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Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
2. SUNSET BLVD. (1950)
3. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
4. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
6. TAXI DRIVER (1976)
7. JAWS (1975)

If mechanical shark effects and John Williams' relentless theme music were all it had going for it, Jaws still might have become the highest grossing movie in history at the time of its release. And it likely would still be lumped in with Star Wars as a progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster phenomenon. In truth, Jaws has always been much more than a mere creature feature or special effects extravaganza. From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears onscreen, accompanied by otherworldly sonar pinging noises signaling unfathomable depths of mystery, to the mournful dinosaur roar that accompanies the shark's final descent back to the murky deep, we are firmly in the grip of a master filmmaker. And while Steven Spielberg's gifts would eventually sour, with sure-handed storytelling giving way to transparent manipulation, here his every instinct is sound and his attention to detail astonishing. His tonal control is absolute; the darkest of horrors coexist with lusty seafaring adventure and character-based comedy, and it is all of a piece. The biggest laughs lead into the most frightening shocks, and vice-versa. It's a balancing act enhanced by the finest score of John Williams' career. His dum-dum-dum-dum shark theme is instantly recognizable to anyone on the planet - hell, sharks probably swim around humming it - but it's a remarkably resilient piece of music, speeding up into bursts of nautical derring-do, slowing down to an ominous, guttural portent of doom. The shark itself, when it is finally seen, remains an impressive movie monster. Even if its artificiality is more apparent to today's effects-jaded movie audience, its appearances are still fleeting enough to startle and delight. Set Jaws beside any of the contemporary summer cash leviathans and the hollowness of modern-day Hollywood's vision of action-adventure entertainment is laid bare.

8. PSYCHO (1960)
9. ANNIE HALL (1977)
10. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. STAR WARS (1977)
2. THE GODFATHER (1972)
3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are various movies that speak to me very personally -- and this one certainly qualifies, having spent most of my existence as an alienated, overeducated white dude -- but Mike Nichols’ tight, elemental collaboration with the dream team of Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle makes my list of Best Movies Ever because, like all the other movies in my Top Ten, it’s both an elemental, near-perfect example of -- and also rises above -- its genre to become a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic milestone. Plus, as a friend of my parents once said, it features the best use of a crucifix ever.

4. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

When a movie penetrates as deeply into the culture and the collective unconscious as this adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s first Oz novel, the filmmakers must have done something right. The fact that it was considered a commercial disappointment upon its initial release but nevertheless went on to become a beloved American classic also says something. But the main reason I include it here is because it’s a fully realized work of art that fully utilizes all the possibilities of cinema, from the grim black and white cinematography that suddenly explodes into color and the infectious soundtrack to the special effects that brought flying monkeys to a grateful world. It’s easy to take The Wizard of Oz for granted in this cynical, ironic, post-modern world, but honestly: who in cinema history kicks more freakin’ ass than Margaret Hamilton as Miss Elmira Gulch and the mean green you-know-who? Answer: nobody.

5. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

As crazy-ass Dennis Hopper’s unhinged Kurtz acolyte would say, “I wish I had words...” Here are three -- epic, unsettling, iconic -- but they don’t even begin to capture the essence of the surrealistic war opera Francis Ford Coppola dragged into existence at the (temporary) cost of his own sanity four years after the Fall of Saigon. It’s difficult to separate the finished product from the legend of its infamously agonizing production history (see: Hearts of Darkness), and the generally terrible footage unearthed for the Redux version released in 2001 clearly demonstrates the razor thin line between genius and drek (and, seriously, what kind of zap did U.S.C. put on the heads of Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas that none of them can ever just leave friggin’ well enough alone)? Still, whenever people refer to the original 1979 theatrical version of Apocalypse Now as a flawed masterpiece, I always get confused, since the flaws (fat Brando, crazy Hopper, the slow descent into anarchy) are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

6. ANNIE HALL (1977)

7. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

8. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

9. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

Many of the movies in our consensus and individual Top Tens are beautiful downers, primarily concerned with death, violence, heartbreak and/or the inescapable ennui of existence -- and, while it’s true that depressing themes and great films often go together, it’s important to remember that celluloid is also a great delivery system for adrenalin shots of pure joy like Young Frankenstein, a nearly perfect movie with a hilarious script and a dream ensemble that ranks 9th on my list instead of 8th because (“Puttin’ On The Ritz” notwithstanding) the even more nearly perfect Singin’ In The Rain has slightly better song and dance numbers.

10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

You may have noticed by now that the vast majority of the Best Movies picked for these lists by the Screengrab brain trust were released prior to 1980, which does a great disservice to the Sundance generation of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Maybe it’s just that films like Down By Law, Boogie Nights, Fargo, Do The Right Thing, Dazed and Confused or Pulp Fiction need to marinate for another decade before we’re ready to start comparing them head-to-head with the likes of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane...but as far as I’m concerned, The Royal Tenenbaums already qualifies as one for the ages. By turns wistful, cynical, romantic, suicidally gloomy and insanely optimistic, Wes Anderson’s richly imagined masterpiece (about a burned-out family of geniuses in a dream-world New York) is everything I could possibly ask for in a movie: career-topping performances from everyone involved, whip-smart writing, gorgeous visuals, fearlessly eccentric style and Gwyneth Paltrow French-kissing a naked chick...top that, Orson!

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

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

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part Five)

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

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Let's say the opening sequence in The Wild Bunch runs through the moment when they escape their first gun battle of the movie. During the credits, the Bunch rides into town in stolen uniforms, passing teetotalers and children who have tossed scorpions in among angry ants. The enormous and lethal scorpions being brought down by millions of ants? That's less a metaphor than foreshadowing. The Bunch heads into a bank, where they quickly begin to execute their plan to rob it. And the first line from The Bunch's leader, Pike, is "if they move, kill 'em."

Soon the Bunch becomes aware that they're trapped, with gunmen hired by the railroad lining the rooftops across the street. They decide to use the passing parade of teetotalers to create confusion while they make their getaway. In the ensuing shootout, lots of innocent people die. And that's how we meet our anti-heroes, crooks lined up against the even-more-crooked railroad, bad men in bad times. The shootout is both exciting and horrific, both meant to titillate and disgust the viewer, much like the film as a whole. Sam Peckinpah knew that audiences have bloodlust, because having bloodlust is just part of being human. And he reveled in that bloodlust because he also knew that it never leads anywhere good. You want violence?, he seems to ask, well, what do you think of the leading man's horse trampling a woman? How about a man being shot full of holes in front of a couple of kids? Violence only begets violence in Peckinpah's eye. And there's no escape from it. In this movie, released at the height of the Vietnam War, Peckinpah is asking: is this the world that you want? Is your only choice whether to be a scorpion or an ant? (HC)

BLOW OUT (1981)

Throughout the 1970s, Brian DePalma positioned himself as Hollywood’s latest “Master of the Macabre”, a self-appointed heir to the mantle of Hitchcock. And in this vein, the first few minutes of Blow Out feel like a logical progression of his career -- a DePalma-esque pastiche of a fly-by-night coed slasher picture, complete with a subjective camera straight out of Halloween. What’s sort of surprising is how right DePalma gets the feel of these movies, from the clumsy camera movements (no confident Steadicam in this scene) to the oppressive cut-rate synth score and sound effects, to the nameless actresses cast entirely for their taut physiques. Gradually it dawns on the audience that this scene is a joke, and a damn good one too. But DePalma saves his best joke for last, as the killer infiltrates the shower room, draws his knife and pulls back the curtain to reveal a blonde who turns to the camera and… well, “screams” isn’t quite the word for it. “What cat did you have to strangle to get that?” asks the mixer to the sound guy, played by John Travolta. DePalma has always been fascinated with the nuts and bolts of making cinema, and he’s never been shy about sharing them with the audience, with Blow Out being perhaps the best example of this tendency. But even more important is the way DePalma uses the opening scene to set up the film’s finale, in which Travolta finally gets the right scream, albeit in the worst way imaginable. The way DePalma sets up this goal for his protagonist and then lets him back into accomplishing it would be clever and funny if it wasn’t so unbearably sad. (PC)

GOODFELLAS (1990)

Like most great directors, Martin Scorsese knows the value of starting a movie off right, in order to reel the audience into the story he’s telling. But while most of his films have pretty killer openings, nothing he’s done before or since has topped the first few minutes of GoodFellas. Instead of starting at the beginning of the story -- the early years of his protagonist Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) -- he begins in media res, with Henry and his crew, Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), driving down the highway in the middle of the night. Suddenly, there’s a knocking sound coming from behind them, and they eventually discover that it’s the bloodied body in the trunk, not quite as dead as they’d thought it was. As hooks go, this one’s a doozy -- who are these guys, and who’s the ill-fated man in the trunk? But look also at how Scorsese uses the situation to efficiently establish the three men’s personalities -- Jimmy the cool customer, Tommy the violent hothead, and Henry the follower, standing back and taking it all in. A more conventional film might have begun with the glamorous trappings of the gangster lifestyle, but Scorsese begins with the violence and doubles back to the fun stuff, so that while we watch Henry and pals living the high life, we’ve already seen them doing the dirty deeds it took to get them there. And it’s telling that when Henry’s voiceover starts up, stating that “as far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a gangster” before Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches” kicks in, the image we see onscreen is Henry’s weary face, numbed to the brutal spectacle taking place before his eyes. (PC)

DEAD MAN (1995)

In less than 8 minutes, Jim Jarmusch has Johnny Depp's William Blake leave the relative comfort of late-19th century civilization and travel by train backwards into savagery. The landscape outside grows more and more brutal, as do his fellow passengers. When Crispin Glover's train fireman comes to undercut his assumptions (i.e., spout weirdness at him, this being Crispin Glover), Blake gets his first glimpse of just how far outside of his world he has traveled. Glover says that he "wouldn't trust no words on no paper" and Blake should realize right there how fucked he is. He doesn't, though. He really has no choice but to follow through, even if that mean staring down Robert Mitchum and his gun. Even as he speaks to Glover, his fellow passengers, hunters and trappers by their garb, leap up and start firing out of the train at buffalo, denying their meat to the Native Americans, and dealing death without meaning to the majestic animals. Life and death don't carry the same weight out here, a lesson Blake will not learn until too late. (HC)

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Was it Oscar Wilde who said "talent borrows, genius steals"? No one knows this better than Quentin Tarantino. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman stands motionless on an LAX conveyor belt while "Sound of Silence" plays in the background. In Jackie Brown, Pam Grier starts out on a conveyor belt at the more low rent Long Beach airport. Queue Bobby Womack's "110th Street." We see her in her bright blue airhostess uniform, nicely matching the mosaic background. Cut to x-ray images showing the insides of a few — is that a gun, or am I imagining things? A security guard's metal detector floats over some woman's white-pantsed crotch. Meanwhile Jackie glides through security with her bag and uniform, walks then picks up and runs, making it to her job at the gate just in time to greet passengers with a friendly airhostess smile. What more do you need to let you know you're in for sex, drugs, and desperation to get out of a dead-end job, just barely under the surface in sunny California? (SCS)

And finally...

JAWS (1975) & STAR WARS (1977)

A naked woman disappears in the water at night, devoured by a terrifying unseen monster, effectively terrifying generations of beach enthusiasts within minutes...a massive starship soars over my pubescent head, which very nearly explodes in sheer, geeky excitement...I don't really have much new to say about either film or their iconic, totally kick-ass opening sequences...but, damn, we couldn't really end our list of all-time great beginnings without them, now could we? (AO)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Andrew Osborne

Independent Film Festival Boston Review: Winnebago Man

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:05:00 GMT

My Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak and I tried to see Ben Steinbauer’s hot ticket documentary Winnebago Man three times during the 2009 South-By-Southwest festival in Austin, TX and were thwarted each time: once by sold-out crowds, once by SXSW traffic combined with sold-out crowds and once by a scheduling conflict.

Thus, I was happy to finally catch up with the movie at this year’s IFFB (which, curiously, stands for just “Independent Film Festival Boston,” rather than the presumably too mainstream-sounding “Independent Film Festival OF Boston”) -- and, I’m happy to report, the experience was nearly as rewarding and worth the wait as Steinbauer’s own three year pursuit of his elusive subject, Jack “Winnebago Man” Rebney, a.k.a. the Angriest R.V. Salesman in the World.

My wife had never seen the infamous YouTube clip that spawned Steinbauer’s project (a fact that, when spoken aloud at yesterday’s screening, brought astonished cries of disbelief from several audience members surrounding us at the Somerville Theater) -- so for those of you similarly unfamiliar, “Winnebago Man” was among the earliest generation of viral video superstars, back when “viral videos” were actually bootleg VHS tapes passed from one found footage enthusiast to another. Later, with the advent of YouTube’s paradigm-shifting time-suck technology, the montage of expletive-laden outtakes from some long-ago industrial film “blew up” (as the young people say), inspiring dozens of online parodies and spreading the Winnebago Man’s Daffy Duck-esque exasperation to millions around the world:

Austin documentarian Steinbauer, no stranger to on-set frustration and stress, became obsessed with the man in the clip (who’d inevitably become, among other things, a kind of patron saint to independent filmmakers everywhere) and set out to discover what the Winnebago Man himself thought of his new-fangled digital age fame (if, indeed, he was aware of it, or even still alive).

And so begins a funny and thought-provoking investigation into the nature of overnight on-line notoriety (featuring several hilarious and wince-inducing clips of comparable interweb superstars like the Star Wars kid and Aleksey “Impossible Is Nothing” Vayner), followed by a search for Rebney, the mysterious, reclusive Winnebago Man (whose Kurtz-like enigma is pieced together in the first reel of the film via intriguing clues like a telling string of P.O. boxes and off-the-grid identity erasure, the purple prose of a lone online classified ad attributed to Rebney and, eventually, first-hand accounts of actual encounters with the angriest RV salesman in the world).

Then one day, in a comically thrilling moment, the voice of the actual Winnebago Man finally issues from Steinbauer’s answering machine, luring the filmmaker on a journey that snakes through the rest of the film like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Rebney. Since the filmmaker’s multi-faceted encounter with the real-life man behind the ranting is part of the fun and suspense of Winnebago Man, I won’t reveal more, except to say the results are funny, unpredictable and satisfying, resulting in a foul-mouthed, misanthropic (yet deeply human) examination of privacy and community in the internet age -- ideally suited for a double-feature screening with the somewhat sunnier, thematically-linked and equally enjoyable Best Worst Movie on your Netflix queue and/or at a savvy art-house near you.

Related Articles:
SXSW: The Final Round-Up
SXSW Review: Best Worst Movie

For God So Loved the Human Race That He Brought Keanu Reeves Out of Mothballs...

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Benjamin A. Plotinsky thinks he's picked up on some recent tendencies in science fiction. " There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the plot of The Matrix or Superman Returns."

The evidence is pretty much right there on the surface, and not just in such moments as the one early in The Matrix where someone tells a not-yet enlightened Keanu Reeves, “You’re my savior, man, my own personal Jesus Christ,” or the later one where Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus tells Reeve's Neo, “Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.” Morpheus also tells Neo, “When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth. . . . After he died, the Oracle prophesied his return—that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people.” As Plotinsky notes, "We don’t know [whether Neo is the One] until near the movie’s end, when a comrade-in-arms betrays Neo and Morpheus. Neo chooses to save Morpheus’s life by surrendering his own. The machines kill him—but then he mysteriously returns to life and obliterates his enemies, to the grand accompaniment of trumpets and a choir...It takes no great perception to recognize how closely this plot tracks the basic Christian narrative, though it conflates the Passion with the End Days, adding the betrayal of a Judas to a messianic Second Coming."

As for "Bryan Singer’s underrated Superman Returns (2006) sought to answer an age-old question: Does humanity need gods? Lex Luthor, Superman’s eternal nemesis, answers early on. After Luthor compares himself to Prometheus, an accomplice retorts: 'Sounds great, Lex, but you’re not a god.' 'Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don’t share their power with mankind,' Luthor snarls. He’s in agreement with Lois Lane, who has won a Pulitzer for an op-ed titled 'Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.'" When Superman returns, he proves both his archenemy and his old flame (and mother of his son) wrong: he selflessly saves the world, after which he "remains in a coma until his son...restores him to life. He leaves his hospital room empty until a nurse discovers it, just as Mary and Mary Magdalene find Jesus’s empty tomb."

It may be possible to nod appreciatively at all this and still have doubts about whether sci-fi stories are automatically enriched if they mirror religious mythologies. The Christ story parallels underlying the Matrix trilogy definitely got heavier and more explicit as the movies crashed into their second and third installments, and whether this is coincidental or not, there are plenty of people who think that the movies themselves also got progressively worse. There may be even more people who would argue that any position that depends on including the terms "underrated" and "Superman Returns" in the same sentence has to be a non-starter. To his credit, Plotinsky readily acknowledges that when, "As the world knows to its sorrow, [George] Lucas revived the Star Wars franchise in 1999 with The Phantom Menace," any inclination to downplay the religious-mystical aspects of the earlier films, or treat them playfully, were long gone, and the movies suffered because of it: "...where the original movie never deified Luke, The Phantom Menace describes Anakin—the future Darth Vader, Luke’s father—in terms so messianic as to make Neo blush, repeatedly calling him 'the Chosen One.' The source of the term is in Luke—the Evangelist, that is—where Jewish leaders say of the soon-to-be-crucified Jesus: 'Let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!' The movie is fuzzy about who exactly has done the choosing, however—a failure doubtless rooted in Lucas’s carelessness with plots."

Plotinsky makes a case that religious themes, which he also detects in The Terminator, E.T., and I Am Legend, jumped to the front of sci-fi creators' minds as the Cold War receded and geopolitics, which had once fueled the Star Trek series, became too confusing and gray for easy metaphorical consumption. Certainly it was a bleak day for the Star Trek franchise when Earthlings and Klingons learned to just get along. Incidentally, if there's anything to all this, might it not be true that The Terminator, with its save-the-unborn-savior plot and its very-'80s nuclear-terror tremors, is a key transitional work, about a messiah coming to save us from the bomb? (I just thought I'd drop that in here; I'm sure not trying to suggest that Plotinsky's article needed to be any longer.) In any case, we may have already seen things start to shift back: the recently completed Battlestar Galactica series invoked God and gods and religious prophecy left and right, but in the context of an allegory about 9/11 and the development of post-9/11 morality. Will the new Star Trek movie mark a full return to the thrilling days of intergalactic secular warfare involving aliens with growly accents and exotic facial hair? As the old Vulcan proverb says...

Screengrab Review: "Lymelife"

Nick Schager — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In case you haven’t been listening to what prestige and art-house films have been blaring, the suburbs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The carefree contentment projected by all those white-picket-fence homes, and the smiling cheer of all those good-looking people in their nice clothes and fancy cars? It’s all lies, joyful facades that mask serious social dysfunction. Despite seeming like the place where happily-ever-afters come true, the suburbs are in reality hotbeds of familial discord, of tumultuous adolescent anger and misery, and of deception, greed, selfishness and alienation. If you thought that moving there from the vile, corrupting city was smart, think again. Relocating to a comfy home, and mingling with your undoubtedly Yuppie neighbors, will only warp you into a desolate conformist zombie like those seen in American Beauty, The Ice Storm and countless other likeminded dramas. And desperately running through the streets like Leonardo DiCaprio’s wretched Revolutionary Road hubby, or performing fatal makeshift abortions on yourself like Kate Winslet’s hopeless wife, are your only avenues of escape!

Excuse the sarcasm, but seriously – does anyone still find this gibberish relevant? Pulling the curtains back on picture-perfect suburbia is such a stale, clichéd modus operandi that it’s long ceased to be of any use. And one suspects that the reason so many recent films address this topic from the detached confines of an earlier era (anywhere from the ‘50s to ‘80s) is because only in the past would characters actually view as revelatory the fact that non-city-living isn’t a surefire blissful existence. Which brings us around to Lymelife, a late-‘70s-set tale about screwed-up Long Island high-schooler Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose crumbling family includes cold, philandering real-estate developer dad Mickey (Alec Baldwin), military brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), and gloomy, quietly suffering mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy). His life a checklist of movie clichés about adolescence, Scott is picked on by the local bully, loves Star Wars, and pines for his pretty older neighbor Adrianna (Emma Roberts), who flirts with and teases him. Also in the mix are Adrianna’s crazy parents: mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is an adulteress sleeping with Mickey, and her dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is a mess of a man who, instead of looking for work, smokes pot in his basement, his deterioration ostensibly instigated by a case of lime disease.

I say ostensibly because Charlie – like everyone else in Derick Martini’s film (co-written with brother Steven) – is really suffering from suburbanitis, that stultifying malady in which moving to the ‘burbs not only doesn’t solve, but in fact amplifies, barely suppressed problems. Lymelife shows directorial restraint in depicting Scott’s confused headspace, and its performances are universally solid, with both Rory Culkin and Hennessey conveying a tempered soulfulness that helps prevent their characters from succumbing to cartoonishness. Yet the narrative they’re assigned to breathe life into is irrevocably moldy, a portrait of father-son and husband-wife strife, as well as of budding teenage sexuality and maturity, that’s defined by groaningly bittersweet, paradise-is-an-illusion shots of middle-class homes spied out of school bus windows. Apparently semi-autobiographical, Lymelife sporadically nails sharp (if familiar) details, for example a shirtless Scott rehearsing how to be cool and macho while staring into his mirror, or Scott and Adrianna’s awkward maiden sexual experiences. Too bad, then, that such authenticity is drowned out by an overarching don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover message that long ago lost its luster.

In Other Blogs: Knowing Me, Knowing You

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At Scanners, Jim Emerson weighs in on Roger Ebert’s Knowing bafflement. “It's one thing to be the voice in the crowd pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. It's very different to feel like you're the only one who's cheering an Emp you feel is magnificently attired…But critical opinion isn't an electoral contest where winners and losers are determined by some (largely illusory) consensus. Not many years ago, the general public would not have had any idea of what many critics outside their own town had said about a film -- nor would they have known how each and every movie performed at the box office weekend after weekend.”

David Frank of Rope of Silicon puts his trust in Ebert. “In trendy sushi bars across the country a quiet buzz hums among kids wearing black-rimmed glasses and Alamo Drafthouse T-shirts. They wonder if Mr. E ate some magical Freaky Friday fortune cookie with Ben Lyons — not than any of these curious folk would admit to seeing any version of Freaky Friday. Has the man given up? Is he losing it?...I haven’t seen Knowing. Which means I can’t say whether I agree with Ebert or not. Regardless of whether I think Knowing is junk or treasure, I do know the man has not lost it. He has not gone Earl Dittman on us. He really does believe Knowing is a great science-fiction film despite whatever you, your mom and your favorite hipper-than-thou Internet curmudgeon thinks. And that’s why I love Roger Ebert. He’s his own man.”

Beyond the Multiplex looks at “a completely miscellaneous grab bag of indie openings,” including the intriguing Severed Ways. “Impressive and also absolutely ludicrous, this is the movie you need to recommend to that suburban metalhead cousin in desperate need of having his mind blown. Purportedly based on an episode from the Vinland Sagas, in which two 11th-century Norsemen are left on their own to fend for themselves in unknown North America, writer-director-actor Tony Stone's Severed Ways is something like a DIY combination of black-metal video, Italian horror film, The Blair Witch Project and some really slow, nature-obsessed art movie like Old Joy.”

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard converse about two “unfortunately overlooked and/or unfairly maligned” films, David Gordon Green’s Undertow and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris. Says Harris: “I wanted to talk about Undertow largely because it's been forgotten: you're right that almost no one brings it up these days in talking about Green, who's mostly known for his first two films and now the Judd Apatow collaboration Pineapple Express. Ebert's rave aside, I believe Undertow got decidedly mixed reviews upon release, including its fair share of very negative ones, but on the whole I wouldn't say it's maligned so much as simply overlooked. That's unfortunate, because in my opinion it is Green's best film thus far, the film that comes closest to fulfilling the tremendous promise he's displayed in all his features. It's not a perfect film by any means, not a masterpiece, but in its own strange way it is ‘great,’ a baroque fable about the loss of childhood innocence and the totemic power of family.”

Let’s wrap it up with this week’s installment of List-o-Mania courtesy of Spoutblog: 10 Films That Saved Their Franchises. Like, uh…Attack of the Clones? “It made the least amount of money of the three Star Wars prequels, but Attack of the Clones was the trilogy’s saving grace, because after the ‘George Lucas ruined my childhood!’ disappointments of The Phantom Menace, this second (or fifth?) installment of the franchise got the old fans excited again by alluding to (and leading in the direction of) more characters and events of the original movies, while overall featuring a better plot and more satisfying action.” I’m fainting with damned praise.

SXSW Review: “New World Order”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the New World Order, where 9/11 was an inside job and secretive elitist organizations called the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Council on Foreign Relations are plotting our enslavement. Our only hope is a ragtag band of conspiracy theorists, anarchists and anti-globalists, led by the mad prophet of the Info Wars, Alex Jones.

Jones launched his empire more than a dozen years ago on Austin's public access television, a haven for kooks like the guy who calmly lectured about out-of-control feminism while wearing a toilet seat around his neck. At first Jones seemed right at home, but it soon became clear that cable access couldn't hold him; his charisma was too fierce, too weird, and worse yet, every once in a while he made sense. But between brain and mouth there was no interlocutor, so although he was capable of the occasional trenchant observation about the trampling of Constitutional rights or the erosion of personal freedoms, it wasn't worth trying to sift through his elaborate stream-of-consciousness black helicopter fantasias to find them.

That is, unless you buy into the whole global conspiracy, like the subjects of this compelling new documentary from Luke Myer and Andrew Neel (Darkon). Although Jones is the central figure here, we also meet a number of his counterparts and protégés, including 9/11 "Truthers" Luke Rudowski and Seth Jackson, retired police officer and militia-based separatist Jack McLamb, and Turkish-Irish filmmaker Timucin Leflef. They have little in common besides their fiercely held belief in the New World Order.

Myer and Neel aren't concerned about the reality of these beliefs, and they don't present any counter-arguments or talking head rebuttals. They don't have to. In a way, New World Order is an extension of their previous film Darkon, which was about live-action role-playing gamers. That movie's tagline was "Everybody wants to be a hero," which could just as easily apply to this one. You don't need a Ph.D. to figure out the psychology at work here; we'd all like to think our lives our important, and if you can convince yourself that you're one of the few in the know about what's really going on in the world, one of the few fighting the good fight against forces bent on destroying you...well, then you have a lot in common with Jones, Rudowski, Jackson and the rest.

Paranoid delusions are contagious in New World Order, and Alex Jones is patient zero. Bloated almost beyond recognition from his early cable access days, his face a puffy fright-mask of popeyed outrage, Jones leads his minions to the hotel where the annual Bilderberg Conference is taking place. He sees his enemies behind every tree and around every corner - he's continually evading cars he imagines are pursuing him and at one point announces that a nearby bare-shirted bicyclist is clearly Secret Service. When a fire alarm goes off in the hotel just as he's set to call into a talk radio show, it's simply more confirmation that They're Out to Get Him. That he's living the movie in his mind is evident from the references to The Matrix, Star Wars and even Ghostbusters that pepper his rants.

It's no wonder that youngsters like Rudowski and Jackson fall so easily under his spell; they admit that before 9/11, they gave little to no thought about the larger global picture, so why wouldn't they be susceptible to a Hollywood-ready narrative that explains it all? At least Leflef actually channels his paranoia into creative work by making his own dystopian sci-fi films. The others are activists of the worst kind, the perfect storm of self-righteous certitude and blowhard ignorance. A healthy skepticism of government, institutions and the wealthy elite is a good thing, but without ever overtly passing judgment, Myer and Neel show how easily it can curdle into narcissistic rage.

Related:
SXSW Review: Roadsworth: Crossing the Line

Unwatchable #49: “Laserblast”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Unwatchable Week rolls on with one of our periodic substitutions. The actual #49 movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list I’ve been working from all along is the 1989 Bo Derek sex comedy Ghosts Can’t Do It. Oh, how I wish I could find this movie, but there doesn’t appear to be any trace of its existence left on earth besides a handful of reviews and a four-second YouTube clip of Derek in a wet t-shirt. This is a tragedy that any self-respecting film preservationists should devote all the resources at their disposal toward rectifying. After all, we’re talking about a movie that swept the Razzies, taking home Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Derek) and Worst Director (John Derek). I demand a fully restored Criterion Collection edition by year’s end, but in the meantime, we have to find a replacement for today’s Unwatchable installment. As is my policy, I have consulted the current version of the IMDb Bottom 100 list and selected the first entry that does not also appear on my version of the list.

That turned out to be Laserblast, an early effort from producer Charles Band, who was essentially the Roger Corman of the VHS era. Glancing over his filmography, I see that Band has spent much more of his career exploring our primal fear of dolls and puppets than I would have guessed, although these days he’s turned his attention to the largely untapped “scary gingerbread men” genre. In 1978, however, aliens were all the rage…and Band and his first-(and only-)time director Michael Rae were not about to buck the trend.

Even if, like me, you have a soft spot for cheesy ‘70s sci-fi, you’ll be hard-pressed to extract much entertainment value from Laserblast. The fun begins with a couple of Play-Doh aliens vaporizing a rather vampiric-looking fellow wielding a laser cannon. After this brief but oh-so-tantalizing burst of sci-fi action, Laserblast turns into a horny teenager movie, as young Billy Duncan (Kim Milford) wakes from a dream only to find his slutty mother is off to Acapulco again. The lonely boy tries to visit his girlfriend Kathy, but her crazy grandpa (Keenan Wynn) who thinks he’s still in World War II chases him off. Billy wanders out to the desert, where he finds the abandoned laser cannon. This completely turns his day around, as you can imagine. He starts blasting cacti and sand dunes as any of us would, little realizing the effect this alien artifact is having on him.

Exposure to the weapon turns Billy’s skin an unhealthy shade of green, and he develops some sort of seeping chest wound that calls for a cameo from Roddy McDowell as the town sawbones. I’m sure Mr. McDowell was just happy to be in a cheesy ‘70s sci-fi movie that didn’t require him to sit in a makeup chair for seven hours, but he doesn’t bring a whole lot to the party. Billy continues to mutate, much to the dismay of Kathy, the local law enforcement, an investigating government agent, and Billy’s high school tormenters (including cinematic uber-nerd Eddie Deezen in his motion picture debut).

The dramatic conclusion finds Billy hitching a ride with a hippie driving a VW bus and using his trusty laser cannon to blow up a Star Wars billboard. (Now that’s chutzpah.) His rampage is cut short when the Play-Doh aliens finally catch up and give him a taste of his own medicine. I’ll say this much for the aliens: they may be cheaply made, but at least they have personality, which is more than I can say for Billy or any other human in the movie. Otherwise, Laserblast has little to offer besides periodic explosions and a chubby girl in a bikini eating cake. I know some of you are into that sort of thing.

Previously on Unwatchable:
50. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix
53. Baby Geniuses
54. Meatballs 4

Unwatchable #50: “Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Unwatchable Week! Every day this week will feature a new installment of the most ill-advised exercise ever undertaken by a member of the reviewing press, as your faithful movie janitor (that would be me) continues his mind-numbing quest to watch every film on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. We've finally cracked the top 50, so there's no point stopping now.

Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace is, as you may have deduced, the sequel to The Lawnmower Man, which was once known as Stephen King's The Lawmower Man until the master of horror sued New Line Pictures to have his name removed from the credits. When you consider some of the movies Stephen King has seen fit to leave his name on, this would seem to be quite an indictment. Actually, King's problem with the movie is that it has absolutely nothing to do with his short story "The Lawnmower Man." As I recall, King's Lawnmower Man was a big fat naked guy who ate grass and any woodchucks that might be hiding in said grass, while New Line's Lawnmower Man was Jeff Fahey in a funny wig.

The 1996 sequel Lawnmower Man 2 offers neither of these options. Instead, it stars Matt Frewer as Jobe, the same character played by Fahey in the first movie. Jobe was once a simple-minded lawn care employee, until a scientist used drugs and virtual reality to turn him into an evil genius. When last seen, Jobe had entered cyberspace and was making all the phones in the world ring at once. He had his reasons, I’m sure.

As the second movie opens, Jobe is sucked out of cyberspace and imprisoned in a new body with only one working limb and Matt Frewer's face. He is now forced to work for James Lipton lookalike Jonathan Walker (Kevin Conway), who wants Jobe to finish building the special Chiron chip that will give him control over all the world's computer systems, and thus all its banks. Jobe dives back into virtual reality to find his old pal Peter, a teenager with a gang of VR hacker buddies. Jobe asks Peter to find Dr. Benjamin Trace (Patrick Bergin), the chip's original inventor, who can provide him with the secret doofalator bypass program that will allow him to unleash all of the chip's power.

Of course, Jobe plans to use the power for his own nefarious purposes, which James Lipton lookalike would have figured out if he'd seen the first movie. There's an awful lot of nonsensical techno-babble of the sort you used to be able to get away with in cyberspace-themed movies before everyone got access to the Internet and realized it was mostly useful for porn and twittering. There are also lame retreads of sci-fi action sequences familiar from the original Star Wars trilogy, and plenty of cutting edge mid-90s "virtual reality" graphics. (I was sure by now we'd have the special VR goggles that let us mingle with bigwigs at the White House or Playmates at Hef’s Grotto without ever leaving our parents' basements, but I guess those are still a few years off.)

If there's any wit to be found in Lawnmower Man 2, it's in the casting of Frewer, who was, of course, the original virtual star, Max Headroom. That joke gets sort of old once you realize Frewer is essentially reprising his Headroom performance, but without the cool squiggly video backgrounds. Oh, 1990s - can't you do anything right?

Previously on Unwatchable:
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix
53. Baby Geniuses
54. Meatballs 4
55. A*P*E

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

LUKE SKYWALKER & PRINCESS LEIA, STAR WARS IV-VI (1977-1983)

Getting his first look at Princess Leia in what was once the first and is now supposed to be the fourth Star Wars movie, Luke fairly moos, "She's beautiful!", thus revealing that he's an old-fashioned boy who likes his headphones big, round, and gnarly. Later, Leia will plant a quick smooch on him while he's in the process of saving their asses. This was back in those more innocent days when George Lucas, whatever he's said to the contrary since then, didn't know that he was going to be making a second movie, let alone that he had a whole complicated mythos to spin around it. By the time of The Empire Strikes Back, when Leia plants a hot one on Luke to make Han Solo jealous, it was clear that Leia had decided that her heart was with the bad boy who liked to hang out with Bigfoot, but just as clearly, Luke still thought he might be in the running. Certainly he didn't have the traditional manly response to his sister slipping him the tongue. You revisionist historians can dance around this all you like, but the fact is that for a couple of movies there, the all-ages audience for the Star Wars saga was treated to the sight of the Annakin sibs kind of hitting on each other. No wonder George Lucas opted to abandon his plans for a trilogy of films that would follow the action of Return of the Jedi, where the big reveal was made: he didn't have the heart to stage the most awkward holiday dinner scenes in movie history.

MAX SCHUMACHER & DIANA CHRISTENSEN, NETWORK (1976)

The May-December romance is always a tricky maneuver to pull off. This one stands out partly because it's totally bewildering; I've heard theories about how the moon landing was faked that make more sense than the plot turn that throws these two together. The movie sets them up as oppositional figures from the start: Faye Dunaway's "liberated" young woman Diana who, in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's cranky vision, stands for commercial exploitation and debasement, and the older man, Max, (William Holden) who, as the mouthpiece of traditional broadcast journalistic standards, represents the last stand against the corruption of the medium. When Max's old friend, the anchorman Howard Beale, has a breakdown and turns into a ranting crazy, Diana runs with it, turning the news into a showcase for the crazy man's diatribes in the name of entertainment; Max responds by accusing Diana of having "learned life from Bugs Bunny." Then, somewhere in the middle of all this, Max leaves his wife for her, they boink, and then they break up. And from the start of it all Diana's busy undermining Max's career, so it's not even as if she's using him as a stepping stone. Seriously, it's as if Eliot Ness and Al Capone just threw caution to the winds and got it on three-quarters of the way through The Untouchables. The closest thing to an explanation for this comes from Max's wife, played by Beatrice Straight, who parachutes into the movie just long enough to tell him that he's experiencing "his last roar of passion" before male menopause sets in. The Academy Award voters who gave Straight a Best Actress Oscar for this speech might almost have been reacting in self-defense.

BOBBY DUPEA & RAYETTE DIPESTO, FIVE EASY PIECES (1970)

This counterculture hit has its snobbish side, particularly in its scenes involving rich-boy classical pianist turned slumming hardhat Bobby's quote-unquote "romantic" life with "Rayette Dipesto", a name that the Minnie Pearl enthusiasts at the Grand Ole Opry would regard as a bit glaring in its white trashitude. Everything about Bobby's blue collar existence is there to signal that he's meant for better things, but there are real traces of affection and respect in his friendship with his co-worker (Billy Green Bush), whereas he treats his squeeze Rayette as if she were something he won at the company raffle when he was really hoping to come home with the waffle iron. Not that the movie doesn't agree with him that she's a nightmare: in scene after scene, he gets to smolder while she gets to whimper and whine. The question of what's wrong with him that he's chosen to keep company with such a horror never seems to get addressed. The ending, with him deserting her in the middle of nowhere, may be the act of a bastard, but it's definitely the best thing for him, for her, and for the audience.

DEBBY & VINCE STONE, THE BIG HEAT (1953)

In Fritz Lang's noir potboiler, Gloria Grahame is the platonic ideal of the smart moll, and as her gangster boyfriend, Lee Marvin, at his most bestial, is the last person in the world anyone should get smart with. By most conventional standards this is a horrendous pairing, but it's a classic if your thing happens to be mutally assured destruction. The evening that ends with him scarring her face with hot coffee even begins with him manhandling a different woman, which must be her version of foreplay. No longer able to count on her looks as her meal ticket, she throws in with the rogue cop (Glenn Ford) on the mob's tail and turns herself into a sacrificial victim by paying Marvin back and goading him to put her out of her misery. They were made for each other, dahling.

AL & VERA FROM DETOUR (1945)

Film noir has given us a lot of self-deluding males who become willing accomplices to deadly females, but there’s no bigger chump than Tom Neal’s Al and no bigger a shark than Ann Savage’s Vera in Detour. A zero-budget production shot more or less over a weekend by Edward G. Ulmer and a crew of Poverty Row nobodies, Detour is one of the most nihilistic – and yet thrilling – post-war noir films in existence. Al Roberts is a never-was nightclub piano player who travels west to hook up with a woman who clearly couldn’t be more glad to be shed of him. It’s not hard to tell why: Al is a sad sack’s sad sack, a self-pitying, pouty loser who blames his every misfortune – and he’s got plenty of ‘em – on the whole rest of the world. When a kindly drunk slips him a big enough tip to go to California and see his girl, he looks at it like someone’s shat a big old turd in his morning coffee. Along the way, after an uncanny turn of events, he runs into the appropriately named Ann Savage playing Vera, who “looks like she just got thrown off of the crummiest freight train in the world”. She’s a seething cauldron of rage, and as up to no good as a hurricane, but that doesn’t bother Al, who’s looking for a new set of gams to walk all over him. Vera sizes him up as a grade-A cut of chump in about a millisecond and spends the entire rest of this wonderful, horrible little film heaping abuse over him, to his barely registered protests. The pure inappropriateness of this abusive relationship is part of what makes it such a filthily energetic noir classic.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Review: "Fanboys"

Nick Schager — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The rise of the Internet has helped the geeks inherit the Earth, a development celebrated by Fanboys, a rather formulaic road-trip comedy colored by Star Wars mania. Thanks to having its theatrical release delayed for more than a year, Kyle Newman’s film took on something of a mythic stature in the far corners of the ‘net, as the holdup made it seem like a case study in the mainstream’s condescending disrespect for all things geeky. Now that the wait is over, however, the truth seems more plain: Fanboys struggled to garner a slot at the local multiplex because it’s little more than a broad, juvenile triviality that aims to boost its target audience’s self-esteem about their obsession without ever convincing outsiders why rabid support for certain beloved properties (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) is warranted. To be sure, entertainment is the primary modus operandi at work here. Nonetheless, there’s something missing in the film's treatment of its central passion, which – explained by one character with little more than “I like it because I do” – is so lacking in self-analysis that the entire affair proves merely an extended high-five to those already in the Skywalker-adoring club.

A project like this should naturally be guided by Star Wars love, yet were that enthusiasm wedded to even a trace of reflection about the sensibleness of such insane fidelity to a fictional sci-fi saga, Newman’s film might have managed to say something, anything, about the virtues and limits of fervent fandom. Instead, however, funny-ha-ha references are the proceedings’ defining trait, alongside puerile humor, pratfalls and more gay-panic jokes than you can shake a lightsaber at. Oh yes, and cancer – specifically, the terminal kind that nerd Linus (Chris Marquette) has, and which motivates his three Ohio friends Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel), and Eric (Sam Huntington) to convince him to embark, in 1998, on a cross-country journey to Lucas’ San Francisco Skywalker Ranch to steal a rough cut of Episode I: The Phantom Menace so he can see it before shuffling off his mortal coil. It’s a plot instigator of an embarrassingly lazy sort – what, their lifelong fixation on the franchise wasn’t incentive enough? – though, as befitting the action’s general slapdash quality, it barely plays a factor, too busy is Newman having his characters make late-‘90s-specific comments about chat rooms and letting Seth Rogen flail about in two separate, equally cringe-worthy roles.

In this predictable fantasyland, sexual frustration is alleviated by a hot female who works at a comics store (Kristen Bell), Trekkies are “gay,” and just about everyone understands the preeminent value of Star Wars. Cameos from Kevin Smith, Carrie Fisher and William Shatner only confirm that the film is cheekily self-aware, and don’t distract from the poorly executed stabs at pop culture humor – Canadian prog-rockers Rush may not be cool, but liking them is hardly hilarious – and weak attempts at emotional drama via Eric and Linus’ strained relationship. The white elephant in the room is, of course, that Episode I is terrible, a fact that’s ultimately addressed in a straightforward punchline-y way, rather than used as the crux of a tongue-in-cheek look at the misguided nature of blind devotion. But so it goes with this disposable comedy, so intent on indulging in obscure Star Wars trivia, banal sub-Kevin Smith arguments about the series, and Harry Knowles idolization that one soon craves just a single moment when – as in Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s legendary Late Night with Conan O’Brien segment – the air might be slightly let out of the insular, full-to-bursting fandom bubble.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Star Wars Holiday Special"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:25:00 GMT

The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved. Notorious would be a better word. Infamous would be another. It also isn't a movie; it's a television special. What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix. In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it. Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years. Or unless you have Google video. Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release: George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special? It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke. It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it. It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good. It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it. Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

Written and produced during a brief period of time when it wasn't completely certain how humongously successful the Star Wars mythos would become, its creators decided to cash in by putting together something that combined the worst elements of the sci-fi classic with the utter dregs of 1970s variety shows. To get one thing out of the way, the Star Wars Holiday Special does contain the first appearance of Boba Fett, in a nifty little animated sequence by Canada's legendary studio Nelvana. Beyond that, though, it is 100% utterly horrible and awful from the first frame to the last. It's so bad, you don't even know how it ended up on TV even in the late '70s. The plot, such as it is, involves Chewbacca's quest to defy an Imperial barricade and get home to spend "Life Day' -- a sort of outer-space super-Christmas -- with his Wookie family. But the Special isn't so much a story with a plot as it is a bunch of completely disastrous moments strung together so incoherently that it makes you want to commit suicide. At times, you begin to suspect that the Star Wars Holiday Special is what the head of the Silver Shamrock Corporation should have gone with in Halloween III instead of those lame masks that turned kids' heads into bugs.

Picking out the worst moment of the Star Wars Holiday special is like picking out the worst moment of the Second World War: it's really just one unspeakable horror after another, only WWII ended sooner. Every time you think you've seen a scene that is as ungodly bad as it can possibly get, another scene that's even worse shows up, and then you look at your watch and you realize that there's still an hour and a half left to go before it's over. A mere listing of some of the most memorable scenes should be enough to scare off any sane human being: there's the scene where Chewbacca's wife, son and father -- Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy -- bellow at each other in Wookie-speak (which resembles a couple of dying walruses bellowing at each other) for something like fifteen minutes, with no subtitles. There's the scene where Art Carney walks around with his shirt open to the belly-button talking about how he loves to make a Wookie happy. There's the scene where the nauseating old freak Itchy watches Wookie porn, which involves Dihanne Carroll manning a futuristic phone sex line, and makes profoundly disturbing Wookie pleasure noises. There's the scene where an Imperial storm trooper watches a Jefferson Starship music video for no discernable reason. There's the scene where Mark Hammill shows up wearing more makeup than Joan Crawford (and looking considerably less butch, to boot). There's the musical number by a coked-out-of-her-gourd Carrie Fisher, which would be the worst musical number in television history if it weren't for the fact that it comes after an even worse musical number by Bea Arthur. (Yes, that's right, Bea Arthur is part of the Star Wars canon, and there's nothing you can do about it, fanboys.) There's not one, not two, but three comedic roles by Harvey Korman, one of which involves him playing an outer space version of Julia Child called Chef Gormaanda. There's the scene where Han Solo kills a guy just to break up the monotony. And more, more, so much more.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is mind-numbingly bad, but it has a special cachet because of its inexplicable attachment to one of the most popular film franchises of all time. Fans of utter kitsch will enjoy it on its own merits -- I mean, honestly, this thing reeks so bad it's simply amazing that no one breaks character and asks director Steve Binder just what the fuck he think's he's doing -- but for Star Wars fans, it's virtually a rite of passage: if you can watch this colossal stench-bomb, featuring almost all the original cast, and still call yourself a fan, no one can dare question your loyalty to the franchise ever again.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An uncontrollable 2 turtledoves crapping all over your kitchen. The only way this thing could possibly be any worse is if it had Jar Jar Binks and/or Hayden Christensen in it.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I grew up right next door to Thanksgiving Town, USA: Plymouth, Massachusetts, former home of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and future home of Plymouth Rock Studios and a nice big casino.

My next door neighbors used to work at Plimoth Plantation, where docent actors dress up in 17th century drag and mosey up and down the streets of a life-size replica Pilgrim settlement, discussing crops and Calvinism, while modern Native Americans in traditional buckskin attire give their side of the story in a nearby encampment.

So I like to think I know a thing or two about Thanksgiving. And let me tell you: it’s not all about the yams.

In fact, before the Macy’s Day Parade and the advent of that delicious Brundlefly monstrosity known as Turducken, the fourth Thursday of November was all about chowing down eel and corn and celebrating a bountiful harvest. In fact, as I learned on a recent visit to Plimoth Plantation, the name for the annual kick-off to the Christmas shopping season is actually a compound word that literally means “giving thanks”!

And so, as we here at the Screengrab prepare our traditional Turkey Day feast of pretzel sticks, jelly beans, two slices of toast and a handful of popcorn, we’d like to just take a few moments to express our gratitude for the people, places and movies that made us the full-on film geeks we are today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE SCREENGRAB!

ANDREW OSBORNE IS THANKFUL FOR:

WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1950 & 1972)

Forget Mickey Mouse: Bugs Bunny was there from the start, teaching me the importance of carrots, proper directions to Albuquerque and a wised-up appreciation of life (for all its feathered frenemies, megalomaniacal Martians and gun-toting Fudds). So I was a bit disappointed when I realized What’s Up, Doc? (the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater) wasn’t a cartoon...but Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap screwball homage soon won me over with its igneous rocks and silly accents and, especially, that endless, blissful car chase through the streets, alleys and staircases of San Francisco (and, eventually, San Francisco Bay). All that (plus a gratifying act three cameo by Mr. Bunny himself!) made this goofy-smart romantic comedy my first favorite movie, and it only got better with time as I grew up and came to appreciate the chemistry of Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand (both at their cinematic finest) and the comedic brilliance of the irreplaceable Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton and Kenneth Mars. But the real reason this movie’s on the list is so I can say thank you to my film geek parents for always bringing me to whatever movie they went to go see on a Saturday night (even when it scared the bejesus out of me), thus instilling a life-long love of pop culture that’s guided my cinematic view of the world ever since. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

STAR WARS (1977)

I’ve already written an embarrassing number of posts about the life-changing religious experience of seeing this movie as an excitable, impressionable ten year old nerd, but looking back on it now, I can only say...George Lucas, all is forgiven. (And besides, what’s Thanksgiving without the Star Wars Holiday Special?)

THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Given the embarrassing Baby Boomer reverence for Lawrence Kasdan’s self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Love Generation touchstone of growing up and selling out (not to mention the way the film pretty much ruined all the songs on its mega-hit Motown soundtrack by making them go-to clichés for every subsequent entry in the “Diane Keaton dancing around a living room” genre), this one almost wound up on last week’s Guilty Pleasures list. But despite all the people who deride the film as just a shallow rip-off of John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven, I have no guilt and nothing but love for The Big Chill. I first saw it after a particularly painful orthodontist’s appointment in my junior year of high school, and though I may not have been the intended target audience, I took the movie instantly to heart, partly for its evocation of the sixties (an era I romanticized desperately in the Just Say No Reagan eighties), but mostly for its celebration of the enduring power of friendship.

JOHN WATERS & DIVINE

Then, after high school, I stopped Saying No and dove headfirst into the psychedelic wonderland of college, that freaky, institutionalized Rumspringa when America’s sons and daughters move away from home and go batshit crazy for a year or three. After spending the first eighteen years of my life as an upright goody two-shoes, I was itching to break bad and take a walk on the trashy side...and when it comes to desperate living, I quickly discovered there was no better tour guide than John Waters and his large and lovely muse, Divine. From Mondo Trasho to Hairspray, Baltimore’s favorite son and fake daughter warped my young adult mind with their glorious bad taste, healthy disrespect for convention and pre-punk aesthetic, while also serving as self-made role models of DIY ingenuity for those determined to live a life less ordinary.

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

In 1993, my then-girlfriend and I attended an L.A. cast and crew screening of Dazed and Confused (with, if memory serves, my future Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak). We didn’t know any of the soon-to-be-famous actors in the stellar ensemble cast (including Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck) when the lights went down, but when the lights came up, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by characters we’d only just met but felt like we’d known forever: hey, look! It’s O’Bannion and Darla! And over there! It’s Wooderson! (All right, all right, all right!) A few months later, I got dumped by the aforementioned girlfriend, but numerous subsequent screenings of Dazed and Confused helped to ease the pain, and today I remember Richard Linklater’s last day of school and first night of summer vacation at least as fondly as my actual high school experience.

PULP FICTION (1994)

Some movies you see and forget just as soon as the lights come up. Pulp Fiction was not one of those movies. In 1994, I spent every last dime I had (and a lot of dimes that I didn’t have) attempting to surf the Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes indie renaissance with my own no-budget 16mm production, Apocalypse Bop (starring the indomitable Mr. Von Doviak), which I’d spent the summer directing back in my home town near Thanksgiving Town, USA. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and so when the movie wrapped, I decided to road trip back to the West Coast with a couple of friends from the Bop shoot. Stopping for breakfast in Austin, Texas, one of those friends met a girl and couldn’t stop thinking about her, so when we finally reached California, he called her up and asked if she wanted to go see Pulp Fiction with him on opening night. She said yes, and so he turned around and flew right back to Austin. Meanwhile, my return to L.A. woke me up from my filmmaking fandango to the cold, hard reality that I was unemployed, with no prospects and no money to pay my rent. I had exactly twenty dollars to my name. And I’m happy to say I spent that twenty dollars on popcorn and a ticket to go see the opening night of Pulp Fiction with my pals in the San Fernando Valley, while my other friend was watching the same movie on the same night on his cross-country date in The Lone Star State. He wound up staying in Austin for the next several years, and days after watching Jules and Vincent Vega strut across the screen to the strains of “Misirlou,” my own bacon got snatched from the brink of disaster by an out-of-the-blue offer to go work on a war movie in the Philippines. And so I’m eternally grateful to have once been young and foolish enough to have those kinds of adventures, living in extremis at exactly the right time and with exactly the right people the night Quentin Tarantino got medieval on our ass.

SXSW, THE PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL & THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS (2009)

And speaking of Austin, the city of Slacker has been, at different times, my literal and spiritual home away from home for years now, and never is it more glamorous (or crowded) than the middle of March, when the capitol of Texas plays host to the South-By-Southwest music and film festival, a fantastic collision of pop culture, booze and barbecue that makes Thanksgiving look like Arbor Day. Every spring, it renews my faith in the vaunted “indie film” spirit (even though I’m old enough to know better), and then every summer, I take another, mellower sip of the indie Kool-Aid (not to mention the world’s best Bloody Marys) at the Provincetown Film Festival, with John Waters presiding as patron saint in the same way Richard Linklater is the Mayor of South-By...and with all that friggin’ indie spirit washing over me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed once again to its siren song, so I’ll just wrap up this list with thanks to my collaborators on The Meat City Beatniks, an indie film musical (co-written by me, Scott Von Doviak, Eric Jacobson and Jim Dryden) and starring Elliot Dort, Ben Gallant, Sheree Bass, Matthew Woodward, Rob McKim, Ms. Amar, Joe Gallo, Michael Sesling, Kellianne MacFarlane, Bill Christensen and Amy Jeglinski-Osborne...a production which (thankfully) I mostly managed to wrap in 2008 and which will (hopefully) premiere in 2009...so stay tuned! (And have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Click Here For More Thanks From Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video of the Day: The Five-Minute "Star Wars" Holiday Special

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

This week is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars Holiday Special. If you're one of the lucky ones who missed this made-for-TV abomination, it is widely believed to be not only the worst thing ever made with the name "Star Wars" attached, but the worst thing ever made of any kind. How bad is it? It's so bad that George Lucas -- the man who released the crawling, hideous thing that is Episode III: Revenge of the Sith to theaters worldwide -- yanked it from circulation so that it can only be seen in low-grade bootleg form. It's approximately two hours long, but it seems like it's about two months long -- which is why we're eternally grateful to the good forks at The Late Night Explosion for culling it down to an agonizing but survivable five minutes.

This version gives you tiny snippets of almost all the things that make the original Star Wars Holiday Special so mind-searingly awful -- the endless untranslated bellowing of Chewbacca's family, the wookie porn, the Jefferson Starship music video, the song by a coked-out Carrie Fisher, the interminable clowning by a disco-shirted Art Carney, the sight of Mark Hammill made up like Joel Grey in Cabaret, the Bea Arthur musical number -- but in brief enough doses that your brain doesn't immediately seize up and fall out of your ear the way it does when you have to watch the whole thing. Enjoy!

Fantastic Fest Review: Fanboys

Film Threat Unveils Frigid 50 of 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

As we enter the final weeks of 2008, there can be no doubt that the season of listing is upon us. Exhibit A is today’s unveiling of the 2008 edition of Film Threat’s annual hatchet job, The Frigid 50: The Coldest People in Hollywood. (As a former Threat-er myself, I mean “hatchet job” in the most loving way, of course.) “Unlike those other lists that brown-nose their way into some pampered celebrity's good graces, the Frigid 50 is a written declaration of who or what in Hollywood needs a reality check, detailing the least-powerful, least-inspiring, least-intriguing people in all of Tinseltown. Before a career is over (or in some cases, immediately after), it finds itself sitting in Frigid 50 territory.”

So who made the cut this year? Hit the jump for a few choice selections.

Some of FT’s calls are fairly obvious. For instance, M. Night Shyamalan earns a berth for continuing “to burn audiences with arty, overly indulgent films that fail to entertain, let alone intrigue or frighten. The Happening was supposed to be his artistic comeback, but it was his worst movie to date (and no one thought it could get worse than The Village)." No one can be surprised to see perennial punching bags like Mike Meyers or Nicholas Cage on the list.

There are a few surprises, however. For instance, number ten is “You.” “You made Beverly Hills Chihuahua #1 for two weeks. You’re the reason we have to be frisked when we go to a movie to make sure we're not smuggling in cameras. You bring toddlers to a 10pm screening of The Hills Have Eyes. You show up late to the movie, then loudly ask questions about shit you missed because you couldn’t be bothered to leave the house five minutes early.” Wait, that was you? I have to agree, you are a real pain in the ass.

The real surprise to me – given that Film Threat founder Chris Gore has always been such a huge Star Wars fan, he found a way to write about it in the introduction to my book Hick Flicks – is number two. “We remember when it was actually ‘cool’ to wear a Star Wars t-shirt and ‘uncool’ to glue on Vulcan ears. How the times have changed. Let’s face it, Star Wars is dead. The reasons for the demise of Star Wars may be numerous, but it really comes down to three prequel films that are not only awful in retrospect, they make the original three look worse knowing the full back story. It doesn’t help that George Lucas and company continue to deliver things the fans never really asked for or don’t care about.” I for one welcome this new age of Star Wars hate.

As for the number one selection…well, it’s bound to be controversial. Check it out for yourself.

Related:
M. Night Shyamalan Straight Up, Hold the Twist
Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip the Clone Wars

Unwatchable #63: “Alone in the Dark”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Of the many fine and noble reasons to take on this Unwatchable project (a paycheck, an outlet for repressed hostility, an excuse to put off watching Berlin Alexanderplatz), the chance to familiarize myself with the oeuvre of Uwe Boll certainly ranks…somewhere. We pick on him a lot here, so it seems only fair that I ensure it’s justified. The first Boll work we encountered was BloodRayne 2: Deliverance back at #77, and this was my conclusion: “I have to assume this is not close to Uwe Boll’s worst work, because it’s pretty much indistinguishable from any other straight-to-video genre junk.”

Alone in the Dark is probably a step closer to Boll’s worst work. Like BloodRayne 2 and most of the Boll filmography, its origins lie in the ancient Japanese art of the “videogame.” The movie begins with the longest expository crawl I have ever encountered. You could combine all the opening crawls from every episode of Star Wars, including the ones about galactic trade routes, and they wouldn’t add up to the length of this thing. So much back story, so little need for it. It has something to do with an ancient advanced race of Indians called the Abnaki, who opened the portal to the world of darkness and let all the booga-boogas out.

Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a former agent for Bureau 713, the government agency of paranormal investigations (Your tax dollars at work under the Bush administration!), is haunted by these whatsihoosies, both in his dreams and in his real life, where they have taken over the bodies of people who grew up in the same orphanage as he did. Along with his girlfriend, the brilliant anthropologist and museum curator Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), and the forces of Bureau 713, headed up by hothead Burke (Stephen Dorff), he must defeat these computer generated beasties before they do all the terrible, terrible things.

It’s basically a cross between a zombie movie and an Aliens ripoff, with a little dash of Indiana Jones, but it would all be instantly forgettable if not for the deranged casting. Much has been made of poor Tara Reid in her thick glasses and hair-in-a-bun, trying to act all smart and stuff. And it’s true, one does have difficulty maintaining a straight face when she talks about “decoding the pictograms” or mispronounces “New-FOUND-land.” It’s like watching a Sarah Palin interview, which is not an experience I’ve been anxious to relive quite yet. But let’s not be sexist here. Can we not agree that Slater makes an equally implausible genius investigator, and that Dorff is perhaps a little out of his depth as a leader of men? It’s as if the bus carrying the entire drama club plunged over an embankment, and the drama coach was forced to recast the school play with the head cheerleader, the backup quarterback and the guy who makes bongs in wood shop.

All things considered, though, Alone in the Dark is a mighty tedious cacaphony of automatic gunfire and bad special effects. I'm still waiting for Dr. Boll to impress me with some Ed Wood-grade lunacy. Don't let me down.

Previously on Unwatchable:
64. Angels’ Brigade
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 25-31, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hello, kiddies! It’s me, Pennywise the evil clown, and I’ve got a bone to pick with the Screengrabbers this week. In fact I just may PICK THEIR BONES CLEAN. It’s bad enough they showed me no respect in The Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). But to ignore me completely in the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Parts One, Two, Three and Four)? Unthinkable!

Just look at these other so-called horror classics they saw fit to highlight this week. The Exorcist? I find chunks of guys like him in my stool! Tenebrae? What does that even mean? Seizure? Seize this! Halloween and Friday the 13th? Those are just days of the week to me.

Look, if you want to write about Star Wars auditions or Batman sequels or Zack and Miri making pornos, I’m not going to complain about being left out. Hell, write about farting dog movies for all I care. But when it comes to horror, let’s not forget who’s boss.

Happy Halloween!

Snake Plissken Meets Chewbacca

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

So, I didn’t intend this to become a series, but here it is: my THIRD post about supercool and nerdy Star Wars shit I’ve stumbled across on YouTube while looking for other Screengrab stuff.

This time around: Plissken.

Remember that SNL skit where they had funny fake auditions for Star Wars from the likes of Christopher Walken, Richard Dreyfuss and Walter Matthau? (If not, just click above!)

Anyway, today’s gift from the magical land of YouTube is the real Kurt Russell (!) auditioning for the role of Han Solo (!!!!), side by side with a clip from Harrison Ford’s audition.

Did Lucas make the right decision? You decide! (And then, y’know, keep it to yourself, so Lucas won’t get the bright idea to go digitally replace Ford with Russell in some new updated Special Edition first trilogy release.)

Related Stories:
Jabba The Portly Irish Gent
Biggs News To Me

Your First Look at Star Trek 90210

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

The new Entertainment Weekly cover story has the scoop on J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and while the cover photo doesn’t exactly set my phasers to stun (Kirk looks like he should be leading panty raids at Starfleet Academy), at least fans can be reassured that Abrams never much cared for Trek anyway. “‘All my smart friends liked Star Trek,’ he says. ‘'I preferred a more visceral experience.’ Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount's offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.’” Oh boy!

What Abrams does like about Star Trek is its “unabashed idealism. ‘I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,’ says Abrams, whose infectiously upbeat energy and disdain for cynicism are among his most marked attributes… In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as The Dark Knight is raking in gazillions of dollars, Star Trek stands in stark contrast…It was important to me that optimism be cool again.’”

The EW piece goes on to drop a few hints about the story. “Star Trek's time-travel plot is set in motion when a Federation starship, the USS Kelvin, is attacked by a vicious Romulan (Eric Bana) desperately seeking one of the film's heroes. From there, the film then brings Kirk and Spock center stage and tracks the origins of their friendship and how they became officers aboard the Enterprise…. The adventure stretches from Earth to Vulcan, and yes, it does find a way to have Nimoy appearing in scenes with at least one of the actors on our cover — and maybe both… The opening sequence, for example, is an emotionally wrenching passage that culminates with a mythic climax sure to leave zealots howling ‘Heresy!’” Admittedly, I was always more of a Trek guy than a Star Wars partisan, but I checked out long before the parade of spinoff series in recent years. A little heresy doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Here’s the full article if you want more from Abrams and his cast (including Leonard Nimoy) and some photos from the bridge and beyond.

Related:
Star Trek Showdown: Shatner Fires Back
Star Trek Teaser Follow-Up: The Real Deal

Jabba The Portly Irish Gent

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If you've ever read any of my posts on the Screengrab before, you may recall that I am a tremendous dork.

As such, I tend to get inordinately excited when I stumble across Star Wars-related ephemera on YouTube that most fans have probably known about for years.

Back in April, for instance, I discovered, much to my amazement, that George Lucas had actually filmed all those scenes I'd only ever heard about in the Star Wars novelization (and Marvel Comics adaptation) where Luke Skywalker hangs out with Biggs Darklighter and his other no-account pals in Anchorhead on Tatooine.

And now what to my wondering eyes should appear but the original footage of Han Solo confronting Jabba the Hut in the Millenium Falcon's Mos Eisley docking bay, way back when Jabba was played by big-boned Irish actor Declan Mulholland rather than the CGI slug that replaced him in the 1997 Special "Greedo Shoots First" Edition of the movie.

If the preceding paragraph is old news or complete gibberish to you, then by all means just scroll on by to one of the Screengrab's other fine blog offerings...but for any fellow geeks who've never had the pleasure of seeing Harrison Ford menaced by a furry Weeble, enjoy!

Fantastic Fest Review: “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The tone was set before the Fantastic Fest screening began, as Kevin Smith took the stage and, correctly assessing the prevailing sentiment in the Paramount Theater – “Holy shit, is he fat!” – launched into a scatological monologue about his morbid obesity’s effect on a creaky toilet seat. If his speech scared anyone off, well, they probably had no business being in a theater where a Kevin Smith movie called Zack and Miri Make a Porno was about to unspool.

Rarely has there been a more clear-cut case of truth in advertising. Zack and Miri do indeed make a porno, and that is pretty much the extent of the plot. Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are employees at a Starbucks-type coffee chain and also roommates, but their relationship is entirely platonic and their combined income isn’t sufficient to keep the lights on and the water running on a consistent basis. They decide to attend their 10 year high school reunion anyway, and are surprised to learn they’ve become viral video stars. Earlier in the day, a kid with a cell phone camera snapped footage of Miri changing clothes in the coffee shop, including a glimpse of her in oversized granny panties and a concluding shot of Zack mooning the camera. Thus a brilliant scheme is born: Why not make a porn movie and use the profits to pay off all the bills?

If you think Kevin Smith would use a premise like this as an excuse to pile up dick jokes like donuts – well then, you are obviously familiar with the work of Kevin Smith. Zack and Miri enlist a cameraman (Jeff Anderson, Randal of the Clerks movies) and a cast, including Smith regular Jason Mewes, Traci Lords, and actual porn star Katie Morgan (you may know her from Phat Ass Tits 4 or Interracial Cum Junkies 3). Their first effort is called Star Whores and features characters named Luke Skyballer and Hung Solo – yes, more Star Wars references, imagine my glee – but when that proves too ambitious, they decide to shoot the down-and-dirty Suck My Cockacinno right in the coffee shop.

Somewhere under all the balls and assholes in Zack and Miri, a heart beats. Zack isn’t thrilled with the idea of Miri having sex with someone else in the movie and vice-versa, and as their own big scene approaches, trepidation builds. Can they still be friends after doing the deed, even if it’s only for a porno? Thanks to the two leads, this question becomes more than just a throw-away. I’m expecting Seth Rogen fatigue to set in any day now, but he and Banks do make an endearing pair, and no one was more surprised than me to end up caring about them in the end. (Heh, heh – I said “in the end.”)

In a way, Kevin Smith has something in common with Tyler Perry. It’s doubtful that either one of them is ever going to progress as a filmmaker, but their loyal fans don’t really care. If you like Kevin Smith movies, this is probably one of the better ones. If you don’t, rest assured Zack and Miri is no quantum leap forward.

Related:
Screengrab Fall Preview: Andrew Osborne's Picks
Screengrab Speculation: Who is Diablo Cody REALLY?

Fantastic Fest Review: “Fanboys”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve mentioned this a time or twelve here, but unlike my colleague Andrew Osborne, I don’t have the Star Wars gene. Sure, I loved the movies as a kid – maybe not quite as much as the Planet of the Apes series or anything with Bigfoot in it – but they never became an inextricable part of my life essence and I definitely wasn’t waiting in some smelly tent for Episode I back in 1999. If we’re playing “Star Wars vs. Star Trek,” Kirk, Spock and the gang win out with me every time. So I wouldn’t appear to be part of the target audience for Fanboys, the long-awaited story of four geeks and a gal who take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch in order to be the first to see The Phantom Menace.

Having said that – and despite all the delays, reshoots and controversies over plot points that dogged the movie in recent months – Fanboys proves to be an enjoyable ride for the most part. If you’ve followed the behind-the-scenes machinations, you know the set-up: It is 1998, and lifelong Star Wars geek Linus (Chris Marquette) has terminal cancer. (This is the part the studio didn’t like, but after an outcry from fanboy nation, it is restored.) Along with fellow Force enthusiasts Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel) and estranged best friend Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus sets out in a van to accomplish the one thing he wants to do before he dies: see the long-awaited first prequel to the Star Wars trilogy. (As an aside, and without giving away whether or not he accomplishes his goal – imagine this is your dying wish and the movie in question turns out to be the freakin’ Phantom Menace. Ah well, at least it wasn’t The Clone Wars.) Road trip hijinx galore ensue, including a pit stop in Austin to pick up top secret intel on Lucas’s fortress from Ain’t It Cool News ubergeek Harry Knowles, a night in jail that will have you rethinking your whole approach to prison pooping, and a rumble at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. There are cameos galore, including actors from the original trilogy, Seth Rogan in multiple roles and even the Shat himself, William Shatner.

Stylistically, Fanboys is sort of a mesh between the Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow sensibilities (Smith has a cameo and Apatow oversaw the reshoots and enlisted many of his regulars), but its secret weapon is co-screenwriter Ernest Cline, who has absorbed every ounce of nerdy minutiae from the past 30 years and deploys his vast store of useless knowledge for both punchlines and poignancy. Although Fogler still strikes me as a poor man’s Jack Black, the core cast is engaging, particularly Kristen Bell as the one girl who’ll put up with the geeks.

My main problem with Fanboys is that I wish it had actually been made ten years ago (as per Cline’s original plan), before geek culture became so pervasive and satisfied with itself. After another decade's worth of prequels, merchandising and ubiquitous references, I don't care if I never hear about Yoda, Chewie or Ewoks ever again. In a way, though, that's beside the point. Star Wars is the secret language of these characters – the way they always communicated. In that respect, it's no different than if the movie had been about, say, terminally ill Cubs fans taking a trip to see their team win their first World Series in 100 years – they'd just talk about Ernie Banks and “Let’s play two” instead of Darth Vader and “May the Force be with you.” The story is really about the friendship, the journey and the laughs along the way, and on that level it works even if you don't give a shit whether or not Greedo shot first.

Related:
Fanboys on the March
Fanboys vs. Darth Weinstein

Entertainment Weakly: Attacking EW’s Defense of The Clone Wars

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:21:00 GMT

Okay, I realize it’s dumb to get annoyed by articles in entertainment magazines, but I do write for The Screengrab...and isn’t public venting what the InterTubes are all about? So allow me to respond to Jeff Jensen’s defense of George Lucas and The Clone Wars in the current issue of the usually somewhat less annoying Entertainment Weekly (which at least had the good sense to give the feature-length animated infomercial in question an F). Bemoaning the aforementioned F, the poor box office showing of The Clone Wars and general fanboy discontent with Lucas, columnist Jensen writes, “Missing from the overheated bashing of The Clone Wars was the crucial point that it was made for kids, not the grown-ups for whom the original trilogy remains (ridiculously) sacred.”

Um...okay. Because Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were edgy Scandinavian Dogme 95 films made for grad students and aging Cannes jurists, right? That same "for kids!" argument has been used to defend The Phantom Menace, the Elmo-fication of Sesame Street and the general dumbing down of family entertainment from the time I actually was a kid ‘til now: hey, chill out, Grandpa...it’s okay if insert TV show or movie here is shallow, poorly written and generally dimwitted. It’s for kids!

Now, it’s not that everything I watched as a child of the ‘70s was primo high quality Art. I though Welcome Back Kotter was the height of urbane, sophisticated wit in my formative years, and was shocked to discover how incredibly crappy the program seemed when I caught a stray episode a few years back.

But Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back hold up (and, okay, we can argue later about Return of the Jedi). I may not be as goofy-nerdy-crazy about them now as I was in my pre-pubescent geekery, but I can still appreciate the craftsmanship that hooked me as a child. Yet more important than sheer craftsmanship is the lack of condescension in those earlier films. Lucas took his storytelling seriously then: much of his audience may have been youthful, but he didn’t treat us like kids. He took his goofy, made-up characters and the goofy, made-up world they lived in as seriously as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling all took theirs, without mugging for his young audience like a birthday party clown.

In The Clone Wars, a character refers to Jabba the Hutt’s son as “Stinky.” That’s not dumb because I’m an adult. It’s just dumb. It breaks the fourth wall. It breaks the reality of the storytelling universe, because it’s a cheap, easy, “hip” reference from our world, not the fictional world of the story. And even kids who may like that schtick today (a small number, judging by the film’s box office results) will realize it’s dumb when they get a little older. Nobody has to defend the Harry Potter-verse by reminding adults that, hey, it’s for kids! Adults like Harry Potter DESPITE the fact it’s made for kids...they like it because it’s good.

Later in his article, Jensen informs us that, in addition to thinking aging hipsters (and, I guess, kids) shouldn’t expect quality from kid stuff, we should also realize “Star Wars is a stream of content – books, comic books, toys, micro-cartoons, videogames, DVDs, and, soon, a TV series. This new generation sees no distinction between movies and their merchandise, and that’s just fine with them.”

Which means today’s kids must be dumb as a sack of hammers, except Jensen then goes on to elucidate that today’s biggest movie franchise (Harry Potter) is a “literary franchise [accessory].” Which, as far as I can tell, has no meaning whatsoever nor relation to all the kids out there who actually CAN tell the difference between a certain work of art that moved their souls and, say, a Harry Potter toothbrush from Wal-Mart. “The Clone Wars will not be remembered as a great animated movie,” Jensen concludes, “or an awful one, for that matter. But it might be remembered as part of a larger pop moment that is wiring the future of entertainment.”

On behalf of all the old fogies AND the youngsters of America, I hope to God he’s wrong.

Related Stories: Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip The Clone Wars, George Lucas and the License to Print Money

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We were going to continue our Back To School salute with this week’s Top Ten list, but thought we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceover talent (who died on September 1) with a list of some of our favorite coming attractions.

This is a strange subject, perhaps, for a Top Ten(-ish) List, since many people regard previews as nothing more than glorified commercials that give away all the good parts, annoying time wasters before the movie you really wanted to see (or, at best, a last minute chance to rush out and get popcorn without missing anything important).

As for me, I sometimes go to movies I’m not even all that excited about just to get myself a good dose of coming attraction action. Trailers are like a perfect little ADD film festival: four or five upcoming releases boiled down to their purest essence in high velocity speedballs of action, music and memorable sound bites designed to goose my anticipation of movies I’m looking forward to or draw my attention to unheralded films I might otherwise have missed.

Most of the time, though, previews allow me to vicariously enjoy all the best moments of flicks like Death Race and Disaster Movie without requiring me to actually sit through them, thus expanding my cinematic horizons while saving wear and tear on both my ass and my wallet.

So here’s a quick Screengrab preview of coming attractions: next week, The Top College Movies of All Time!

And now...on with our feature presentation.

DON LAFONTAINE: THE VOICE

The man...the myth...the trailers. Hard to choose just one LaFontaine original to write about, so this seemed appropriate. But as far as individual coming attraction previews go, there’s no better place to start than with...

The trailer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

In a previous Screengrab list, I wrote: “After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life).” Allow me to elaborate, for those who were NOT 12-year-old boys in 1979: I had Star Wars sheets, a Star Wars poster above my bed and roughly 1200 plastic Star Wars figures, vehicles, playsets and little tiny guns in my toy chest. I’d seen Star Wars theatrically at least a dozen times, and I’d already read the screenplay, the novelization AND the Marvel Comics adaptation. I knew every frame of film, line of dialogue and Ben Burtt sound effect by heart. And then, in the Year of Our Lord 1979, they re-released THE BEST FILM EVER once again into theaters...only THIS time with the promise of a trailer at the end for the long and desperately awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. And so I paid my parents’ money yet again, and watched Luke blow up the Death Star yet again, and then...at last...the music surged, a brand NEW logo in that funky Star Wars font drifted into view...and...well, the rest was such an undiluted rush of adrenalized oxytocin bliss I essentially disappeared into a barely cognizant state of pure sensation usually reserved for ketamine addicts and William Hurt’s character in Altered States. I only began to process the experience on the second or third viewing of the trailer (following my 14th or 15th viewings of Star Wars)...but, in a nutshell, seeing Luke, Leia, Han Solo and the rest busting free of scenes I knew like Catholic liturgy to suddenly act out BRAND NEW scenes, in BRAND NEW vests and hairdos was equivalent to waking up and discovering the sky was suddenly green and ice cream was a breakfast food. Reminiscing on the embarrassing geekiness of my pre-pubescent obsession (and, uh, this entire blog entry), I can fully empathize with the new generation of kids who waited up ‘til midnight in full Harry Potter drag to snag their Deathly Hallows hardcovers the second they went on sale...and I even (almost) forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar Binks and (ugh) Stinky the Hutt and all the future disappointments that eventually followed that one glorious trailer.

The trailers for INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), TWISTER (1996) & THE PERFECT STORM (2000)

And then, of course après Star Wars, le deluge. It may not be fair to blame George Lucas (and/or Steven Spielberg) for double-handedly ending the glorious era of ‘70s filmmaking, but the Midas-fingered directors certainly helped to usher in the current era of commerce driven “event” movies. But unlike the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back trailer, which enthralled my pre-pubescent soul while promoting an actual movie worth seeing, many of today’s “event” trailers have become stand-alone short subjects far superior to the films they ostensibly advertise. Independence Day may not have been a great movie, but the trailer (with its exploding White House, embattled New York and stirring call to arms by a faux-macho American president) was certainly a grabber (and, in retrospect, an eerie pre-post-9/11 propaganda film). The same CGI highlight-reel approach, featuring at least one big compelling “gotcha!” moment -- like the glimpse of that giant wave in The Perfect Storm preview or the truck (or is it a tractor?) flying right at the audience in the final seconds of the Twister trailer -- has become an art form unto itself in recent years, not unlike a carnival barker spiel far more entertaining than whatever the unwary are likely to find if they actually buy a ticket and step inside the tent.

The trailer for ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and this freaky-ass trailer for VIDEODROME (1983)

But, of course, mainstream blockbusters aren’t the only productions that generate trailers as good or better than the films they promote. With no stars or Burger King tie-in promotions to aid them, B-movies and indies have always lived or died by their posters and trailers. The 1950s was a golden age of schlock movie previews (like this one for Robot Monster), with all the wooden acting and dull exposition stripped down to just the juicy monster money shots. Meanwhile, indies prefer to entice with their critical raves, film fest appearances, and/or (in the case of this Videodrome teaser) a freaky, inexplicable smörgåsbord of sight and sound compelling enough to lure audiences into uncharted waters if only to find out what the hell is going on...even when said imagery bears little relation to actual scenes from the movie.

The trailer for BUBBLE (2005)

If you were a big-name director who’d just made a low-budget film with no stars in a town most people couldn’t locate on a map, how would you sell it? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’d break pretty much every rule of trailer-making. This brilliant spot for Bubble contains exactly none of the following: voiceover, shots of the actors, plot summary, or critical or festival notices. Heck, there’s barely even a human presence at all, aside from the “Another Steven Soderbergh Experience” credit at the very end. Instead, Soderbergh gives us a montage taken from the inside of a doll factory (the film’s primary setting), with isolated doll parts progressively taking the final shape of the dolls. All this set to a jaunty yet creepy orchestral piece (anybody know where it’s from?), giving the proceedings an eerie feel. In the context of the story, the montage has an air of hopelessness -- are we merely dolls slapped together by an uncaring hand? -- but taken on its own merits, it’s a brilliant bit of salesmanship, a distinctive trailer for a movie that otherwise might fall quickly under the radar.

The trailer, website, etc. for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

It figures that The Blair Witch Project would have made good use of the fleeting-glimpse concept that has been at the heart of so many great trailers; after all, it was at the heart of the movie, too. The trailer's real innovation was to combine a tried-and-true gimmick that linked it to such films as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Fargo -- the deliberate confusion as to whether this was a "true" story and what was then still a new idea, the use of a promotional web site -- and really work that sucker in a way that no one ever had before. By using the trailer to whet the viewer's curiosity and then flashing the site's URL with its implicit promise to provide more information at the click of a mouse, Blair Witch really fuzzed the line between hype and hoax, and in the process served up an all-encompassing promotional campaign that may have been more fun than the movie itself.

The trailer for THE BIRDS (1963)

This sinister mini-movie – a twisted take on the educational short film – may be the most clever theatrical trailer ever produced. Alfred's macabre sense of humor is on full display here, and he draws out the gag just a little too long, making the audience comfortable before -- gaa! scary birds! The Birds never explains why all the world's winged creatures suddenly revolt, which only adds to the horror. This trailer's answer? They were just tired of being made into chicken dinners and fancy hats.

Click Here for Part 2!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

In the same way graphic novels like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have expanded the thematic possibilities of pen and ink comics beyond run-of-the-mill superhero adventures and the romantic entanglements of the gang at Riverdale High, so too does this pristine cinematic adaptation demonstrate the ability of animation to lend a necessary artistic distance to depictions of events that would simply be too grim or painful to watch otherwise. Satrapi’s autobiographical tale (which she co-scripted and co-directed with her graphic novel collaborator Vincent Paronnaud) tackles big subjects like the Iranian Revolution, Islamic fundamentalism and the agony of adolescence with visual flair and heartfelt humanity, while the voice performances (by an effervescent Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve and her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (as Satrapi) are far more three-dimensional than many of 2007’s live action female roles.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)

On the one hand, the inclusion of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a bit of a cheat, since parts of the movie are live action...on the other hand, there’s a long tradition of films that combine ‘toons with real people, from Gertie the Dinosaur and Mary Poppins to Paula Abdul’s timeless duet with MC Skat Cat in her video for “Opposites Attract.” More important, though, is the unique and historic worlds-colliding nature of the project, which brings together a veritable who’s who of animation's golden age gliterrati in a mainline pleasure shot of pop culture ecstasy equivalent to a Star Wars sequel (NOT written by George Lucas) where Han, Chewie, Luke, Leia, R2D2, C3P0 and Yoda somehow team up with Captain Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard and all the rest of the Star Trek gang on Babylon Five to help Ellen Ripley battle Aliens. Or, to put it in slightly less embarrassingly geeky terms: the scene where Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse appear together on screen for the first and only time kicks the historic Robert De Niro/Al Pacino summit in Michael Mann’s Heat right square in the keister. I remember watching Roger Rabbit for the first time in a theater and hearing an audible gasp from the audience at the moment in the film when a live-action studio exec pulls up the shade in his office, only to find Dumbo hovering just outside: just the kind of giddy, weightless moment of gleeful surprise that animation was made for...plus, the controversy surrounding the public’s laser-disc discovery of a single-frame image of Jessica Rabbit with no panties was a perfect farewell joke from animation’s salty past as it passed its torch to the gleaming digital age.

THE INCREDIBLES (2004)

Brad Bird has developed a reputation as nothing less than a one-man Coen Brothers of the animation world. Like the Coens, his movies are crammed full of homages and references to other films; like the Coens, he’s proven adept at handling films in a wide variety of genres; like the Coens, he loves camera pyrotechnics and visual tricks of all sorts; and like the Coens, his idiosyncratic personality comes through in every project he tackles. The ex-Simpsons staffer has grown into the most immediately recognizable directorial presence in American animation, and this stunning (and often hilarious) take on the mythology of superheroes is possibly his greatest achievement. It’s almost pointless to praise the astonishing visuals, which, even four years down the road, don’t seem to have been surpassed by the ever-changing technology curve; but the real treat here is the deft blend of a solid action story featuring plenty of physical humor and rock-‘em-sock-‘em fight scenes for the kids with a fantastically sophisticated storytelling style for the adults, including visual callback to everything from Saul Bass and James Bond to the Fantastic Four. It’s also a movie well worth owning on DVD, with a ton of bonuses including kid-pleasing animated shorts and a whole cornucopia of hidden jokes for the grown-ups. The Incredibles is that rare breed of movie that really does have something for everyone.

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)

1988 was a banner year for Japanese animation. While Akira was opening up new vistas for the possibilities of “Japanimation” to convey dark and heavy sci-fi/action themes, Isao Takahata was showing the world that the same medium was capable of telling small, quiet, emotional stories that had just as much power and impact. Based on a tragicomic memoir by Akiyuki Nosaka, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of a young Japanese boy who, along with his sister, faces the massive changes and upheavals that came with the Second World War. Takahata had himself survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and the book struck a particularly personal chord with him; he decided he would make his animated adaptation – produced by Studio Ghibli at the same time as Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro – as realistic as possible, including the decision, unusual in animation involving children, to cast age-appropriate voice actors in all the roles. One of the most shocking things about the film is that it begins on a jarringly tragic note, with the death of the narrator: the rest of the film chronicles the inevitable events that lead up to it, devastatingly portraying how, in trying times, even those with the best of intentions can make irrevocably bad decisions. An incredibly moving, terrible sad, and beautifully made film, and an unsparing portrait of the eternal costs of war.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Feature Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, according to our very own Scott Von Doviak, Star Wars: The Clone Wars may not exactly be on the short list for this year’s Best Animated Feature Film Oscar, although, to paraphrase Warner Bros. head of distribution Dan Fellman, awards, critical praise and boffo box office were never really the point, since the movie, essentially, "was targeted to a specific audience for specific reasons [i.e., to promote the upcoming Cartoon Network series of the same name]. We accomplished that mission, and it will continue in another medium."

That crazy dreamer! Just goes to show that, when it comes to animation, even studio execs can get swept up in the magic that happens when pencils, paint, pixels, Plasticine modeling clay or paper cut-outs meet persistence of vision and insane amounts of patience.

According to our old friend, Wikipedia, “The earliest form of animation is a 5,200 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta which has five images painted along the sides. When the bowl is spun, it shows a goat leaping up to a tree to take a pear.” (And, ironically, scientists have since determined the bowl actually received better reviews and a higher per-screen average than The Clone Wars...but I digress.)

Anyway, the aforementioned bowl may or may not be included in NEXT week’s list of The Screengrab’s all-time favorite animated shorts, but in-between then and now (get it? get it? I’m here all week! Try the veal!) please join us for a very special Screengrab salute to the greatest animated features of all time!

PINOCCHIO (1940)

It’s possible my family would disown me if I didn’t include this classic of old-school Disney animation since, according to legend, this is the movie that my grandfather Joe took my grandmother Louise to on the night he proposed. (Awwww!) Personal family history aside, it’s hard to argue with Pinocchio as a prime example of traditional American cel animation. Oh, sure, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had scarier witches, The Jungle Book had Louis Prima and Bambi traumatized an entire generation, but Jiminy Cricket is one of the all-time iconic animated characters, Monstro the Whale is pretty fucking bad-ass, the Pinocchio nose bit launched a zillion stand-up routines and political cartoons and, between my grandparents’ love story and childhood memories of melancholy end-of-the-weekend episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney, “When You Wish Upon A Star” is embedded deep enough in my DNA that all the shitty cover versions and cynical Disney ad campaigns from then 'til now still haven’t managed to dislodge its pure, essential sweetness from my black little heart.

FRITZ THE CAT (1972)

The film that opened up brand-new horizons for scores of boomer spawn that accidentally stuck this in the VCR, mislead by the cartoon cover. Fritz, a Village denizen in a turtleneck sweater, discusses James Baldwin, scores with NYU chicks, starts a race riot and smokes a whole hell of a lot of grass. This was the first animated feature to be rated X. Yet the cartoon depictions of bathtub group sex amid pink clouds seem rather tame in this post-Britney age. The film is based on Robert Crumb's eponymous comic. However, Crumb did not like the film much. He felt it was, "really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi's confusion, you know. There's something real repressed about it. In a way, it's more twisted than my stuff. It's really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way."

AKIRA (1988)

Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s epic film adaptation of his own bestselling manga series isn’t just one of the best animated features of all time; it’s also one of the most important. Simply on its aesthetic merits, Akira is a winner: the cyberpunk-suffused story of a near-future Tokyo plagued by gangs and facing the threat of an uncontrollable teenage psychic is visually stunning, packed with detail, and suffused with unstoppable energy. The script is deep and complex, but never so deep that it gets in the way of the dynamic action sequences; every frame seems to burst with color, motion and power. It’s also well-acted, well-written, and surprisingly sophisticated in its use of music and sound. But beyond its merits as a film, it truly opened up the gates for “Japanimation”; what was previously the occupation of a relatively small number of hobbyists became the obsession of a whole generation of fans. Future anime productions would find millions of new admirers, and older movies and TV series would gain a brand-new audience, often leading to their first-ever home video releases in the west. The runaway popularity of Akira likewise lead to a new interest in manga comics, as fans of the movie tracked down the comic it was based on, establishing a new and insatiable western audience for Japanese serial comics. A live-action remake is currently in the works and scheduled for release sometime in 2009, but even if it can capture the thrilling visual imagery of Ôtomo’s animation, it can’t hope to duplicate the massive cultural impact of the original.

TOY STORY (1995)

Nowadays, the word “Pixar” associated with a movie is practically a guarantee that we’re going to get a smart, funny, technically astounding animated film that will be enjoyable for both kids and adults. But back in 1995, before Toy Story was released, there was a certain feeling of dread that accompanied the announcement of its production. We’d all seen computer animation, and to be honest, we weren’t all that impressed. It was thought of as a heartless, soulless medium, the playground of technicians, not artists. And at the very least, it wasn’t something that Disney Studios – the people responsible for the greatest animated features of all time – should be associated with. Once we actually got a look at it, though, all fears were laid to rest: Toy Story was a revelation. Its visuals were light-years beyond anything we’d seen at the time; it’s certainly been surpassed on a yearly basis since then, but even viewing it now, it’s hardly an embarrassment. But aside from the technical revelation of what computer animation was capable of, the story was downright terrific. It was driven by its characters, not its gimmicks; and, avoiding the trap that would befall many of its followers, its humor was driven by situations and not empty pop-cultural references. Though the precedent it set of using already-famous celebrities instead of established voice actors to voice the characters was a bad one, here the choice is unimpeachable, as Tom Hanks, Wallace Shawn, and even Tim Allen give performance perfectly attuned to their characters. Combine all of this with a timeless story and a terrific score by Randy Newman, and you begin to realize how Pixar got its sterling reputation in the first place.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four; Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Release Date

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Dark Knight has finally been dislodged from its perch atop the box office charts. Tropic Thunder took over the number one slot with a weekend total of $26 million. Batman and company fell to second place with $16.8 out of a total of $471 million, which means it has passed Star Wars on the all-time list just as The Clone Wars debuts with $15.5 million. Vicky Cristina Barcelona had a blockbuster opening by Woody Allen standards, finishing the weekend in 10th place with $3.7 million.

Bad news for Hogwarts fans: the sixth movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been bumped from its November release to next summer. As this AP story notes, Entertainment Weekly didn’t get the memo, despite being owned by the same parent company as Potter distributor Warner Bros. In other kid lit news, a live-action Goosebumps feature is headed for the big screen. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Problem Child) are adapting the R.L. Stine series, per the Hollywood Reporter.

Finally, the Moulin Rouge is returning to the silver screen. Toulouse Latrec fans need not apply, however, as Variety reports The Fabulous Moulin Rouge concerns a short-lived Las Vegas casino “that sprang up in 1955 and closed six months later under mysterious circumstances just as it was gaining momentum and attracting singers such as Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.” We suspect the involvement of Danny Ocean.

Related:
Trailer Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip "The Clone Wars"