The Screengrab : the president's analyst

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

A few gags and the “The Inquisition” sequence from HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART 1 (1981)

Mel Brooks’ hit-to-miss ratio was never lower than in this comedic ode to the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and other funny-outfitted periods from humanity’s first dozen or so centuries on Earth. For every short, funny line or gag (i.e., “It’s good to be the king,” “The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen...oy! Ten! Ten commandments” and the Jews In Space coming attractions trailer) there’s some embarrassingly lame poopy and/or booby joke or some interminable exposition about a plot point nobody cares about. But for eight continuous minutes in the middle of the movie, Brooks nearly tops his beloved “Springtime For Hitler” sequence from all the various incarnations of The Producers with his insanely catchy take-down of another of history’s great tragedies, the Spanish Inquisition, thus foreshadowing the iconic funnyman’s welcome focus on Broadway in recent years (which, despite generating the unnecessary 2005 Producers remake, has at least prevented Brooks from tarnishing his legacy with more unfunny late period cinematic dreck like Dracula: Dead and Loving It).

The reveal of the villain from THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

This satirical comedy about the title character (James Coburn) and how he becomes targeted for abduction or assassination by the secret agencies of virtually all the world's governments, including his own, because of what he knows about his most famous patient, was written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, a clever but erratic jokester otherwise best known as the creator of the TV series Barney Miller. The movie has a long-standing cult reputation that it may deserve just on the basis of its brilliant premise, but most of it is actually shrill and underbaked, and Flicker's sweaty determination to make it a swingin' affair leave much of it looking as dated as strobe lights and brown acid. But the climactic revelation of the true villain and the villain's master plan is so choice that it's easy to believe that Flicker forged ahead with the whole thing just because he couldn't bear to throw away that punch line.

The balloon-globe bit and Jack Oakie from THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940)

Charles Chaplin dug in his heels and resisted the coming of sound like a sumbitch, and his satire on Hitler and the Nazis was his first real talkie. (His previous feature, Modern Times, had sound but no actual spoken dialogue.) Some people clung to it gratefully at the time of its release, but time has not been kind to it: it's overlong, with lots of dead spaces, and given what we now know about what the Nazis were doing, the dreamily idealistic ending (in which Chaplin's hero is able to snap the country out of its fascist spell by commandeering a microphone and telling them about "brotherhood") can leave you feeling sad at the inadequacy of well-meaning satire to deal with true evil. And Chaplin was right to worry about sound affecting his career: the cultivated-gentleman speaking voice that he probably took a great deal of pride in having developed off-screen didn't match up with the lowdown comic effects he was best at producing as a performer. The movie's high point is the purely physical routine he does with a balloon-globe: relieved of the necessity of dealing with language, he's enough in control of what he's doing to make it funny, beautiful, and scary all at once, which must have been what he was aiming for with the rest of the film. The other high point is Jack Oakie's guest appearance: his burlesque impersonation of Mussolini packs enough energy to lift the movie to the clouds. Given that Chaplin notoriously took the scissors to Buster Keaton's performance in Limelight after he realized that Keaton had upstaged him, it probably says a lot about Chaplin's hopes for this movie that he was willing to put up with letting Oakie steal every scene they had.

The Roscoe's commercial from TAPEHEADS (1988)

This slapdash attempt at an instant midnight movie classic herniates itself in its attempt to be hip and outrageous, but it does have its glory moment in the TV commercial for Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles -- a real place, don'tcha know -- complete with a rapping King Cotton and a trio of fly girls cooing, "Waffles're just pancakes with little squares on 'em!" Part of the joke -- the part the filmmakers may not have been fully in on -- is that, with its attempt to bathe a banal product in a salable coating of trendy weirdness, the sequence deftly parodies what most of Tapeheads itself embodies. It's also pretty funny that, a decade or so later, Kentucky Fried Chicken actually tried to reach out to the "urban market" with a TV ad campaign in which a cartoon Colonel Sanders danced ("Go, Colonel, go, Colonel!") and jive-talked to the accompaniment of made-for-TV-hip-hop music, thus rendering this scene almost as prescient in its way as Network.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 3

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Engulf & Devour, SILENT MOVIE (1976)

Mel Brooks's generically titled comedy stars Brooks as a movie director who plans to save the troubled Big Picture Studio with a star-studded silent picture. This makes him the target of Engulf & Devour, the monstrous corporation (whose motto is "Our Hands Are In Everything") planning to gobble up the studio. Their methods of sabotaging the film's success range from sending Bernadette Peters to vamp the director, a former drunk, and knock him off the wagon, to stealing the picture itself before its grand premiere. Weirdly, all this is said to have been partly inspired by the actual takeover of Paramount Pictures by Gulf & Western, which was probably a lot noisier.

Union Broadcasting System (UBS), NETWORK (1976)

In screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's attack on television, new anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is saved from cancellation and becomes a major star — "the mad prophet of the airwaves" — after he reacts to news of his firing by flipping out and promising to kill himself on the air, a spectacle that the mass audience finds entertaining. With Beale's ratings on the rise, the head of the entertainment division (Faye Dunaway) takes over the news department, a speculative joke that some thought came to fruition one year later when the ABC news division was handed to sports-broadcast head Roone Arledge. Unfortunately, Beale's diatribes against the loss of individuality and free will are regarded by Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the head of the company that owns the network, as a threat to corporate power, so he summons the prodigal newsman to his office for a lecture on "the primal forces of nature." ("There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.") Beale is so impressed with this wisdom that he agrees to "preach" Jensen's philosophy to the television audience, which finds it so demoralizing that they tune out in droves, which leads to Beale's on-camera assassination. In the years since Network came out it has become customary to salute Chayefesky for having been clairvoyant, though it's hard to think of an easier way of predicting the future accurately than guessing that TV is always going to keep getting worse.

The Phone Company, THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

At one point in this spy spoof, a globe-trotting KGB agent observes that no matter where he goes, everyone he meets there hates the phone company. It turns out they have good reason. In a movie that features assassins of many lands picking each other off while trying to kill or kidnap the title character (James Coburn), the ultimate force of evil revealed at the climax is The Phone Company, whose android spokeman (William Redfield) unveils a diabolical plan to force all Americans to have a call-receiving device implanted in their heads. Of all the evil corporations in movie history, this one is almost certainly the funniest, though it must be conceded that the movie's depiction of the phone company as a sinister, monolithic force is dated in certain ways. For one thing, it turns out that most Americans today would probably be happy to sign up to have a chip put in their heads if it enabled them to download free movie trailers and video clips.

OMNI Consumer Products, ROBOCOP (1987)

Screenwriter Edward Neumeier was reportedly inspired to pen the script to Paul Verhoeven’s classic cyberpunk satire of American capitalism run amok after spending time on the set of Blade Runner. Like the Tyrell Corporation, OCP is a monolithic enterprise that virtually controls the police, and likewise has a run of bad luck with a series of robotic creations that do their jobs a bit too well. (If only Tyrell had the good sense to hire Miguel Ferrer.) Back in 1987, Omni Consumer Products’ stated intention to fully privatize organizations that had previously been thought of as the purview of government — "hospitals, prisons, space exploration. . . we practically are the military," says CEO Ronny Cox — seemed like absurdist comedy at best. Now, in the era of privately-run prisons, for-profit hospitals, billionaires in space, and Blackwater, the joke’s not quite so funny anymore.

Cyberdyne Systems, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

Most of the companies covered in this week’s list are up to no good — a little profiteering here, some inside trading there, maybe even endangering a few people’s health to turn a profit. But only Cyberdyne Systems, a second-tier Silicon Valley B2B manufacturer, brings about the destruction of the entire human race. Through convoluted events of the sort that only take place in movies involving time travel, Cyberdyne is responsible for the development of SkyNet, the nuclear defense computer network that eventually becomes self-aware and decides that we humans are too troublesome for our own good. From then on, it’s nuclear holocausts, killer robots, and grim, inevitable doomsday for everybody. We’re pretty sure that, despite their cunning manipulation of the situation and determination to put profit over safety, this isn’t the way that Cyberdyne’s managers would have wanted things to turn out; a global atomic extinction can’t have done much for their stock value.

The Tyrell Corporation, BLADE RUNNER (1982)

The very model of the 'megacorp' that constituted the primary villains in the cyberpunk fiction Blade Runner helped create, the Tyrell Corporation’s gigantic, pyramid-shaped arcology looms over a ruined polyglot Los Angeles. While the ‘little people’ are sold a steady diet of drugs, sex, cheap food and promises of off-world salvation, Tyrell (and its founder, the oleaginous Eldon Tyrell, brilliantly portrayed by Joe Turkel) controls the police, using them as hired goons to hunt down rogue replicants. These artificial life forms were created by the brilliant and unscrupulous Tyrell to serve as soldiers, sex slaves and workers in highly dangerous conditions, but he designed them too well; some achieved self-awareness and sought to eliminate the built-in expiration date that kept them from becoming too human. Tyrell’s desire to create the perfect being and then destroy them shapes this brilliant film's central conflict.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield