The Screengrab : steve martin

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

FAME (1980)

To me, nothing says “ending” like an all-singing, all-dancing grand finale...and while there are dozens of great movie musicals that climax with memorable showstoppers -- from Hairspray’s “You Can’t Stop The Beat” and Hair’s “Let The Sun Shine In” to the painterly tableau of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence at the end of 1776 -- I’ve always had a special place in my heart for “I Sing The Body Electric,” which features most of the major characters from the original 1980 version of Fame (as opposed to all the moist, crappy knock-offs that followed). The number gives me chills every time I hear or see it performed, capturing as it does that terrifying, exhilarating moment of maximum potential when young graduates teeter on the verge of their leap of faith into adulthood. (Plus, it’s nice to see Coco with her shirt back on, none the worse for wear after the icky photo shoot of a few scenes earlier.) (AO)

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Dennis Potter's stylized Depression musical stars Steve Martin as Arthur, a sheet music salesman who thinks he has to believe in the happy songs he peddles to survive the throbbing nightmare is his real life. His ever-escalating flight from reality ultimately leads him to the gallows. The movie ends with his last fantasy, in which he escapes to dance in a production number with the heroine (Bernadette Peters), the only logic behind it being the conviction that no one could suffer so much in life unless it was a set-up for the happy ending to come. It's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" as staged by Hermes Pan. (PN)

MEMENTO (2000)

Christopher Nolan’s calling-card head-scratcher begins with its ending and then works backwards to its start, which one assumes is the traumatic event that bestowed Guy Pearce’s tattooed vigilante with short-term memory loss and propelled him down his vengeful path. What we get instead is something more confounding, a mordant and melancholy conclusion that compels us to consider the relationship between memory and identity and, just as pressingly, forces us to once again reconsider everything about the story we thought to be true. (NS)

THE DEVIL'S REJECTS (2005)

Rob Zombie’s neo-exploitation redneck horror show overflows with disturbing grindhouse violence, highlighted by a motel room kidnapping-torture sequence that’s just plain mean. Yet at the mid-way point of The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie turns the tables on his cop vs. psychos scenario, positing William Forsythe’s lawman as the true sadistic lunatic and the Firefly clan as empathetic antiheroes, a transparent bait-and-switch provocation that culminates in a slow-motion blaze-of-glory finale (set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” no less) that brazenly thumbs its nose at propriety. (NS)

THE UNFORESEEN (2007)

The most unforeseen conclusion to Laura Dunn's documentary about land development and water rights in and around Austin, TX (which is where I happen to live) came when I wound up sympathizing with the heavy. Even though this guy has defied environmentalists and the civic will, he too has ended up on the sharp and pointy side of his political beliefs, and it feels less like just desserts than even more tragedy. (HC)

THE ORDER OF MYTHS (2008)

I can't tell you the great thing about the ending of The Order Of Myths, because there's always that chance that you haven't seen it, and it would be shameful to spoil the reveal at the end. Let's just say that most of the film proceeds without a narrative voice, allowing the subjects to tell their own story without comment. And yet filmmaker Margaret Brown is always a couple of steps closer to the story she's telling than she lets on at any point up until the end. Her reveal transforms your understanding of the previous 75-odd minutes, a trick that is clever enough in fiction films but downright revelatory in a documentary. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

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

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. WIRED (1989)
2. SHOWGIRLS (1995)
3. THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

Even the worst movies at least attempt to be...y’know, movies. And by “movies,” I mean human behavior consciously recorded with a motion picture camera for the purpose of entertaining or engaging other humans...even if said “movie” is just a random series of unrelated images that are cool to look at when you’re stoned. Sadly, Dennis Hopper couldn’t even attract potheads (potheads!!!) with this legendary debacle, one of the films that helped to end the 1970s American film renaissance with its extreme, boring crappiness. I attempted to get through it once, and as far as I can tell, Hopper just accidentally left a camera running during a wild weekend in Peru . My in-laws’ old home movies are at least 17 times more interesting, relatable and dramatic, and cost about a million dollars less to produce.

4. REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000)

So...NONE of this movie’s fans ever saw Trainspotting? And the rave reviews and cult following were for...what, exactly? The daring, controversial idea that...gasp...drug addiction is bad? The hokey, sub-MTV visuals? The cartoonish, one-dimensional characters? The sneering condescension towards poor, sad, lonely people? Oh, I know, it must be the achingly self-conscious, utterly humorless pretension! I mean what is the point of this exercise in grim hopelessness, exactly? The characters are just as pathetic (and DULL!) when they're sober as when they're fucked-up -- they never even seem to get any pleasure out of their drugs of choice -- and there's no solution or alternative to all their misery. It's like the art film equivalent of a Friday the 13th movie: you meet some paper-thin characters with one trait each (one's sulky, one's pouty, one's black and one just wants to fit into an old red dress) and then wait for them to get knocked off, since it's the only interesting thing that's likely to happen. (And, excuse me, but wouldn't a trained medical doctor dealing with a pill-addicted middle-aged woman try, I dunno, placing her into a 12-step program or something before zapping 50,000 volts into her frontal lobe? Ooh...but that wouldn't be EDGY!)

5. FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991)

I just double-checked the Internet Movie Database to confirm that, yes, here was the exact moment Lucifer ate Steve Martin’s soul. This movie represents an entire genre of cynical, deeply mediocre capitalist pig comedies -- most of them directed by Nora Ephron, though Bride was in fact directed by Charles “I Love Trouble” Shyer, who earns his place on my shit list for kicking off the current My Super Sweet 16 era of American horribleness by promoting the notion that you’re a terrible father if you don’t mortage your house and go deep into debt to buy your spoiled bitch daughter a bunch of ridiculously expensive shit nobody in the world really needs.

6. BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1976)

It’s not that I have a problem with bloody movies or depictions of violence or even tortuous cinematic ultra-violence...but when blood, torture and suffering is the whole point of the exercise, I tend to get depressed...and then just bored and aggravated. I mean, hey, I got no beef with 2000 Maniacs or A Clockwork Orange or the various days and nights of the living dead or even Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Michael Madsen lopping off the cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs? Fine. Running down innocent bystanders in Grand Theft Auto? Sign me up. And porn of the sexual variety? Ahem. But explain to me again why I’m supposed to watch a sobbing woman scream and scream as her teeth are yanked out and a drill is shoved into her brain for minutes on end? Oh, right...because I’m a friggin' sociopath who digs torture porn, and Bloodsucking Freaks was the first sad example I ever saw.

7. THE MEXICAN (2001)

Many bad movies are dull, annoying and profoundly unentertaining, but the truly heinous ones go that extra mile into the realm of the downright philosophically offensive. I'm not even especially P.C., but at the time of its release, The Mexican was the most blatantly racist movie I'd seen since The Phantom Menace (see below)...and that's not even the worst part: what the hell were Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Tony Soprano doing in this crap? With all their 2001 A-list clout, they chose to do THIS...exactly the type of Hollywood diarrhea that prevents far, far better projects from ever seeing the light of day.

8. BREAKING THE WAVES (1996)
9. LAST DAYS (2005)

Sooooooooooooooooo boooooooooooooooooorrrrriiiiinnnnngggg...

10. THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

I was a hardcore Star Wars geek from the second that Imperial Star Destroyer first flew over my head at the Westgate Cinema in Brockton, Massachusetts way back in 1977...and 22 years later, long after I should have known better, I stood in line outside Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California for untold hours to get myself into one of the first screenings of The Phantom Menace. Once inside, the atmosphere was like a carnival love-fest of excitement, with beach balls bouncing around the theater while the faithful screamed and ululated in joyful anticipation. And then...Binks.

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

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS MICHAEL IN THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Following an especially painful round of orthodonture during my junior year of high school, my father brought me to The Big Chill to cheer me up, and I immediately fell in love with the movie, which celebrated the type of close-knit friendship that had sustained me through the many dateless nights of my adolescence. On the verge of young adulthood and the dissolution of those (mostly platonic) hometown relationships, I was also drawn to the film’s evocation of the big, chilly world I’d be facing after graduation, far from kith and kin, and started imagining myself as a cool, mordant loner not unlike William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet, Nick (except without the war injury impotence) -- the type of guy likely to attract weirdly sexy free spirits like Meg Tilly’s Chloe in droves once I got to college. Yet, in truth (as my friends were always happy to remind me), I was never really the Nick in our little group, but rather the Michael: i.e., Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy, needy motormouth, the guy with the painfully obvious motives and the total lack of game with the ladies -- but then again, at least he wound up with most of the best lines (and a pair of functioning testicles)! (AO)

STEVE MARTIN AS NAVIN JOHNSON IN THE JERK (1979)

The title is a misnomer. Navin Johnson isn't really a jerk. Jerks screw you over just for the pleasure. Jerks have intent. Jerks drive Hummers, talk during movies, and buy Carlos Mencia DVDs. Navin is more of a well-meaning idiot, which is the type of role that Steve Martin does best. He heads out to make his way in the world, but chance makes him rich before chance takes it away. Don't try to read too much into it. The search for larger meanings is admirable and all, but sometimes the gunman just hates cans. (HC)

JACQUE TATI AS M. HULOT IN MON ONCLE (1958)

The French had a way with fools. Like Boudu in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Jacques Tati's Hulot is less an idiot than an anarchic force of nature sweeping through the modern world and blowing away all of the little lies people tell themselves to maintain a sense of order. In the sequence above, the movie visits Hulot in the bustling corner of Paris where he lives. Ignore the Italian subtitles. You don't need to know the exact words to know what is being said. Hulot's sister lives with her family in a sterile ultramodernist nightmare, presumably in a far more affluent area of Paris. Consider the awful gurgling fountain:

It's no wonder that Hulot's nephew idolizes his goofy, absent-minded, and absolutely free uncle. Unlike Boudu, Hulot is making an effort to get along in the modern world, but it's clear that everything about it leaves him befuddled and bemused. And one of the best roles of the fool is to show his or her audience why their world is confusing and ridiculous. (HC)

CARY GRANT AS WALTER BURNS IN HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

The Cockney hustler that was inside the handsome gent called Cary Grant never made his presence more strongly felt than in this version of the great American theatrical comedy, His Girl Friday, in which Grant played the ultimate comic monster, the self-centered, bulldozing newspaper editor Walter Burns -- a role that gave him the chance to break the land speed dialogue record while demonstrating his ability to make it seem charming that he was pushing everybody around and giving the thumbs-up to the occasional felony. Burns is a man who'll do anything to get what he wants, and he could be played as a man the audience loves to hate; letting Grant run with the role turns the character into the amoral, ruthless son of a bitch that audience members suddenly realize they wish they could be. The performance may be the closest that a mortal man of woman born has come to approximating the movies' ultimate embodiment of the can-do spirit, Bugs Bunny. (PN)

W.C. FIELDS IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

If you look up "curmudgeon" in the dictionary, you may not see a picture of W.C. Fields’ glowering mug staring back at you, but you probably should. Fields made a career out of playing slight variations on his signature persona -- a guy whose disdain for women, children, animals, and other races and ethnicities was merely a subset of his overall drunken misanthropy. If Fields’ movies consisted only of him belittling those around him, they wouldn’t be funny. Thankfully, Fields realized that there was no better butt of his jokes than himself, both because it made the other characters feel less like victims of his barbs, and because getting picked on by others further fueled his misanthropy. Look at the way the henpecked Harold Bissonette rails against his wife when he’s alone only to clam up whenever she’s around. What’s more, nobody could deliver a joke quite like Fields -- beginning in his trademark nasal whine, he would often passive-aggressively swallow the end of the line, as if the people to whom it was addressed were suddenly unworthy of hearing it. And Fields was peerless when it came to the non sequitur, never more so than in his classic two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer, perhaps the purest distillation of his genius. Hard to say what makes it so brilliant- is it the sight of Fields in mittens and mukluks playing the dulcimer and singing, or such quintessential Fields lines as "My Uncle Ichabod said, when speakin’ of the city, ‘it ain’t no place for a woman, gal, but pretty men go thar’." And if the repeated "it ain’t a fit night out for man or beast" gag doesn’t make you laugh, well, there’s just no hope for you. (PC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: David Lynch and Mark Frost's "One Saliva Bubble"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Few movie artists who've emerged in the last thirty or so years excite so much curiosity about what they're working on--and about what they've worked on in the past and been forced to abandon--as David Lynch. And none are more vocal about their mixed feelings, or worse, about that kind of curiosity. Lynch, who famously abhors the inclusion of directors' commentaries and even chapter stops on DVDs, wants his work to be experienced only in its final, polished form, and he doesn't appreciate having cultists root around in the tangle of his false starts and wrong turns. When someone in the audience of a live Q & A asked Lynch about an early version of the script for Blue Velvet that he'd come across, which ended with Dorothy Vallens jumping off a roof, Lynch curtly responded that the question showed why all the copies of all the early drafts of anything ought to be burned. The true Lynch fanatic is likely to end up feeling a little like Max Brod wrestling with Kafka's instructions to him to destroy his letters and other unpublished writings, torn between wanting to respect the great man's wishes and the desire to know and share as much as possible about what been up to. Because Lynch is principally a movie director, that includes whatever traces we have of what he might have done if he'd had not just more time but all the funding opportunities in the world.

For Lynch freaks, the great white whale of unproduced Lynch projects is Ronnie Rocket, a script that goes back to the late 1970s. Described by Lynch as being "about a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity", the project was originally intended as Lynch's follow-up to Eraserhead. When that didn't work out, it was going to be his follow-up to The Elephant Man, and then his follow-up to Blue Velvet. After Twin Peaks, he began to talk about it as a starring vehicle for Michael Anderson, the dwarf actor who played The Man from Another Place in that series and later appeared in Mulholland Drive. Lynch has rewritten and rewritten the script, and at that same Q & A, he told Elvis Mitchell that after every project he completes, he tries to get Ronnie Rocket a green light. Some people, though, think that the movie will never get made because Lynch is past the point of being able to make it. It might be one of those long-deferred dream projects that directors sometimes fuss over and fantasize about until it takes up permanent residence in some remote corner of their minds, from which it can never be successful dislodged. And some of us who used to anticipate what the director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet's ultimate dream project might look like are less excited about the prospect of seeing it made now by the director of Inland Empire, the man who, in interviews, seems less interested in pushing the boundaries of the audio-visual possibilities of film than in embracing new technology that mainly offers him the pleasures of greater convenience.

Ronnie Rocket is Lynch at his most intensely personal. One Saliva Bubble, which was written in 1987, around the same time that Lynch was reportedly close to making Ronnie with a cast that would have included Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance--the Blue Velvet All-Stars--is a relic of a very different phase in Lynch's career, a period when he teamed up with Mark Frost, a writer best known for his work on Hill Street Blues and the 1987 horror movie The Believers, and tried to meet the mainstream halfway. Based on the results, the idea behind the partnership must have been something like this: the two of them would work bring their weird conceits to the table and decide on which ones they both liked, after which Frost would press them into some commercially viable form that might get the green light from a studio or network, after which Lynch would wrap them in Style. Before hitting pay dirt with Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch worked on The Lemurians, a projected TV series with roots in a variant of the Atlantis myth that figured in the cosmos of Madame Blavatsky, and Goddess, a movie spun from the notion that Robert Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe rubbed out, but only One Saliva Bubble is known to have made it to the completed screenplay stage. At the point where it seemed likeliest that it might get beyond that, it had Steve Martin and Martin Short attached for the leads.

The script begins in "a top-secret, experimental, offensive/defensive military installation hidden away in the countryside outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." In the first scene, some scientists are exposing the innards of a computer system while a trio of security guards "who appear to be refugees from the Neolithic period" stand off to the side, exchanging crude jokes. The title refers to Frost and Lynch's version of the butterfly effect: one of the guards blows a raspberry, and in the process "jettisons a perfect saliva bubble" which floats "past the unknowing, refined, well-groomed Scientists and down into the microscopic copper wires, creating a tiny, seemingly insignificant electrical short circuit," which in turn causes some kind of satellite missile-defense system to emit a beam that strikes the small town of Newtonville, Kansas. The effect of the beam is to cause several citizens to trade bodies, or merge their personalities, or something like that with other citizens. A gang of rowdy, out-of-shape Texans swap places with a troupe of Chinese acrobats; a Britishy matron takes over the body of a black blues musician. And the hero, Wally, "a forty year old milquetoast salesman", trades places with Horton, a ferocious hit man. This is '80s high concept, Lynch style.

Part of what makes it Lynchian is that everybody in Newtonville, and outside it too, seems buggy and warped even before the transformation takes place. It's also marked by a strange mixture of sweetness and darkness. When Wally is trundling around in Horton's menacing form, his love life and overall place in the scheme if things improves, but--and this is probably the most winning idea in the whole script--the bloodthirsty Horton steps into Wally's life and discovers that he loves being a family man, especially since his wife and son love the new, scary version of their family provider. The warmest, and just about the wordiest, passage in the script comes when Horton has to deal with a bully who's been messing with junior. "I know what a hard life you've lived," he tells the kid, "what with your folks divorce and your father's alcoholism. It wasn't so long ago that I didn't know the meaning of a family either. Victor, I know about the loneliness, lying awake at night, feeling like no one in the world cares for you. I know what this can do to you; the rage and frustration. And I just want you to understand you've got a friend here and his name is Wally Newton. By the time he's finished, there isn't a dry eye in the schoolroom. Meanwhile, the military is discussing whether to cover the whole mess up by going with a plan to "reduce Newtonville to a smoking pile of ash, litter the area with sheep with their eyes sewn shut and blame it on UFO's."

One Saliva Bubble reads as if it must have been fun to write. It has an antic, anything-goes tone, "anything" including comical Chinese who say things like,"Herro, Gentremen, how may I herp you?", animated-cartoon tricks involving dogs freezing in the air in mid-pounce and doors that fling themselves open at the sight of the fearsome Horton, cute comic gangsters, broadly drawn cariactures of blustery generals that would strike Buck Turgidsen as a tad much, and an ending that is unintentionally summed up by the stage direction: "The crowd is totally bewildered." Humor has always been a major element in Lynch's work; certainly it had a lot to do with the success of Twin Peaks, especially in the first season, when it was easier to separate the intentionally funny from the other kind. There, the funny moments arose naturally out the characters and situations. But, trying to write a comedy, he seems less interested in story or character than in piling silliness upon silliness. And because Lynch can't seem to help himself from minting a strange, idiosyncratic world even when he populates it with silly accents and fart jokes, there's an abstract, weirdly cerebral feel to the whole thing, like seeing a star MIT student's experimental design for the world's greatest homemade beer bong. Although the film was never made, there may be a clue as to what it would have looked like in Lynch and Frost's follow-up TV series, the short-lived behind-the-scenes radio sitcom On the Air, where the farcical plot turns and slapstick pratfalls were so unfunny they were borderline creepy. The show played like charades night at the Black Lodge. (In turn, Saliva Bubble may provide hints of what might have been in store for us if Lynch had realized another of his ideas for a comedy: Dream of the Bovine, which would have starred Harry Dean Stanton as one of three cows who are reincarnated as people but still think of themselves as cattle.)

With the early, phenomenal success of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost proved that there was a mass audience for a crowd-pleasing serial entertainment served up with the kind of craft, visual imagination, and double-edged with that Lynch brought to the project. But they also wound up demonstrating the corrupting influence of mass success, a corruption that in their case was self-defeating. If they had fulfilled the expectations they'd set up and solved the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder in that first season, they might have been unable to lure their audience back for whatever they did next, but they could have gone out in glory; instead, by trying to extend the plotline beyond the breaking point, they wore out their welcome with the audience and betrayed their implicit pledge to keep Twin Peaks from turning into just another TV show, playing by the same nothing-ever-really-changes rules. After On the Air and the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me (on which Frost had an executive producer credit but no input on the script), they went their separate ways, and it would take Lynch a while to regain his bearings. In his collaborations with Frost and also in Wild at Heart, the movie that was released between the first and second seasons of Twin Peaks, he had begun showing the strain of trying to match up to the way the industry seemed to see him: not as a major artist trying to capture his own way of seeing on film, but as some guy standing by the side of the road holding up a hand-lettered sign reading, "WILL WRITE WEIRD SHIT FOR FOOD."

The Killing Joke

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

For some fans, it won’t be enough for Heath Ledger to win a posthumous Academy Award for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. The not-at-all-crazy folks at the new site The Ultimate Joker are taking it a step further: they don’t want anyone else to ever play the role again.

“They've launched a petition calling for studios to withdraw the character for good from any future Batman movies, a somewhat strange request given all the actors who have stepped into the Joker's murderous shoes on screens large and small,” according to a report at Wired.com. “We truly believe Ledger's performance as Joker is the best an actor could ever do," the site's team leader, Fer Barbella, told Wired.

Despite this belief, the team of Ledger enthusiasts is restricting their petition to big-screen, live action portrayals. “Television and animation is off our radar,” Barbella says, before conceding that he enjoys the work of Cesar Romero and even Jack Nicholson in the role of the clown prince of crime.

If you’d like to join this very important crusade, check out the Ultimate Joker site. It’s a shame, though – why couldn’t somebody have thought of this tactic in time to prevent Steve Martin from taking on the role of Inspector Clouseau?

Related:
He's Hot, He's Oscar-Nominated and He's Dead: The Heath Ledger Stealth Award Campaign
Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

See It First: A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Nick Schager — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Every week, new films come out. But are you, dear Screengrab readers, ready for them? In this weekly column, I'll be offering up an old-school film recommendation to prepare you for the big screen’s latest and – hopefully – greatest.

This week, anyone interested in buying what The Pink Panther 2 is selling – which, from the looks of things, is Steve Martin's overripe French accent, lots of lame pratfalls, and a bunch of formerly respectable thesps slumming it for an easy payday (Jeremy Irons, what’s become of you?) – will first want to become acquainted with 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Despite being the second of Blake Edwards' Pink Panther films, it’s the first in which comedian par excellence Peter Sellers – relegated to second fiddle in the original, more generic The Pink Panther – was unquestionably front and center. Freewheeling and ridiculous, and featuring not only a great Sellers performance but a borderline-brilliant turn by Herbert Lom as Clouseau’s increasingly exasperated and twitchy superior, it’s a superior sequel that, despite the absence of a substantial plot, an opening animated sequence featuring the titular cat, and even the series' signature theme song, remains a brisk, cheery model of slapstick nonsense and droll wit.

Enjoy this tease, and then fire up that Netflix (fast!)

DVD Digest for January 27, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, a whole bunch of late-summer/early-fall releases are coming on DVD to help soothe the midwinter moviegoing blues.

Of this week’s bumper crop of recent theatrical releases coming to DVD, the most noteworthy is Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Genius Products, also Blu-Ray), which became the Woodman’s biggest hit in years due in no small part to the promise of hot Penelope Cruz-on-Scarlett Johansson action. That it was also a welcome change of scenery for the filmmaker- shooting for the first time in Spain- helped matters somewhat as well. It’s definitely worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet- come for the sexy stuff, stay for the memorable performances by Oscar nominee Cruz, Javier Bardem playing a character 180 degrees removed from his Anton Chigurh, and the ever-dependable Rebecca Hall.

Also this week, Warner unleashes the cops’n’robbers trifecta of Edward Norton and Colin Farrell in Pride and Glory (also Blu-Ray), Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace (also Blu-Ray), and Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla (also Blu-Ray). Other releases include: Rainn Wilson in The Rocker (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Kirk Cameron’s inspirational melodrama Fireproof (Sony), the Iraq War drama The Lucky Ones (Lionsgate); Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Image), a docuymentary about the filmmaker’s controversial court case; the French thriller Tell No One (MPI); the babes-and-binge-drinking comedy College (Fox); and a pair of direct-to-DVD animated releases, Hulk Vs. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) and Open Season 2 (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s selection of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by MGM’s The Pink Panther Film Collection (MGM), which includes all of the films including a new pressing of the original, also available in separately as The Pink Panther (1963) Collector’s Edition (MGM, also Blu-Ray). There’s also The Pink Panther Classic Cartoon Collection (MGM), a nine-disc set of the televised Pink Panther shorts. All of this Pink Panther news might be happier if it didn’t portend the release of the second crappy remake starring Steve Martin, but what can you do. Also this week: Mary Poppins 45th Anniversary Edition (Disney).

Finally, the big Blu-Ray only news this week is the release of Universal’s The Bourne Collection, which includes all three theatrical features (sorry, no Richard Chamberlain TV movie), along with a raft of extras. Also this week: Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday Director’s Cut (Warner), the college band drama Drumline Special Edition (Fox), and the annual release of Groundhog Day (Sony).

DVD Digest for January 20, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With the recent deep freeze that has stricken much of the country, now’s the perfect time to curl up in front of the television and watch a DVD. And don’t think the studios don’t know it.

DVD of the Week: The cream of this week’s DVD releases looks to be the snazzy new Criterion edition of Gregory Nava’s breakthrough film El Norte. This lovely mini-epic about a pair of Guatemalan refugees venturing north to America, Nava’s film told a too-common story that hadn’t been successfully dramatized in movies before. Shooting the film largely on the fly, Nava and his wife/collaborator Anna Thomas helped to kick-start the American independent film movement by redefining the sorts of movies could be made with limited means. Both the standard edition and the Blu-Ray edition include a new commentary track by Nava, interviews with Nava, Thomas, and the film’s principal actors, Nava’s 1972 student film The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva, and more. At a time when “Sundance movies” have practically become a formula unto themselves, El Norte is a reminder that independent film can be more than just a cliché.

Also this week in classics is Criterion’s standard-format edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, which also includes a remastered version of the 1935 John M. Stahl original. Or if you like your weepies more contemporary, there’s always The Notebook Limited Edition Gift Set (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s slate of recent releases coming to DVD is headlined Saw V (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest entry in a series that will surely continue as long as there are people willing to come up with convoluted ways to kill off characters. Also this week: Mark Wahlberg in the video game adaptation Max Payne (Fox, also Blu-Ray), the story of Heisman winner Ernie Davis in The Express (Universal, also Blu-Ray), the family films Igor (MGM, also Blu-Ray) and City of Ember (Fox), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the “a white man shall free them” drama The Children of Huang Shi (Sony), the cult-ready musical gorefest Repo!: The Genetic Opera (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), and the direct-to-DVD horror movie Amusement (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD, this week brings The Rockford Files Season 6 (Universal), Emergency! Season 5 (Universal), and Moonlight: The Complete Series (Warner).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only titles is highlighted by the enduring classic This Is Spinal Tap (MGM), in an edition that boasts all of the extras from MGM’s standard-format edition. Also this week: Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 (Sony), Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher (Fox), Tony Scott’s Domino (Warner) (for my money, the most underappreciated movie of the decade so far), Alexander Payne’s Election (Paramount), Steve Martin making an ass of himself in The Pink Panther (Sony), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Unfaithful (Fox).

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 10-16, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, Pansy Nation. Why don’t you get your fat faces out of your computer screens for five minutes and go get some fresh air? Maybe do a push-up or something. Y’know, when they asked me to host the Highlight Reel this week, I figured I was gonna be showing clips of The Outlaw Josey Wales and Any Which Way You Can. I didn’t realize the Screengrab was nothing but a bunch of limp-wristed globbers. Well, I never had a glob. Never saw the need for it. What am I gonna do, sit around writing about Strangers in a Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-of-Water Stories (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)? Hell no, I’ve got boars to shoot.

I’ve never been to Sundance, either. I always figured it was just an excuse for Redford and his pinko friends to hit the slopes before going back to the lodge for tea and fairycakes. But I guess if you care, you can read about Five Must-See Documentaries, Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Parts One and Two) and Five Movies to Skip. Hell, you can even read about Slamdance if you want.

Here’s some more crap I don’t care about:

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark’s Picks and Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Keyword Theater: The Winter Edition

Screengrab Live Blogs the Golden Globes

Nine-Point Plans

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Undeserved Oscar Buzz

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 – 2009

Netflix Killed the Video Store…Or Did It?

Why Must Steve Martin Suck?

Thursday Poll for January 15, 2009

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

With the Oscar ceremony little more than a month away and nominations being announced next week, I used last week’s Thursday Poll to ask you about your tastes in Oscar hosts. And you responded rather decisively that when it comes to recent Oscar emcees, your preference was for Jon Stewart, erstwhile host of The Daily Show and star of such cinematic gems as Death to Smoochy, Big Daddy and Playing By Heart, who brought in 57% of the votes. By some not-all-that-odd coincidence, Stewart also shared the screen with your second-favorite recent host, Steve Martin (24%), in Stewart’s big-screen debut, 1994’s Mixed Nuts (yeah, we’ve expelled it from our memory banks too). In third place was one-timer Ellen DeGeneres, with former Oscar mainstay Billy Crystal and the hugely divisive Chris Rock in a dead heat for last. How will Hugh Jackman compare? Well, he couldn’t be any worse than Rock, could he?

This week, on the tail of Clint Eastwood’s latest directing effort Gran Torino, we look at the iconic actor/director’s most celebrated films. A perennial Oscar favorite, Eastwood’s films have been nominated for Best Picture four times to date, winning twice. Which Eastwood-directed Best Picture nominee is your favorite?

Which is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Why Must Steve Martin Suck?

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

I understand why Robin Williams movies suck. Sure, he’s done good (or at least interesting) work in everything from Moscow On The Hudson and The Best of Times to The Fisher King and even creepy, icky One Hour Photo (part of the “dark Robin” trilogy along with Insomnia and Death To Smoochy). For the most part, though, Williams is primarily known for some combination of annoying, "look at me! look at me!" over-the-top wacky (Mrs. Doubtfire, Toys, every single talk show appearance ever) and/or shameless, cloying, dewy-eyed schmaltz (Jack, Patch Adams, Fathers' Day...oh God, I’m choking on my own vomit)...

But I get that. Williams is a needy, hyperactive mental case. Sure, he’s talented and seems like a sweet, well-meaning guy, too...but I’m also guessing he’s been to a LOT of Narcotics Anonymous meetings full of weepy, life-affirming speeches and “I love you, man” hugs. On some level, I’m willing to believe Williams actually enjoyed his own performance in License To Wed.

But Steve Martin knows better...doesn’t he? I mean, in real life, the man is an icy-cool art-collecting intellectual. He’s written witty pieces for The New Yorker and well-received plays and books like Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Shopgirl and The Underpants. He studied English poetry in college and majored in philosophy. He was the classiest Oscar host since Carson. He’s a zillionaire, fer chrissakes. SO WHY IS THIS MAN STARRING IN THE PINK PANTHER 2?

Sure, okay, yes, he started his career as the “wild-and-crazy guy” of The Jerk and "King Tut" fame...but whereas a comedian like Williams is willing to do just about anything for a laugh, Martin, even at his goofiest, always seemed to be in on the joke: the Jerk was actually, in fact, the smartest guy in the room.

And right from the jump he wasn’t afraid to go dark and edgy, as evidenced by his underrated turn as the doomed feckless dreamer in Pennies From Heaven. But with the exception of roles in a handful of projects like The Spanish Prisoner and his own Shopgirl (where he played, respectively, a villainous con man and a rich man incapable of love), Martin has left the tantalizing possibilities of his dramatic range woefully unexplored. He could easily be having Bill Murray’s film career now...

...but, fine, let’s say he’s just not that into drama. He is, after all, a comedian. So then the question becomes: why so many shitty comedies, Steve? Sure, Bill Murray will phone in the occasional Garfield to help finance his alimony payments, but overall the man has very little to apologize for in a thirty-year career: Where The Buffalo Roam was terrible (but at least he was genuinely interested in the subject matter), Kingpin was stupid (but funny), Wild Things was trashy (but at least it was good trash), etc.

Conversely, I challenge Steve Martin to point to a single redeeming quality in The Pink Panther (x2), Cheaper By The Dozen (x2) or the deeply unfunny and, frankly, morally reprehensible Father of the Bride (which, like his other terrible, terrible movies, he felt compelled to make twice). Martin isn’t just a Hall Of Fame stand-up comedian, he’s also written and/or appeared in some really good (or at least pretty good) comedies like All of Me, Roxanne, Planes/Trains/etc., L.A. Story, Baby Mama and even Parenthood, so it’s not like he doesn’t know better. And it’s not like he needs the money. And he doesn’t even have any kids (the usual excuse for smart actors who appear in dumb-ass “family” entertainments).

So why, Steve?

Why?

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: The Pink Panther 2
Allen and Martin In Print

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

Summer of '78: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78! I’ve been on vacation, so this week we’re catching up on the past few Thursdays.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Release Date: July 24, 1978

Cast: Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, George Burns, Donald Pleasance, Sandy Farina, Steve Martin, Aerosmith

The Buzz: The classic Beatles album comes to life on the big screen...without the Beatles. Or as its producers claimed before its release, “This generation’s Gone with the Wind.”

Keywords: Beatles, Based on Album, Cornet, Glass Coffin, Hot Air Balloon, Drugged Drink

The Plot: There’s a plot? Well, let’s see…crinkly narrator George Burns tells us of a magical town called Heartland, full of love and joy and the wonderful music of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sgt. Pepper left his musical instruments to the town of Heartland – instruments with the power to make dreams come true, Burns (as Heartland mayor Mr. Kite) tells us. Eventually Pepper’s grandson Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and the Henderson brothers (The Bee Gees) form a new version of the band, which becomes quite popular. Hollywood music mogul B.D. Hoffler (Donald Pleasance) signs the band to his label, and they must leave Heartland – and Billy’s girlfriend Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) behind. While the boys are away being corrupted by the music biz, Heartland is taken over by Mean Mr. Mustard and his singing robots. They hate joy! They hate love! They love money! They steal the magical instruments and Heartland descends into decrepitude. Now superstars, Billy and the Hendersons are alerted to the disappearance of the instruments by Strawberry and set out to recover them. They also perform a benefit concert for the town, with guest appearances by Earth, Wind and Fire and Future Villain Band (played by Aerosmith). This is when things get really confusing, but somehow Strawberry is killed, Billy is depressed and tries to kill himself, but a weathervane turns into Billy Preston, who shoots lightning out of his hands to save Billy and also turn some other people into nuns. Or something like that.

The Test of Time: This movie fails just about any test you’d like to give it, but none more so than the test of time. I can see why it seemed like a good idea in ’78: the first wave of Beatle nostalgia was sweeping the land, with the Beatlemania revue lighting up Broadway (“Not the Beatles, but an incredibly simulation!”) Producer Robert Stigwood had successfully brought the rock musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy to the screen. Put two and two together and you get…an incoherent exercise in Ken Russell-lite psychedelia with a nearly unlistenable soundtrack, and one of the most notorious bombs of the ’70s. What’s really amazing to me is that I’d never seen it before now. Even at the heights of my own Beatle mania in the ’80s, I never sought it out; its reputation was always that terrible. And, I must say, well deserved. Produced more than a decade after the album that inspired it, the movie is actually much more dated than its source (which, lets be honest, is pretty dated itself). I don’t think anyone has ever accused Peter Frampton or The Bee Gees of being timeless artists, but even so, their disco fried versions of the Beatles classics are enough to make me doubt I ever liked the songs. They might as well be singing the lyrics phonetically for all the meaning and emotion they’re able to wring out of them, and the songs are all used in such numbingly obvious ways. (“Say, the sun is coming up in this scene. What would be a good number to sing here?”) And then there’s the “Golden Throats” parade of guest performers, including George Burns and his timeless rendition of “Fixing a Hole.” Seriously, did any of you buy this soundtrack album and listen to it on purpose? I mean, more than once? Steve Martin’s goony take on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is often cited as one of the few highlights, but I think that’s overstating the case. Only Aerosmith’s “Come Together” works, and of course it was the only real hit. The movie ends with a group sing-along of the title track that's obviously intended as a tribute to the famous Sgt. Pepper album cover, but is more like dying and going to ’70s Celebrity Hell. Among the luminaries on hand are Carol Channing, Sha Na Na, Wolfman Jack, Leif Garrett, and Seals and Crofts. It’s certainly a thrill.

Quotable Quote: “She came in through the bathroom window.”

2008 Equivalent: The obvious choice would be Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical Across the Universe, but unfortunately that came out last year. So I’ll have to go with Mamma Mia!

Previously on Summer of '78: Revenge of the Pink Panther

Summer of '78: "Revenge of the Pink Panther"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78! I’ve been on vacation, so this week we’re catching up on the past few Thursdays.

Revenge of the Pink Panther

Release Date: July 19, 1978

Cast: Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Dyan Cannon, Burt Kwouk, Robert Loggia

The Buzz: Peter Sellers returns for the final time (sort of) as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau.

Keywords: Sequel, Clouseau, Farce, Transvestite, Clothes Blown Off, Farting Scene, Dominatrix

The Plot: In an effort to prove he has not lost his killer instinct, the head of the French Connection orders the assassination of France’s greatest detective, Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The “beum” fails to kill Clouseau, although the world believes he is dead. Former Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is released from the insane asylum and is reinstated to head the investigation into Clouseau’s death. (This is a minor continuity error, as Dreyfus had been disintegrated by his own doomsday machine in The Pink Panther Strikes Again, but let’s not split hairs.) With the assistance of his faithful man-servant Cato (Burt Kwouk), Clouseau goes undercover in a variety of disguises in order to solve the mystery himself. In the course of his investigation, Clouseau stumbles upon French Connection boss Douvier's former mistress Simone Legree (Dyan Cannon), who informs the great detective that her ex-lover is the would-be assassin. Together they pursue Douvier to Hong Kong (with Sellers in an offensive buck-teeth-and-coolie-hat combo), with Dreyfus – now convinced Clouseau is still alive – hot on their heels. A tour-de-farce chase ensues, or at least that’s the plan.

The Test of Time: In the pre-Jaws portion of my movie-going life, my favorite movies included Snoopy Come Home, Herbie Rides Again and The Return of the Pink Panther. For this I do not apologize. The fact that I was still eagerly anticipating new Pink Panther movies as late as 1978 may be a bit more shameful, but at the time I didn’t realize Peter Sellers was a comic genius wasting his little remaining precious time on slapdash Blake Edwards slapstick. (He did waste time on even worse things, of course.) The series had grown increasingly cartoonish over time and was virtually a live-action version of the Road Runner by this point, which would be fine except that I can’t help but notice this one isn’t very funny. It’s painfully clear that Sellers was on the sidelines when most of his pratfalls were performed, and he’s scraping the bottom of his barrel of humorous disguises and hilarious voices. (OK, the inflatable parrot on his shoulder during his “sea captain” routine made me chuckle.) When Clouseau ends up in drag being whipped by a dominatrix, it’s not nearly the outrageous spectacle Edwards seems to think, and that pretty much sets the tone for this subpar outing. Naming a character Balls is not really a sign that you have any. No, Edwards only proved he had enormous, senseless balls after Peter Sellers’ death, when he kept cranking out Pink Panther movies. The ones starring Roberto Benigni and the immortal Ted Wass were bad enough, but there was nothing sadder than Trail of the Pink Panther, made up of Sellers outtakes and ending with a Sellers stand-in being shit on by a seagull. By contrast, Revenge is a comic masterpiece.

Quotable Quote: “When you have been killed as many times as I have, you get used to it, believe me.”

2008 Equivalent: Tragically, it’s Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther 2.

Previously on Summer of '78: The Swarm

Trailer Review: The Pink Panther 2 (teaser)

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

After more than three decades in the business, you’d think Steve Martin would have a better idea of his strengths and weaknesses as an actor. For example, he’s generally excelled at playing normal-seeming guys who try (and generally fail) to maintain their composure, as well as people who aren’t as smart as they think they are. One thing that’s for sure is that two Pink Panther movies still haven’t made him any good at being a more kid-friendly Peter Sellers. Once again, Martin seems to take the vaguely Frrrrrrrrrranch ack-sont as an excuse to turn Clouseau into a character who almost willfully gets into mischief, when Sellers’ immortal incarnation was deadly serious about going about his work, even while working well above his mental pay grade. Of course, this teaser shows nothing from the movie, but then it shows us everything we need to know- the third-rate slapstick, the kid-friendly antics, and Martin, once again getting everything all wrong.

Morning Deal Report: Sienna Miller in the Hood

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Add Sienna Miller’s name to a list that already includes Audrey Hepburn, Uma Thurman and Rich Little. That would be the list of people who have played Maid Marian in one version or another of Robin Hood. Ridley Scott’s “revisionist take” called Nottingham already has Russell Crowe on board, but not in the role you might think. According to Variety, Scott’s version “focuses on the Sheriff of Nottingham (Crowe) as a noble and brave lawman who labors for a corrupt king and engages in a love triangle with Marion and Robin Hood.” Miller is currently shooting G.I. Joe, so she should have action figures aplenty in stores by this time next year.

Insert your own “offer they can’t refuse” joke here. The estate of Mario Puzo “has filed suit against Paramount Pictures, claiming the studio owes it at least $1 million in revenues from the series of video games based on the Oscar-winning film The Godfather,” per the Hollywood Reporter. The author’s son Anthony is behind the lawsuit, which states: “Despite the vast wealth Puzo created for Paramount, it has refused to pay his children their agreed share of the revenue from that audio-visual product.” No truth to the rumors that Puzo’s lawyers are responsible for the horse’s head found in the Paramount CEO’s bed.

Finally, you’ll be delighted to know that the appropriately named Film Movement has acquired the U.S. distribution rights to The Pope’s Toilet. The Cannes favorite “is set in 1988, as a small Uruguayan town, Melo, gears up for the arrival of Pope John Paul II. One local resident, trying to profit from the visit, decides to build a portable pay toilet for the event, setting in motion a chain of unforeseen complications,” Variety reports. I guess that answers Steve Martin’s old question, “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

Related:
How Bad Will "G.I. Joe" Be?
American Lawsuit

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

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

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

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

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

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

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

AFTER HOURS (1985)

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

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

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

FAT CITY (1972)

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

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

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

NEAR DARK (1987)

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

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Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The new release 10,000 B.C. revives a genre that some of us thought was long past reviving, the dawn-of-man cave people melodrama. The new movie's director, Roland Emmerich, is a technophile size freak who probably thinks that the latest developments in computer animation and other special effects make it a great time to visualize a chaotic, untamed planet overrun with strange forms of wildlife threatening actors who are modeling proposed hair styles for Rob Zombie — though my recollection is that, in the past, the whole point of these movies was to showcase a rising performer (such as Victor Mature, star of the 1940 One Million B.C., or Raquel Welch, star of its 1966 remake) who seems made to be photographed wearing a loincloth. Anyway, this genre received its knockout blow more than twenty-five years ago, in Caveman, filmed in Mexico by the director Carl Gottlieb, who also co-wrote the script with Rudy DeLuca. Gottlieb is a well-travelled show business jack-of-all-trades whose career includes a stint with the '60s improv-comedy troupe the Committee, various acting gigs, and partial authorship of the script of Jaws (as well as full authorship of its making-of book). Gottlieb made his film directing debut with the 1977 Steve Martin short The Absent-Minded Waiter, but Caveman was his first time behind the camera on a feature film. It remains his only feature, maybe because he's yet to find a project that might count as a worthy follow-up to directing a cast, all speaking "prehistoric" gibberish, that included Ringo Starr, John Matuszak, and a stoned Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ringo plays Atouk, the sad-sack misfit of a tribe of cave folk led by — or, rather, bullied and pushed around by — Tonda, played by the towering, fiercely bearded Matuszak. Atouk graduates from loser to outcast when he enrages Tonda by lusting after the big guy's lady, Barbara Bach. (This was the movie where Ringo and Bach met. They were married before it was released to theaters, and in a month they'll be celebrating their twenty-seventh anniversary. Tip your hats, people.) The resourceful Ringo takes advantage of his new freedom to assemble his own rival tribe, which includes Dennis Quaid, Carl Lumbly, the great Jack Gilford and, as Gilford's daughter and Ringo's eventual love interest, a very charming, pre-Cheers Shelley Long. He also discovers fire, music, advanced weaponry, and the pleasures of standing upright. (He proceeds to convert his friends, grabbing them from behind as if administering the Heimlich maneuver and yanking their spines straight to the accompaniment of a terrific cracking noise.) The whole thing has a playful, friendly quality, and the good guys are pretty close to irresistable. The bad guys are no slouches themselves; the late Matuszak gets to demonstrate an all-out slapstick aplomb that Hollywood seldom bothered to tap during his acting career, and Bach, strutting about in her fur bikini, was accurately described by one reviewer, Michael Sragow, as looking like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life. Mixed in among the people are a quartet of stop-motion dinosaurs, including the aforementioned T-rex, who are very ready for their close-ups. Will 10,000 B.C. reveal that its makers have learned anything from Ringo and company? It remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that if Roland Emmerich understood anything about the appeal of stop-motion dinosaurs, he never would have made Godzilla.

New Holiday Classics: Reindeer Games

Peter Smith — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

In his new memoir Born Standing Up, Steve Martin recalls that, back in the late ‘60s, he romanced the daughter of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, until the director John Frankenheimer stole her from him while filming Trumbo's script for The Fixer. After mentioning that, two decades later, the director tried to seduce Victoria Tennant at a time when she was Martin's wife, Martin notes that "Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him." Unlikely though it may seem, John Frankenheimer actually did get a few movies directed when he wasn't concentrating on screwing with Steve Martin's love life. The 2000 Reindeer Games was his last film, and though not in the same league as his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, it's actually one of his live ones.

This thriller, from an original screenplay by plot-twist specialist Ehren Kruger, stars Ben Affleck as a prison inmate who's sort of a Cyrano de Bergerac in reverse; Ben's best pal in prison has been exchanging love letters with a young lady he's never met in the flesh, but when the pal is killed in the prison yard and Ben, after being released, meets the girl and she turns out to be Charlize Theron, he pretends to be the dead man. (This may sound like a bad idea, but remember that Entertainment Weekly has recently determined that Ben is only the fiftieth-smartest person in Hollywood.) Enter Theron's blue collar werewolf of a brother (Gary Sinise) and his posse of plug-uglies (Clarence Williams III, Donal Logue and Danny Trejo), who are under the mistaken impression that Ben used to work at the local casino and can help serve as tour director during their big Christmas Eve heist.

Reindeer Games is jerry-built on a switchback trail of reversals, revelations, and sputtered, improvised fake outs. It finally pushes its luck in its attempt to get one last twist in before the closing credits; we've read campaign literature from Lyndon LaRouche that makes more sense than this movie's last fifteen minutes. But up until then, this wintry, violent movie offers some good cheap thrills with its adrenaline overload. The cast of supporting baddies are as amusingly sleazy as any collection of movie lowlifes since Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up, which also featured Clarence Williams III looking very scary and completely out to lunch. It's a plot-driven movie, but with many diverting moments of local color, such as Danny Trejo thoughtfully laying out his plan to institute a second mid-summer Christmas season to boost the national economy, and Dennis Farina, as the stressed-out wiseguy in charge of the snowbound casino blasting away with a machine gun while calling out, "Hey, Santa, merry Christmas!" All this, plus the fiftieth-smartest guy in Hollywood takes several heavy blows to the face. Ho ho ho!

— Phil Nugent

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Allen and Martin in Print

Peter Smith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege." Blessedly, as a sop to those who like him funny, Allen has also authorized the release of Mere Anarchy, a new book of his recent "casuals" from The New Yorker, as well as The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose, which vacuums up the contents of the three earlier collections that Allen published from around 1970 to 1980. The new collection, which brings together the pieces Allen started publishing again in the 1990s after a long time away from the typewriter, are sometimes a little creaky, but they have their moments. The thicker book, however, is a dandy flashback to that period when Allen's pores seemed to spontaneously produce off-kilter sophomoric wisecracks. You can see him losing interest in the form towards the end of the book, but that's when he rallies and produces his best effort at staying gut-bustingly funny while telling a real, honest-to-God story: "The Gleams Episode", about an ill-fated love affair between Emma Bovary and a frustrated CCNY professor who has the ability to literally escape into the pages of literary classics.

Playing the mandarin may actually come a lot more naturally to Steve Martin, who seems to have put an inhuman amount of cool, thoughtful contemplation into a career that began with him marketing himself as a spastic ass. Martin describes Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, a memoir that takes him from the start of his performing career to the point in 1981 when he retired from stand-up to concentrate on movies, as "not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know." (Martin has also written a new alphabet book, with illustrations by Roz Chast.) Like Allen, Martin has gradually moved away from his earlier, spirited film work, but with a difference. He was once eager to star in the chance-taking Pennies from Heaven and to explore his bittersweet side in his scripts for Roxanne and L.A. Story, but at some point he got fed up with putting his heart and blood into projects that were perceived as commercial disappointments, and for more than ten years now, he's plainly seen movies as something you do for the money and pitch straight down the center of the road. His more ambitious work has been done elsewhere (as in his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile and his novella Shopgirl, which inspired a 2005 film in which he co-starred with Clare Danes) or at least in movies that were somebody else's baby (such as David Manet's The Spanish Prisoner, where he had a chilling role as a con man). The excerpts from his memoir that have appeared already are graceful, affecting, and leave the reader wanting more. In the meantime, he's about to start a new movie, based on his idea of what movie audiences want: it's an unnecessary sequel to his unnecessary remake of The Pink Panther. — Phil Nugent