The Screengrab : terry southern

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

CLORIS LEACHMAN AS FRAU BLÜCHER & GENE HACKMAN AS THE BLIND MAN IN YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

April Fool! Uh...by which I mean I apparently miscounted, and there are actually 38 great comedic performances on this list instead of 35 -- (it's been that kind of week) -- but I couldn’t bring myself to skip two of the funniest characters in the history of cinema (especially now that we know the actors who portrayed them were bonin’). Indeed, the topical bonin’ reference is pretty much the main reason I decided to single just Leach and Hack out from Young Frankenstein's perfect storm ensemble (including Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn and Peter Boyle). But as great as all the rest of the cast may be, I have to admit, Gene Hackman’s cameo in Brooks' horror parody is one of those magical movie moments that literally makes me laugh every single goddamn time I see it...and while some may be suffering from Leachman fatigue after the performer’s stint on Dancing With The Stars, I’ll always love the lady for going on TV and shaking her badonkadonk a year after being told she was “too old” to reprise her role as Frau Blücher (insert horse whinny) in the Broadway adaptation of Brooks' film. Or, as Lisa Timmons posted at Socialite Life: “...by God, if she wants to die by acting her ass off on...Broadway, then get the heck out of her way, I say. It's like refusing to let a cowboy die with his boots on. Blasphemy.” To which I say: amen, sister. (AO)

GEORGE C. SCOTT AS GENERAL BUCK TURGIDSON IN DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Not to take anything away from Peter Sellers – who played three roles in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black nuclear holocaust comedy and played them to perfection – but the best comic performance in the movie came from George C. Scott, an actor not normally known for his comedic roles. And, in fact, Kubrick had to trick him into the performance: Scott was encouraged to play way over the top in what he thought were piss-takes, but which Kubrick ended up using in the film. Scott was furious and reportedly vowed not to work with the director again, but it’s that supremely hysterical overacting that sells the role. Writer Terry Southern specialized in creating authority figures whose behavior was entirely inappropriate to their station, and no one fits that role better than Turgidson: allegedly patterned on gung-ho anti-communist General Curtis LeMay, Buck seems completely incapable of treating the imminent nuclear exchange seriously. He fields calls from his mistress, starts fistfights with the Soviet ambassador, and displays a childishly enthusiastic pride at the possibility that one of his damaged planes will bust through Russian radar and trigger a doomsday bomb. Scott’s wild enthusiasm actually leads him to topple ass over teakettle in one scene, a happy accident that perfectly fits his character’s role as an egomaniacal child who has been placed in charge of unthinkable power. (LP)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

JOHN BARRYMORE AS OSCAR JAFFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

No American actor ever made theatrical stylization work as well in movies as Barrymore, and when he played men of the theater, the impacted layers of self-parody in his performance just kept popping like strings of firecrackers. This movie was based on a play that in turn was based on an unproduced play called Napoleon of Broadway, a label that, if anything, sells the maniacal producer Jaffe short -- given enough men on horseback and a sufficiently isolated island, Napoleon could be stopped. Gorgeously over the topic from the word go, Barrymore plays him as a man who works behind the scenes in the theater because no stage would be big enough for the performance he calls his life. (PN)

MISCHA AUER AS CARLO IN MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

A Russian emigree born Mikhail Semyonovich Unskovsky, Auer was one of the supreme comic character actors of a great era for them, a man whose sometimes mournful-seeming countenance could never conceal the fact that there was helium in his shoes. His role here set the tone for much of his career: he plays a pianist who, having been adopted by rich society grand dame Alice Brady as her "protege", settles into her family's Art Deco mansion and easily adapts to being their pet. Auer was also memorable as a henpecked husband in a Western cow town in Destry Rides Again, and in Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, where, as the manager of a flea circus, he rolls up his sleeve and announces to his charges, "Soup's on!" (PN)

HARPO MARX IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

As a kid, I watched endless hours of Marx Brothers movies (courtesy of my dad). I felt the most kinship with the fast-talking bullshit artist Groucho. But it was quiet, sad Harpo who stole my heart. I didn't quite get why he wouldn’t talk. No matter, his kindly face with the rubber mouth and big sad eyes, together with that little horn, said more than an entire film's worth of yakking from Groucho. Who was he supposed to be, exactly? Dunno and don't care. In Monkey Business, someone suggests he's a "dumb Swede?." Perhaps he is a caricature of a FOB Irishman to to go along with the other ethnic stereotypes that the Brothers' characters seem to be based on. The mystery adds to his allure. No matter his origins, it would seem that Harpo's hobo owes something to Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, but where Chaplin verges on the annoying, the comic genius of Harpo is that he is always understated and soothing, even at his most burlesque. Like a good children's book, Harpo appeals to everyone precisely because he never speaks down to the audience. (SCS)

MARLON BRANDO AS GRINDL THE GURU IN CANDY (1968)

Candy is routinely derided as a godawful, amateurish mess, a barely watchable '60s relic and a travesty of the Terry Southern-Mason Hoffenberg novel. Furthermore, Brando's participation in it is often pointed to as the ultimate degradation that the great actor submitted to during the dark period between his '50s triumphs and his early '70s comeback. Let's define our terms here: this movie really is a piece of shit. But Brando is hysterical in it. Playing a fraudulent horndog of a guru whose Indian accent turns into a New York honk as he applies himself to the task of getting into the heroine's pants, and looking like a cross between a Roman senator and Alice Cooper, he dives right in and applies the broadest comic strokes, single-handedly bringing a MAD-comics tone to this crass, tinny show. As Brando became increasingly estranged from his own craft, more and more it was the opportunity to play comedy that lured him out of the fortress he'd built around himself with his own flesh, and in movies like The Freshman (1990), he showed that he could join in with the critics and gossip columnists in making fun of himself, and do it with more wit and grace than any of them could. (PN)

JACK NICHOLSON AS GEORGE HANSON IN EASY RIDER (1969)

Any good clown has a hint of tragedy. Jack Nicholson takes it to the limit as alcoholic ACLU lawyer George Hanson — the only latent liberal in a small hick town. Hanson is in the habit of poncing around Main Street in white linen suits and his starspangled football helmet, getting hammered daily and then sleeping it off in the local jail. Perhaps that is the kind of thing you can get away with in your own town if your father's a big shot. Better not try it outside city limits though. When the hippie bikers come through he seizes the opportunity to escape. This can't end well. (SCS)

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE GODFATHER (1972)

Perhaps you've heard of it? The epic (and epically popular) metaphorical study of how the American dream was corrupted begins with the words "I believe in America" and then spends six hours and fifteen minutes (counting Part II) making it clear just what that belief entails. Sweet dreams, Papa.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

After skewering the soul-deadening effect of modern cubicle culture in 1999’s Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge created a comedic future dystopia (mirroring that of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons”) where idiots have inherited the Earth (because all you overeducated hipsters out there either didn’t spawn or tried to prevent unsustainable overpopulation by limiting yourselves to one or two kids while the irresponsible, short-sighted and just plain dumb were breeding like rabbits). Idiocracy featured eminently bankable heartthrob Luke Wilson (as well as plenty of good ol’ lowest-common-denominator fart jokes) and received largely positive reviews...yet, mysteriously, the film was withheld from critics and vanished without a trace, receiving virtually zero publicity from its distributor (20th Century Fox) during its shockingly miniscule 125-screen theatrical run, whereupon the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD. So what happened? Well, I’ve never heard an official explanation, but I suspect the Suits either didn’t get Judge’s film or its depiction of our nation’s ever-lowering standards of taste, intelligence and acceptable civilized behavior hit a little too close to home, given the media’s complicity in the closing of the American mind. In Judge’s film (set in 2505, but clearly, even shockingly evocative of the trashiest parts of our modern-day landscape), nothing matters but sex and money, nobody is responsible for their own behavior, everything (including the population’s disposable clothing) is branded with corporate logos and anyone who dares to appear smart, competent, cultured, self-aware or sensitive (y’know, elite) is branded a “fag” and viewed with hostility and suspicion, even if (like Wilson’s time-traveling 20th century everyman) they’re trying to prevent global catastrophe. Judge somehow got product placement from real companies (whose representatives apparently never read the script: one scene, for instance, features an H&R Block that offers tax returns with “happy endings”), and biting the hands of his corporate masters so viciously may be the real reason the Suits buried the film, although (like Office Space) Idiocracy has managed to attract a small cult following (which this entry will hopefully increase), bringing some overdue attention to an unfairly neglected satiric gem of smart dumb comedy.

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969)

Terry Southern was the foremost satirist of American culture of his generation, and The Magic Christian is a jab at American money-lust unrivalled by anything this side of William Gaddis' JR. And while director Joseph McGrath (abetted by two Monty Python's Flying Circus alums, Graham Chapman and John Cleese) transplanted the action to his native England when he adapted the book for the big screen, transforming billionaire prankster Guy Grand from an old line Northeasterner to (im)proper British banker along the way, there was still no mistaking what country the author had in mind when he penned the tale of a man whose sole purpose in life was to prove that everyone has their price. A few of the scenes play nicely into the new but not exactly improved British sensibility of the film, but most of the bizarre schemes Grand comes up with to test the limits of his countrymen's greed – from a ludicrously overpriced luxury car roughly the size of a city block to a championship boxing match calculated to enrage by having the fighters kiss at a vital moment – could only resonate the way they do in America. The change of scenery does give the movie a bit of a schizophrenic feel (as does the addition of a rather purposeless Ringo Starr as Grand's son), but really, if someone tells you he's made a satire of a cash-hungry nation full of venal hacks who will sell out their every principle for money, you know what country he's talking about even if everyone in the movie talks like Alastair Cooke.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

Suppose an alien, a blank slate with no preconceptions about our country, found himself in America. To him it is neither the land of opportunity nor the Great Satan, so with no frame of reference or historical context, what elements of our culture make the greatest impression upon him? Rampant consumerism? Unchecked capitalism? The duplicity of governments and corporations? That's one way of looking at Nicolas Roeg's trippy sci-fi flick (adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis), but like much of Roeg's '70s output, The Man Who Fell to Earth resists easy interpretation. David Bowie, already the man who sold the world, takes on the title role, one Thomas Jerome Newton. A visitor from another planet suffering from extreme drought, Newton has come to our world on a rescue mission. Using alien technology, he secures a number of patents (including one for ultra-futuristic self-developing film) and amasses a fortune, with which he plans to finance a return trip home (presumably with plenty of water, although like everything else, this is never really explained). But Newton loses focus, corrupted by wealth, drink, television and the only people he trusts. By the time he falls into the clutches of a government agency that has discovered his true nature, he has flamed out, never to return to the stars. Roeg keeps us as disoriented as his protagonist with his slippery acid trip visuals and elastic interpretation of time and space, but there's no mistaking the intent behind such images as Bowie stirring his gin with the barrel of a six-shooter, and it ain't God Bless America.

POINT OF ORDER (1964)

Emile de Antonio, the early, smarter, non-self-promoting version of Michael Moore, didn't pretend to be an investigative journalist. In his first film, which is about the Army-McCarthy hearings, he didn't even make any pretense to topicality: Point of Order was released ten years after the hearings themselves, and seven years after Joseph McCarthy's death. De Antonio's eye was on the big picture. He had the insight that, by boiling the 187 televised hours of hearing down to a tight 97 minutes of political vaudeville -- Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch's greatest hits -- and doing without voice-over narration or any other kind of explanatory devices, he could skirt charges of bias by seeming to let the HUAC all-stars hang themselves by their own words and actions. At the same time, by selecting just the right material and emphasizing the ridiculous to such a degree that the movie was immediately praised as a work of nonfiction satire, he seriously affected how the Red-hunters in Congress would be seen for generations. De Antonio would use the same political scrapbook technique in such later films as the Vietnam War doc In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon biography Millhouse: A White Comedy, movies that attracted less mainstream attention in part because their targets hadn't been off the front pages for a decade at the time they were released.

Click here for Part One and Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Take Five: Gotta Get A Guru

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru. But let's face it: Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent. Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us.

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons: first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

CANDY (1968)

This big-screen adaptation of the Mason Hoffenberg novel (actually the infamous Terry Southern writing under a pseudonym) is generally regarded as a major failure. It's not that there weren't talented people involved -- besides Southern himself, and his co-writer Buck Henry, the cast is crammed with fine actors -- but the entire film seems to go off the rails from the very start. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't plenty of bizarre treats for those with the energy to sit through it. This updating of Voltaire's Candide is purely Southern in the sense that authority figures are always portrayed as phony, venal, and couching some grotesque habits or appetites. In this instance, we're treated to the the sight of the monstrour Grindl -- a sex-crazed Hindu guru played by an overheated Marlon Brando -- putting the poor, put-upon Candy in yet another compromising position.

THE PARTY (1968)

All right, so technically, Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi ("That is what my name is called") in the Blake Edwards farce The Party isn't a guru. (That title more rightly belongs to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Sellers in 1979's Being There.) But he is Indian, sort of, and he does speak in Hindi platitudes that those around him mistake for pearls of inscrutable eastern wisdom. For example, when asked who he thinks he is, he responds, "In India, we do not think who we are. We know who we are." Whoa, heavy. The rest of the movie is pretty much straight-up Blake Edwards comic fare, and it falls flat on the stereotypes at times, but a few scenes are still paralytically funny forty years later, especially when a stoned Bakshi comes across a parakeet cage and solemnly intones the name of the birdseed: "Birdy Num Num."

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

In this stunning, surreal, and nearly incomprehensible masterpiece by ultimate provocatuer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guru is Horacio Salinas, a Christlike thief who is half savior and half mountebank. Under the tutelage of the Alchemist, a mysterious figure played by Jodorowsky himself, he and his gang of mystical banditos -- each named for a different celestial body -- plan nothing less than an assault on Heaven, where they will depose the reigning gods and take their places. Visually, this is exactly the sort of film people talk about when they talk about crazy European art films: it's bewildering, deliberately offensive, totally impenetrable, and weird for the sake of being weird. It's also absolutely brilliant, and Jodorowsky -- who's the real guru here -- shows us what it might be like inside the mind of the truly enlightened -- and it alternately makes us gasp at its beauty and scares the hell out of us.

HOLY SMOKE (1999)

Jane Campion's weirdest movie -- which, if you think about it, is really saying something -- features the always-engaging Kate Winslet in the role of a young woman who decides to embark on a quest for spiritual self-discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Along the way, she encounters the guru Chiddaatman Baba (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) and falls under his sway -- and that's just where the movie begins. From there, she is confronted by Harvey Keitel as a deprogrammer -- sorry, "cult exiter" -- hired by her family to get her back, and discovers that he's not without his own guru-like tendencies. A battle of wills, intellects and bodies ensue over the terrain of feminism, spirituality and sexuality, and the movie degenerates into a bit of a chaotic mess, but it's at least a glorious mess with two terrific actors like Keitel and Winslet at the fore.

When Movies Are Too Timely for Their Own Good

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Everybody complains that big Hollywood movies don't show enough awareness of current events, but a lot of people get just as uncomfortable when their escapist entertainments seem to be getting to close to reminding them of what they were hoping to get their minds off when they fled to the theaters. Last year, a full-blown media circus sprung up in Britain around the still-unsolved case of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl who was reported missing from the Portugal resort where she and her family were on vacation. (The case received a lot of media attention partly because the parents actively sought it out in their public calls for help in finding their daughter, which in turn attracted shout-outs from celebrities.) One side effect of the case is that Ben Affleck's cracking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which happens to deal with a murky case involving a lost little girl, had its English premiere postponed out of deferrence to sensitive feelings stirred up by the actual case. (Affleck himself has said, "We are acutely aware of the situation... we don't want to release the movie if it is going to touch a nerve or inflame anyone's sensitivities." Now, with the movie finally slipping into British theaters, Andrew Hubert does a quick run-down of other high-profile releases that had to bob and weave to keep from being overshadowed from actual events, in many cases unsuccessfully. Perhaps the most obvious forerunner to Gone Baby Gone in this department is The Good Son, which was made at a time when its star, Macaulay Culkin, was seen as having worn out his welcome as America's favorite twinkling child freak. Directed by thriller specialist Joseph Ruben from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, the movie was supposed to exploit the queasy feelings that Culkin inspired in some while easing his transformation to "real actor" by casting him as an evil child psycho. Unfortunately, by the time it was ready for theaters, a news story about a British toddler who was murdered by a couple of ten-year-olds had helped set off a wave of paranoia about killer kids. The movie was denied a theatrical release in England, and while it made it into theaters in the states, it did disappointing enough business that poor Culkin was required to paste his smile back on and star in Richie Rich.

There was also a real spate of these things in the wake of 9/11; Hubert doesn't mention Collateral Damage, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the last throes of his action movie career, played a fireman on the revenge trail after Arab terrorists blow up his family, but he does cite the over-the-top black comedy Buffalo Soldiers, which was punished for depicting members of the American military in an unflattering light at a time when hyper-patriotism was suddenly the flavor of the year. (Ironically, not long before September 11, 2001, Tim Blake Nelson's O was quietly dumped into theaters after two years on the shelf. That movie, which updates Othello to a modern high school, with Mekhi Pfifer as a basketball star dating Julia Stiles while Josh Hartnett whispers poison in his ear, reportedly freaked studio chiefs out because they saw "parallels" to Columbine in it, an unlikely enough possibility that it's worth considering that maybe they just felt like burying a movie that centered on an interracial romance. (By the time O was released, Stiles had starred in another interracial high school romance, Save the Last Dance; it was a hit, which might have helped spring O from movie jail.) Then there's Dr. Strangelove, which did manage to overcome having its first test screening on November 22, 1963. For some of us, the great modern movie mystery is: why did they cut the pie fight scene in the war room that was originally supposed to end the film? Everyone who might have some inside knowledge of that one has been asked about it, and so far as we've been able to determine, no one has ever given an answer that matched up with somebody else's. George C. Scott told a Playboy interviewer that the scene--which, as he recalled, included the line, "Gentleman, out beloved president has been struck down in the prime of life by pie! We demand merciful retaliation!"--was cut because of the Kennedy assassination. However, Terry Southern once told a Yale writing class that the real problem was that the people onscreen were smiling too broadly, because, according to writer Jeff MacGregor, they "all had too much fun hurling pies at George C. Scott." Peter Sellers once gave a long, vivid description of the scene to a Rolling Stone interviewer before explaining that "Stan" just thought it went on too long; discussing it in a documentary about the film, critic Alexander Walker insisted that the pies flew so hard and fast that "you couldn't tell what you were looking at." Always Mr. Analytical, Stanley Kubrick just insisted that he was making a "satire" and that the pie-throwing was too "farcical". Reports that Kubrick kept obsessively going back to the drawing board, and that somewhere in the vaults there are scenes of HAL 9000 hitting Keir Dullea with a pie and Private Pyle squirting the drill sergeant with his rubber carnation, remain unconfirmed.

No, But I've Read The Movie: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange. The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death.

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment: the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before. Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words." A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.

WHAT IT HAD: A truly visionary director — one of the greatest of all time — who could not have been more perfectly suited to bring to the screen the bleak, cold, stylized dystopian London of Burgess' novel. A script that, while it may have lacked the writerly approach to language and truth that permeated Burgess' source material, at least remained surprisingly faithful to its story and made a largely successful attempt to bring the 'Nadsat' slang used by the droogs in the novel to the big screen. A hypnotically compelling lead performance by a young and terrifyingly believable Malcolm McDowell. A brilliant soundtrack by Wendy Carlos that matched the mood and tone of the film to an uncanny degree. A handful of some of the most memorable scenes ever put to celluloid in a science fiction film.

WHAT IT LACKED: A man at the helm who possessed the same deep and abiding sense of linguistic play as the author of the book. A director whose ability to write a script was as sure-handed as his ability to frame a shot. A strong secondary cast. A sense of political commitment and philosophical heft as deep as its source material. An ability to easily distinguish between violence presented to shock and violence presented to titillate, and a willingness to make the viewer care about the difference. A true satirist's moral center, and a true storyteller's ability to put ambiguity in service of the truth. A reluctance to go out on a sour note that felt exploitative. The final chapter, which did so much to make sense of the book, but which, when left out, leaves behind a somewhat incoherent film.

DID IT SUCCEED?: It succeeded hugely on its own terms, but what terms were those? Kubrick's specialty was subtlety of emotion, not subtlety of intent; he was a visual filmmaker, not a philosophical one, and a story as deeply philosophical as A Clockwork Orange was done something of a disservice by being placed in his hands, no matter how stunning the film is to look at and how long its best-known setpieces stay with you. Kubrick's determination to provoke provides them movie with some of its finest moments and some of its worst; and while the movie is not without its ambiguity, it sacrifices profundity for power, which is not always an acceptable tradeoff. However, it does what it sets out to do so spectacularly that it's almost churlish to note that Burgess' fears about the filmed version of his novel came very precisely true.

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce