by star Doug Benson, Super High Me -- which combines a fairly legitimate section on drug law reform, straight-up concert footage of Benson's act, and extended segments of his attempt to get high every day for a month -- isn't the most coherent or well-presented film you'll ever see. Which, given the topic, is pretty understandable. But it's got its funny moments, and if nothing else, it allows you to see that Benson is none the worse for wear after his 'experiment' (which, let's be honest, would represent cutting back for a lot of people), and the movie is stocked with successful actors and comedians who are successful and yet get stoned quite regularly. It's a good thing Benson's not black, though, or this movie would probably be used as evidence at his trial.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.