The Screengrab : the brown bunny

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)
2. THE POSTMAN (1997)

After the half-billion-dollar disaster that was Waterworld, it’s a wonder that any studio would give Kevin Costner money for anything, let alone another massively budgeted post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic. But Warner Brothers ponied up the jack, and auteur Costner decided to show them what he could really do. Wasting another quarter-billion dollars, and bringing eternal shame to the MPAA voters who had, less than a decade before, awarded him a Best Director Oscar, Costner created one of the worst films of all time. Wasting a decent source novel by David Brin, The Postman is noisy, stupid, indulgent, witless, and interminable, and it ends with one of the biggest cop-out endings in motion picture history; but what makes it truly special (by which I mean wretched) is what a colossal vanity project it is for its director/star. Cramming the movie with his relatives, he turns his character from a relatable idealist to an impossibly perfect superman who is loved by everyone who encounters him. It’s the kind of manically overindulgent ego-stroke that used to kill entire careers in the old Hollywood system; unluckily for moviegoers worldwide, it didn’t do the same for Costner.

3. SHOWGIRLS (1995)
4. CALIGULA (1979)

Anyone can make a shitty movie with a bad cast and a crap writer. But it takes a special level of awfulness to take one of America’s leading literary lights, have him write a script to be performed by some of the world’s greatest actors, and spend tens of millions of dollars recreating the period in which your film is set, and still have it end up so horrible that it’s rightly considered one of the worst movies ever made. Conceived (and originally directed, until even he figured out what a colossal piece of shit he had on his hands) by Bob Guccione as a sort of combination of highbrow historical drama and low-grade softcore pornography, the story of the deranged Roman emperor Caligula was such a disaster that original screenwriter Gore Vidal sued to have his name removed from the final project – which, considering the stuff he left his name on, is a pretty powerful indictment of the film. Tinto Brass did most of the directing after Guccione bailed, and seriously bad directing it is, though if both the writer and the director have bailed on the project, it’s probably going to suck no matter who takes the helm. Not only did the eight-digit catastrophe waste the talents of big-leaguers like John Gielgud, Malcolm McDowell (in his worst venue until he decided to appear on Heroes), Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole, but – criminally unforgivable for a movie funded by the head man at Penthouse – it was so incompetent, enervating and ill-conceived that it wasn’t even remotely sexy.

5. THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)
6. URBAN MENACE (1999)

As a rule, I’ve tried to avoid sticking low-budget indie fare like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster and Manos: The Hands of Fate on my list of the worst movies of all time. For one thing, it’s too easy – these films were often made in isolation by untrained filmmakers with zero budget, second-hand equipment and amateur actors. It’s amazing they made those films at all; expecting them to be good was expecting too much. For another, they’re from a different era; some of the acclaimed and popular films coming out of Hollywood featured dialogue just as hokey and scenarios just as idiotic, only they were assayed by skilled professionals in front of and behind the camera. But I’ll make an exception for the dreadfully bad 1999 gangsta-horror flick Urban Menace. Directed by the criminally awful Albert Pyun – whose career as an auteur of crap puts even Uwe Boll to shame – it was directed by a seasoned studio filmmaker; it had a budget that could have paid for everything Ed Wood ever made ten times over; and its target audience was the presumably more sophisticated filmgoer of today. But for all that, it plays like Plan 9 Goes Gangsta: Snoop Dogg’s stand-in is a lanky, faceless nobody who looks nothing like him. The script is through the bottom of the barrel and three feet into the ground below the barrel. The ‘actors’ include theatrically deficient rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe, who not only can’t act, but can’t even be understood. The plot can barely be said to exist, and the setting consists of a warehouse that was undoubtedly chosen for its proximity to the director’s house. It’s the kind of hacked-out garbage that’s so amazingly bad that you’ll be shocked they even make movies this bad anymore.

7. THE HAPPENING (2008)

There’s a 1967 hippies-on-a-rampage flick called The Happening that, oddly enough, could also arguably qualify as one of the most awful movies ever, but the worst-case scenario we’re discussing here is the one that may have provided a final capper to director M. Night Shyamalan’s downward career spiral. Usually, a stupid plot alone isn’t enough to make a movie qualify for all-time-worst status, but the plot of The Happening (trees turn against mankind and use some kind of floral pheremones to trigger a wave of mass suicide and madness) is Navy vs. the Night Monsters-level bad, and utterly dashes any hopes the movie had of being good by its very existence. Luckily for us, though, Shyamalan throws in tons of extra bad-movie elements in case the asinine plot isn’t enough: a ridiculous lead performance by Mark Wahlberg, interaction between the lead actors utterly free of charisma, hooty special effects, a subpar script, and set pieces that are meant to be dramatic and terrifying but instead come across as laughable, or, worse yet, boring and pointless. Shyamalan went from shocking the world with his seemingly unique gifts to shocking the world at how bad his movies were; it seems unlikely that he has the ability to make a movie worse than The Happening (assuming any studio will give him money to make a movie ever again). But then again, that’s what people said about The Village, too.

8. BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)
9. MOMENT BY MOMENT (1978)
10. TOMMY BOY (1995)

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

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BUFFALO 66 (1998)

At some point in the recent past, we here at the Screengrab compiled a list of our guiltiest pleasures, and one of mine was The Brown Bunny, which I pretty much only wanted to see because of the notorious...uh...love scene between director/star Vincent Gallo and his co-star (and former paramour) Chloe Sevigny. Such a prurient interest is sad on two levels: first, that a grown, married man would rent a movie just to watch a quasi-famous actress get busy with an allegedly prosthetic schwanzstucker...but secondly that Gallo’s sophomore directorial effort would have so little else going for it after the flat-out brilliance of Buffalo 66. Starring as an ex-con loser who kidnaps a bored teen (Christina Ricci) in hopes of passing her off as his wife in a doomed effort to impress his hateful parents (Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston), Gallo's Billy Brown is all jittery desperation and hostile self-loathing...yet somehow, by the end of the movie, you’re rooting for both the character and the director, while the grim, hellish landscape of upstate New York in winter (a perfect reflection of the protagonist’s stunted isolation) has somehow blossomed with unexpected hope.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000)

Sundance, like most film festivals, has never lacked for sensitive dramatic films about dysfunctional families. This entry, which marked the film directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan, stood out enough to count as a redemption of the genre. It also upped the profile of its star, Laura Linney, and all but launched the career, after some ten mostly uneventful years in movies, of Mark Ruffalo. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 festival, and Lonergan (who himself picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award) finally follows it up later this year when his second feature, Margaret, starring Anna Pacquin and Ruffalo, arrives in theaters.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2001)

In the wake of The Blair Witch Project, Sundance slowly fell victim to that most dreaded of industry catchwords: “Buzz.” And as the fest’s spotty post-1999 reputation confirms, the most troublesome thing about encouraging and promoting buzz is that, when the buzzed-about don’t live up to their advanced billing, it’s the festival itself that suffers. Few films have ever arrived at Sundance with more early-bird hype than did Mary Harron’s American Psycho in 2001, given that, as an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous serial killer tome, its mixture of tongue-in-cheek ‘80s details and brutal violence, all wrapped up in a Kubrickian chill, seemed to make it, in the minds of many prognosticators, an “edgy” film with Fight Club-ish cult-fave potential. Such similarities, it turned out, were superficial at best. Still, American Psycho remains, eight years on, one of the few to match its lofty Sundance expectations, thanks to Christian Bale’s pitch-perfect personification of yuppiedom as a lethal mental affliction, Harron’s eerily composed, sterile direction, and a superlative murder scene set to the ominous sound of Huey Lewis and the News.

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Every once in a blue moon, Sundance provides a platform for a truly exciting new voice, and in 2001, that was Richard Kelly, whose Donnie Darko received enthusiastic critical and audience response upon its premiere. Kelly hailed from a film-geek background but, with his debut, refused to simply indulge in name-check homages and cheesy nostalgia, instead creating an authentic sense of his ‘80s time period and suburban milieu (and the discomfort liberals felt during Michael Dukakis’ failed ’88 presidential bid), all while offering up one giant head-scratcher of a sci-fi saga involving time travel, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” and a menacing, knife-wielding giant rabbit who foretells news of the coming apocalypse to Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal). As assured as it is beguiling, Donnie Darko, like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (which preceded it by a year), is a genre piece that rewards and, in certain respects, requires repeat viewings to unlock its twisted chronological mysteries, something that can’t, unfortunately, be said of Kelly’s follow-up Southland Tales. Me, I say come for the mystery, stay for the entrancing atmosphere of doomed-teen-romanticism.

SUPER TROOPERS (2001)

Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe behind Super Troopers, Club Dread (2004) and Beerfest (2006), is a decidedly hit-or-miss outfit, inspired one moment and flat the next. That description certainly applies to their debut about a group of misfit-slacker state troopers, which first screened at Sundance 2001 and amounts to a series of gags that range from the brilliant to the dreary. If the latter slightly outnumber the former, however, they don’t overshadow them, thanks in part to some inspired casting – how Broken Lizard convinced serious thesp Brian Cox to participate in such inanity remains baffling – that energizes the film’s humor. But moreover, Super Troopers thrives thanks to its pièce-de-résistance involving a couple of troopers pulling over a speeding car in which the backseat teenage passenger, in an effort to avoid arrest and prosecution, has engulfed a giant bag of marijuana. The bizarre incident that follows is dim-witted goofiness of a virtuosic variety, delivering a hilarious high so powerful that it carries one through quite a bit of ensuing patchiness.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part One)

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

So, we’ve just survived a teeth-grindingly suspenseful presidential election, and now we’re entering the prestigious “serious film” season of Academy Award predictions and Best of 2008 lists...but in between all the high-minded political rhetoric and contemplations of quality cinema, Screengrab’s chief pollster and trailer-meister Paul Clark thought it might be a good idea for us to get down off our high horses for a week and reveal the movies we’re REALLY watching on our laptops when we SHOULD be dissecting the eschatological subtext of Synecdoche, New York.

Yes, I’m talking about Guilty Pleasures...NOT the overlooked indie gems we totally “get” because we’re smarter than everyone else, NOT the films that were unfairly maligned by the philistines in the mainstream media, but rather the truly flawed and disreputable movies we’re downright embarrassed to admit we kinda like.

So, c'mon, fess up...I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, as we here at the Screengrab reluctantly reveal our ALL-TIME GUILTIEST PLEASURES!

ANDREW OSBORNE’S GUILTY PLEASURES:

Okay, so to get this shame spiral spinning, I figured I’d go ahead and rank my unmentionables from least embarrassing to most indefensible, starting with...

5. MEATBALLS (1979)

So, okay, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Sure, the Animal House-lite Bill Murray vehicle doesn’t really try very hard (while at the same time occasionally trying too hard)...but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s painfully sincere in its sweetness, and not as remotely hep or ironically detached as, say, Wet, Hot, American Summer...but it just doesn’t matter! Sure, it’s not as highly regarded a “slobs vs. snobs” comedy as Caddyshack (which I never really dug as much as my friends anyway), and, true, it spawned a series of truly horrible sequels...but it just doesn’t matter! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!!! Indeed, that rousing Camp North Star "doesn't matter" chant became my very own motivational Geek Creed throughout high school and college, and while my classmates were rockin’ out to Foreigner, Rush and Zeppelin, I was singing along to the Meatballs soundtrack LP (featuring the “hit” single “Makin’ It”), and to this day I still know all the words to the “Counselor in Training” campfire song (“We are the CITs so pity us...”) -- but for me, the most embarrassing thing about this particular guilty pleasure was how much I yearned (and still yearn) for the simple niceness and camaraderie of its summer camp world (as opposed to the mean, boring streets of reality), and also the extent to which I subsequently modeled my adolescent behavior on Murray’s cool jerk class clown self-assurance in a desperate attempt to hide the full extent of my own breathtaking dorkiness.

4. GUMMO (1997)

There’s a lot of guilt (and guilt-by-association) just being a Harmony Korine fan in the first place. Admit to liking Kids, for example, and people automatically assume you’re some kind of disgusting pervert who actually thinks sexy teenage girls are sexy. Whereas liking Gummo just makes you look crazy: many critics and viewers reacted to Korine’s ugly, plotless, mess of a movie with boredom, confusion or flat-out hostility, and according to Wikipedia, during the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.” And, honestly, I can’t blame them. In many ways, Gummo is completely indefensible: it’s not exactly entertaining, it’s not really about anything and it’s hard to argue with people who find it pretentious or, in the words of film critic Ken Hanke, “the vilest waste of two hours of my life.” It’s not a movie I’d normally recommend to anyone...unless you’re the kind of person who's spent a little time in the kind of aimless trailer park wonderland where beating the everlovin’ shit out of a helpless chair makes for a good-time Saturday night. As for myself, I was only ever a dilettante visitor to the type of world Gummo portrays in its artily artless depiction of a fictionalized Xenia, Ohio – a town where the “Pets or Meat” lady from Roger & Me or the “Coven” crew from American Movie might feel right at home – and like those films, it’s easy for viewers to find themselves wondering if Korine is depicting offbeat humanity for its own sake or merely exploiting his subjects (a combination of real people and slumming actors like Chloë Sevigny) as “white trash” art objects (or both). Yet just by questioning whether you are or should be judging, say, the feral kid in the pink bunny ears or the widowed mother tap-dancing in her disaster area basement to get a smile out of her grim-faced son, you’ve instantly become more self-conscious than any of the characters you’re watching...hence the guilt.

3. THE BROWN BUNNY (2004)

And speaking of pretentious art films starring Chloë Sevigny...this one’s a major source of guilt, and I haven’t even SEEN it yet. The Brown Bunny’s been lingering on my Netflix queue for two years now, partly because I’m too embarrassed to just move it to the top and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong: though I’m perfectly willing to believe Vincent Gallo lives up to his reputation as an arrogant pain in the ass, I also thought his auteurial debut Buffalo ’66 was flat-out brilliant, and so I’m willing to believe there’s some merit in his follow-up effort, even though most reviewers (including, famously, Roger Ebert) have condemned The Brown Bunny as 93-118 minutes (depending on the cut) of shameless, tedious navel-gazing with all the entertainment value of, well, a long, boring road trip with Vincent Gallo (though Ebert did later amend his original harsh review after seeing the shorter cut). I suppose the potential boredom factor is the main reason I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the movie...yet it nevertheless remains in my queue month after month, year after year for pretty much the only reason most people have ever heard of The Brown Bunny: the infamous scene near the end where Sevigny blows Gallo on camera. Never mind my wife’s perfectly good question about why on earth I would ever want to see Gallo’s icky gnarled penis. Never mind reports I’ve had from reliable sources that the fellatio is totally faux anyway, and real or not it’s one of the least erotic sex scenes in the history of cinema...I just can’t help it: when it comes to the perverse American fascination with celebrities engaged in real (or even simulated) sex acts, I’m guilty as charged.

2. CAMP (2003)

And now things get really embarrassing. Like the teen drama geeks of its titular summer theater retreat, Camp is homely, dorky, amateurish and way too earnest for its own good...but also sweetly charming and downright irresistible to a fellow drama geek like me. Despite increasingly hostile and exasperated reactions from my loved ones, the "Turkey Lurkey" production number from the movie's super-peppy soundtrack was my holiday theme song for 2003...and, as if it’s not embarrassing enough to own the Camp soundtrack (including a musical theater version of Todd Rundgren’s “The Want of A Nail” you’ll often see me belting at the top of my lungs in traffic whenever my wife’s not in the car...yes, that’s right, I said wife...I am, indeed, a closeted heterosexual), I actually went back for a second dose of inexcusable pep and summer camp geekery (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) when Alexandra Shiva directed a documentary called Stagedoor about the real Catskills inspiration for the Camp camp, featuring a counselor named Jeff Murphy who just so happens to be one of the stars of my own “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” indie film directorial debut (and fantastic stocking stuffer!), Apocalypse Bop (featuring the Screengrab’s very own Scott Von Doviak)!!!

And finally, my deepest shame...

1. ST. ELMO’S FIRE (1985)

Good Lord. What can I say? There’s so much to hate about Joel Schumacher’s 1985 Brat Pack circle jerk I don’t even know where to begin. Leonard Pierce has gone on record with his belief that Andie Macdowell is just about the worst actress ever committed to celluloid, and she’s just a co-star here, sharing the screen with the quivering lips of Andrew McCarthy, the flaring nostrils of Judd Nelson and Demi Moore in full effect. For those who could barely stomach Friends, St. Elmo’s Fire is a thousand times worse, chronicling as it does the loves and lives of six bland white yuppies as they struggle to become even more rich and privileged. Oh, wait, except for Rob Lowe, who’s the sax-playing pretty boy “rebel,” who’s saddled with all the very worst of the film’s terrible, terrible frat-douche dialogue (“It ain’t a party ‘til something gets broken,” “I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,” etc.). Even as a teenager, I cringed at Demi Moore’s gay stereotype buddy and the fact that the only black character in a movie full of smug whites is an icky black streetwalker (who McCarthy’s struggling writer character raps with ‘cuz he’s such a man of, y’know, “the people”). Yet despite all the movie’s glaring flaws, it remains my Guiltiest Pleasure. I even like the godawful John Parr title song (a.k.a. “Man In Motion”). Why? I can only plead nostalgia on this one. I was and remain a sucker for movies like The Big Chill or Dazed and Confused that feature romanticized groups of witty friends hanging around and kvetching about their problems...and St. Elmo’s Fire featured Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in a mini-reunion from one of the all-time classics of the genre, The Breakfast Club (released earlier the same year), coinciding, as it happened, with my own transition from high school to college (and all the attendant coming-of-age melodrama thus implied), when lines like, “We're all going through this, it's our time at the edge,” were a soothing balm to my sheltered teenage soul. Aaaahhh-booogeda-booogeda-booogeda, ha, ha, ha!

Click Here For More Guilt From Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Movies Make You More Smarterer

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Take heed, cinephiles! You know how the eyes of your friends and relatives tend to glaze over when you talk about your favorite movies' editing and directing style? It turns out you're not just gassing on pretentiously – you're really describing how the human brain works!

ScienceDaily reports that, according to a new scientific study carried out in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (no, we never heard of it either), researchers from NYU and elsewhere have discovered that not only do movies exert a powerful hold on higher brain functions, but also that the movie's style, content, editing and direction can make a considerable impact on its neurological effects.

The study, believed to be the first quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of motion pictures on the human brain, was carried out using MRI scanners, inter-subject correlation analysis, and other things we dropped out of college to avoid learning about. Using a baseline of a ten-minute, unedited clip of a concert in Washington Square Park (we'd have suggested Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny), the researches determined that films exert a "tight grip on viewers' minds" through a "sequence of perceptual, emotional and cognitive states, which stimulate overall brain activity. In the test, highly detailed, constructed aesthetics – such as in the films of Sergio Leone and Alfred Hitchcock – engaged the minds of test subjects the most.

It's good to know all of our movie geekery over the years is actually improving our minds, but you know there had to be a downside, and here it is: according to the article, the study "may serve as a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products, and offer a new method for exploring how the brain works." Even as we speak, someone is in a pitch meeting, explaining how the new Uwe Boll video game movie is actually an important neurological tool.

Happiness: The Video Game

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:55:00 GMT

It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.

Her online MMORPG based on Todd Solondz's Happiness seems like a real winner, especially (given that similar games like World of Warcraft are massive time- and money-pits) since she proposes that "because true, lasting happiness can never be achieved, no one can ever win and the game goes on forever." We're likewise fond of the idea of a Gummo first-person shooter with an all-black-metal soundtrack. But the best idea by far is a racing game based on Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny where "you're the only one on the road, and when you finish the race, instead of a trophy you get an absurdly long blow job from your dead girlfriend." Someone get Prince Vince on the line — I have a feeling he'll pay for this himself.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

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