The Screengrab : steven spielberg

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

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

A.I. (2001)

One of my day jobs is teaching various screenwriting courses, and I always use A.I. as a prime example of how NOT to end a movie. Of course, Steven Spielberg pretty much deserves his own wing in the terrible ending hall of fame: Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Schindler’s List and the tacky, tacked-on “Special Edition” ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which pretty much robbed the original ending of all its original mystery and wonder by not freakin’ knowing when to leave well enough alone. Of course, this unnatural, Brundlefly amalgam of the director’s flashy Hollywood huckster instincts and the Kubrickian darkness of the project’s original father (who died while the project was still mired in development hell) is pretty hapless throughout its running time, but it does manage a nice, poetic moment when David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot programmed to yearn for love from a mother who despises him, winds up trapped beneath the ocean, staring at a statue of the Blue Fairy, wishing endlessly for something he can never have. Hmm, I thought watching the movie for the first time, not a bad little dramatization of the human condition there, Spielberg...for don’t we all wish for things we’re programmed to want but can never achieve? Yet Spielberg, being the kind of guy who DOES get everything he wants, apparently has no use for the bittersweet frustrations of the great unwashed. Nope, Spielberg’s all about happy endings...and, apparently, mommy issues, because the movie doesn’t stop there: instead, it goes on and on and interminably on, getting sillier (and creepier) with each passing moment, as millennia pass and magical future robots allow little David to finally get what he always wanted...alone time in bed with a mother who LOVES him and ONLY him, dammit! C.G.I. + T.M.I. = ick. (AO)

CONTACT (1997)

Seriously, Robert Zemeckis and Carl Sagan? After all the mind-numbing science-vs.-faith arguments between Jody Foster’s astronomer and Matthew McConaughey’s minster, all you deliver is a silly-looking CG beach landscape – snow white sand! glowing blue water! – and the revelation that the much-discussed alien/God is Foster’s dearly departed daddy? It’s a figurative punch in the stomach from a film that’s already spent two hours slapping us in the face with faux-profound jibber-jabber and wannabe-2001 “trippy” sequences. (NS)

SCHOOL DAZE (1988)

So far, so good: by the time he reached the end of his second feature, School Daze, Spike Lee had opened up to new filmmaking techniques as well as expanding his political and emotional canvas to much wider and deeper topics than he’d attempted in She’s Gotta Have It. As the final moments of the two-hour film approached, Lee had introduced elements as far-ranging and controversial as class and race issues in the black community, date rape, divestiture, careerism and gentrification, and revolution vs. assimilation. It would be difficult to tie all those threads together, but Lee had matured so much as a filmmaker, viewers were confident he could pull it off. So what happens? Lawrence Fishburne lumbers all over campus, hollering “WAKE UP!” to audience and actors alike, all of whom seem surprised that he’s gone off script. Viewers wanted to wake up, all right – to a world in which Lee hadn’t pissed away all the goodwill of the rest of the movie on this obnoxious, go-nowhere student film ending. (LP)

JUICE (1992)

Whatever alien virus possessed Spike Lee to give School Daze such a flimsy cop-out of an ending, he apparently passed it on to his cinematographer. Four years later, when the talented but inconsistent Ernest Dickerson made his debut as a feature film director, it was with Juice, his own take on the gangsta epic that was then sweeping Hollywood; for most of its running time, it was a particularly compelling example of the genre, buoyed by solid performances in the lead roles by Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur. Then, in the movie’s climactic moments, bam! Spike Lee Disease strikes again: in a turn of events that is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely, Epps’ character tosses aside his piece and then pursues and disarms Shakur, who obligingly falls off of a building. A random partygoer tells Epps that now, he’s got the “juice”, which explains and/or resolves exactly nothing when it comes to everything that has gone before. All that talent on display, and not a script doctor in sight. (LP)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

It’s not exactly Stanley Kubrick’s fault that the ending of A Clockwork Orange falls short. At the time he did his infamous adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, the actual end of the book, the 21st chapter, was not available in American versions. (Kubrick lived in England, but he’d first read an American edition of the novel.) So when the script was written, he had no idea that the chapter even existed. It features an older if not wiser Alex growing bored with his utra-violent lifestyle and contemplating going straight, getting a job, and raising his own family – a contemplation which, turning the book’s themes of moral panic on their ears, includes the vital possibility that his children might seem as nightmarish to him as he seems to be to his parents’ generation. Without this insight, Burgess considered the American version of the book to be deeply flawed; and without its subversive self-criticism, the movie Kubrick made of it seems morally and philosophically confused. Still, he’s not entirely blameless; when filming started, he got hold of an English edition with the complete 21st chapter, and decided not to change the script one bit. (LP)

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION (1984)

Okay, the ending of this neo-pulp cult classic isn’t great. It’s one of those big cast mashups that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, with the whole cast walking purposefully together while music blared on the soundtrack and the camera jumped around showing the audience what it looked like when people walked from one place to another from different angles. But that isn’t what makes it one of the most disappointing endings of all time. It’s the very last thing we see before the movie fades to black: a title card promising that Buckaroo Banzai and His Hong Kong Cavaliers will be back, in Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Twenty-five years later, it’s a promise that has yet to be fulfilled. Today, deals are inked to make multi-picture franchises long before they know whether the first movie will be a hit or a dud; even as we speak, a sequel to the nearly universally panned (and not nearly as popular as it was anticipated to be) Transformers movie is gearing up to hit theaters. So why, every time we watch this widely beloved cult hit, must we be reminded of a sequel that’s never going to come? (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)

So, a few years back, my lovely Polish bride was in a production of the theatrical version of The Bad Seed, where bratty little hellspawn Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) gets away with a whole lot of evil behavior, including (gasp!) matricide, simply because the gullible adults in the story (much like the gullible adults of today) are unwilling to see children -- especially cute little white children -- as anything but perfect little angels. But in the Hays Code ‘50s, villains simply HAD to be punished, at least in the movies, leading to one of the most ludicrous finales in cinematic history, whereby the bad seed gets her comeuppance Old Testament style with a good ol’ bolt from the blue courtesy of God (or possibly Zeus) Himself...followed by a dorky curtain call (complete with a comical “spanking” for McCormack) to reassure skittish audiences that, hey, folks! It’s just a movie! See? Everybody’s alive and well and no evil will ever befall you if you stay on the right side of the tracks with all the decent, well-dressed, respectable Christian people...honest! (AO)

THE QUIET AMERICAN (1958)

We could keep you up all night babbling about all the movies that softened and betrayed the endings of their source material (and even original screenplays, in some cases), denting otherwise excellent movies: Stella seeming to reject Stanley's blandishments in A Streetcar Names Desire, Mel Cooley squawking "Get me the FBI!" at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and on and on. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about the dangers of well-intentioned American efforts in Indochina may take the prize, though -- partly because it has so much to recommend it (particularly Michael Redgrave's performance as the aging British reporter whose disapproval of the title character -- Audie Murphy -- is gummed up with the knowledge that the younger man is his romantic rival, and the sensuous, flowing atmosphere and camera work), which makes it all the more frustrating when Mankiewicz betrays Greene in the last scenes. The revelation that the American was the moral angel he believed himself to be, and the decision to have the woman the two men shared turn away from the surviving member of their triangle in disgust, was a significant enough alteration to lay waste to everything that had come before it. (The 2002 version, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, is in many ways a clunkier piece of filmmaking, but it holds up better just by being true to Greene.) (PN)

NO WAY OUT (1987)

This slick update of The Big Clock relocates the action from the world of magazine publishing to Washngton, D.C., where the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) kills his mistress (Sean Young, so it's not as if a jury in the world would view him unsympathetically) and launches a search for the woman's other lover (Kevin Costner) while working the angle that she may have been the victim of a possibly apocryphal Soviet mole called "Yuri." Naturally, he puts Costner in charge of the investigation. In what appears to be the ending, Costner manages to slip away after exposing the bad guys; then, in the concluding scene, it is revealed that Costner, an actor who has trouble passing for anything but a lifelong resident of California, turns out to in fact be Yuri, the Russian mole. It's a twist ending, and to steal a line from David Edelstein, it's twisted, all right. (PN)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

For the most part, Steven Spielberg's take on Philip K. Dick is one of the director's smartest and most accomplished entertainments in recent years, topped off with one of his most mind-melting bad endings; it's like seeing an Olympic athlete ace the first nine parts of the decathlon before fleeing the course to get fucked up on hillbilly heroin. The drop is so deep and so sudden that some enterprising geeks have an explanation for it: they'll tell you that everything that happens after Tom Cruise is sealed away in his frozen prison tube is actually a dream that his character has of being rescued and redeemed; despite what the movie shows you, as the credits roll, he's actually still locked away in there and the villain is triumphant. If some guys sitting at computer keyboards could come up with a nifty idea like that, how come Spielberg, with access to every writer in Hollywood and the millions to pay them, had to settle for the ending he wound up with? (PN)

HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002)

This Woody Allen comedy stars our hero as a washed-up movie director who, given the chance to make his comeback film, suffers an attack of hysterical blindness and has to blunder through the entire production without being able to see what he's directing. Of all Allen's recent misfires, this one feels especially revealing because of the way that he fails to leap at the chance to score some sure laughs with the obvious joke that's waiting to be made: at no point do we get to see any of the footage that's been okayed by this poor bastard working in the dark. This, it turns out, is only the fair warning for the well-worn groaner awaiting us at the end, when the disgraced director receives the happy news that his blind man's movie has been declared a masterpiece by...the French! For a guy who's spent more and more time in the late stages of his career accepting plaudits from those same French critics and audiences, this counts as perhaps the laziest instance of biting the hand that feeds on record. (PN)

GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

Martin Scorsese's period epic was inspired by a 1928 book that was a garish collection of tall tales recounting the "real" hidden history of New York City. By the time Scorsese and his screenwriters got through embellishing it further and welding a plot to it, the result was practically a steampunk fantasy of barbaric city dwellers with a few Mad Max extras sprinkled in having knife fights all over the Five Points district. Which is fine; it definitely counts as something to see. However, the movie crashes as it strains to build to a proper climax. The main plot, involving a conflict between the local dictator Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his arch-nemesis (Leonardo DiCaprio) happens to climax just in time to collide with the 1863 Draft Riots, an actual historic event that, as Scorsese stages it, smashes into the storyline like a runaway truck tearing through the back of the theater and steamrollers the main characters. The most charitable interpretation is that Scorsese was trying to show how petty and, in historical terms, forgotten the people whose struggles he'd been involving us in for the preceding two and a half hours really were. But it feels as if The Lord of the Rings had ended with the news that the year was actually 1945 and Mordor was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, and that just as Frodo and Gollum were battling for the ring, they were all wiped out by the dropping of the atomic bomb. (PN)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

MELVIN AND HOWARD (1976)

Jonathan Demme's version of the meeting of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) and Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) begins with a beauty of a long opening sequence, with Melvin giving the broken-down derelict Hughes a ride in his truck after picking him up in the desert in the middle of the night and gradually melting away his surly, defensive paranoia with the warmth of his cornball, middle American sincerity. The movie ends with a lovely little dream that finds the two of them back in the truck, with Howard taking the wheel from the exhausted, put-upon Melvin. Dennis Potter must have seen it and liked it, because he wrote a variation of it into the ending of his own 1985 film Dreamchild, with Lewis Carroll and the old woman who'd once served as the basis for his Alice standing in for Howard and Melvin, and it killed there, too. (PN)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

When I first saw Apocalypse Now on VHS in the late '80s, the finale left me breathless. Willard terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice, took Lance down to the boat, and then, after they crept away down the river, the promised airstrike fulfilled Kurtz's final instruction and exterminated them all. In the above clip, over the footage that floored the teenaged me, Francis Ford Coppola himself explains why this was not his intended interpretation. But what does he know? Coppola, who would later go on to direct such gems as The Godfather Part III and the Robin Williams vehicle Jack, thought that what the film really needed was another hour dealing with French imperialism in Southeast Asia. Although Saturday Night Live cut to the quick in their satire of the ending (Martin Sheen played a man hired by the studios to travel up river and shut down the production, and Coppola, out of ideas, blew everything up), the explosion of the set and murder of the people who worshipped Kurtz like a god is a better fit for the themes: the destructive clash of Western imperialism and other cultures, Willard becoming as hollow as Kurtz, and the fucking horror, the horror. The Coppola-approved ending is below (some of it has been translated to another language, but the visuals are what's important at the end), and while the juxtaposition of Willard's face and the statue is beautiful, luster is lacking compared to the deep reds, yellows, and whites of the airstrike. (HC)

THE BIRDS(1963)

End of the world. You expect it to come from someplace obvious, like a nuclear blast or a plague or a monster from the deep. But instead nature has turned on us, and nothing's ever going to be the same. The clip above discusses the ending that Evan Hunter intended in the script. His version had more gore, but the visual implication in the actual ending of the movie is much more unsettling, the birds covering every surface, the horrible sound of their cooing and calls, the sky dark and ominous as the car slowly starts to twist along the road. End of the world. (HC)

And, of course, we certainly couldn't forget...

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

CASABLANCA (1942)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

...but if we DID forget any of your favorites, then hopefully these two guys can pick up the slack...

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

Last week we saluted Slim Pickens’ whooping death trip aboard a nuclear bomb, but of course, that was only the beginning of the end of Dr. Strangelove. There’s no pie fight as Stanley Kubrick had originally planned, but we do get to see the great minds of the War Room contemplating the bright side of nuclear annihilation (10 women for every man!), the continuation of Cold War tension through the end of the world and beyond, and of course, the song we hope will be playing in your head as the Screengrab fades to black: We’ll meet again…don’t know where, don’t know when... (SVD)

THE PASSENGER (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s ennui-drenched cinema reached something of an apex with The Passenger, the tale of a reporter (Jack Nicholson) who, while in Africa on assignment, assumes a dead stranger’s identity to escape the soul-crushing disaffection of his own life. It’s a beguiling pseudo-noir that culminates with one of cinema’s most awe-inspiring shots, a 7-minute single take – in which the camera magically passes through a room’s iron-barred window and then rotates 180-degrees – that expresses the film’s faith-and-philosophy-tinged portrait of the folly of dreaming about escape. (NS)

CARRIE (1976)

The shock ending of Brian De Palma's horror classic provides a hint as to how De Palma got the reputation in some quarters as a rip-off artist: it's a direct steal from the ending of John Boorman's Deliverance, from just four years earlier. But it's also a clear indicator of how De Palma, in the quarters that matter, earned the reputation of a master director: his execution smokes Boorman, whose scene was a bit of a botch. By contrast, De Palma's makes audiences jump as high as anyone has ever managed without installing ejector seats in the theater. (PN)

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Just a quick word to acknowledge how clever Spielberg was to have the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest of holies, the subject of all of this strife and death, crated and boxed away in an anonymous government warehouse, presumably one of thousands of forgotten treasures. That's a wry sense of humor there. (HC)

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)

The best movie endings are the ones that come at great cost, the ones that make us feel that we’ve lived with these characters and that their eventual fate, whatever it is, has been earned. The greatest recent example of this is Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After a truly epic sequence of events, changes of scenery and direction, life, death, moral redirection, and any number of other twists and turns, the young lovers Jen and Lo, hiding out at the Wudan temple, fondly recall their time together in the forbidding, barbaric deserts, where their love had first blossomed. “Make a wish, Lo,” says Jen, in one of the most perfect deliveries of a movie line in modern memory; “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again,” he replies. Jen then silently hurls herself off the edge of the temple, into the clouds below, suspended first and then flying, calling back to a legend they’d discussed during their desert idyll as Tan Dun’s majestic, gorgeous music plays us to the credits. It’s one of the most romantic endings imaginable, and guaranteed to raise a lump in the throat of all but the coldest viewer – a scene that’s truly earned. (LP)

25TH HOUR (2002)

For most of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton) is shown coming to grips with his upcoming incarceration -- saying goodbye to his loved ones, trying to determine who sold him up the river, even asking his best friends to beat the snot out of him so he won’t look like an easy target for prison rape. But just when Monty has more or less accepted his fate, the morning he’s scheduled to make the trip up to prison, his dad James (Brian Cox) meets him for the trip with an alternative -- to escape and start a new life. Over the next ten minutes, James paints a beautiful picture of this way out -- go West, find a little town in the desert, get a new identity, and so on -- and with Terence Blanchard’s elegiac score playing behind him, the plan is as tempting as it is far-fetched. But there’s a steep price for this escape, as Monty could never return to his old life. And so, the central theme of the movie snaps sharply into focus -- the choices we all must make in life. James is prepared for the possibility of never seeing his son again as long as he knows he’ll be okay, but is Monty ready to give up everything he knows for freedom? As we see him passing all those New Yorkers he once railed against, now smiling at him and seeing him off, we wonder if he can sacrifice his past to save his future. And just when he’s come to the end of his imagined life, all of a sudden he snaps back to his real one, back in the car on the road to destiny, and Lee’s camera lingers once again on Norton’s face. The choice is yours, Monty. (PC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

2 Years Ago in the Screengrab: The Romantic Comedy Subsidy Program

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

FALL, 2007: Matthew McConaughey is sitting in front of the TV in his trailer when the door swings open and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, ushers us inside. McConaughey springs for the remote, but before he can switch off the set, we can see that he's been watching himself in the 1996 John Sayles picture Lone Star. Bernanke simply smiles, but Kate Hudson doesn't bother stifling her laughter. McConaughey blushes. "Did'ja read Janet Maslin's review of that one in the New York Times?" he asks. "Compared me to Paul Newman. Said that I should have had the lead in it, that I should have had Chris Cooper's part."

Hudson sits down next to him on the couch and gives him an affectionate hug. "I should show you my notices from Almost Famous sometimes," she purrs.

"'Course," says McConaughey, "Chris Cooper's got an Academy Award now. Which he deserves! He kept at it, kept acting, and you know, I decided to do this instead." Then he remembers that Bernanke is in the room. Looking up at the Chairman, he adds, with just a race of sheepishness in his voice, "And I'm proud to do it. It's important work."

McConaughey and Hudson are working on Fool's Gold, the latest project of the Federal Rom-Com Make-Work Administration, a division of the Fed that was set up under Alan Greenspan in 2002. A dedicated Randian, Greenspan saw the Administration's work as a way to generate work in the film business while at the same time isolating the kind of mediocrity that was so offensive to him as a follower of John Galt. Every year, the F.R.C.M.W.A. would put into production a handful of films that would keep the most mediocre technicians, directors, actors, and crew members fully employed and occupied, boosting the national employment numbers while keeping those employed from polluting the talent pool from which those trying to make actual good movies were forced to draw. The F.R.C.M.W.A. projects might employ a few good supporting actors, just to make the experience bearable for those involved; on projects so fetid that no good actor wanted any part of them, they could always make do by casting Dane Cook in multiple roles.

It was decided early on that, to make it easier to identify the F.R.C.M.W.A. projects from the other films released in a given year, three people who had established acting careers for themselves would be hired to exclusively appear in the Administration's pictures. It was a hard sacrifice; it meant effectively retiring from the acting profession. Hudson and McConaughy were among those first approached. Hudson was quick to sign on. "It just sounded easy, you know? I mean, I hear these other girls talk about creating characters, testing themselves, trying new things, blah blah blah, and maybe I don't get it. I do this, and I still get paid and my picture's in People and if there's a 'rock star'"--Hudson rolls her eyes as she makes air quotes with her fingers--"that nobody else wants, I can marry him. Maybe I'm missing something, but if you can get that with hard work and I can get it just by watching my diet and showing up, why would I want to do any hard work, when knowing that it's not even supposed to be any good is such a tremendous load off." She shrugs. "I guess I'm my mother's daughter, y'know?"

McConaughey took some persuading. "I sort of miss acting," he admits. "I mean, maybe I was only any good in like, one out of fifteen times at bat...that little bit I did in Dazed and Confused, it was kind of entertaining, right?" He looks at me open-mouthed for a long time. I'm slow to catch on that he's actually waiting for me to say yes. I nod, and he looks very relieved. "Now, you take your A Time to Kill and your Contact and your Amistad--okay, I'm a little bitter about Amistad. I think that Steven Spielberg could have protected me better. I mean, maybe not guide me to a good performance. I understand that he had a lot of other things to think about on that one. But he was in charge of the editing, not me, and there's just so much he could have cut out that would have made it less embarrassing. You know, that moment where I'm supposed to be a lawyer in the 1830s, and I get a ruling that I like, and I pump my arm and say, 'Yes!' like I'm playing pick-up basketball...I asked him, years later, I asked him, 'Steven, I know I deserve the blame for being the one who did it, but why didn't you just cut it out?" And you know what he told me? He said, 'Matthew, I remember when you did it during filming, I had what my doctor later diagnosed as a mini-stroke, and when I came to, I didn't remember you'd done it. And then when we were editing, every time I saw that moment in the footage, I'll be darned if I didn't have another mini-stroke, and forget all about it again. I didn't retain my awareness that you done it, and that I'd left it in the picture, until the red-carpet premiere. I mean, when I saw you do it up there on the big screen, naturally, I had another mini-stroke and blacked out. But this time, when I came to a few minutes later, everybody in the theater was still laughing."

McConaughey continues, "So I did keep plugging away, and I wanted to keep trying, but I was up late one night mulling over the offer, and thinking about how my career was going. And the last real movie I did was this thing where I fought a dragon." McConaughey's eyes seem to mist over. "I picked up the phone and said, sure. If it's good for the economy..."

McConaughey and Hudson co-starred in the F.R.C.M.W.A's first project, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Since then, McConaughey has starred in 36 films for the administration, with Hudson making 47. This is the first time they've co-starred since Ten Days, making it a bittersweet reunion for them both. They and the others who've become an essential component in the process have learned a lot as they've gone. "Sometimes," Hudson says, "in the early days, there'd be a line in a script that makes you laugh, and you're like, whoa, how did that get in there? It''ll turn out that the writers have trouble padding out the scripts to feature length by themselves. So they'll 'borrow'"--she makes the air quotes again--"lines or ideas from their friends, or family members, or something the saw on the Internet, or somebody peeing himself in front of the bus stop, and it may turn out that those people have some talent." It used to be policy that anything good that found its way into a script would be peeled off and submitted to the writing staff of The Simpsons. "But," says Hudson, "that doesn't really happen anymore since Ben came on board with his little 'brainstorm.""

Bernanke succeeded Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve in 2006 and was immediately briefed on the workings of the F.R.C.M.W.A. "And at that time," he says, "the Iraq War had really hit the wall and the guys whose bright idea that was were not in very great demand, so there were all these neo con geniuses roaming the halls of the White House, starting crap games and weeping. So I thought to myself, these are guys who were brought in for their understanding of foreign policy and national defense, and when a bunch of lunatics from Saudi Arabia staged a terrorist attack on American soil, their big master plan was, we should find a country in the Middle East that has no connection to these nut jobs and where there's a tin horn dictator who won't even let them set a toe inside the country, and invade that place, and topple the government, and create such chaos that everybody there hates our guts, and the lunatics who attacked us can roll in for the first time ever and use it as their farm team, that'll show 'em. I got to thinking, wow, what would a bunch of minds like that do with a subject like courtship strategy? So I told Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Condalleezza Rice, and Richard Perle that it was vital to our national interests that I had spec scripts for romantic comedies from each of them on my desk within the week, and within four hours Feith turns in the screenplay of Failure to Launch!" The scripts are produced under pseudonyms. It turned out that Rice, who prepared for the assignment by buying a box set of Love, American Style, had a sense of farce structure just rudimentary enough in its general level of competence that her scripts have a chance of being slightly better than bearable. Bernanke sells them to Jennifer Lopez's company.

I note that neither McConaughey nor Hudson has yet made a film with the third working headliner of the F.R.C.M.W.A., Jennifer Aniston. Is that a matter of just never finding the right script.

"Actually," says Bernanke, "that's kind of a soft spot around here, because while Jennifer is a very important member of the Administration, she doesn't know that she's in the Administration. Along Came Polly, The Break-Up, Marley & Me--she thinks they're all real movies. And we humor her because she's such a valuable member of the team. You see, the scripts that Jennifer does, they aren't generated in-house. Somebody trying to do his best actually wrote them, but they're absolutely F.R.C.M.W.A.-quality. Jennifer herself picked them out from the pile; she has the most unerring instincts for what it is we do. We like to this of her," Bernanke beams, "as our little truffle-hunting friend."

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Eight)

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

And now, the worst...

Bjork in DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)

Most of the deaths on this worst list are disappointing, ill-conceived or simply ridiculous, but Dancer In The Dark is another animal entirely. The end of feel-bad auteur Lars Von Trier’s 2000 sadistic (and ultimately pointless) exercise in suffering and hopelessness was so excruciatingly painful and unpleasant to watch that I felt like I'd been punched in the ribcage. Which is not to say it's a bad movie, exactly. Which is not to say it's a good movie, either. I have to give a certain amount of respect to a film (and scene) that produces such a visceral reaction in me -- but, then again, I had a similar reaction to that infamous bootleg videotape of a politician shooting himself in the head at a press conference. Like somebody said once, it's easy to get a reaction out of an audience: just strangle a puppy. But that don't necessarily make it art. (AO)

Tom Hanks in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

Earn this? Blow me. Saving Private Ryan isn't thoroughly terrible, but the schmaltz at the end is hard to take. Tom Hanks is shot by the same guy whose life he spared a few days before? Gimme a break. Why, those evil, ungrateful Germans. I guess they got what was coming to them. All of the swelling strings and tearful codas in the world can't mask how unearned and meaningless this death scene is. I'm fairly sure that Spielberg expects his audience to start laying palm fronds at the feet of the greatest generation who fought the Nazi menace after all this sturm und drang, but I was left wishing it had come some 14 hours earlier, back when I cared about the movie. (HC)

Mel Gibson in BRAVEHEART (1995)

Mel Gibson is really into the torture porn and martyrdom, isn't he? I know this isn't news; even the South Park parody is old and moldy. But at the end of Braveheart, Gibson's weird fetish wasn't old and creepy yet. It was new and creepy! And meant to lead the audience to admire ol' William Wallace for his hearty shout of "FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMM" despite his (offscreen) pain. And hey, if Mel could take the fake pain of the fake torture and still rally enough shout for freedom, what's a little waterboarding among friends? Perhaps I'm being overly glib; this movie was made well before our nation turned a blind eye to torture. And the message really isn't pro-torture so much as "boy, those English sure enjoyed publicly torturing that Scot guerrilla warrior." But the endless slo-mo, the black-and-white morality throughout, the obnoxious pushy score, all of these were torture enough for me as a viewer before we even approached Mel's craptastic death scene. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to shout freedom and escape the theater. (HC)

William Shatner in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994)

They got Spock’s death right in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, except that he wasn’t really dead. They got Kirk’s death all wrong in Star Trek: Generations, but he still stayed dead – hell, he couldn’t even score a cameo in the new movie. A misconceived bridge between the old school Trek crew – emphasis on “old” by 1994 – and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and company, the movie was meant to launch a series of Next Generation movies while giving the outgoing administration a dignified sendoff. It didn’t accomplish either task with much success. The Next Gen flicks quickly petered out, and only three of the original series cast signed on for their farewell voyage – two of whom (James Doohan’s Scotty and Walter Koenig’s Chekov) disappear with little fanfare early in the proceedings. In the final reel, Screengrab MVP Shatner shows up to lend Picard a hand stopping Malcolm McDowell from destroying the universe or something, but Kirk’s “heroic” actions are pretty run-of-the-mill by his standards and his final moments woefully anticlimactic. (SVD)

But don’t take our word for it – here’s the man himself:

Shatner Responds: The Death Of Captain Kirk

Al Pacino in THE GODFATHER, PART III (1990)

No matter your faith, your creed, your political persuasion or your favorite Beatle, there’s one thing upon which all right-thinking people can agree: Michael Corleone’s story ended with the final shot of The Godfather, Part II. Nothing came after that. We all know he died at some point, because that’s how it works, but there was no reason to ever see it happen because the story was over. Unfortunately, some wrong-thinking people disagreed and eventually one of those people turned out to be Francis Ford Coppola, who had some bills to pay. He even wanted to title this movie The Death of Michael Corleone, just to make it clear that this is something he thought we should see. And so, at the end of his very terrible movie The Godfather, Part III, Coppola jumps some unknown distance into the future, where we find Al Pacino sitting alone on a bench with a bunch of grey shit in his hair. And then suddenly – and here I can’t put it any better than my friend John Mitchell did back in the day – he slumps over like Ruth Buzzi just whacked him with her handbag. And a little dog licks his face. I realize this is how I’m probably going to go out, too, but nobody made three movies about me. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak

Fox Pulls the Plug on "Terminator" TV Series

Phil Nugent — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Fox has canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the expensive TV series spun off from the now 24-year-old movie franchise, after two seasons and a mere 31 episodes. The series was "created" by Josh Friedman, a screenwriter and blogger who, strangely enough, is best known for his association with movies that he didn't work on. (Friedman was co-credited, with David Koepp, with the script for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, based on a script he'd written based on the H. G. Wells novel before Spielberg and Koepp got involved, and he got the ball rolling on Snakes on a Plane as an Internet punch line.) The series, which got off to a fast start when it premiered mid-season in January 2008, starred Lena Headley of 300 in the role made famous by Linda Hamilton and Thomas Dekker as John Connor, the role created by Edward Furling in Terminator 2, picked up by Nick Stahl in Terminator 3, and about to become, as of this coming Friday, the now-exclusive property of Christian Bale. The cast also included the dancer-actress Summer Glau, whose picture now belongs in the dictionary next to the term "hot poker-faced killer robot babe." It is an unwieldy term, but clearly it or something with the same meaning belongs in the language.

The series, which ended with a cliffhanger designed to make viewers sit up and yell at their sets, "Oh, like this wasn't already confusing enough!", recently won 53% of the vote in the TV channel E!'s annual Save One Show poll, in which viewers select their favorite among a selection of programs said to be in danger of imminent cancellation. (Ironically, the shows that came in second and third in the rankings, Chuck and Dollhouse, have both since been renewed.) For his part, Friedman has issued a public letter thanking fans for their support, saying, "Every network wants a big fat hit, especially one with a brand name behind it, and Fox was/is no different. They supported the show, they supported my vision of the show, and they gave it plenty of time to find an audience." Of course, for the movie industry, the big question is whether this bodes ill for the relaunch of the brand name as a big-budget movie franchise, when Terminator Salvation opens. If the movie fails to live up to its makers' hopes, they may have something to point to now besides Bale's much-disseminated video rant.

Morning Deal Report: Dreamworks Has a Dream

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

“DreamWorks has acquired the life rights to Martin Luther King Jr. and is bringing a biopic on the slain civil rights leader to the bigscreen,” Variety reports. Steven Spielberg is among the producers. "We are all honored that the King Estate is giving us the opportunity to tell the story of these defining, historic events," Spielberg said. "It is our hope that the creative power of film and the impact of Dr. King's life can combine to present a story of undeniable power that we can all be proud of." It remains to be seen whether Spielberg will direct.

George Clooney’s Goats have found a home. The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson’s nonfiction book, is in post-production and distribution rights have been snapped up by Overture, per The Hollywood Reporter. “CAA packaged and sold the satire, in which Ewan MacGregor stars as a reporter who comes across a solider (Clooney) who reveals that the U.S. Army is using paranormal techniques in Iraq. Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges co-star, Peter Straughan wrote the screenplay and Clooney, Heslov and Paul Lister produced.”

But there’s more Clooney news! The Cloon will star in A Very Private Gentleman, an adaptation of the Martin Booth novel to be directed by Anton Corbijn. ‘Clooney will play an assassin who hides out in an idyllic Italian town before carrying out a final assignment. He resists his usual aversion to human interaction, and his friendships and romantic entanglements complicate his mission.”

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

On This Day in Screengrab History: May 12, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

SATURN 3 (1980)

To be honest, the scariest thing about Stanley Donen’s Cheez-Whiz science fiction chamber piece isn’t the giant “Demi-God” robot Hector (not even after the human-brained cyborg is reprogrammed with the horny, homicidal impulses of Harvey Keitel’s Abby-Normal cerebellum). Nor is it the terrible acting by Farrah Fawcett or the sight of Kirk Douglas’ naked rump in action. No, for me, the scariest thing about Saturn 3 is the inexplicable streak of Puritan fundamentalism it elicited when I saw it on the big screen many moons ago, prompting me to sit down and fire off an angry letter to Starlog magazine about all the unnecessary sexual content Donen had slipped into a genre (science fiction) that was usually a non-threatening, safely asexual haven for pubescent, maladjusted geeks like my then (barely) 13-year-old self. The fact that Keitel stared at the private parts of (scantily-clad) Fawcett’s dog, Sally, then later wrestled with a nude Douglas filled me with moral outrage (masking hormonal unease) that was later replaced by massive embarrassment when the aforementioned letter was actually published and, worse, discovered (and mercilessly mocked) by my friends. And now, thanks to the wonders of modern bloggage, I can share my Saturn 3 embarrassment with the whole wide world, all at the touch of a button...thanks a bunch, technology! (AO)

WARGAMES (1983)

In WarGames, Matthew Broderick is the first kid in America with the Internet, but unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to know how to use it to download porn. He does know how to hack into his high school’s system and change his grades, which is useful, but not as useful as changing his cute classmate Jennifer’s (Ally Sheedy) grades. He also tries to break new ground in the field of cyber-piracy by downloading a cool new game from the manufacturer before it’s even released, but instead inadvertently hacks into the NORAD supercomputer known as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) and launches a potentially apocalyptic game of Global Thermonuclear War. From a modern standpoint, WarGames plays like a goofy shotgun marriage of John Hughes-ian ‘80s teen comedy and dated technothriller, but I’ll give the movie credit for anticipating the potential for cyber-terrorism long before any of us knew what that meant and also for tapping into Reagan-era anxiety about nuclear war, accidental and otherwise. It’s harder to forgive the simplistic, preachy “tic-tac-toe” ending (seen above), but maybe they can fix that in the inevitable remake. (SVD)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

Steven Spielberg turned a Philip K. Dick story into an action vehicle for Tom Cruise, with results that actually trash the ideas in the original material less thoroughly than a lot of other moves based on Dick's work. The ideas can't said to be far from timely, either. Cruise is the head of the Washington, D.C. "Precrime" force, which uses psychics and a vast electronic surveillance network to pick out people who are contemplating committing crimes and arrest them before the crimes actually occur. Cruise, as twittishly self-satisfied as ever, sees nothing troubling about this way of doing things until he himself is identified as a potential evildoer, at which point he suddenly detects certain flaws in the system. A good movie up until the last fifteen minutes or so; not even Dick ever imagined a drug that could make the ending go down easily. (PN)

SERENITY (2005)

Most of Joss Whedon's space-cowboys fantasy (spun off from his criminally short-lived TV series Firefly) revels in futuristic technology, treating it as a blast, but it has a sting in its tail: the revelation of what terrible secret the government is sitting on. In one of his novels, William S. Burroughs once invented a drug called Bor Bor, which was "held in horror" by Burroughs' heroes and "only used as a weapon against our enemies"; its effect "is to lull the user into a state of fuzzy well-being and benevolence, a warm good feeling that everything will come out all right for America." The crew of Serenity discover the remains of a city that consists of functioning, automated buildings filled with dusty corpses; they are all that is left of a population that was fed on an experimental drug that was designed to produce a more tranquil, non-violent people less inclined to object to or protest anything, and who became so satisfied with the state of things that they stopped moving altogether and quietly starved to death. That's one version of Morning in America. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Nick Schager — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Though dogged by rumors that executive producer Steven Spielberg spearheaded its production, 1982’s Poltergeist was nonetheless The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s first mainstream, major-studio success. His 1985 follow-up Lifeforce, however, demolished most of the professional momentum generated by his prior effort, and a simple recap of its plot suggests why. Investigating Haley’s Comet, a joint American-British space shuttle crew discovers an extraterrestrial ship full of desiccated bat-man creatures and three nude humanoids trapped in giant crystals, whom the astronauts bring aboard their own craft. Some time later, another space expedition recovers these three unclothed figures, including a gorgeous female (Mathilda May), and transports them to Earth, where they turn out to be space vampires who can possess bodies and are intent on draining – and then beaming to the umbrella-shaped ship they’ve positioned just above London – as many human souls as they can harvest. As May’s sexy E.T. sucks people dry and telepathically communicates with the astronaut (Steve Railsback) who first discovered her, Londoners sapped of their lifeforces become zombies, terrorizing the city and putting mankind’s continued survival in peril.

The term “batshit insane,” it seems, was created with this specific film in mind. And yet I’d argue that’s a positive, since how many unironic psychosexual space vampire-zombie apocalypse films do you get in one lifetime – and helmed by Tobe Hooper in his (relative) prime, no less? Adapted from Colin Wilson’s novel Space Vampires by Don Jakoby and Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, Lifeforce has an off-the-deep-end mentality that was bound to alienate, its plot going from silly to ludicrous to mental ward-bonkers without even an accompanying hint of wink-wink self-consciousness. Hooper plays his bizarro material straight, which in this case involves repeatedly employing a dreamy, hallucinatory aesthetic marked by twisting, gliding, seemingly weightless camerawork, extreme soft-focus lighting, and heightened shot-reverse shot angles for his protagonists’ telepathic conversations. Juxtaposed rotating close-ups of May and Railsback during their maiden encounter not only beautifully evoke how Railsback’s world is about to be turned figuratively upside-down, but elegantly establishes the two characters’ forthcoming mental-physical union, one of many instances where Hooper’s evocative direction elevates his often loony-tunes sci-fi saga.

Hooper’s potent widescreen cinematography and Henry Mancini’s robust score help foster a surrealistic atmosphere for a story simultaneously intoxicated and frightened by femininity. The embodiment of male sexual fantasies and anxieties, May’s Playboy-ready, perpetually nude succubus gives the action a perversely electric energy, while the performances of Railsback, Peter Firth (as a military colonel) and Frank Finlay (as a government scientist who studies “death”) afford just enough campiness to keep the proceedings light. Originally trimmed of 15 minutes by TriStar Pictures, Lifeforce’s restored 116-minute DVD cut boasts few glaring plot holes but a number of memorable horror images – blue lightening flashing around the gaping mouths of a reanimated, dried-out corpse and his victim; May’s alien materializing from the blood spewing out of a deceased Patrick Stewart’s mouth; an ominously carnal dream sequence; and a final, naked make-out session between May and Railsback in a column of blue light comprised of human souls. Frequently outlandish and far from profound, it’s nonetheless a box-office bomb that, like its horror-maestro director, deserved quite a bit better.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 14-20, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You look marvelous. I must confess I was touched, as am I every year, when the good people at AMPAS called once again to ask me to host the Oscars. Although they begged and pleaded and cajoled and nearly stooped to bribery, as they always do, I simply could not work the telecast into my very busy schedule. I’m currently touring with my very touching one-man show about going to Yankee Stadium with my dad, watching Mickey Mantle gracefully prancing through the lush green outfield of the House That Ruth Built, sharing the laughs and the tears that only a father and son can truly know. So I don’t have time to do all the research, such as reading Up the Academy: The Screengrab Salutes the All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Truly I wish I could squeeze Phil Nugent’s Oscar Predictions, In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload, Harvey Weinstein Predicts Another Great Oscar Year for Harvey Weinstein, Oscar Prospectus and Academy Awards Show Cuts Best Song Nominee "Down to Earth" Down to 65 Seconds; Peter Gabriel Vows Silent Protest into my busy schedule. But I cannot.

Nor can I read any of the following:

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Screengrab Review: "Must Read After My Death" and "Eleven Minutes"

Mike White’s Amazing Race

Counting Down to “Watchmen”

Reviews By Request: How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford)

Unwatchable #51: “Simon Sez”

Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

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

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)

When it comes to second-guessing the Oscars, few Best Pictures raise Hollywood’s hackles like Shakespeare in Love. The legend goes something like this: way back in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant war movie Saving Private Ryan was a cinch to win the top slot, but sometime between the announcement of nominations and the opening of envelopes, Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the evil geniuses behind Shakespeare’s Oscar campaign) flew the invisible Miramax blimp over Hollywood and fired their diabolical Hypno-Ray at the helpless population, thus forcing all the innocent Who’s Who down in Whoville to vote for the wrong movie. As John Foote posts at InContention.com (reflecting an apparently common consensus), “Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that Shakespeare in Love, a lovely film, was actually better than Saving Private Ryan?” Well...uh, yes, actually. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Shakespeare in Love was MUCH better. Ryan, for all the slam-pow-gasp shock & awe chaos of its opening battle scene devolves shortly thereafter into a standard-issue World War II potboiler, circa 1952, complete with “Brooklyn,” “Redneck” and all the rest of the colorfully standard-issue Hollywood band of brothers fussin’ and fightin’ their way across Europe under the command of a tough but secretly tender-hearted father figure (played by a wildly miscast and completely unbelievable Tom Hanks). Shakespeare In Love, meanwhile, presented an Elizabethan world more fully-imagined than fellow Best Picture competitor Elizabeth, thanks to a remarkably literate and inventive screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And, while it’s easy to mock the GOOP-tastic Gwyneth of today, Paltrow generated palpable chemistry with co-star Joseph Fiennes in a well told, old-school love story, surrounded by a flawless supporting cast, all of them at or near the top of their games. True, movies this smart don’t usually win Oscars...which is probably why so many Academy voters are still baffled by Shakespeare’s victory.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)

So many of Oscar's pronouncements amount to a string of missed calls and concessions to sentimentality that when they get one right square on the nose -- when someone is rewarded for the best work of their career at that point in time as opposed to what they did a few years ago or what they might do if they can be induced not to chuck it all and go back to night school or even, as in the case of something like Ben Kingsley's performance in Gandhi, what the person they're playing did -- it stands out. The Academy has had plenty of opportunities to give Jack Nicholson a thumb's-up these past several years, and plenty of times they've jumped at the chance, even when, as in 1997's As Good As It Gets, the performance in question called to mind Picasso's boast that "I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody!" But they got it just right with Nicholson's first Oscar, for his Randall Patrick McMurphy, a performance that he gave a year after Chinatown set his movie star status in stone, and one that goes farther than he'd ever gone before, with fewer ingratiating winks and nods to the audience than he'd ever include in a full-length performance again. And since the movie, for all its virtues, rises and falls on the strength of its star, it deserved its Best Picture Oscar...a painful thing for this lifelong Jaws partisan to concede.

THE WORST:

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937)

Today Paul Muni is best remembered for his starring role in Howard Hawks' gangster classic Scarface. It turned out to be a rare occasion when Muni provided movie audiences with entertainment value for their money. After winning an Oscar nomination for his next film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Muni lost to Charles Laughton for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII and must have vowed to never be out-biopic'ed again. In short order, he established himself as the leading advocate of pompous, overbearing movies, winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Life of Louis Pasteur, in which he cured anthrax over the outraged objections of the small-minded, and then starred in Zola, in which he "J'accused" up one side of France and down the other. He also starred in Juarez, as Juarez, and The Good Earth, in which he must have disappointed his diehard fans by not actually portraying the planet. It all made him the Mister Oscar Bait of the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, audiences were sick of the self-righteous sight of him. He tried to get back to where he once belonged, but too much time spent reciting gaseous speeches while buried in historically conscientious makeup jobs had blunted his instincts, and some of his later movie roles, such as his lovable gangster in Angel on My Shoulder (1946), are actually even worse than the Oscar-bait stuff. He died in 1967, the bulk of his filmography fit only to serve as a cautionary example that Meryl Streep failed to heed.

DRIVING MISS DAISY (1989)

It’s not often that a movie dealing with racial issues is so totally (if well-meaningly) clueless that it gets an entire rap song dedicated to its utter boneheadedness, but Driving Miss Daisy is that movie, and Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn” is that song. After years of racism, stereotyping, and opportunities denied, Chuck D and his cohorts seemed to be saying, this is what constitutes progress? A movie about a cranky old southern Jewish woman whose black chauffer learns to live and love with her irascible, patronizing demeanor? Not only was it offensive on a number of levels – intentionally and otherwise – but it simply wasn’t a great movie by any reckoning. Its adaptation from a stage play was realized hamhandedly, Bruce Beresford’s direction is perfunctory, and the acting ranges from good but uninspiring to ambitious but dull (Dan Aykroyd ineptly takes the kind of risks that would later rejuvenate Bill Murray’s career). It’s easy to say that its victory came about because of a weak competitive field – other candidates ranged from poor (Dead Poets Society) to good-but-not-great (My Left Foot) – but the thing to remember is that 1989 was also the year that Spike Lee’s wonderful Do the Right Thing, a superior movie in every respect, and one that said far more about racial relations than Driving Miss Daisy could dream, was released. And it didn’t even get a nomination.

DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990)

Hot on the heels of Driving Miss Daisy, you wouldn’t think Oscar would be so quick to embrace another well-meaning racial drama, especially one helmed by someone who’s an even worse director than he is an actor. But sure enough, the voters’ tendency to absurdly overvalue any directorial effort by an actor that rises above total incompetence won out, and Kevin Costner’s bloated, plodding quasi-Western Dances with Wolves took home the Best Picture trophy in 1990. Continuing their history of giving Martin Scorsese the finger, they passed over his tremendous gangster tale GoodFellas in deference to this ridiculously overlong, condescending story of a white man who becomes beloved of the Indians by virtue of his sublime spirituality (heaven forfend the hero of the movie be an actual Indian, because then there wouldn’t be a starring role for director Kevin Costner’s favorite star, actor Kevin Costner). Dances with Wolves isn’t quite horrible enough to be the modern-day equivalent of The Greatest Show On Earth; it does contain some thrilling scenes, some decent acting, and direction that’s proficient if never outstanding. But its grossly overweight running time and heavy-handed message are easily the equal of anything in DeMille’s hokey circus epic. Still, things could have been worse; though no one remembers this anymore, The Godfather Part III was a Best Picture nominee in ’90, too.

BRAVEHEART (1995)

Oh, Oscar, when will you learn? By 1995, a clear theme was emerging: if you’re a well-known actor, and you manage to direct a movie without crushing yourself to death with a SteadiCam or making the entire movie with the lens caps on, you’ve got a pretty strong chance at winning a Best Picture or Best Director award even if your movie is an obvious mediocrity facing competition from much better movies by actual directors. You’d think the Academy would have figured it out: Warren Beatty did nothing worthwhile after Reds. Robert Redford never made a great movie after his Ordinary People win. Kevin Costner’s post-Dances with Wolves work is an utter embarrassment. Clint Eastwood is the most reliable acting director in Hollywood, and even he’s not that great by the standards of legitimate, non-acting directors. And yet, they fell for the exact same trick with Mel Gibson’s second directorial feature, the overheated, self-important William Wallace biopic Braveheart. A few well-staged battle scenes and some fancy speechifying don’t save the sluggish pace of the movie or the overwhelming sensation that Wallace is a bit of a sociopathic bully, and the movie doesn’t bear up to even one repeat viewing. It’s not awful, and Gibson has shown he’s capable of good work as a director since then, but Braveheart didn’t even remotely deserve to win Best Picture, even in a relatively weak year for movies.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

If you think this economy is causing problems for you, shed a tear for Steven Spielberg. As Kim Masters reports, DreamWorks, the film company that Spielberg co-founded in the '90s with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, "sold itself to Paramount in 2006 for about $1.6 billion, but the relationship with Paramount chief Brad Grey quickly soured. When contracts allowed it, DreamWorks partner David Geffen stepped out and stepped down. Spielberg and CEO Stacey Snider also left, planning to raise their own money and distribute their films through Universal. That's the studio that Spielberg has always considered his home. (He kept his offices there even after his company sold itself to Paramount.)" At the time, nobody thought that Spielberg would either be begging for pennies or sweating to close a movie deal anytime soon. But then the bottom fell out of the economy, and DreamWorks started ceding to Paramount its right to participate in the production of some hotly anticipated projects that it had developed, treating them as so many sandbags that needed to be tossed over the side. Of course, Spielberg has never lacked for a full plate, but at the moment he's been focused on Lincoln, the planned biopic starring Liam Neeson and written by Tony Kushner. Part of the idea behind the movie was to have it ready for release this year, as part of the celebration of Abe's 200th birthday, and Spielberg was hoping to begin shooting in a few weeks. But he was also hoping that he'd be able to raise the money. When he and DreamWorks found that tough sledding, they asked Universal, which was expected to ultimately distribute Lincoln, to chip in with financing. When Universal proved cool to that, DreamWorks entered into tentative, secret talks with Disney, talks that became a lot less tentative when it turned out that they weren't all that secret. When Universal, which thought it had an exclusive offer from DreamWorks, found out about the Disney negotiations, the studio pitched a fit and, in what Masters calls "an embarrassment that stunned Hollywood", told the aging golden boy and his company to go screw, "pushing DreamWorks into a hasty distribution deal with Disney—a deal less favorable, in certain respects, than the one that had been contemplated at Universal."

Lincoln is now in limbo, along with a few other DreamWorks projects (including Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones) that the studio doesn't want to relinquish its rights to but can't afford to fund or buy outright. Spielberg is hoping that Paramount will foot the bill on Lincoln--Masters notes that the decision will be made by "Brad Grey—the man the DreamWorks team treated for a long time as a mortal enemy." A couple of things make this more complicated than it might seem from a distance. For one thing, Spielberg's relations with Universal run so far back and so deep that nobody's sure whether their disagreement is just a little tiff--Spielberg still has his office on the Universal lot and "continues to serve as a consultant on the Universal theme parks, for which he collects a princely two percent of the gate from all of the parks outside Southern California." And nobody's sure about the commercial prospects of Lincoln: it's one of Spielberg's "serious" movies, and might well turn out to be less along the lines of Schindler's List in terms of popualar appeal than his previous attempt at dealing with the issue of slavery, the ambitious and much-unloved Amistad. So whoever gets in bed with Spielberg for this may not be beginning a long-term relationship with the world's most successful director; they could just be paying for one of his tax write-off projects before he gets over his mid-life crisis and goes crawling back to his first wife's house. (Meanwhile, Disney is said to be toying with the idea of tying its Lincoln-themed attractions at its own park to the movie by hiring Liam Neeson to supply the voice of the Robo-President, an idea that, if anything came of it, would surely have Universal lawyers parachuting onto the Disney CEO's front lawn.) No doubt this will all end up working out in a way that makes everyone involved feel just wonderful. Until then, writes Masters, "the spectacle of Steven Spielberg reduced from 800-pound gorilla to maybe 400-pound gorilla is enough to send shivers through even the iciest executives in the business."

Screengrab Review: “The Shark Is Still Working”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

As I’ve mentioned here before, Jaws is a movie that’s always been near and dear to my heart. I realize I am not alone in this, especially now that I’ve seen the fan-made documentary The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws. A true labor of love – maybe even a labor of obsession – the nearly three-hour film has been in the works for four years, which is a good thing since several of the principal participants are no longer with us. (Peter Benchley, author of the novel Jaws, died in 2006, and February 10th will mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Roy Scheider, who played Chief Brody and narrates this documentary.) The Shark Is Still Working is required viewing for any Jaws fanatic, but for the moment, at least, that’s a problem: the documentary has yet to secure distribution, although it seems a no-brainer that Universal should pick it up for DVD release at least.

Wisely, director Erik Hollander and his crew have not made another behind-the-scenes “Making of Jaws” doc, instead confining the familiar production tales to the first fifteen minutes or so. (The film’s title comes from a story Richard Dreyfuss could tell in his sleep by now, about walking around Martha’s Vineyard during production and hearing the constant squawk of two-way radios: “The shark is not working! Repeat! The shark is not working!”) Instead, Still Working is an exhaustive – and occasionally exhausting – scrapbook of Jaws minutiae: along with the expected interviews with Benchley, Scheider, Dreyfuss, director Steven Spielberg and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the documentary goes in-depth with artist Roger Kastel (who painted the famous one-sheet image of shark closing in on nude swimmer), late voice-over talent Percy Rodrigues (who lent his low-key menacing tones to the Jaws trailer) and Carl Gottlieb (the co-screenwriter who penned the influential making-of book The Jaws Log).

But there’s more – much more. Still Working also features some solid gold video footage of Spielberg on the morning the Academy Award nominations for 1975 were announced. (“I got beaten out by Fellini!” a crestfallen Spielberg announces, with indignant character actor Joe Spinell at his side for some reason.) Collectors of Jaws props and memorabilia, attendees at a Jaws fan convention and builders of a replica of the original mechanical shark “Bruce” are also interviewed, as are filmmakers Kevin Smith, M. Night Shyamalan, Bryan Singer, Eli Roth and Robert Rodriguez, all citing Jaws as a huge influence. (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether more good than harm has been done.)

At times, The Shark Is Still Working can be a bit repetitive. I lost track of the number of testimonials to the oft-cited accidental brilliance that led to the shark going unseen for the first half of the film (although it’s nice to hear Spielberg admit that Jaws would be a much worse movie if he made it today, given the ready access to CGI effects). But while a few trims here and there wouldn’t hurt, it’s really the ramshackle enthusiasm for tangential matters that makes the documentary such a joy for Jaws fans. My absolute favorite section of the film centers on the residents of Martha’s Vineyard, many of whom participated in the making of Jaws, either behind the scenes or as local color onscreen. I’m not much of a fan convention guy, but I’m very sorry I missed JawsFest 2005 and its screening of the original movie right on shark beach – and I’m especially sorry I didn’t get there before the rotting hull of the Orca was completely dismantled by overzealous fans. Watching The Shark Is Still Working is the next best thing to being there, however, and here’s hoping everyone gets the chance to see it soon.

Reconstructing Stanley Kubrick’s “Aryan Papers”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Last summer we told you about Kubrick’s Boxes, the documentary Jon Ronson made about digging through the extensive Stanley Kubrick archives. (Sadly, the YouTube link to Ronson’s film is no longer functional.) As it turns out, Ronson was not the only one given the keys to the legendary filmmaker’s attic. Turner-prize nominated artists (and twins) Jane and Louise Wilson “were invited to delve into the Stanley Kubrick archives at the University of the Arts in London and come up with a piece of work to coincide with a major Kubrick season on the South Bank this year. What they alighted on was the fascinating story of Aryan Papers, a film that he was adapting from Louis Begley's 1991 novel, Wartime Lies,” according to The Guardian.

The Wilsons will tell the story of the unmade film through an installation at the BFI in London. “Kubrick, a secretive obsessional perfectionist by any standards, spent months on preproduction for Aryan Papers, even casting the Dutch actor Johanna ter Steege in the lead role. The Wilsons came across intriguing stills of Ter Steege in different costumes, shot at different angles and in different lights and, taking these as a starting point, then approached the actor herself. The resulting film will cut between the stills and their interview with Ter Steege.”

Kubrick abandoned the project once Steven Spielberg began work on his Holocaust film, Schindler’s List. (Given how many movies on the subject have been made since – and how long it took the director to complete his later films – he probably could have proceeded without worrying about any conflict of interest.) Or, as Louise Wilson notes, he may have had a different reason for moving on to other things: “Having spoken to Johanna, it sounds like he got very depressed. He was so immersed in this research I think he found the process quite disturbing and upsetting.”

If you happen to be in London in the next few months, you can check out the installation at the BFI beginning February 13th.

Related:
The Kubrick Rarities
Kubrick's Marketing Man Speaks

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:

BLUE VELVET (1986)

I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.

MOUSEHOLES (1999)

Helen Hill, who died in 2007, and who earlier this week was awarded a Leo Award by the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, was a friend of mine. Helen was an independent filmmaker, though given the way that term is bandied about these days, it doesn't begin to capture just how independent she was; she never had an agent or a distributor, but finished her short animated films when she could and trucked them around to festivals with a reel tucked under her arm. Her masterpiece, Mouseholes, is a tribute to her dead grandfather that draws on home movies, Helen's own childlike animation, and tape-recorded conversations to make something sublime out of one of the most remarkable things about movies, and one of the key ways in which they have forever changed our world: their ability to enable us to hold onto a few invaluable pieces of the people we've lost, like ghosts trapped in bottles. For Helen, the film was about hanging onto part of her grandfather; now, for those of us left behind, the film has become about holding onto part of the woman who made it.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Let's be clear about this: the reason that one of the best, funniest comedies in the history of movies exists is that its producer-director, Howard Hawks, had the balls and the taste to be corrupt in just the right way. A lot of people with as much talent as Hawks would never have thought of taking The Front Page, which then had a pretty good claim to being the greatest American play yet written and is nothing to sneeze at now, and turning it into a romantic comedy by giving the lead role a sex change and turning the other male lead into her ex-husband, who's waiting to make his next move. And while Hollywood was, and always will be, full of crass jackals who'd think nothing of trying something like that, hardly any of them would have been able to pull it off. (A 1988 remake of Hawks' rip-off, set in the world of TV news and starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels was apparently made just to demonstrate this very point.) By now, His Girl Friday is so solidly (and deservedly) entrenched in its super-plus classic status that most people are barely aware of what a cold-blooded commercial calculation it's based on, or even that it has a title that ought to make you barf. I bring all this up now not because it takes anything away from the wonderfulness of the movie, because it doesn't: if I'm ever exiled to a desert island, this son of a bitch is coming with me. But it's worth keeping in mind, so that in a movie culture increasingly open to conventional wisdom and partisan warfare, everyone keeps in mind the final word on how greatness is achieved: you just never know.

TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1065)

Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute documentary record of the 1964 Olympic Games was commissioned by the Japanese government as part of their effort to use the games as their announcement that the country had transformed itself since World War II and was eager to be regarded as a smoothly functioning, hospitable member of the world of nations. Originally, the Japanese telegraphed both the ambition of the project, and their willingness to meet the rest of the world halfway, by hiring Akira Kurosawa, who at that time had no serious challengers for the title of the Japanese director who was best-known and most revered outside Japan. Luckily, somebody had a reality check and realized that Ichikawa, who was known for his ability to improvise in the face of changing conditions, was better suited temperamentally to this mission that the proud old samurai and control freak Kurosawa. Besides, the world already had one great Olympics documentary showing what the games looked like through the eyes of a director accustomed to bending reality to her will: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, legendary for the way it transforms the musclular bodies on display into black-and-white film poetry. Ichikawa's brightly colored film captures the atmosphere, the flavor, the summer fun aspect of the whole spectacle, as well as the awesome mixture of the personalities involved. And though it's a measure of Ichikawa's mastery that it all looks effortless -- a few thousand people got together and had some contests, and all he did was point a camera at it and boil the results down to the good stuff -- the sense it gives you of the scale of the enterprise is explanation enough as to why there weren't more Olympics movies like this prior to the mid-1960s. Of course, there'll never be anything like it ever again; none of the people who might put up the money would see the point, because now we get to watch it all while it's happening, on TV. Whoopy-dink.

THE FILMS OF W.C. FIELDS

Pauline Kael: "From their titles, it's hard to tell the W.C. Fields movies apart; as John Mosher observed, 'Fields is Fields, a rose is a rose.' " Wilfrid Sheed:"...we demand more of Fields than even comic genius. We have to believe he meant it. We want certification that such a one existed: a mean, child-hating con man who was so funny about it that he made these things all right." Although there were other great screen comedians who were funnier in a greater number of ways, such as the Marx Brothers, and others who were more gifted visually as moviemakers, such as Buster Keaton, Fields' scraggly, underfunded, rattily uneven body of work retains the special fascination of representing one mean-spirited bastard's judgement on, and self-defense strategy against, the world. Fields has turned out to be one of those movie figures, like Bogart, who never goes out of style or fully loses connection with the modern world, yet it doesn't get any easier, as the years go by, to believe that the movies themselves got made on the level. The Fatal Glass of Beer, Million Dollar Legs, Mississippi, It's a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break -- they all look as if they made late at night when the studio bosses had gone home and the security guards had passed out drunk, using money that whimsically crooked bookkeepers had skimmed from the budgets of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Although there are people working today who are probably as talented as Fields, and maybe even as idiosyncratic, there are no parallels for his career; as soon as Bill Murray, probably the closest living point of comparison, showed that he could make people laugh in a thrown-together movie like Stripes, he was thrown into big-budget special effects exravaganzas like Ghostbusters and eventually forced to turn character actor, which might have been his strategy for self-defense. To find anything close to Fields' vehicles today, you'd probably be best off searching the schedule of the Animal Planet channel.

RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979)

Hard to believe now, but there was a time in our culture when stand-up comedians didn't get to leave behind every inflection of their act, cusswords included, perfectly preserved on cable TV specials. Lenny Bruce, who more or less invented the modern conception of the nightclub comic as satirical firebrand and verbal cartoonist, left behind only a posthumously released film record of one of his last performances, caught after his legal and drug problems had snuffed out his energy and wit and reduced him to a wry, paranoid figure snuffling in front of a bare brick wall. (Earlier clips of Bruce doing a TV-friendly version of his act on the Steve Allen show give you some idea of how much of his act was physical, and so is missing from the performances that were released on records.) Bruce's greatest disciple, Richard Pryor, was much luckier: this full-feature performance film caught him in full flight at the height of his powers, at a time when he was using everything he'd learned about working a crowd and applying it to a young lifetime's worth of experiences and observations. The film was released a year before Pryor, in a guilt-stricken, coke-baser's frenzy of despair, lit himself on fire; its sequels, starting with the 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, record his partially successful attempt to relaunch himself after that traumatic meltdown, and his subsequent discovery that both his health and his inspiration were all but shot. But at least future generations won't be in any danger of thinking that this man was just the guy in The Toy.

McCABE & MRS. MILLER; THE LONG GOODBYE; THIEVES LIKE US; CALIFORNIA SPLIT; NASHVILLE (1970s)

In 1970, Robert Altman, then 45, directed the first hit film of his career, M*A*S*H. Ten years later, on a wavering leash from producer Robert Evans and a fluctuating budget, he directed Popeye, which was to be his second hit, even though it turned out to be the kind of commercial success whose star, Robin Williams, would still be apologizing for it twenty years later. In between those two hits, Altman would be able to make thirteen feature films, make them his way, for good or ill, and get them distributed by major studios whose bosses were still reeling in confusion from the collapse of the old system and cowed by Altman's many prizes and adulatory reviews. The five listed above are my favorites from that amazing body of work, which is as alive and unconventional as any large-scale attempt to understand America that any artist has ever embarked on. You might prefer five others; I'm generally up to taking another look at any of them, except maybe for Quintet and A Perfect Couple, because I find that revisiting even the ones that I think stink on ice feels less like looking at dead, bad old movies than like revisiting distant, weird members of the family who I haven't seen since the last time they got out of rehab. The fact that any of them exist at all is conclusive proof that desperate bewilderment at the top is not the worst thing you could have in the movie business. You might think that the same guys who were prepared to sponsor Altman to such a degree on the basis of one hit would have handed him the keys to the kingdom after he'd had a second one, but by 1980, the corporate heads had decided they knew what they were doing again, and the next year, Altman gave up on Hollywood and spent the rest of the decade working in theater and cable TV and making filmed plays on shoestring budgets, with only one small return to actual feature filmmaking, the barely released O. C. and Stiggs. He restarted his movie career right on schedule, in 1990, beginning with Vincent and Theo, a Van Gogh biopic that is as great as anything he ever made, and as unprofitable.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

The greatest fusion of commercial thriller and political satire ever to come out of Hollywood -- and, as directed by John Frankenheimer, a still-stunning mixture of old-studio technique and new-style TV-age hipness -- is fairly high on the list of movies that nobody should have been able to get made at all. The novel, by Richard Condon, was a great success but also widely taken for being unadaptable. In fact, George Axelrod, who did the masterful screenplay, has said that he was stymied with a concrete case of writer's block until the film's star, Frank Sinatra, cured him by calling up and saying that it had been a while and he would like to see some pages. (Axelrod was the film's co-producer, alongside Frankenheimer, so technically, he was Sinatra's boss, but let's get real: having Frank Sinatra call you up and tell you that he sure would like to see you flap your arms and fly over the Chrysler Building might turn out to be the cure for gravity.) It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that the mercurial Sinatra would gain control of the picture himself and pull it from theatrical distribution or TV broadcast until 1988. The reasons for this, mostly financial in nature, aren't altogether clear, but contrary to popular urban myth, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with guilty feelings related to the possibility that the movie anticipated the Kennedy assasination. (By then, Richard Condon had written a novel, Winter Kills, that was directly based on JFK assassination conspiracy lore, and that book was made into a movie, written and directed by William Richart and starring Jeff Bridges, the blighted production and distribution history of which would spur rumors and allegations related to the organized-crime connections of some of its financiers and the disinclination of Embassy Pictures to alienate its own connections in the defense industry.) But I can say that I remember finally seeing The Manchurian Candidate for the first time -- actually, the first three times -- in the spring of 1988 at the Prytania Theater in New Orleans, and that of all my experiences with movies that have been re-introduced to the public after a spell in the vault, none has been as far from disappointing as my experience with this one.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)

Marcel Carne's three-hour-plus romantic celebration of the life of the theater, as rich and satisfying as any epic-scale film entertainment in history, was made during the Nazi occupation of France, a time when the Vichy government imposed rationing and other restrictions on materials and did not permit the production of any movie intended to be longer than 90 minutes. (Carne got approval to proceed with his script only by pretending that the finished product would be released in two parts.) The production provided employment, and gave cover, to many Resistance members, who worked as extras alongside Nazi loyalists who had been assigned to the project by Vichy, smiling and nodding in polite conversation with those scumbags while memorizing their faces and imagining how they were going to look with nooses draped around their necks. (Legend has it that Carne dragged out the production towards the end in anticipation of the arrival of the Allies so that the movie could wrap in a free France.) This kind of big moviemaking is commonly associated with decadence now, but Carne's commitment to his elegant conception and vast canvas was strong enough that he plowed ahead, creating the illusion that he had much greater material resources than he had. Some contemporary "independent" filmmakers who think they're demonstrating their own artistic integrity when they can't bother to focus the camera properly ought to be made to sit through this movie and then handed ritual seppeku blades, in trust that they'll do the right thing.

JAWS (1975)

I was eight years old. She was two: this was 1977, the first year she was "officially" re-released after her debut in 1975, to compete with this slutty new number on the block named Star Wars. A lot of the kids I knew were all excited about the new girl, and couldn't understand why I was so excited about the chance that I might get to see some old hag who everybody had been talking about for a couple of years, but I had done some asking around, and everything I discovered seemed to confirm that the new girl didn't have a shark. And I had been fascinated by the thought of Jaws for, it seemed, my whole life; it seemed that, for as long as I could remember, I'd heard people talking about her in vague, soft whispers. I knew that I was supposed to be too young for her, because I'd spent so many hours -- yes, hours -- lying on my belly looking at the newspaper ads, and gazing at that special box that read, "May Be Too Intense for Younger Children." (As the Mad magazine parody pointed out, putting that line in the ads as a means of keeping kids out of the theaters was like trying to keep ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground.) Ultimately, I got to see it because the Disney cartoon The Rescuers was also playing at McComb, Mississipp's only two-screen theater -- McComb, Mississippi's only movie theater -- and because my mom decided that she'd rather be getting her hair done and shooting shit with the girls for those two hours than sitting next to me watching Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor lend their voices to the characters of a couple of mice. After I got home -- following a very awkward car ride during which I, still in a state of shock, deflected my mom's questions about the movie she thought I'd seen with a series of "Hah?"s -- I would go through many stacks of white typing paper trying to adapt the movie to comic-strip form, in much the way that Hunter Thompson, I would read later, had spent his youth copying pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald longhand, so that he could feel their prose rhythms coursing through his fingers. It was the closest I had come at that time to writing a movie a love letter. In retrospect, she probably thought I was kind of goofy, if she thought of me at all. I was just one of millions of boys staring at her with my eyes and mouth wide open, I know that. And in the years since -- Christ, in the decades since -- I've known a lot of movies that were smarter, sweeter, more generous, more mature, more beautiful, and had more to teach me about the world. But you never forget the first one. This year she turned thirty-three, and it would be an understatement to say that she still looks good for her age. I expect that, if I'm still around when she's sixty-six, I'll still want to drink her bath water.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: From X-Men to X-Boys

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The X-Men franchise won’t end with the upcoming Wolverine spinoff – but then, you knew that, didn’t you? In addition to a standalone Magneto movie already in development, Fox is going younger with X-Men: First Class. Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz will pen the script, “using the younger characters introduced in the previous pics in future installments -- teenagers with powers taught at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. Resulting film would likely draw from elements of the Marvel comic of the same name, launched in 2006, and enlist such characters as Iceman, Rogue, Angel, Colossus, Jubilee and Shadowcat, who have appeared prominently or made cameos in prior pics,” Variety reports.

Will Smith and Steven Spielberg are collaborating on a remake of Old Boy, the 2003 Korean film co-written and directed by Park Chan-wook. “The original film, which like much edgy Asian cinema includes some disturbing material, detailed a man's mysterious kidnapping, 15-year imprisonment and feverish quest for revenge upon being released,” The Hollywood Reporter reminds.

Not to be outdone, Gore Verbinski will remake The Host, the 2006 Bong Joon-ho-directed Korean thriller. Per Variety, “Story follows a town terrorized by a giant mutant squidlike creature hatched by toxins that flow into a nearby river from a military base.” Where Hollywood is concerned these days, it seems “Made in Korea” is the stamp of quality.

Related:
Steven Spielberg: Teacher's Pet?
Attack of the Half-Assed Hollywood Remakes of Asian Horror Movies

Set Your DVR!: November 17 - 24, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

My infant daughter has been sick this weekend, and I'm not feeling too great myself. So this may be the most slapdashed, pithy-free column yet. Keep those expectations low! Adam Christ asked last week about setting up an online movie discussion based on one of the flicks I mention in this column. I don't have an answer for him, but I promise to figure it out soon. Anyway, here's what I like this week. As always, be sure to mention any glaring omissions in the comments thread and I'll edit the column to add your recommendation.

Mon, Nov 17:

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am). By god, what a great movie.

Tues, Nov 18:

3:30/4:30 am: The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit on AMC. Quite a contrast from Mad Men, but it should provide a little something to help tide us over.

5:05/6:05 am: Incident at Loch Ness on IFC (repeat at 10:15/11:15 am and 3:25/4:25 pm). This is not a great or even good movie. But it is rather fun to watch Werner Herzog parody himself.

5:15/6:15 pm: Ride The High Country on TCM. One of my all-time favorite films, this is the first movie Sam Peckinpah directed that's really a Peckinpah movie. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, two actors a little past their sell-by date, are perfectly cast as Old West gunfighters in a similar autumnal period of their lives. There's a fascinating shift in tone about halfway into the movie. I don't mean to detract from the first half when I say that it has that slight remove from reality that's not too unfamiliar to fans of earlier Westerns, especially those of John Ford and Anthony Mann. The cowboys may be tough, but they're pretty clean and well-spoken. At the halfway point, the action moves to a rough mining camp, which shepherds a more realistic look at the past: grimy, ugly, amoral. Westerns would never be the same.

7/8 pm: To Have And Have Not on TCM. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone loves Bogey & Bacall.

10:30/11:30 pm: Top Hat on TCM. Astaire. Rogers. You know the score.

Wed, Nov 19:

5/6 am Burden of Dreams on IFC (repeat at 12:35/1:35 pm). Brilliant documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo.

9:15/10:15 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 3:45/4:45 pm).

5:35/6:35 pm: Ride With The Devil on IFC (repeat 11/20 at 4/5 am).

10:05/11:05 pm: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat on 11/20 at 2:05/3:05 am).

Thurs, Nov 20:

12:45/1:45 am: Sunrise on TCM. One of the greatest film of the silent era. I was fortunate enough a few weeks ago to catch a showing of this in a friend's film class with a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20s. I was a little worried that some of the kookier silent movie tropes would lose the audience, but I was dead wrong. They loved it. It's a loveable movie.

8/9 am: Duel on CHILLER (repeat on 11/21 at 2/3 am). Spielberg's first film.

9:45/10:45 am: The Cars That Ate Paris (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). An oddball film from early in Peter Weir's career about a town that bolsters its income by causing horrendous car accidents.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. This is the Lon Chaney version.

Fri, Nov 21:

1/2 am: Citizen Kane on TCM. I don't know if you've ever heard of this film, but it apparently has some sort of reputation.

3:15/4:15 am: The Stranger on TCM. Orson Welles' most conventionally-directed movie.

8:45/9:45 am: High and Low on IFC (repeat at 3/4 pm). Kurosawa and Mifune do crime drama. Their best movie that doesn't involve samurais.

11 am/12 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC.

Sat, Nov 22:

3:45/4:45 am: Die, Monster, Die! on TCM. In Germany, this is The Monster, The!

7/8 am: The Sword of Doom on IFC. One of the finest samurai movies that wasn't directed by Akira Kurosawa.

4:45/5:45 pm: Vertigo on TCM. I'm breaking my no-Hitchcock rule again. But no matter however long it's been since you last saw this, it's been too long.

Sun, Nov 23:

5/6 am: Bend of the River on AMC. Mann/Stewart Western.

5/6 am: A Night In Casablanca on TCM. Marx Brothers.

1/2 pm: The Thomas Crown Affair on TCM. Steve McQueen!

Mon, Nov 24:

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat 11/25 at 12/1 am). John Hillcoat's Aussie Western.

Dreamworks SK...?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:15:00 GMT

The studio system is long dead, but for over 30 years, David Geffen has been proving that the old-time movie mogul is still a going concern. One of the richest men in Hollywood history, Geffen is a true multimedia tycoon who's made money in film and music hand over fist and whose personal worth is estimated at close to $6 billion. Indisputably one of the biggest power players in the industry, he's had a huge impact on almost every studio you can name: Universal, Paramount, Disney, and the DreamWorks studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. But, having hit 65 -- the age at which most people look forward to a respectable retirement -- is Geffen ready to walk away from it all?

Just weeks after engineering a break from Paramount -- which had recently purchased DreamWorks for over a billion and a half dollars -- Geffen continued to wheel and deal like a mogul of old. He formed a new company with Spielberg and Stacey Snider, backed by money from one of the biggest players in the emergent Bollywood system, and then -- shockingly -- seemed to indicate that he was backing off from production, and perhaps leaving the entertainment industry altogether. According to an article in the New York Times, even Spielberg is stunned at the possibility: "I cannot imagine not having David in my professional life. If that's true, I'm going to have to figure out what to do about it."

Of course, Geffen has made a career out of shocking people -- just ask Disney's stockholders if you don't believe it. So this could just be another ploy, another bargaining chip, another tactic in a still-full bag of tricks. But if he really is out of the game for good, it'll be, in many ways, the end of an era. As easy as Geffen was to hate -- he had a reputation as parsimonious, crude, and often manipulative -- he may be the last of the big-time moguls. And his retirement may echo the end of the studio system: we may not have much liked him when he was around, but we'll kinda miss him when he's gone.

Related Posts:

Hollywood on Fire

Spielberg Talks Tough to Beijing

Honorable Mention: The Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

There was some back-and-forth among the writers here at The Screengrab over whether Steven Spielberg’s first blockbuster should be included on a list of classic horror movies. But ultimately, it made the cut because, whether or not it qualifies as a horror movie, the truth is that it’s seriously scary. A far cry from the long-standing King of Hollywood Filmmakers who has become semi-notorious for his inability to satisfactorily end his movies, the Spielberg who made Jaws did so with one thing on his mind -- to scare the ever-loving shit out of the audience. And oh man, did he ever succeed. Much has been made of the technical issues with the animatronic shark “Bruce” forcing Spielberg to find clever ways to make the shark’s presence felt onscreen (who can forget that moment when the dock slowly turns around?). However, the withholding of actual shots of the shark actually makes him more frightening, given all the buildup he’s had up to that point. Along with being Spielberg’s most frightening movie, it’s also his most perfectly structured, divided almost evenly between the attacks on the townspeople and the mission by Brody, Quint, and Hooper to bring down the toothy killer. The first half has plenty of good scares to be sure -- the head popping out of the boat, for one -- but it’s the second hour that makes Jaws a classic. The setup is little more than three men on an old boat, and as the makeshift crew hunts down, then fends off, the shark, Spielberg never once cuts back to the mainland. The claustrophobia that results causes the tension to skyrocket, so that every time the shark returns to take another shot at bringing down the boat, the film becomes ever more nerve-wracking. But for all the brutal attacks we see, nothing in Jaws burrows under your skin quite like Quint’s immortal monologue about his experiences aboard the Indianapolis, in which he shares his first-hand knowledge of just how much damage sharks can do.

BLACK SUNDAY (1960)

The Italian director Mario Bava, whose other credits include the 1971 Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve), regarded by some as the first slasher/splatter movie, is that rare horror specialist who has earned a reputation as a major filmmaker on the basis of his stylish and atmospheric approach to such genre eternals as cobweb-strewn dungeons and gore-stained torture instruments. He made his name largely on the basis of this Saturday-matinee classic, in which a beautiful young woman visiting her ancestral home is menaced by her long-dead but now-back ancestor, a Moldavian witch who was burned at the stake in 1630. The English actress Barbara Steele played both parts, popping her eyes ever so slightly to indicate when she was supposed to be the murderous, unearthly one. Neither Steele's youthful amateurishness as an actress nor the fact that, by her own account, she was never too clear on what the funny man with whom she shared no common language and who kept waving and jabbering at her from behind the camera was going on about, were enough to get in the way of the fact that, with her stunning features set off by her long black hair, she was both a striking image of virginal innocence imperiled and rampaging evil at its sexiest; the movie turned her into one of the best-loved scream queens of the '60s and '70s.

BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)

This deeply unwholesome film is perhaps the best work by boundary-pushing splatter director Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker), who can be heard on the DVD director commentary reminiscing that he always managed to include one scene in each of his films that he enjoyed the pleasure of staging and shooting by himself, because at that point the crew invariably walked out shaking their heads and muttering, "Oh, you sick bastard..." This one, Henenlotter's version of an anti-drug addiction film, is about a fool (Rick Herbst) who strikes up a partnership with a parasitic creature called Aylmer (pronounced "Elmer") who injects him with an addictive, hallucinogenic substance in exchange for the man's help in keeping the monster well fed on his preferred diet of human brains. Elmer also talks, in a voice provided by John Zacherle, beloved in cult circles as New York's most celebrated TV horror show host.

FIDO (2006)

It's a measure of how influential George Romero's conception of zombiedom has been that people who adopt his ideas of shambling, flesh-eating corpses that can only be finished off with a crushing blow to their brains aren't seen as rip-off artists, but rather as traditionalists working with what, since 1969, have been the established rules. Another measure is the way that Romero's imagery has been spoofed in comedies whose makers are confident that the audience will immediately recognize what it is they're making fun of. The British comedian Simon Pegg and his collaborators had a major success making fun of zombies in Shaun of the Dead, but this Canadian film, directed and co-written by Andrew Currie, honors Romero's attempts to use his undead hordes to satirize American society, only with a steadier and subtler hand than the master has sometimes maintained himself. Set in a Blue Velvet-style suburbia where it'll always be the 1950s, Fido features perhaps the best ever performance by an actor as a zombie by Scottish comic Billy Connolly, in the title role of the hungry but strangely winning pet of little Timmy (K'Sun Ray), who soon realizes that his grunting, growling pal is trying to tell him something.

GINGER SNAPS (2000)

This Canadian film does for werewolves what Carrie and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series did for high school misfits in their respective supernatural target groups. The word "snaps" in the title is a verb: Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and her little sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) have a close knit "you and me against the world" relationship, which manifests itself in the form of a deep (and, to the minds of their school instructors, inappropriate) fascination with death, but after Ginger experience her first period and begins to have confusing feelings about boys, Brigitte senses the beginning of a wedge coming between them that presages the conflict to come when Ginger is bloodied by a werewolf-like creature and begins to literally transform into a different, and dangerous, species. The movie almost didn't happen because of real life adults' concern about teenagers' "inappropriate" obsessions with death and violence: the project's funding was threatened by adverse publicity after the Columbine high school shooting took place during pre-production.

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

Contributors: Paul Clark of the Living Dead, Phil Nugent Is People!!!!

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

SHIA LABEOUF

Like Sarah Palin (but far less scary and secessionist), “The Boof” was plucked from relative obscurity and forced down America’s collective throat despite a staggering lack of qualifications for a job that any number of people could do better. Unlike Palin, whose ascendancy was engineered for cynical political advantage, I have no idea why Hollywood in general (and Steven Spielberg in particular) picked LaBeouf as their Gen-Y A-List representative...but for now I guess we’re stuck with him (and since I already posted a longer rant on the subject back in April, I’ll leave it at that...at least until Stockholm decides he’s ready for his Nobel Peace Prize for, y’know, bein’all peaceful an’ shit).

ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'll grant you that this one is like shooting fish in a barrel – but if you're going to set a barrel of fish in front of me and hand me a gun, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's not as if I'm a lifelong Williams hater. I was there when he debuted as Mork from Ork on a 1978 episode of Happy Days; I even remember taping the show (on audio cassette – this was pre-VCR) and listening to it over and over. (This was perhaps the 374th dorkiest thing I did in 1978. Number 212 was dressing up as Mork for Halloween, although my mother did a fabulous job with the costume.) I had his comedy album, Reality, What a Concept, some of which I even understood. He was a fine Popeye, and although it's been many years since I've seen either The Survivors or Moscow on the Hudson, I remember liking them at the time. So when did it all go awry? Some would point to Dead Poets Society, and certainly the seeds of sentiment and sanctimony were planted there, but I would argue in favor of Awakenings, in which those seeds sprouted into the Sensitive Man Beard. Into the early '90s, Williams could still garner critical acclaim by hacking through the same eight voices he always uses in Aladdin, but after a sickly stretch including Jumanji, Jack, Father's Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man, defenders were harder to come by. (Somewhere in there he won an Oscar by breaking out the SMB again for Good Will Hunting, but I'd like to think a re-vote today would send it to Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights instead.) After a brief but failed flirtation with a "dark phase" (including One Hour Photo and Insomnia), Williams has returned to serving up his patented cocktail of shtick and schmaltz. By 2007's License to Wed, even he seemed to be tired of his own act.

EWAN McGREGOR

McGregor first attracted attention for his work in the films of director Danny Boyle, with whom he was supposed to have some Scottish, post-MTV Scorsese-and-De Niro thing going on. In Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, McGregor had the most prominent and sympathetic of the three main roles, alongside Kerry Fox, who made him her bitch, and Christopher Eccleston, who out-acted him into the next county. They followed that up with the much bigger hit Trainspotting, where Robert Carlyle swabbed the screen with him. The Boyle-McGregor partnership finally came to an acrimonious end when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, thus sparing McGregor the chance to have his clock cleaned by Tilda Swinton. (They also worked together on A Life Less Ordinary, another movie full of actors who might have easily stolen it from Ewan, except who would have wanted it?) On his own, McGregor has provided evidence of an adventurous spirit by agreeing to star in several of the most unpleasantly misconceived big projects of the last dozen years, including Peter Greenaway's pervy art exhibit The Pillow Book, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, and David Mackenzie's lyrical ode to post-coital depression, Young Adam. McGregor also acted and sang in Todd Haynes' glitter rock movie Velvet Goldmine, where his famous and often-exposed physique, while certainly hunky enough as the physiques of pampered, hard-drinking young Scottish actors go, looked a little marshmallowy for someone who was meant to be Iggy Pop; however, we like the suggestion brunted by some admiring reviewers that this made it easier to accept that he was really meant to be Iggy and Lou Reed. His most high-profile role since Trainspotting was, of course, that of the young Ob-wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Better actors than Ewan had trouble making their presence felt in those pictures, so it would be wrong to be too hard on him for that chapter of his career, though it does seem amazing that anyone could picture this guy someday turning into Alec Guinness. One hates to be too hard on McGregor for anything, really: unlike some names on this list, not to mention a whole lot of more talented people, he seems like a nice guy, and he's generally not painful to watch. It's just that, seeing him acting in a movie, you often find yourself staring at him and wondering where the rest of the donut went.

CLINT EASTWOOD

Sergio Leone, the director who made Eastwood a star with the Italian Western A Fistful of Dollars, once told an interviewer that, "When Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses," adding that he cast Clint after experiencing the same epiphany, except in reverse: watching Eastwood in action, "What I saw, simply, was a block of marble." The canny Leone would make some terrific pictures with that block of marble, and once the marble was established as the biggest international movie star in the world, he would go on to make a lot of other, shittier movies with a lot of lesser directors, a roll call that includes himself. During his peak years as a movie star, Eastwood established himself as the king of his thing: monolithic, inexpressive, yet implicitly self-righteous in his need to dish out retributive (and pre-emptive) violence to anyone who had it coming to him, which in most of those movies is anyone who's on-screen who he isn't fucking or who isn't played by an orangutan. Back in those days, the conventional wisdom on Eastwood was that it might be fun to watch him pistol whip people on screen, but that you wouldn't want to admit to being a fan if you were applying for a government job. But whatever you think of his earlier action hits, for the last couple of decades we've been sharing the planet with Clint the Auteur, the increasingly hard-to-listen-to, sinewy old guy with the glare of an Old Testament prophet and the voice of a rattlesnake's death rasp who keeps sliding behind the camera to direct a long string of ever more obvious movies with creaking joints that are invariably hailed as masterpieces by people who must need to get their eyeballs oiled. It's easy to think of other cases where it took the critics a while to catch up with an American original, but sometimes they do get it right the first time. John Huston -- who Clint impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart, something he had as much business attempting as Huston himself would have had playing Shirley Temple -- said in Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough, and there's a little of all three in Eastwood.

NICOLE KIDMAN

Between Dead Calm, the 1989 Australian thriller that was her first film released in the U.S., and her Hollywood debut the next year in Days of Thunder, Kidman's onscreen image seemed to lose ten years and at least that many brain cells. Her '90s screen partnership with her then-husband Tom Cruise, which also resulted in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut, was like some post-modern parody of the public marriage and tie-in movie career of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, itself no great moment in the history of human dignity. By the time it was over, any personality or expressive qualities that Kidman ever had were smothered in "glamour." If she's really a star, then she's a star of a very strange kind, with an odd, limited sort of appeal: she's had her greatest successes playing characters who the audience is meant to want to strangle (as in To Die For and Malice) or in movies where somebody already beat us to it: her best performance, by miles, was in the ghost story The Others, where she was completely convincing as a woman so tightly buttoned up and horribly repressed that she didn't even know she was dead. Since the divorce from Tom Cruise, in which she seemed to win official custody of the media and the industry's solicitous respect, she's picked her roles like a politician with a desire to cover as much ground as possible without offending anyone, and they've been a testament to the awfulness of her taste: jumping at the chance to miscast herself in Oscar-bait literary adaptations like The Hours, The Human Stain, and Cold Mountain while courting the groundlings in terribly misconceived remakes of The Stepford Wives, Invasion (as in "of the Body Snatchers"), and the TV series Bewitched. Having some arch, boring glamourpuss making movies for them seems to give studio heads a kick, at least for a while: in 2006, Kidman was the most highly paid actress in movies, even though a look at the returns on her films made it seem that she couldn't draw crows to a cornfield at sundown.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci Shacked Up at “Love Ranch”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Taylor Hackford (Ray) is seeking domestic distribution for Love Ranch, “the independently financed drama he directed in which Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci star as the proprietors of Nevada’s first legalized brothel,” Variety reports. “Their characters are loosely based on Joe and Sally Conforte, who ran the Mustang Ranch, where prizefighter Oscar Bonavena was gunned down after being suspected of having an affair with madam Sally.” Aside from a small part in The Good Shepherd, Pesci has been absent from movie screens since 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4.

An unusual contender has emerged as a potential director of The Trial of the Chicago 7 for Dreamworks. Although Steven Spielberg has long considered helming the project himself and Paul Greengrass was also considered, The Hollywood Reporter notes that the “latest well-known director who has met on the project is Ben Stiller; while the discussions for Stiller to helm the film are very much at the exploratory stage, the actor and DreamWorks are mulling whether such a pairing would work for both parties.”

“Javier Bardem will star in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, the Mexican helmer's first project after his much-publicized bust-up with former screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga,” per Variety. “Pic is about a man embroiled in shady dealings who is confronted by a childhood friend, now a policeman.”

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Baader-Meinhof: A Komplex Issue

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Opening in Germany this weekend is Udi Edel's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. A dramatization of the rise and fall of the West German Red Army Faction -- also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang -- that its producers insist is meant to deglamorize the 'terrorist-chic' reputation of the radical outfit, the movie has already attracted huge amounts of criticism for doing just the opposite.

Of course, it's no surprise that it's a controversial film. The RAF were, after all, bombers, kidnappers and killers, and in today's terror-stricken environment, it's unlikely that any fictional treatment of the Baader-Meinhofs, no matter how critical, would be exempt from criticism for making heroes out of terrorists. Though Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is intended to be a prestige picture (it features an all-star cast, and has already been named as Germany's entrant into the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards), it's encountering significantly more resistance than did Steven Spielberg's Munich, which covered some of the same psychic territory.

Still, surely it's possible to discuss the movie's aims and intentions without entirely glossing over the complex realities of the day. The Guardian article linked above takes as face value the notion that the RAF were little more than mad killers, saying nothing about the extremely repressive and dark political climate of Germany in the 1970s. While it gives admirable space to the families of the victims, other commentary comes from conservative newspaper editors and Ulrike Mienhof's daughter Bettina Roehl, who -- it goes unmentioned -- is a notoriously intemperate right-winger. The mass death of the RAF leaders in prison is given the consensus brush-off as suicide, a theory that has gained acceptance over the idea that they were murdered by the government for little more reason than no one is much interested anymore in defending them. And, most of all, the whole tone of reaction to the film seems predicated on the notion that it's de facto tasteless to even make a movie about historical figures that enough people think are bad.

Eventually, the movie will open in the U.S. It deserves to be subjected to the opinions of the people whose lives were affected by the RAF's crimes; it deserves, too, to be assessed as a work of art.

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Morning Deal Report: Keira Knightley’s Last Night

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Keira Knightley re-teams with The Jacket screenwriter Massy Tadjedin, who will make her directorial debut with Last Night. Per Variety, “Story follows a married couple, apart for a night while the husband takes a business trip with a colleague to whom he’s attracted. While he’s resisting temptation, his wife encounters her past love.” Tadjedin is also at work on an untitled project for Steven Spielberg.

The new family-friendly version of The Rock, who would really appreciate it if you’d call him Dwayne Johnson, will star in a movie based on everyone’s favorite section of Disneyland – Tomorrowland. Or will he? This self-contradictory Variety report first says, “After turning the theme park ride Pirates of the Caribbean into a blockbuster film trilogy, Disney is circling an entire segment of its theme park — Tomorrowland — as inspiration for a space movie that will star Dwayne Johnson.” But two paragraphs later: “Disney denies the film has been titled Tomorrowland or is dedicated to the park’s section, a futuristic area of the Magic Kingdom that includes such attractions as Space Mountain.” Hey, just as long as it’s not based on It’s a Small World, we’re happy.

Robert Zemeckis can’t get enough of that motion-capture technology. He is once again teaming with Monster House collaborator Gil Kenan for “a big-screen version of Airman, a children's adventure book by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer.” Incidentally, Colfer is now at work on a sixth installment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series called And Another Thing. Anyone familiar with this guy’s work? I’m wondering if I should be intrigued or appalled.

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Frank Mundus, 1925--2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Frank Mundus has bit the big one. Mundus, a high school dropout who began running his own boat, the Cricket, out of Long Island's Montauk Harbor in 1951, achieved pop-culture immortality when word got out that he was the real-life inspiration for the character of Quint, the low-rent Ahab created by Peter Benchley in his novel Jaws and played by Robert Shaw in the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie that invented the modern concept of the summer blockbuster. Mundus, who had heard the call of the sea while still a teenager, said that his reputation as a shark hunter began as "a joke": he happened to snare a shark while out fishing one day and decided to post a sign advertising "Monster Fishing." His legend grew after he harpooned a shark estimated at seventeen feet in length and a weight of 4500 pounds. This was back in the days when Peter Benchley was among the customers who chartered his boat, though Benchley always denied having had Mundus or any one person in mind when he created Quint. Mundus, a lovably salty self-promoter, was just as quick to insist on the resemblance, saying of Benchley, "If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.” Those knowledgeable in the arcane ways of the deep will tell you that not getting eaten by the fish you're trying to kill is the true test of a master seaman, one that the fictional Quint, for all his sea-chanty airs, flunked spectacularly.

In 1986, more than ten years after the movie came out, Mundus and another fisherman managed to bag a seventeen-foot great white, setting a record for the biggest fish ever caught by rod and reel. More recently, last year the 81-year-old Mundus got into a disagreement with a nine-foot thresher shark while sailing his boat Cricket II and hauled the misguided creature aboard with a gaff. Rumors that the fish's last words were, "Oh shit, you're that guy who they turned into the guy in Jaws, aren't you? Can I get a do-over here?" remain unconfirmed. By that time, Mundus and his second wife, Jeanette, had relocated to Hawaii, though he often returned to Long Island in the summer, when the tourists and other suckers were out in force. Mundus did all this with one arm that had been left withered since a childhood illness, as well as "his safari hat, a diamond-studded gold earring, a jewel-handled dagger with a shark-tooth blade, and the big toe of one foot painted green and the other red, for port and starboard. If Mundus thought that his "Monster Fishing" sign was pretty funny, that was nothing compared to what he saw when he caught up with the movie Jaws: "It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I've ever seen because too many stupid things happened in it. For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts. And I've never boiled shark jaws. If you do, you'll only end up with a bunch of teeth at the bottom of your bucket because the jaw cartilage melts." Mundus, who died of a heart attack, recently co-wrote, with his wife Jeannette, his own version of his life story, titled Fifty Years a Hooker.

Morning Deal Report: Ashley Judd Meets the Tooth Fairy

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I vaguely remember reporting a while back that Dwayne “The Rock” John had signed to star as The Tooth Fairy, but I wasn’t sure if that happened here in the real world or in a dream. (Yes, I sometimes dream of blogging for the Screengrab. In my underwear. Which really doesn’t distinguish it from reality in any way.) Variety confirms this is really happening with this morning’s news that Ashley Judd has joined the project. “Johnson plays a minor league hockey player nicknamed the Tooth Fairy. Judd plays his girlfriend, a single mother of two kids.” The screenwriters include Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, so you can expect a big-screen sitcom here.

Regular Steven Spielberg collaborator Jeff Nathanson will adapt The Maze of Bones, the first novel in the 39 Clues series. “39 Clues is built around the extended Cahill family, the most powerful clan in the world,” says The Hollywood Reporter. “The series is designed as an interactive adventure for kids ages 8-12 that will involve books published simultaneously in several countries, online games and hundreds of collectible cards as readers compete to solve the mystery of the Cahills' power by searching around the world and through history.”

And in giant robot news, Voltron: Defender of the Universe is headed for the big screen. It will be directed by Max Makowski, someone I had never heard of before this morning but who I have now decided I hate. Per Variety, Makowski “most recently penned the big screen adaptation of TV series Hawaii Five-O for Warner Bros. He also is attached to direct Warners' feature based on series Kung Fu and an American redo of Japanese pic Shinobi at U.” See? You hate him too, don’t you?

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Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

Morning Deal Report: A Hobbit, a Gnome and a Poltergeist Walk Into a Bar…

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Good Idea Fairy is apparently still on vacation, so what the hell, let’s just go ahead and remake Poltergeist! Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, screenwriters of 2005’s Boogeyman and a thankfully stalled remake of The Birds, have signed on to script the remake of the 1982 horror classic. “The original Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper from a script co-written by Steven Spielberg, miraculously skirted an R rating despite its children-in-constant-peril, toy clown-strangling, face-peeling, skeleton-swimming medley of horrors,” the Hollywood Reporter gleefully notes, before going on to mention that the original film “earned further cult status when two of the child actors in the movie died after the film's release. Two nerve-jangling sequels were produced.” Nerve-jangling? I think they mean ass-numbing.

Elsewhere in the land of fantastical critters, Guillermo del Toro’s The Hobbit finally has a screenwriting team aboard, and surprise, surprise, it’s Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. In case you’ve forgotten, Variety reminds: “Jackson, Walsh and Boyens teamed on penning the three screenplay adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. The third pic, The Return of the King, won an Oscar for adapted screenplay.” The Hobbit is due in 2011, so don’t get in line just yet.

Yesterday we told you about Julius, the modern urban crime version of Julius Caesar. Today we regret to inform you of Gnomeo and Juliet, the…garden gnome version of Romeo and Juliet? Yes. That’s what it says here. The “loose and edgy” CGI Shakespeare adaptation will feature songs by Elton John. I’ve really got to get to work on that Morning Deal Report drinking game.

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