The Screengrab : star trek

The Last Morning Deal Report

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

A word of warning: just because this is our last Morning Deal Report at the Screengrab doesn’t mean Hollywood is going to stop announcing ridiculous projects. You’ll just have to find out about them somewhere else. I wish I could say we’ve saved the best for last, but we can only work with what they give us.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz will reunite for James Mangold’s Wichita. It is not the story of a lineman who’s still on the line. “The script has been through many machinations, but the most recent drafts were done by Scott Frank, with Mangold currently fine-tuning the script with Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island). Two-hander has several action scenes. Cruise will play a secret agent who pops in and out of the life of a single woman,” Variety reports.

Kevin Smith has found another pair of dicks. “Seann William Scott and Adam Brody are joining Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in Warner Bros.' A Couple of Dicks,” Smith’s new buddy action comedy, per The Hollywood Reporter. Smith did not write the script, which is by script Robb and Mark Cullen, and “follows a maverick cop (Willis) and his partner (Morgan) who, while tracking a valuable stolen baseball card, tangle with a memorabilia-obsessed gangster and rescue a Mexican beauty who holds the key to millions in laundered drug money.”

Also, there will be another Batman movie, another Star Trek, another James Bond, and at some point, probably another King Kong remake. Save us the aisle seat!

Screengrab Gush: Every Little Step

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Back in April, I offered a first quarter wrap-up of my favorite movies from the first three months of 2009, and -- but for the impending demise of the Screengrab -- I would have returned on July 1 with my second quarter wrap-up, which surely would have included the ridiculously entertaining Star Trek reboot, the moving biopic Grey Gardens (which counts towards my film list since I saw it on the big screen and also because it’s HBO, which is apparently not TV) and the festival favorite Winnebago Man, all of which have been previously reviewed and justly praised on this blog.

The other Q2 movie I’ve seen with a good chance of winding up on my year-end Top Ten is the documentary Every Little Step, a chronicle of the 1975 origin and 2006 revival of A Chorus Line built around the stories of the young hopefuls and veteran gypsies involved in the real-life audition process for Broadway’s classic musical about the audition process.

And yet, as noted in the title of this post, I’m so firmly ensconced in the film’s target demographic that I can’t even really review it: I can only gush how much I, personally, was moved by its depiction of people bound to and by their often cruel and sometimes exhilarating (but always risky and generally low-paying) creative arts vocations in a world that cares a helluva lot more about science, math and the bottom line: you know, the whole “What I Did For Love” thing...

...but maybe you’re NOT familiar with the show biz anthem “What I Did For Love” or any of the other characters or songs associated with A Chorus Line. Maybe you don’t already have fond memories of the musical’s spunky 4’ 10” Asian chorus girl Connie, and so you won’t be inherently fascinated by the revelation that the character was based on Baayork Lee, Broadway’s original Connie (and a member of the revival’s creative team), one of the real-life dancers whose stories Michael Bennett and his collaborators incorporated into the book and lyrics of their Tony-sweeping production. And maybe, if you don’t know about Bennett’s early death from AIDS-related lymphoma in 1987, you’ll miss the melancholy undertow of the documentary’s otherwise jubilant razzle-dazzle.

Still, even with no foreknowledge of the show in question, the “God I hope I get it!” reality show suspense of the audition structure, where we ultimately get to know two candidates for each of several roles (knowing in the end there can be only one, Highlander-style) may be enough to entertain audiences who don’t know “Dance Ten, Looks Three” from “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen” and haven’t been to a theater since their high school talent show. (Me, I was rooting for the cute little Asian girl who was down to her last unemployment check.) So go ahead, add it to that Netflix queue: even if you're not a flaming theater geek, at least it'll tide you over 'til the next season of So You Think You Can Dance With The Stars of American Idol's Got Talent!

Morning Deal Report: Buffy Slays Again

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:30:00 GMT

More people spent time at the Smithsonian than received Salvation over the long Memorial Day weekend. Ben Stiller’s second Night in the Museum trumped the latest Terminator at the box office, taking in $70 million from Friday to Monday. Salvation, which actually opened Thursday night, took in $53.8 million for a total gross of $67.2 million. Star Trek, Angels and Demons and Dance Flick rounded out the top five.

This can’t possibly be a good idea. “A new incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer could be coming to the big screen,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Buffy creator Joss Whedon isn't involved and it's not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel.” This new version “would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike.” Surely there’s a lawsuit brewing back at Whedon headquarters.

Flight Of the Navigator is also set to take off again. “The 1986 original told the story of a 12-year-old boy who is abducted by an alien spacecraft in 1978 and reappears eight years later, still the same age and with no memory of what happened.”

In Other Blogs: The Blogger Experience

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Some Came Running proprietor Glenn Kenny recounts his Girlfriend Experience at The Auteurs. Kenny has a role in the film that was pitched to him as “the Harry Knowles of internet escort reviewers.” Kenny was not immediately flattered. “Harry Knowles, if you don’t know, is famous for founding Aint It Cool News, a movie fan boy website of large popularity and no small industry influence. Knowles (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) is also, as Kyle on South Park would put it, a great big fat fuck. I am, hence, slightly put off.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir talks to Girlfriend Experience director Steven Soderbergh about his prolific, unpredictable career. “I'm always trying to be Howard Hawks, sure. I envy the opportunities that the studio directors got in the '30s and '40s. It was assumed that you would make more than one movie a year, and that that movie could be a western or a musical or a comedy or a drama. Very early on, before I made sex, lies, and videotape, I fantasized that I could have a career in which I could move around like that. It's not easy.”

Ali Arikan breaks from the Trek pack at The House Next Door. “Which is all by way of saying there is absolutely no nuance in J.J. Abrams’s film, not even a soupçon of subtlety, no genuine humour. It’s all piff-paff, whack-bang, etc, packed with heaps of post-modernist “irony” or whatever it is they call this bollocks. Nudge nudge, wink wink ahoy. We are all wallowing in a never-ending adolescence these days. So, instead of making us laugh, J.J. Abrams just wants to make us feel clever, and the whole thing becomes a big ego-massage”

Bright Lights After Dark considers the geography of 3 Women. “It's a point that many viewers miss, though it's difficult to blame them: Robert Altman's 3 Women is really "about" California, and quite distinctly so -- it doesn't belong to its contentual municipality in the sense that, say, Nashville does. And it's not about the psycho-sprawl urban California of Los Angeles or the spittle, cardboard and tinsel California of Hollywood or the plugged culture retro-future sophistry California of San Francisco. It's about the other California, by which one means the smattering of middle-of-nowhere cities always on the brink of suburbia these days, and always reminding us of somewhere else. The dusty, mid-western-like cock-and-bull towns that flank the interstate 5 with ranches and groves. The shattered-shell-and-hanging-kayak-wind-chime Mediterranean beach villas that dot the coastal region from Monterey to Santa Barbara. And, of course, the boilingly barren, frenziedly phallic desert settlements that circle the parched Mojave and Joshua Tree territories.”

And finally in List-o-Mania, Topless Robot offers the 10 Most Blatant Terminator Ripoffs, including Cyborg Cop. “A renegade cop (is there any other kind in these movies?) goes to the tropics to find his long lost brother, who has been transformed into a cybernetic killing machine by a mad scientist in this '93 movie. As the scientist, John Rhys-Davies seems to be under the impression he's filming an episode of Gilligan's Island as his performance has to be seen to be believed.”

When Charles Napier Talks, People Twitter

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We don't want to oversell it or anything, but Nathan Rabin's interview with Charles Napier for The Onion's A.V. Club is the greatest thing ever and deserves to be republished in the slimmest-ever edition of the Library of America series. For the benefit of those so benighted they have a moment's difficulty placing a name to the face or vice versa, the 73-year-old Kentucky-born Napier broke into the business as a space hippie on a 1969 episode of Star Trek before becoming a part of Russ Meyer's stock company. He subsequently became part of Jonathan Demme's stock company, playing the bigamous trucker Chrome Angel in Citizens Band and sticking on a chef's hat for Something Wild and a judge's robe for Philadelphia. (It was his performance in Citizens Band that inspired Pauline Kael to describe him as looking like "a Brian Keith made of concrete." He's done the rounds of TV series guest spots and a lot of voice work, channeling Ted Turner for his regular stint on the Jon Lovitz cartoon The Critic, and he can now be seen in the straight-to-video One-Eyed Monster, in which he does battle with Ron Jeremy's killer penis. (No, for real.) So it's not as if he doesn't have a career to talk about. It must have seemed, going in, that the trick would be to get him to open up. Turns out he was wide open with the screen door banging.

On "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: "I was associate producer on that. They brought me, [Roger] Ebert, and Russ Meyer over to 20th Century Fox because Daryl Zanuck saw this movie we were making, and they wanted a part of it. So we did the movie, they released it. It made lots of money, and it kind of went away for 15 years, ’cause the country club where the producers all went didn’t want to be associated with an X-rated movie. Anyway, they finally re-released it again. It was a very successful hit. It was Russ’ big time at a major studio. He was very pleased with it. Of course, it was my fun too until the day they walked in and took our names off the door and said “Get off the lot.” Everything you did with Russ Meyer was a nightmare, everything was a total fucking catastrophe. It had to be done the Army way, it had to be done his way...This is how we made those first movies: we camped, we stayed outside, we cooked outside. No permits, nothing. We took two cameras, he handheld both of them, edited all of them, and I did all the stunts, I did all the car driving, I did all the makeup and that shit. It occurred to me later that we shot in the desert so the women couldn’t run away from the shoot."

On breaking into the Universal TV series factory: "So now I’m 40 years old and I’m back living on the streets of Hollywood in a parking lot under Russ Meyer, who owned the parking lot. And I said 'It’s over, man. I have no agent, I have no phone, I have no address, I have no nothing.' I had a little unemployment to go. And one day some guy came down the street with a megaphone asking my name, and I’m sitting there with the rest of the winos. I go 'Yeah, what’s up, that’s me.' I hadn’t had a haircut in two months, or a shave, or whatever. He says, 'They want to see you at Universal.' I go, 'What for?' He goes, 'You’ll find out when you get there, you want to go or not?' I go, 'I’m assuming if I don’t go, your ass is gonna be in a lot of trouble, is that correct?' He goes, 'That’s correct.' And we go straight to the lot in the back of the limo, straight to the office of Alfred Hitchcock. They said, 'Don’t say a damn word to him, don’t even look at him. He’s gonna be 10 feet away, and he’s gonna spin around a chair in a dramatic way. He’s gonna say "Go away," or he’s gonna say "Sign him."' So Hitchcock is looking at the guy standing beside him, and he says 'Tell him to turn around.' So I turned around, and Hitchcock said, 'Sign him.' And that was the end of it. I worked from then on, because I worked for Alfred Hitchcock. He owned a big percentage of Universal."

On working with Meyer: "I don’t really have a favorite of any of the pictures I did for him. There’s some stuff in there that scares the shit out of me, frankly, like the frontal nudity in Cherry, Harry & Raquel where I thought, 'Maybe I shouldn’t do this shit.' All it does is show me and whatever her name is galloping toward the camera, me in a cowboy hat and boots and nude. Years later he asked me—we were in a theater, actually, at the Paramount—and he said,'“Charlie, are you ever sorry you did that?' And I go, 'No, but my mother is.'"

On playing a space hippie: "... the writer was 65 years old. What did he know about hippies, right? And Shatner and all of them were upset about it, and of course I didn’t know any difference. I still get letters about that today. In fact, I just got one yesterday. Thirty years later, they wanted me to come back and do a Deep Space 9 and I just—not to be an a-hole about it—I just said, 'Look, I don’t want to wear that silly shirt again. If you can write a role where I’m a general of an army base…'”

Morning Deal Report: Sean Penn’s Place

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Angels and Demons nudged Star Trek out of the top box office spot, taking in $48 million over the weekend. The Enterprise crew added another $43 million to the coffers, for a total haul of $147.6 million in its first 10 days. Wolverine is hanging in there at number three, with $14.8 million, with Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Obsessed rounded out the top five.

Sean Penn will rock you! “Penn is in talks to star in This Must Be the Place, a film that will mark the English-language feature debut of Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who is Un Certain Regard jury prexy at Cannes,” Variety reports. “Penn would play a wealthy rock star who becomes bored in his retirement and takes on the quest of finding his father’s executioner, an ex-Nazi war criminal who is a refugee in the U.S.”

Peter Berg sank your Battleship! “The filmmaker is in talks to direct a big-screen version of the Hasbro board game for Universal. Brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber have signed on to write the script,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “The game, which began in pencil and paper form in the early 20th century and is now available on platforms from cell phones to computers, consists of two players arranging a variety of ships on a grid. The game proceeds in alternating salvos as players try to 'sink' the opposition's ships by guessing where they sit on the grid.” But here’s the best part: “While plot details are being kept below deck, the studio is looking to make an epic naval action adventure.” Really? Not an intimate chamber drama?

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 9-15, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, groovy ‘Grabbers! I’m Jericho Moonpie, Editor Emeritus of the Screengrab. You know, back when I ran things around here, this place wasn’t all about trailer reviews, precursors and unwatchables. Back in my day, the Screengrab was a revolutionary movement! We didn’t have time to sit around and figure out our Top Ten Best Movies Ever, Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten. (Good call on 2001, though. That’s some trippy shit!) We were out there on the front lines, dropping acid in the popcorn down at the drive-in and splicing anti-war slogans into prints of The Green Berets.

But even though today’s Screengrab lacks that ‘60s spirit, I’m still proud of my association with it and I’ll miss it when it’s gone. And so will you! So you better load up on these new posts while you can:

Reviews: The Brothers Bloom, Summer Hours, Jerichow

Unwatchable #36: “Daddy Day Camp”

More "Slumdog" Schadenfreude

Screengrab’s Five to Watch at Cannes

Precursors: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Star Trek Roundup: Potential Villains, Khan Alternatives and the Shatner Scene That Wasn’t

Reviews By Request: Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)

In Other Blogs Goes to Hawaii

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule previews the summer movie schedule. “But even with the proof, in Star Trek, that my expectations could be so fundamentally off-base, it’s still hard for me to get excited, as Entertainment Weekly insists I should, about this summer’s big-ass slate of films. I thumbed through that 'Summer Movie Preview' issue with 'all the buzz on over 80 new films' and was bored stiff by the time I turned the page into the month of July. Really, am I supposed to care that Stephen Sommers, perpetrator of Van Helsing, has a new action blockbuster based on a toy I was bored with in 1967? Am I supposed to get all squirmy with excitement at seeing shots of a sweaty Megan Fox intercut with heavy-metal images from Michael Bay’s new movie about toys I was at least 15 years too old for when they were first popular? And despite my fondness for McG and the first Charlie’s Angels feature (about as zesty and giddily exciting as any pre-fab confection could be), that new Terminator movie just looks so goddamn glum and desperate, and overly familiar.”

GreenCine Daily’s DVD of the Week is Wise Blood. “Otherworldly in its characterizations (did I forget to mention the naïve, hyperactive 18-year-old obsessed with both a shrunken mummy and some guy in a bear suit?) but too sad or realistically perverse—even during a violent act late in the film—to be written off as a grotesque carnival, Wise Blood is not the tale of redemption or maybe accidental martyrdom that the final scenes superficially symbolize. It's about the powerlessness of existence, which is both as terrifying and absurd as that sounds.”

Beyond the Multiplex argues the importance of the original Star Trek. “For me, Star Trek and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites -- one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic -- were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early '70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or Happy Days, had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson ponders whether one bad shot can ruin a movie. “I'm not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby's Being There takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way. But how can just one bad decision -- maybe on screen for just a second or two -- deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that's sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there's nothing to keep it aloft any longer.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, Spoutblog offers 10 Lost Theories Inspired by the Movies. Back to the Future Part III, anyone? “When that bright flash of light ended the episode, the Losties trapped in 1977 were returned to the present time. Or, that’s what a number of the show’s fans are predicting today. But if anyone’s been paying close attention, they’ll know that Lost has taken some cues from the Back to the Future franchise this season. So, logically, by looking at that trilogy, we know that Lost must have its denouement in the 1800s, just as the BTTF series does with Part III.”

Screengrab Presents: THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As faithful readers already know by now, the End Is Near for this blog...but before we all get Raptured up outta this bitch, your soon-to-be-less-employed-than-usual pals here at the Screengrab figured we’d settle the age-old question of ultimate movie quality once and for all with our own definitive and irrefutable rulings on the subject.

Last week, we determined the Top Ten Worst Atrocities in the History of Cinema...and now, after months of intensive research, legal wrangling, animal testing, sleepless nights and enough partisan debate to make the Coleman-Franken dispute seem like a mere coin-toss, we hereby present our individual and collective picks for THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

(And...okay, so we cheated a little, kicking things off with an insoluble three-way tie for the #10 spot, starting with...)

10. DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick’s sophomore effort about a love triangle that develops in the 1920 Texas panhandle is a work of pure cinema in which everything about its story, its characters, and its larger concerns is conveyed through overwhelmingly evocative imagery. From piercing cutaways to the natural world, to Linda Manz’s strange, haunting narration, to peerlessly beautiful twilight hour cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s wrenching score, it’s a film whose mournful poeticism casts a lingering spell, and which stands – in this critic’s humble opinion – as the finest feature ever committed to celluloid. (NS)

10. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)

Earlier this year, I sat down and watched Buñuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour for what must have been the fortieth or so time, and it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, this story is all a fantasy in the mind of the main character’s husband. If you’ve seen the movie, think about it -- the story is about the virginal Severine (Catherine Deneuve), who plays the elegant wife for husband Jean (Jean Sorel), while harboring (and eventually giving in to) fantasies of debasing herself as a prostitute. Observe the way Jean is always on the sidelines of the story, until the final reel, when he gets dragged into the middle of it. And look at his knowing smirk in the final scene. Now, I have no idea if this reading was something Buñuel intended. But no matter -- Belle de Jour is the kind of movie that invites readings like this one, however strange and far-fetched they might be. Also, it’s got Deneuve at the apex of her icy-hot sex appeal, Michel Piccoli at his most insinuating, plus it actually gets funnier with each subsequent viewing. From an objective point of view, Belle de Jour may not be the best movie ever made, but nuts to that -- it’s my favorite, and that’s good enough for me. (PC)

10. STAR WARS (1977)

During my tenure here at the Screengrab, I’ve rhapsodized endlessly and embarrassingly about my love for the original Star Wars, and now, as Grand Moff Tarkin would say, it will be the last time. But why is it one of the best movies ever? Because, personally, no other film has ever transported me as far and completely from the grip of dull reality into the escapist realms of cinematic possibility. Because, in a general sense, it distilled decades (even centuries) of recycled pop culture into something nobody had ever quite seen before. And while many blame George Lucas (and his buddy Steven Spielberg) for spawning the sort of CGI-infused, ADD-inducing summer blockbusters that led to the Michael Bayification of Hollywood, it should be remembered that Lucas’ original space opera was powered as much by crackerjack storytelling, likeable characters and a sincere joie de vivre as it was by special effects...a lesson clearly absorbed by the best of the new generation of blockbuster auteurs like Jon “Iron Man” Favreau and J.J. “Star Trek” Abrams. (And, finally, one last Star Wars fun fact, for old time’s sake: while double-checking the Internet Movie Database to see if I got the above Tarkin quote right, I unexpectedly discovered that the deformed guy who gives Luke Skywalker a hard time in the Mos Eisley cantina (“He doesn’t like you...I don’t like you either”) is apparently a doctor -- Dr. Cornelius Evazan, to be exact -- though I’m guessing the doctorate was more of an honorary degree, possibly bestowed by Arizona State University). (AO)

9. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

"A simple story about bad men in changing times" is how Sam Peckinpah summed it up. But it's so much more than that. Pauline Kael said it was "a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya's" and also that "pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle." Westerns had always been mythic stories, morality tales about good and bad without the guiding force of law to keep matters civilized. The Wild Bunch brought a sense of grim reality to the story without losing the mythic quality. Gunfighters weren't good guys living by a code and bad guys living for themselves. Gunfighters didn't color-code into white and black hats. All of them - crooks, thieves, and highwaymen - were amoral, self-serving murderers. If they had a code of honor, it was a situational code, painting themselves in the best light. In the opening scene, the Wild Bunch weren't above using innocent civilians as a smokescreen when making their escape, nor were the railroad's hired guns above shooting through the civilians to get the Bunch. Peckinpah wanted his audience to feel the blood and iron, and he hoped that people would find themselves excited by the bloodlust and marvel at their own excitement and what it says about people. However, he stuck to a relativistic morality throughout the movie: the Bunch were merciless killers, but the railroad's hired guns were scummy desert rats unworthy of the Bunch. The Bunch robbed trains and put guns into the hands of the Mexican warlord Mapache, but their robbery was silent, clever, and cool, and they despised Mapache's base brutality. Considering the alternatives, they were the white hats, and moreover, they sort of knew it. All the arguments between the Bunch's leader Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his lieutenant Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) were about what it meant to be honorable, what it meant to take a stand against the greater evil. Time is weighing their arguments down. The 20th century is upon them, and they're barely out of the 18th. They're getting older, slower, and there's no retirement plan for gunfighters. Pike talks about making one last score and then backing off, but Dutch brings him back to reality: "Back off to what?" That's a great question, and there is no answer for it. (HC)

8. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Even fifty years ago, it seems Hollywood's best days were already behind it. Los Angeles is a city that has been haunted by its past for nearly the entire length of its existence, and Sunset Boulevard is still its quintessential ghost story. Half a century later, Billy Wilder's masterpiece remains the eeriest and most caustic evocation of the Golden Age's twilight ever captured on celluloid. Wilder is often dismissed as a "writer's director" (or worse). It's true that his visual style is a fairly elemental one, but if Wilder's images don't possess the verve of a Kubrick or an Orson Welles, they do exert a cumulative power: William Holden’s cynical screenwriter shot from underneath as he floats lifelessly in the pool, flashbulbs popping behind him; the same pool seen empty and disintegrating from his garage apartment window, and the decaying tennis court beyond it; faded star Norma Desmond rising into the dust illuminated by a projector casting shadows of her former self on the wall; her legendary approach to the camera at the end, as she proclaims herself ready for her close-up. The air of rot and dissolution is almost unbearable. It's difficult to imagine now how shattering Sunset Boulevard must have been back in 1950. Tinseltown has been skewered many times since, in movies as different as Robert Altman's brilliant The Player and Joe Eszterhas's wretched Burn Hollywood Burn. Yet in all this time, no film-about-film has ever approached the dark, glittering genius of Wilder's vision. Even as the movie industry grows more and more appalling, Sunset Boulevard just gets better and better. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak

On This Day in Screengrab History: May 12, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

As the Final Days draw nigh, nostalgia for the salad days of the Screengrab thickens like gravy left out on the kitchen counter overnight. I’m sorry to mention both salad and gravy in that previous sentence, but I didn’t have any lunch. The point is this: I’ve been leafing through the archives like a beloved old photo album, wistfully looking back at the days when your favorite Screengrabbers were skinny and had all their hair. No, I’m joking, of course – our archives don’t go back to 1983. But they do go back to May 12, 2008, a pivotal moment in cinematic history. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

It was a more innocent time, when none of us had yet seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It hadn’t even leaked on the Internet – although a few reviews had, much to the consternation of Lucas & Co., as we learned from Phil Nugent in his pithy post Indiana Jones and the Internet Critics' Pre-emptive Strike: Ain't It Cool News Sandbags Spielberg and Co. “The initial ‘quick reaction’ was posted to Ain't It Cool News last Thursday evening by ‘ShogunMaster.’ The spoiler-heavy review reports that Harrison Ford ‘has a few lines that work and a million that don't’, trashes the other performers, laments the lack of tension or suspense…and sums up the proceedings with the judgement that this is ‘the Indiana Movie that you were dreading.’” ShogunMaster: a prophet before his time.

Our summer predictions were still looking good, as Andrew Osborne informed us in Speed Racer Bombs! Screengrab Two For Two! “Sad news for the Wachowski Brothers, Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci and Chim Chim the monkey, perhaps...but it does mean we here at the Screengrab currently have a perfect batting average with regard to our predictions for the Top 5 Hits and Misses of the 2008 Summer Movie Season.” Little did we know that Sex and the City lurked just ahead, waiting to sucker punch us with its Manolo Blahniks.

Andrew also lit up the blogosphere with his controversial rant CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why. So influential was this piece that CGI has almost completely vanished from the multiplex, aside from Star Trek, Watchmen, Wolverine, and all the other movies that have made any money this year. For my part, I endured the All-Night Mockbuster Marathon. Hard to believe it’s been a whole year since I last enjoyed this:

Finally, there was this cautionary post: Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko". Well, that sequel is no longer on the way. Exactly one year later – on this very day, May 12, 2009 – S. Darko is released on DVD. What does it all mean? I believe it means the Screengrab is a powerful force that should not be tampered with. But that’s just my opinion.

Star Trek Roundup: Potential Villains, Khan Alternatives and the Shatner Scene That Wasn’t

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

As we learned from The Dark Knight, the water cooler talk on the Monday morning after opening weekend turns to the obligatory sequel. Movieline offers a look at 5 Actors Worth Considering as Star Trek’s Next Villain. Maybe Matthew McConaughey doesn’t strike you as the most obvious replacement for Ricardo Montalban as Khan, but hear them out: “Perhaps only one man in Hollywood can match those physical attributes and be the type of unexpected revelation viewers found in Montalban. So what if McConaughey’s slogan 'Just keep livin’ flies in the face of his bloodlust for Kirk, and who cares if he seems a little too chillax when opening fire on the Enterprise? The flip-flop just might fit, and anyway, anything that keeps him out of another romantic comedy is a casting decision I can live with.”

Premium Hollywood looks at 5 non-“Khan” alternative for the “Star Trek” sequel (and 5 to avoid). Who’s up for some Harcourt Fenton Mudd? “He’s one of the galaxy’s most notorious con men and, over the years, has remained one of the most popular characters in the Trek universe, having popped up in two episodes of the original series, an animated-series episode (Mudd’s Passion), a novel (Mudd in Your Eye), and countless Trek comic books. (Best title: The Sky Above…The Mudd Below.) Indeed, his reputation is such that, in Nintendo’s Starfleet Academy video game, he’s considered to be required study for the cadets.” No higher praise.

We’ve had a little fun at William Shatner’s expense, but io9 breaks the news on the Shatner Scene You Never Saw. “In our exclusive interview with Star Trek writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, we managed to pick their brain as to what landed on the cutting-room floor during rewrites. The most shocking was the actual Shatner scene.” It’s a little spoiler-iffic if you haven’t seen the movie yet, but if you have…well, I don’t think we missed out on a magical moment.

Here at the Screengrab, we have a very simple but potent sequel idea. One word: Tribbles. Think about it.

DVD Digest for May 12, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a bunch of new tie-in DVDs for a little movie called Star Trek flood the market, as well as a new Criterion release from an old master.

But first, recent releases! For most moviegoers, this week’s big ticket title is the Euro-flavored kidnapping thriller Taken. Produced by Luc Besson and helmed by Pierre (District B13) Morel, Taken became the first action hit of 2009 by combining the high-octane grit of its action scenes with the unexpected gravitas brought to the story by star Liam Neeson. Not faring so well at the box office was Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the third in the seemingly deathless vampires-versus-werewolves saga. Also this week, Terence Davies’ Liverpool doc Of Time and the City (Strand) hits stores, along with a trio of high-profile direct-to-DVD releases: the Donnie Darko follow-up S. Darko (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Michelle Pfeiffer and Ashton “Twitter King” Kutcher in Personal Effects (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and The Grudge 3 (Sony), the not-particularly-anticipated third entry in the Grudge series.

In classics, the Trek love continues today with Paramount’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture Trilogy (also Blu-Ray), which thankfully doesn’t include the boring-ass first Star Trek movie, but instead encompasses films two through four. And if Trekkers are in need a few laughs and don’t feel like watching IV (or V, for that matter) again, they can pick up the Galaxy Quest Deluxe Edition (Paramount), which for my money is the best (unofficial) Trek movie since Kirk and Co. saved the whales. Or if you’re all Trekked out, the folks at Eclipse are releasing their latest box set, Eclipse Series 16: Alexander Korda’s Private Lives, which includes four high-spirited big-screen peeks into the lives of Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Don Juan, and Rembrandt. And finally, Criterion’s releasing John Huston’s beloved “late” film Wise Blood (Criterion), one of the last “great” Huston films I still have yet to see. This of course would make it a key candidate for a Reviews by Request column except for oh wait.

This week’s TV on DVD slate is highlighted by the release of The Dana Carvey Show (Universal). Despite airing only eight episodes before getting the axe, this series has a cult following among TV fans. In fact, I’d be tempted to call Carvey a genius for surrounding himself with such promising talents as then up-and-comers Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman, if not for the fact that he was also responsible for The Master of Disguise. Also this week, Seth Macfarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy (Fox, also Blu-Ray).

In Blu-Ray only news, today brings the release of Star Trek: The Original Motion Picture Collection (Paramount), which collects all six of the original cast movies in one spiffed-up Blu-Ray Collection. And Paramount’s got plenty of comedy hitting stores as well, with Black Sheep (Paramount), Major League (Paramount), Wayne’s World (Paramount), Wayne’s World 2 (Paramount), and Without a Paddle (Paramount) on the way. Also this week: CSI Season 1 (Paramount), Force 10 from Navarone (Fox), and The Grudge (Sony).

Finally, our Synopsis of the Week takes us to the world of kiddie animation, with the four-part Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 25th Anniversary Edition, Season 7, available today in four parts from Lionsgate. Dig this crazy premise:

“Mutated into anthropomorphic fighting machines when they fall into the sewer at a young age, four turtles--Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael--have been trained in the martial arts by the sewer-dwelling Hamato Yoshi. Now, they fight crime in New York City, using their ninja skills as well as the aid of news reporter April O'Neil to counter the efforts of their enemy, Shredder. In this collection of the first six episodes from the 1987-96 animated series’ seventh season, the Turtles tangle with both natural and man-made elements while on adventures involving a massive tidal wave, melting glaciers, and the Eiffel Tower.”

Wow, who thinks of this stuff? And whoever thought it would play to kids?

Morning Deal Report: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Reeves

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Star Trek warped its way to the top of the box office, beaming up $76.5 million since its debut Thursday night. X-Men Origins: Wolverine took an expected hit, dropping to second place with $27 million, a 68% dropoff from its opening weekend take. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Obsessed and 17 Again rounded out the top five, while the only other new wide release, Next Day Air, didn't find many takers - it finished sixth with $4 million.

Keanu Reeves will attempt to convey a split personality in a new retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This will be a modern version called Jekyll, per The Hollywood Reporter. "Universal clearly is enamored with the tale as it also has been developing a take on it with Guillermo del Toro, though the two couldn't be more different. Del Toro, who has an affinity for gothic horror as well as creature features, aims to stick more closely to the Stevenson tale. Also, del Toro's project is on the slow track as the filmmaker works on The Hobbit for New Line and MGM, which is expected to take up the next five years. Even when he comes back, he likely will tackle one or two other Universal projects before his version, so a good amount of time will exist between the projects."

Here's a timely announcement: Darren Lynn Bousman, director of three Saw movies, will helm a remake of the Troma classic Mother's Day. "The original Mother's Day revolved around three female friends who, while camping, run afoul of two brothers who engage in murder and rape to impress their deranged mother." Me, I just sent flowers.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 2-8, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Mr. Sulu! Set a course for the nearest multiplex, warp factor five! I’ve read Nick’s Take and Scott’s Take, and I…must…see Star Trek right away! What, you thought I’d be bitter? You thought the Shat Man would be upset that he wasn’t asked to even contribute a cameo, much less assume the captain’s chair that is his birthright? Oh, please. You sound like that paranoid George Takei!

I’m perfectly thrilled that everybody loves this new Trek adventure, even as we all know in our hearts it can’t hold a candle to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I’m even happy that Chris Pine Gets His Kirk On. Let the kid have his fun! We all know who put the T in Tiberius.

One place I was thrilled not to see my name mentioned was in The Screengrab’s Top Ten Worst…Movies…Ever!!! (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten) Believe it or not, some people have had unkind things to say about The Devil’s Rain, and I feared the good people of the Screengrab would fall into the same trap. Since they didn’t, I was happy to read the rest of these fine posts:

Reviews: Outrage, Rudo y Cursi, Adoration

53 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Finding "The Searchers"

The Less Than Triumphant Return of Mad Max

Scarlett Johansson: The Unkindest Cut

Not on DVD: "The Grey Fox" (1982)

Precursors: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Yesterday's Hits: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

With this week’s release of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, I thought the time was right to look back at an earlier big-screen installment of the franchise. But which one? Despite the enduring popularity of the Star Trek brand, few of the Trek movies could be classified as blockbusters. Even The Wrath of Khan, the current fan favorite among the original-cast adventures, only grossed a fairly unremarkable $78 million domestically. As of earlier this week, the biggest hit out of the Trek movies is the series’ fourth entry, 1986’s The Voyage Home, which was the only pre-Abrams Trek movie to gross upwards of $100 million.

So why, out of ten Star Trek movies to date, was this the one that struck a chord with moviegoers? Much of it had to with the idea that it was, to quote a recent essay at The House Next Door, “the Star Trek film for people who don’t actually like Star Trek all that much.” The Trek franchise won legions of fans with its futuristic stories set in far-flung worlds, but others were turned off by the more science fiction-heavy aspects of the show and movies. So, by setting the majority of its story in 1980s San Francisco, The Voyage Home gave devotees another agreeable two hours to spend with their beloved Enterprise crew, and allowed non-fans to enjoy a Star Trek movie without feeling so, for lack of a better word, geeky. When the film hit theatres over Thanksgiving weekend, it took in the largest opening weekend haul of 1986, and eventually became one of the year’s biggest hits.

Of course, there were other factors that contributed to Star Trek IV’s box office success. Even more than most Trek movies, this one was pretty family friendly, with a few mild expletives (or, as Leonard Nimoy's Spock calls them, “colorful metaphors”), but nothing stronger than a “damn,” “hell,” or “double dumbass on you!” Its timely save-the-whales message didn’t hurt either. Through some deliciously convoluted plot developments, the fate of the human race depends on the survival of two humpback whales, which allowed director Nimoy and his co-screenwriters to shoehorn a lesson into the story in the classic Trek fashion.

But most importantly, The Voyage Home was- and still is- funny. The 1980s were the heyday of the fish-out-of-water comedy, and by placing the familiar Enterprise crew four centuries into the past, the film afforded the characters plenty of opportunities to get laughs from their cluelessness about 20th century life. The film, to its credit, makes the most of the disconnect between the characters and their unfamiliar surroundings, and our knowledge of the crew’s personalities only makes it funnier. So when engineering whiz Scotty (James Doohan) comes face to face with an old-school computer, or Chekov (Walter Koenig) wanders around San Francisco inquiring about “nuclear wessels” at the height of the Cold War, the comedy is richer than it would have been had the characters not been so well established.

One of the better surprises the movie holds is William Shatner’s performance. In the more serious Trek episodes and on the series, Shatner had a tendency toward hamminess, especially when the situation called for big emotions. Here, in a more lighthearted movie, Shatner isn’t exactly natural, but that’s the point- his cartoonishly stalwart bearing allows for a nice contrast with the casualness of the eighties setting. One of the more amusing running jokes in the film is that while Kirk repeatedly admonishes Spock for looking out of place, Kirk really doesn’t fit in any better, although he’s convinced that he does. Because of this, he’s able to sell lines like the scene in which he feels the need to apologize for Spock, explaining that he’s an old hippie who “took too much LDS.” Rather than leaning on the line to milk the joke, Shatner practically throws it away, which makes it that much funnier. In recent decades, Shatner has become a parody of himself, so it’s nice to see him getting intentional laughs.

Aside from the comedy, the movie is more uneven, but it’s still one of the better Star Trek movies. Yes, the plot is ridiculous, but that’s part of the fun. Too many big-budget franchises play it safe in their narratives, setting up a formula and sticking to it from film to film. With Star Trek (especially the movies) the formula is less in the plot than in the characterizations- Kirk’s unconventional but instinctive leadership sense, Spock’s unflappability, Dr. McCoy's (DeForest Kelley) cantankerousness, and so on. Because the characters are firmly established, the filmmakers could afford to be more adventurous with the stories themselves. It’s hard to think of another movie series that could get away with a plot that hinges on an alien intelligence that communicates in humpback whale-song, but somehow The Voyage Home makes it work.

Of course, maybe I’m biased. After all, Star Trek IV was the first Trek movie I saw as a kid, although had already seen quite a few episodes from the series. But while I remember laughing a lot back then, it plays better for me now that I’ve doubled back and caught the rest of the movies. One may not have to be a fan of Star Trek to enjoy the comedy scenes in 1986, but a working knowledge of the movies, especially the second and third films, makes the 23rd Century sequences much more worthwhile. The Voyage Home brings the storyline that began with The Wrath of Khan to a satisfying end in the movie’s final scene, in which the crew takes a long, loving look at their new ship- the all-new Enterprise A. It’s an obvious ending, but at the end of this long, strange journey, the crew has earned it, and so has the movie.

Chris Pine Gets His Kirk On

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Here's how Geoff Boucher's profile of Chris Pine, the new James T. Kirk of J. J. Abrams's Star Trek movie, begins: "Wearing a trucker hat, battered blue jeans and an air of breezy confidence, Chris Pine walked through the Paramount Pictures studio lot like he owned the place but felt no particular need to show anyone the deed in his pocket." Seriously, aside from the sartorial details, if you were writing about anybody who was picking up the gauntlet from William Shatner, isn't that how you'd want to be able to describe him? Many a young (28 years old, to be precise) actor might be able to pull off that walk in his head, but in reality? (As if to provide a constant genetic reminder of how many couldn't, Pine is the son of the actor Robert Pine, best known for the disappointed looks he used to direct at Erik Estrada during roll call on CHiPs.) "Shatner will forever be James T. Kirk," says Pine. "There's something set in stone about that. That actually takes pressure off me. I'm going my own way. My name is not William Shatner."

Some of the actors in supporting roles, such as Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy and Simon Pegg as Scotty, have talked to interviewers about how much they enjoyed riffing on the mannerisms of their predecessors, playing with the traits that have so well served generations of nightclub impersonators and stand-up comics. Instead, as the man at the center, Pine saw it as his job to evoke Shatner in the role without imitating him. "There was no sense in trying to re-create what Shatner had done because it was so specific. He was unique, singular, it was his take. I did spice my performance with some of his straight-spined, almost ballet way of moving." (There will now be fifteen minutes of silence while we all try to adjust our conception of the term "balletic" so that it can apply to William Shatner.) If Pine's approach sounds very nuts and bolts, that goes with his having grown up in the business. "Whenever you're on set with people that have put in the years, pick their brains -- that's our apprenticeship, that's how the trade gets passed down, the stories, the lessons. I think with my family and my background, I have a sense of the history of the business, what has come before . . . going with my dad to his auditions I would listen to the actors talk and it was almost like workers in a steel town on lunch break talking about the line or union issues." Now he's kicking back in the captain's chair at a time when a new, turbocharged version of Gene Roddenberry's '60s chestnut may actually be timely. "There's a message in this almost utopian possibility and this team of people who must work together to overcome tremendous challenges."

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Scott's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek" - Scott's Take

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:30:00 GMT

As J.J. Abrams’ mega-hyped, blockbuster-in-waiting reboot of the Star Trek franchise begins, we might be watching any other movie in the series. The usual massive space behemoth posing a threat to the continued existence of the galaxy has materialized, and Starfleet is racing to the rescue. As the responding vessel is not named Enterprise, it’s all reduced to fireballs and cinders in a matter of minutes. But something is different: the captain of the destroyed starship is named Kirk…George Kirk, whose son James Tiberius is born on an escaping shuttlecraft even as his father heroically goes down with the ship. There’s your back story: roguish adventurer Jim Kirk can’t help what he is – he was literally born into it.

All right, so there’s a little more back story than that. There’s the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock’s tormented youth at the hands of his cold, emotionless peers, and the tween Kirk joyriding in a borrowed “vintage” convertible, and smoking hot space cadet Uhura (Zoe Saldana) fending off the advances of twentysomething townie Kirk (Chris Pine) while slumming in a bar outside the Iowa-based Starfleet Academy.

It all sounds like the makings of a feature-length fanwank, but Abrams is nothing if not a clever fellow and he has a few tricks up his sleeve. It’s not just that the mega-threat is a vengeance-seeking Romulan from the future named Nero (Eric Bana) – that’s just another day at the office in the Star Trek realm – but that he’s seeking his vengeance against the future version of Spock we all know and love, played by Leonard Nimoy. And that the youthful Spock (Zachary Quinto) is unable to prevent the cataclysmic first phase of Nero’s revenge, an epic event that may have hardcore Trekkies shaking their fists at the screen and howling in outrage, “That never happened!”

They’d be wrong, however, because Abrams and his writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman have come up with an ingenious loophole that allows them to clear the decks of all the clutter comprising four decades worth of Trek mythology. Abrams doesn’t have to worry too much about being reverent, which allows him to rev it up and have some fun. And Star Trek is an undeniably fun summer ride – it’s got the big thrills, big laughs and special effects that blow away any and all earlier incarnations of Trek, and only rarely insults the intelligence. (You won’t want to give too much deep thought to the “science” involving black holes and red matter.)

The cast is game, although Abrams comes up against the same stumbling block that often bedeviled the original series and its spinoff movies: finding enough for the supporting characters to do. Uhura has a beefed-up role (and there’s a nifty piece of misdirection involving her character) and Simon Pegg makes the most of his brief screen time as Scotty, but the crotchety Bones (Karl Urban) gets short shrift, and Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are still just a guy who can fence and a Russian with a funny accent (“Enemy wessels approaching!”) respectively. (And let’s not even speak of the regrettable stunt casting of Winona Ryder and Tyler Perry in minor roles.)

As it ever was, the focus is on the Kirk/Spock dynamic, which is where the turning-back-the-clock element really pays off. There’s a sharper edge to the relationship here, as the hotheaded man of action and the cool, logical half-alien size each other up as both rivals and potential allies. Quinto has inherited Nimoy’s knack for infusing his matter-of-fact pronouncements with almost subliminal dry wit, and while there’s really no replacing the Shat Man, Pine is surprisingly adept at evoking the bravado and bluster of Kirk without devolving into parody. As unlikely as it once seemed, it looks like the ol’ Enterprise has a few more light-years left in it after all.

Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek" - Nick's Take

Nick Schager — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Hardcore Trekkers can debate whether J.J. Abrams has committed heresy with his franchise-restarter Star Trek. For those not deeply invested in Gene Roddenberry’s humanist sci-fi series, however, this summer spectacular will prove a largely thrilling surprise, its blend of humor, romance and action so kinetically orchestrated that calling out its shortcomings feels like excessive carping. By constructing a story around planet-devouring black holes that function as time-travel portals, Abrams not only affords himself a premise fit for grand intergalactic conflicts but also a handy explanation for why Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban) and their fellow Starfleet peace-keepers only sort of resemble themselves. It’s an alternate reality Star Trek, and all the better for it, serving up the type of breakneck thrills and operatic excitement that’s been absent from this sci-fi universe since 1982’s Wrath of Khan. A distinctly modern blockbuster that comes on like gangbusters and rarely lets up, it re-confirms that Abrams – after energizing Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible saga in 2006 – is a director tailor-made for event pics, his sleek, lens-flared cinematographic style and vigorously to-the-point pacing well-suited for the demands of mega-budgeted tentpole extravaganzas.

In this reconfigured Star Trek, whose mythos occasionally recalls Star Wars, Kirk’s dad dies saving his starship’s inhabitants and, specifically, his wife and newborn baby, and Kirk himself grows up to be a devil-may-care bad boy squandering his potential in cornfielded Iowa. Convinced by paternalistic Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to follow his father’s footsteps by joining the Starfleet Academy, he immediately finds himself in conflict with Spock, a rather disagreeable know-it-all struggling to reconcile his dual heritage as a logical Vulcan and (thanks to human mom Winona Ryder) an emotional Earthling. Much of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s script centers on Kirk and Spock’s combative relationship, though along the way it also deftly provides introductions to the rest of the iconic Enterprise crew, including amusingly grouchy McCoy, mini-skirted sexpot Uhura (Zoe Saldana), tough Sulu (John Cho), goofy Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), and witty Scotty (Simon Pegg). As befitting an origin story, Abrams lavishes most of the attention on establishing his characters’ various relationships, a guiding directive that he admirably pulls off, with the writer/director sneaking in trademark catchphrases and allusions to signature moments in Star Trek history while allowing his new cast to make the revered characters their own.

Pine channels William Shatner’s ladies-man egomania with a playfulness that makes light of the legendary Kirk’s machismo, Urban’s McCoy grumbles with a gusto that would make DeForest Kelly proud, and Quinto gives Spock a smarty-pants attitude that differentiates him from that of Leonard Nimoy’s original Vulcan, who [spoiler alert] eventually figures prominently in the narrative proper. That plot involves Romulan madman Nero (Eric Bana) traveling back in time to exact revenge on Spock and the Federation for his home world’s demise, a scheme to destroy Earth that inevitably feels shoehorned into a film whose primary concern is setting up interpersonal dynamics that can be further developed in sequels. Thanks to the tacked-on nature of Kirk’s battle with Nero, as well as a few too-curt editorial choices that don’t maximize the scenario for thrills, Star Trek falters slightly during its climax. Yet it’s a minor speed bump on an otherwise brisk ride, one that avoids indulging in the franchise’s characteristic social/political allegory in favor of straightforward, uncomplicated sci-fi melodrama and mayhem. Light on its feet, free from the self-seriousness of its predecessors, and shrewd enough to keep one wanting more by not overstaying its welcome, Abrams’ breathless reboot achieves the improbable, forcefully reviving a series that many, including myself, believed had deservedly been left for dead.

Scott's Take

Precursors: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Nick Schager — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Those interested in fully readying themselves for this Friday’s Star Trek would be wise to bypass the franchise’s myriad small- and big-screen iterations and instead take a second look at Mission: Impossible III, the first and most recent franchise to get a vigorous kick in the behind from J.J. Abrams. Unfairly dismissed during its summer 2006 release because of star Tom Cruise’s couch-hopping antics and crazy comments about psychology and anti-depressants, the third Mission: Impossible remains the series’ most accessible and breathlessly exciting, characteristics mainly attributable to its director, who took on the project without any prior experience helming a tentpole extravaganza, and yet provided the no-nonsense adrenalized excitement absent from Brian De Palma’s intricate first and John Woo’s embarrassingly flamboyant second installments. Abrams borrows liberally from his TV series Alias as well as countless other sources for his story about IMF agent Ethan Hunt’s efforts to hunt down a Maguffin from a master criminal (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s kidnapped his new wife (Michelle Monaghan). And to be sure, not all of the narrative works, most notably with regards to its efforts to humanize the more-or-less superhuman Hunt. Still, Hoffman’s villain is excellent, and Abrams’ action-and-espionage centerpiece sequences have a visceral, invigorating electricity that one hopes Star Trek – which I’ll be reviewing here at The Screengrab later this week – also possesses.

In Other Blogs: Where No Blog Has Gone Before

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard get their Trek on, running down the first six films in the series. “There's something ephemeral about these films, something insubstantial, like they'll all just melt away once I stop thinking about them. Maybe it's because they're so thoroughly rooted in this weird nostalgia for the original series, a nostalgic feeling that I can't say I really share. Each of the films has an extended montage, some of them longer and more insufferable than others, in which the camera caresses the glistening surface of the starship Enterprise with fetishistic glee, like a horny dude ogling a naked centerfold or a mid-life crisis case polishing the chrome on his sports car. In the first film, it feels like it takes 20 minutes for everyone to stop just gawking at the damn ship in disbelief. It's a strange experience to watch these films with all these obvious nostalgic cues—the crew reassembling for each new mission, the familiar faces being highlighted, the bombastic music whenever the ship first appears, the obscure nods to episodes of the TV series—and to realize that I'm not in on the reminiscences of the intended audience.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern weighs in on twittering at the movies. “I don’t think I’m gonna start catching up with all the 21st century technologies, for example I still don’t have a cellular phone device or those shoes with the wheels in them. But everywhere I go I hear about this “twitter” they got now. Moriarty writes in his column about how Harry Twittered him something or other, Harry writes in his column about what he was Twittering during the movie because it was so scary, Devin Feraci on Chud is mad because some other douchebag used his twittering during Crank 2 and also he had to cancel his tweeter for Even Rachel Wood because he was disappointed in the quality of her twitterings, or whatever.”

Beyond the Multiplex features more Jarmusch chat. “For me, film is very related to music, in that it flows before you in its own time signature. And my own musicality is on the slower side. Maybe it's like the way I talk. Maybe I think slowly. Then there's the aspect that, I don't know why ... I'm attracted to the moments that are somewhat -- maybe completely -- devoid of something dramatic. My films are built around those things. Coffee and Cigarettes is just little moments out of a day that are not considered important. Or I made Night on Earth, in which the whole film is made up of cab rides that, in a dramatic narrative, would be the part you would leave out.”

David Poland of The Hot Blog has an interesting take on that viral version of Wolverine. “Personally, I think Fox should include the now-infamous leaked version in the eventually DVD package for this film. Own the situation. And if you are a film lover, the footage of unfinished effects is kind of interesting when you see the final version. It’s the kind of stuff that studios put in DVD extras in order to illustrate the process of building effects.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog offers the very timely How to Survive a Plague - 10 Lessons From the Movies. For instance, Don’t Bomb the Plague. “The original hushed-up outbreak in Outbreak is thought to be eradicated with a bomb, and in The Crazies the military wants to destroy an infected town with nuclear weapons. But as we see in the former, such means aren’t guaranteed to make the plague go away. In The Andromeda Strain, it’s even learned that the threatening bacteria will be strengthened by an atomic bomb, which is unfortunate since the underground facility in which the alien organism is being studied is equipped with a self-destruction mechanism employing such weaponry. Fortunately the lab also has a way to disarm that bomb, but it’s best to just not have such “safety” measures in the first place.”

DVD Digest for April 28, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, Hollywood January-doldrums releases start finding their way to DVD, while the studios continue to flood the market with tie-ins to their upcoming summer blockbusters.

Hey, remember three months ago when Bride Wars (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Hotel for Dogs (Disney, also Blu-Ray), and The Uninvited (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) all got released in theatres? If not, they’ll all be hitting DVD today to remind you of their existence. Other recent releases hitting stores this week: Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke in What Doesn’t Kill You (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Van Damme goes arthouse in JCVD (Peace Arch); Rod Lurie’s Valerie Plame-inspired drama Nothing But the Truth (Sony); and the documentary Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed in the mountains (Zeitgeist), about the same plane crash that inspired the book and movie Alive.

This week’s biggest classics release is a pair of films from the great, controversial Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, In the Realm of the Senses (Criterion, also Blu-Ray) and Empire of Passion (Criterion). Both films, originally released during Oshima’s fertile mid-1970s period, will be released with plenty of extras, including documentaries, interviews, and even cut (sorry) scenes on the Realm disc. Also today, Criterion will be releasing a new edition of Stephen Frears’ British gangster drama The Hit, and Jim McBride’s semi-forgotten cult classic Glen and Randa (VCI) will hit stores as well.

New TV on DVD releases hitting stores today include: Seth McFarlane’s American Dad vol. 4 (Fox), and the animated series Marvel X-Men vol. 1 and vol. 2 (both Disney).

And just in time for their new big-screen counterparts to arrive in theatres, Star Trek: The Original Series vol. 1 (Paramount) and The Da Vinci Code (Sony) will arrive today in Blu-Ray only releases.

Finally, with this week’s Plot Synopsis of the Week, I’ve decided to spotlight something other than a Japanimation title this time. There are plenty of movies like Fox’s new direct-to-DVD feature Legally Blondes dumped into the market every week, but this one caught my attention mostly because it hits all the expected marks for a movie of this kind. It almost sounds like a parody. Don’t believe me? Check it out:

Elle Woods may have moved upward and onward through law school, but her pink and frilly spirit lives on in her young, adorable cousins Annabelle and Isabelle (Camilla and Rebecca Rosso). Fresh from England, the blond twosome assume their fashion savviness will help them make friends at their new California prep academy in no time flat. One can imagine their frizz-inducing horror, then, when they discover that their new place of learning is run by uniform-loving, junior-capitalist snobs! After the most influential students at school frame Anna and Izzy for a crime they didn’t commit, it’s up to the girls to prove not only their innocence but their capabilities. Reese Witherspoon presents this spin-off of the beloved franchise that helped make her a superstar. LEGALLY BLONDES is helmed by Savage Steve Holland, the quirky director of BETTER OFF DEAD and ONE CRAZY SUMMER.

Translation: Reese Witherspoon got sick of playing Elle Woods after installment #2, but she was still contracted for one more movie. So instead of shelling out to make her happy, we’ll have her “present” a cheapo version to polish off the trilogy, thereby allowing us to plaster her name in big letters above the title in order to fool those who don’t look too hard at the DVD boxes. No mention of siblings in the original films, but we can always do the “cousin” connection, since it worked for the American Pie spinoffs, right? The twist this time is that there are two of them- twins, even! No name twins, but what can you do? From there, the plot practically writes itself. Fish-out-of-water comedy, snobbish baddies, little dogs, and blonde jokes out the derriere! How could it miss? Oh, and why not get a comedy director from the eighties who needs the work?

See what I mean?

He Died, but Then He Got Younger: The Prequel Perplex

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ryan Gilbey suggests that, now that it's barely even fun anymore to complain about sequels and remakes, we should shift gears and reserve our disgust for the concept of prequels. By some accounts, the term "prequel" was coined by George Lucas to describe the young-Don-Vito sections of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Godfather, Part II. However, the first time the term was widely used in the press to label a feature film which had no other discernible reason for being may well have been in 1979, when Tom Berenger and William Katt starred in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.

This was not the first time that somebody had built a new work around a speculative history of what happened to the characters in an earlier work before they reached the point in their history where they made the audience's acquaintance in the first place. Even before The Godfather, Part II, this approach actually had a tony literary pedigree. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (filmed by John Duigan in 1993) filled in the pre-history to Jane Eyre, and the 1971 movie The Nightcomers, with Marlon Brando, attempted to lay the groundwork for Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But Butch and Sundance established the basis for regarding prequels as a singularly uninspired and parasitic form. Apparently it was made because some genius noticed that the tenth anniversary of the money-making Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was approaching, and it seemed a shame to waste such a ripe excuse to try to cash in again. There was just one problem: the first movie ended, famously, with Butch and Sundance being turned into Swiss cheese by the Bolivian army. So a sequel was out of the question, but it might be possible to go backwards. And since there was this new actor in town whose major qualification for stardom seemed to be that he looked a lot like a young Robert Redford...

In the end, Butch and Sundance tanked, William Katt transitioned from starring in movies to appearing on TV each week in The Greatest American Hero and looking as if he was praying to take a bullet between line readings, and it looked as if prequels might turn out to be one of those momentary fancies of the movie industry, like disaster epics or Steven Seagal. A few more prequels did trickle out in later years, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Amityville II: The Possession. But the concept wasn't revived big time until, yes, George Lucas decided to jump-start his fantasy of actually making another Star Wars trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace. Even now, though, prequels, which are much more commonly found in the ranks of the straight-to-video than among actual theatrical releases, tend to occur only when a franchise has been tapped to pitiful death (see Hannibal Rising) or when the producers are desperate for a gimmick that might help to compensate for the fact that the original stars want nothing to do with it (see Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd).

We might also want to define our terms a little. Gilbey, anticipating the day when movie prequels themselves become "respectable", cites Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming The Hobbit, as a prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the book that del Toro is adapting before he wrote the Rings books; surely that matters more than the fact that the books have somehow managed to get themselves filmed in the wrong order. On the other hand, J. J. Abrams's Star Trek straddles the line between "reboot" and prequel: it means to reinvent the old franchise, but in the process of doing so, it introduces the audience to James T. Kirk and his merry band at an earlier stage of their development than Gene Roddenberry dared, or cared, to go. Ideally, this kind of thing might be done with a little humor, teasing the audience with the shared knowledge we have of what these characters are fated to become. At worst, it might give us the chance to see what it looks like when fan fiction is perpetrated with a $150 million budget.

Of the high-profile releases about to come barging through the door, Wolverine is closest to the dreaded prequel prototype. The signs are pretty much there, except in reverse: the X-Men franchise has been pronounced dead, or at least mothballed, but everybody's favorite moody mutant is indestructibly immortal, and Hugh Jackman is still at an age where he can pull off the role. So maybe the best way to try to squeeze a little more money out of the character, minus his familiar supporting cast, is to zap back to before most of them were born and fill in some of the bad boy's back story, which apparently goes back for fucking ever. Wolverine's director, Gavin Hood, who readily acknowledges that "Prequels are usually bad," adds that, since "most of the audience knows what's coming... the excitement should be not 'what?' but 'how?' It changes the emphasis. Usually a movie is about what will happen. Here it's 'How will what we know will happen, happen?'" That sounds about right. And it's true that even when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, the movies can still surprise you. For instance, I saw Gavin Hood's previous films, Tsotsi and Rendition, and now, people who may well have seen them too have hired him to direct a big-budget summer movie. Boy, am I surprised.

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Paul:
Looking at this summer’s would-be blockbusters, I only see two real sure-thing titles. But while this leaves a lot of question marks to those trying to predict which titles will hit big, it also leaves a lot of room to predict some potential sleeper movies to come out of nowhere, given good word of mouth and the right marketing campaign. I’m almost sure I’ll regret these hasty decisions sometime around mid-May, but that’s just part of the game, isn’t it?

3. TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (June 24)

Paul:
Remember those two sure things I mentioned before? Here’s one of them: let’s not underestimate the box office prospects of Transformers, a mistake that was made by many Hollywood insiders prior to the release of the first Transformers movie. Yes, the Michael Bay name didn’t give many people hope, but audiences turned out in droves all the same thanks to a combination of eighties nostalgia and the desire to watch giant robots kicking ass. If anything, the sequel promises even more action and destruction, hopefully with less dopey humor getting in the way. Getting released just before the July 4 weekend can only help its prospects.

Nick:
Michael Bay’s Transformers made $319 million domestically in 2007. And unless Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 123 (June 12) has legs, or Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (July 1) becomes a runaway smash, there’s little slam-bang competition surrounding Fallen’s June 24th release. Consequently, there’s no reason to suspect that this more-is-better sequel – featuring a wider roster of Autobots and Decepticons, as well as mega-hottie Megan Fox – won’t be greeted with massive box-office enthusiasm.

Scott:
I don’t want this to be true, but I have to be a realist when doing these projections. Otherwise I’d have the new Jarmusch movie in this slot, and that ain’t gonna happen. Bay + LaBeouf = big box office once again.

Andrew:
Blechh.

2. STAR TREK (May 8)

Scott:
The sequel is already in the works, so you know Paramount is feeling bullish. More than four decades worth of built-in fan base can’t hurt, but even non-Trekkies are likely to be swept up by the hype, which may dwarf even William Shatner’s ego by the time this is released.

Andrew:
I noted this as one of the films I was most excited to see in 2009, even though I fully expect to be disappointed and I’m way too old for this kind of nonsense. But being a Star Trek fan is like being Catholic...it gets into your system early, and once it’s there, it’s there for good, resurfacing when you least expect it, flying in the face of all the logic and common sense you otherwise thought you had.

Nick:
Trekkies (or Trekkers, or whatever they want to be called) will turn out in droves for J.J. Abrams’ reimagining of their beloved series. So too will the uninitiated, thanks to the Mission: Impossible III director’s decision to place as great an emphasis on breathless, epic action as on franchise minutiae.

Paul:
Will old-school Trekkers be down with a reboot of their beloved franchise with an almost entirely new cast? Will non-Trek fans even care? And why do the studios continue to release their big-budget movies in the second weekend of May (a.k.a. the Speed Racer weekend), which has consistently proven to be a box-office dead zone?

1. HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (July 15)

Paul:
Here’s that other sure thing. I eventually decided to make Potter my top pick for several reasons. First, the Potter-philes have been salivating over this latest installment ever since the last movie two summers ago, and the ballyhoo over the release date (pushed back from last November) has only heightened their excitement. Secondly, Half-Blood Prince appears to be the most action-packed entry in the series to date, which should be enough to bring out the more casual fans of the series who might otherwise have waited for DVD. And finally, there’s the mid-July release date, which proved so lucrative for The Dark Knight last year. With relatively little competition in the surrounding weeks, Potter should rule the latter part of the summer, and if I was a Warner exec, I’d try my damnedest to secure this weekend every year.

Nick:
It was delayed from last Fall to July 15, meaning anticipation is high. And it’s the installment in which a key figure bites the supernatural bullet. Both of those facts (as well as a PG rating) should make this sixth Harry Potter film gargantuan.

Scott:
The Potter freaks were hopping mad when Warner Bros. delayed this release last fall, but let’s not kid ourselves; all will be forgiven when it finally rolls into theaters.

Andrew:
I haven’t read the books, but I’m devoted to the film series...and I’m a grown-ass man. For my fellow adults who keep sincerely trying to convince me the books themselves are the sorts of things that adults should actually be reading, and especially for all the kids out there who grew up on J.K. Rowling’s really pretty awesome juggernaut -- I’m still totally digging the gay Dumbledore thing, for instance -- NOT seeing Half-Blood isn’t even an option. Plus, Emma Watson is no longer jailbait, so I’m now officially allowed to look at her boobies.

Click Here For The Hits (Part One), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Paul Clark, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Starlog Magazine’s Final Frontier

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

After 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog magazine has ceased to exist as a print publication. “Official word of Starlog's demise came in a posting last week on the Starlog.com site, buried five paragraphs deep in an update informing readers that Starlog.com had relaunched in beta as part of a ‘massive digital initiative’ and touting the fact that a ‘Digital store,’ to launch next month, will feature digital editions of the entire Starlog catalog,” SciFi Wire reports. “The last print issue available for the time being is #374,while issue #375 will be available exclusively as a digital edition on the network in the very near future.”

I’m not going to claim that I’ve kept up with Starlog lately – I’m guessing the last issue I read had some hot scoop on the secrets of Return of the Jedi – but this announcement still bums me out a bit. I remember purchasing the very first issue of Starlog in 1976 (or, more likely, hounding my mother into buying it for me), the one you see pictured here. At the time I didn’t care anything about “David Bowie’s new sci-fi movie” or whether “The Changes” would help Space:1999; I was all about that Star Trek episode guide. Decades before the existence of Television Without Pity, I nearly grinded that issue into dust, checking off the episodes I’d seen and giving them my own special star ratings. With no IMDb, Ain’t it Cool News or Morning Deal Report to be found, it was only through each new issue of Starlog that I learned of such tantalizing upcoming fare as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and the first Superman movie. The magazine was probably my first introduction to film criticism, through reviews by David Gerrold (who dared to find fault in The Empire Strikes Back, as I recall) and Harlan Ellison (whose Starlog reviews are collected in Harlan Ellison’s Watching.)

Anyway, the Twitter generation has no use for icky print and paper, so another long-running publication bites the dust. Still, there is some good news – once they put the entire digital archive online, we’ll all be able to have a good laugh at young Andrew Osborne’s letter decrying the sexual content of Saturn 3. See, there’s always a silver lining.

Video of the Day: Leonard Nimoy at the Alamo

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we told you about Leonard Nimoy’s surprise appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse, where the new Star Trek movie unspooled in place of the previously announced screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Alamo blog has the scoop on how the evening unfolded: “The opening credits of KHAN played out on the screen, and the audience was already psyched…In the very opening scene, though, something started to look off. The print we had was really bad, with long green lines and scratches through the whole thing. Before we’d made it more than ten lines into the dialogue, the scratches consumed the film, the picture got warped, and the film itself caught fire like the engine room of the Enterprise.” At this point, the screenwriters took the stage and…well, see for yourself. We have the video after the jump:

“Star Trek” Beams Down in Austin

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Proving again that there is no truth in advertising, a theater full of Star Trek fans promised a shiny print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan were instead forced at phaser point to sit through the new J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise due in theaters next month. To say this is an outrage would be an understatement. I stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on my Ricardo Montalban breastplate! Do you know how many times I rehearsed Khan’s big speech so I’d be prepared to emote along as he announced, “I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!”? And all that for nothing. I was so upset, I actually left my tricorder in the men’s room.

All right, I didn’t actually attend the screening last night. I’m always up for a little Khan, but I really don’t want to be in a theater full of people who are really, really up for a little Khan. Call me a hypocrite if you must, but now I know I missed out on a big surprise. This is the event as originally advertised by the Alamo Drafthouse: “Fantastic Fest and Ain’t It Cool News present a free screening of STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN with an exclusive sneak preview of 10 minutes of NEVER BEFORE SEEN footage from the new STAR TREK!” According to Wired, Leonard Nimoy – yep, Ol’ Gray Ears himself – stunned the audience with a surprise appearance and announced that they would be seeing “the entire new movie just hours before it made its international bow in Sydney.”

If anyone was disappointed by the bait and switch, they weren’t tweeting about it. Slashfilm has collected reactions ranging from Harry Knowles’ predictable “holy fuck! the new Star Trek fucking rules the universe” to the more restrained “ZOMG!! Just saw the new star trek movie and it MELTED MY PANTS!!!!!\” This is all well and good, but it still raises the troubling question: Can we ever trust the Alamo Drafthouse again? For instance, tonight’s schedule would have us believe that the “Young Frankenstein Quote-Along” is on tap, but if I show up in my Igor hoodie, how do I know I won’t get some new Will Ferrell remake of Young Frankenstein I haven’t even heard about yet?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go look for my tricorder.

Related:
Your First Look at Star Trek 90210
Harlan Ellison vs. Star Trek, Paramount, et al - Round XXVI

2009: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

So, Watchmen didn’t exactly bomb, nor was it exactly a hit. With a 65% critical Tomato-Meter rating, it was neither a fiasco nor a critic’s darling, and for all its sex and violence, the onscreen content was far less controversial than all the legal maneuvering involved with getting it to screens in the first place.

In other words, the first big film of the year was a lot like the rest of 2009’s films to date: nothing to really get all het up about one way or the other...with two notable exceptions, courtesy of last month’s SXSW festival: the obnoxiously onanistic My Suicide is already a lock for my year-end Worst of 2009 list, while the documentary Best Worst Movie could easily find a spot in my year-end Top Ten, thanks to its winning cast and (mostly) cheery depiction of the pleasures and pitfalls of filmmaking (as well as the mysterious alchemy that transforms a terrible film like Troll 2 into a beloved cult classic).

As for the rest of the first quarter highs: the inventive visuals of Coraline, the good-natured mumblecore bromance of SXSW’s Humpday and the laid-back ‘80s nostalgia of Greg “Superbad” Mottola’s Adventureland were all perfectly enjoyable experiences nevertheless unlikely to chart much higher than Honorable Mention come December (unless 2009 winds up being a truly uninspired film year from here on out...unlikely, considering that our current Year of the Ox is already outpacing last year’s Rat: i.e., by April 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorable film (Full Battle Rattle) and a whole lot of Hamburger Helper (Penelope, Cloverfield, 21 and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day).

Other 2009 offerings unlikely to be more than pleasant hazy memories by December include SXSW fare like Beeswax, The Slammin’ Salmon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and the Richard Linklater sneak preview Me & Orson Welles, along with Sunshine Cleaning, Monsters vs. Aliens and I Love You, Man...films that, like most everything else I’ve seen this year, seem like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of originals I liked a lot more.

I dunno...maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve seen too many films by this point, and I’m getting cranky and hard to please, and even if a new Pulp Fiction premiered next month, I’d be too jaded to appreciate it...or maybe it's just that nobody’s released anything truly special, gripping, hilarious, original and/or mind-blowing in a while. (But then again, I haven’t seen Fast & Furious yet, so that could all change in a day or two!)

Long-range forecasts indicate a continuing trend of pleasant but disposable cinema moving forward into the second quarter of 2009, although I have cautiously high hopes for Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, Star Trek, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, Land of the Lost and even HBO’s biopic Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big & Little Edie of Maysles Brothers fame (which may not be a movie in theaters...but, hey, Angels in America was my favorite movie of 2003 on the small or big screen, so who knows?).

Plus, I just saw the following trailer for the new Sam Mendes film, Away We Go, starring the potentially appealing duo of John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, which could be goddamn charming or still yet more indie-mumbly grist for the mill...see you in June for the Second Quarter report!

Related Stories:
2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up
Screengrab Presents: The Top Ten Movies Of 2008
Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne’s Picks

Morning Deal Report: Star Trek’s Continuing Voyage

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The Star Trek reboot won’t be in theaters until May 8, but Paramount is already going forward with a sequel. The studio “has hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof to pen the screenplay. J.J. Abrams, who directed and produced the latest chapter, is onboard to produce the follow-up alongside his Bad Robot partner Bryan Burk. No decision has been made yet on whether Abrams will return behind the camera for the sequel,” Variety reports.

Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are Going the Distance. That’s right, Drew Barrymore is making a romantic comedy. You can only get this sort of shocking news right here at the Morning Deal Report. “The story by first-time scribe Geoff LaTulippe follows a couple trying to maintain a long-distance relationship,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

State of Play director Kevin Macdonald will direct the Roman military drama The Eagle of the Ninth. “The story revolves around a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion, a brigade of Roman soldiers that vanished after heading into the untamed Highlands of Scotland 15 years earlier.” Jamie Bell is set to star.

Related:
Star Trek Showdown IV: Shatner's Last Nerve
State of Play in Hollywood

Harlan Ellison vs. Star Trek, Paramount, et al - Round XXVI

Peter Smith — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Screengrab contributor Faisal Qureshi reports on a brewing lawsuit. — ed.

I'm sure a lot of people have been enjoying the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek trailer with Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang rebooting the franchise after Paramount sucked it dry so many years ago. Now comes news that Harlan Ellison is suing Paramount for money he says they owe him for writing the classic 1967 Star Trek episode, "City on the Edge of Forever." For those unfamilar, the episode follows the adventures of Kirk and Spock as they travel to 1930s Earth, after a deranged McCoy inadvertently changes the past and prevents the the Federation from ever existing. To complicate matters, Kirk falls for social worker Edith Keeler (played quite well by Joan Collins), but Spock discovers that Keeler needs to die to restore the timeline.

Fans generally consider the episode to be the best of the series, but the production wasn't a pleasant experience for Ellison. His account of the whole mess also claimed that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had consistently lied to the public about the author's contribution. Yesterday evening, Ellison announced that he was going to sue Paramount. This is no idle threat given this is also the man who took successful legal action against James Cameron, ABC (for plagarism) and more recently, AOL. To quote from the scathing press release:

"To quote Gandhi: 'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.' ...And please make sure to remember, at the moment some studio mouthpiece calls me a mooch, and says I'm only pursuing this legal retribution to get into their 'deep pockets,' tell'm Ellison snarled back, 'F---in'-A damn skippy!' I'm no hypocrite. It ain't about the 'principle,' friend, its about the MONEY! Pay me! Am I doing this for other writers, for Mom (still dead), and apple pie? Hell no! I'm doing it for the thirty-five-year-long disrespect and the money!

"The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who 'have more important things to worry about,' who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely 'take' meetings, and shuffle papers — much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams — they refuse even to notice. . . until you jam a federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars. . . from OUR labors. . . just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters."

Even more importantly, Ellison is suing his own labour union, the WGA, for failing to take his complaints seriously. Given the last high-profile case involving Paramount's accounting practices was 1990's Art Buchwald vs. Paramount (the book about the case, Fatal Subtraction, also gave the WGA a kicking for their perceived lack of support), one wonders how far this case will go before Paramount or Harlan throws in the towel. Given his history within the court room, Ellison probably won't be the one to fold.

Trailer Review: Belated Super Bowl Edition, Part 1

Paul Clark — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Hey there, folks. I was under the weather last week, so Sarah Sundberg kindly stepped in for me with some Trailer Reviews. Thanks, Sarah! But now that I’m back, I find that I’ve got some catching up to do. Now, if you’re like me, you probably don’t watch football (I’m a baseball guy myself). But missing last week’s Super Bowl also means that I didn’t get to see the high-priced spots for a whole bunch of big-budget Hollywood fare coming later this year. So if you haven’t seen these spots yet- or would like to see them again- here you go. I’ll begin with the action movies, followed later today by the family movies and comedies.

Star Trek- Awwww, isn’t that cute? It’s JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Babies! Seriously though, this doesn’t impress me any more than the original trailer did. Paramount’s gonna have to work harder than this to get anyone who isn’t a Trekker excited about this.

Fast and Furious- I wasn’t a fan of the two sequels, but I’m hoping maybe this might bring back some of the original’s dumb fun factor. However, that scene with the burning semi doesn’t give me much hope- too much reliance on effects over real precision driving skills.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen- the Michael Bay rule: when in doubt, make it bigger and louder. I know a lot of people were buzzing about this commercial, but to these eyes it looked like more of the same crap. Include me out this summer.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra- Um, no. If this movie doesn’t use the theme song from the original G.I. Joe: The Movie (”Ar-mies-of-the-night/e-vil-ta-king-flight/Co-braaaaaa! (Co-braaaaaaa!)”), then I have no reason whatsoever to bother with this one.