The Screengrab : tom cruise

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

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

And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)

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

THE QUIET AMERICAN (1958)

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

NO WAY OUT (1987)

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

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

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

HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002)

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

GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

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

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Last Morning Deal Report

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

A word of warning: just because this is our last Morning Deal Report at the Screengrab doesn’t mean Hollywood is going to stop announcing ridiculous projects. You’ll just have to find out about them somewhere else. I wish I could say we’ve saved the best for last, but we can only work with what they give us.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz will reunite for James Mangold’s Wichita. It is not the story of a lineman who’s still on the line. “The script has been through many machinations, but the most recent drafts were done by Scott Frank, with Mangold currently fine-tuning the script with Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island). Two-hander has several action scenes. Cruise will play a secret agent who pops in and out of the life of a single woman,” Variety reports.

Kevin Smith has found another pair of dicks. “Seann William Scott and Adam Brody are joining Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in Warner Bros.' A Couple of Dicks,” Smith’s new buddy action comedy, per The Hollywood Reporter. Smith did not write the script, which is by script Robb and Mark Cullen, and “follows a maverick cop (Willis) and his partner (Morgan) who, while tracking a valuable stolen baseball card, tangle with a memorabilia-obsessed gangster and rescue a Mexican beauty who holds the key to millions in laundered drug money.”

Also, there will be another Batman movie, another Star Trek, another James Bond, and at some point, probably another King Kong remake. Save us the aisle seat!

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek" - Nick's Take

Nick Schager — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Hardcore Trekkers can debate whether J.J. Abrams has committed heresy with his franchise-restarter Star Trek. For those not deeply invested in Gene Roddenberry’s humanist sci-fi series, however, this summer spectacular will prove a largely thrilling surprise, its blend of humor, romance and action so kinetically orchestrated that calling out its shortcomings feels like excessive carping. By constructing a story around planet-devouring black holes that function as time-travel portals, Abrams not only affords himself a premise fit for grand intergalactic conflicts but also a handy explanation for why Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban) and their fellow Starfleet peace-keepers only sort of resemble themselves. It’s an alternate reality Star Trek, and all the better for it, serving up the type of breakneck thrills and operatic excitement that’s been absent from this sci-fi universe since 1982’s Wrath of Khan. A distinctly modern blockbuster that comes on like gangbusters and rarely lets up, it re-confirms that Abrams – after energizing Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible saga in 2006 – is a director tailor-made for event pics, his sleek, lens-flared cinematographic style and vigorously to-the-point pacing well-suited for the demands of mega-budgeted tentpole extravaganzas.

In this reconfigured Star Trek, whose mythos occasionally recalls Star Wars, Kirk’s dad dies saving his starship’s inhabitants and, specifically, his wife and newborn baby, and Kirk himself grows up to be a devil-may-care bad boy squandering his potential in cornfielded Iowa. Convinced by paternalistic Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to follow his father’s footsteps by joining the Starfleet Academy, he immediately finds himself in conflict with Spock, a rather disagreeable know-it-all struggling to reconcile his dual heritage as a logical Vulcan and (thanks to human mom Winona Ryder) an emotional Earthling. Much of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s script centers on Kirk and Spock’s combative relationship, though along the way it also deftly provides introductions to the rest of the iconic Enterprise crew, including amusingly grouchy McCoy, mini-skirted sexpot Uhura (Zoe Saldana), tough Sulu (John Cho), goofy Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), and witty Scotty (Simon Pegg). As befitting an origin story, Abrams lavishes most of the attention on establishing his characters’ various relationships, a guiding directive that he admirably pulls off, with the writer/director sneaking in trademark catchphrases and allusions to signature moments in Star Trek history while allowing his new cast to make the revered characters their own.

Pine channels William Shatner’s ladies-man egomania with a playfulness that makes light of the legendary Kirk’s machismo, Urban’s McCoy grumbles with a gusto that would make DeForest Kelly proud, and Quinto gives Spock a smarty-pants attitude that differentiates him from that of Leonard Nimoy’s original Vulcan, who [spoiler alert] eventually figures prominently in the narrative proper. That plot involves Romulan madman Nero (Eric Bana) traveling back in time to exact revenge on Spock and the Federation for his home world’s demise, a scheme to destroy Earth that inevitably feels shoehorned into a film whose primary concern is setting up interpersonal dynamics that can be further developed in sequels. Thanks to the tacked-on nature of Kirk’s battle with Nero, as well as a few too-curt editorial choices that don’t maximize the scenario for thrills, Star Trek falters slightly during its climax. Yet it’s a minor speed bump on an otherwise brisk ride, one that avoids indulging in the franchise’s characteristic social/political allegory in favor of straightforward, uncomplicated sci-fi melodrama and mayhem. Light on its feet, free from the self-seriousness of its predecessors, and shrewd enough to keep one wanting more by not overstaying its welcome, Abrams’ breathless reboot achieves the improbable, forcefully reviving a series that many, including myself, believed had deservedly been left for dead.

Scott's Take

Precursors: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Nick Schager — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Those interested in fully readying themselves for this Friday’s Star Trek would be wise to bypass the franchise’s myriad small- and big-screen iterations and instead take a second look at Mission: Impossible III, the first and most recent franchise to get a vigorous kick in the behind from J.J. Abrams. Unfairly dismissed during its summer 2006 release because of star Tom Cruise’s couch-hopping antics and crazy comments about psychology and anti-depressants, the third Mission: Impossible remains the series’ most accessible and breathlessly exciting, characteristics mainly attributable to its director, who took on the project without any prior experience helming a tentpole extravaganza, and yet provided the no-nonsense adrenalized excitement absent from Brian De Palma’s intricate first and John Woo’s embarrassingly flamboyant second installments. Abrams borrows liberally from his TV series Alias as well as countless other sources for his story about IMF agent Ethan Hunt’s efforts to hunt down a Maguffin from a master criminal (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s kidnapped his new wife (Michelle Monaghan). And to be sure, not all of the narrative works, most notably with regards to its efforts to humanize the more-or-less superhuman Hunt. Still, Hoffman’s villain is excellent, and Abrams’ action-and-espionage centerpiece sequences have a visceral, invigorating electricity that one hopes Star Trek – which I’ll be reviewing here at The Screengrab later this week – also possesses.

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

RISKY BUSINESS (1983)

Sex sells...especially here on Nerve.com, which is why I included the HOT!!!! train sex clip above rather than, say, a clip of Bronson Pinchot counting money in the suburban bordello launched by Tom Cruise’s home-alone upper-middle-class teen wanker Joel and Rebecca De Mornay’s hooker with a heart of coal, Lana, the better to separate Joel’s horny friends from their virginity (not to mention their trust funds). But, in the same way Deadwood’s Machiavellian barkeep Al Swearengen realized the best way to get rich quick during the South Dakota gold rush was simply to bilk the prospectors, Joe Pantoliano -- in his breakthrough role as Guido the Killer Pimp -- is the movie's real schemer, winding up with all the money from Joel’s Young Enterpriser start-up. In a similar way, Tom Cruise wound up reaping most of the benefits from Risky Business, which launched his career into the A-list stratosphere while writer/director Paul Brickman somehow didn’t get to direct another movie until 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, by which point his once seemingly promising career had gone in the drink like Joel’s Porsche (along with the A-list dreams of Mornay and my own personal rooting interest, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong). But that’s capitalism, for ya! (AO)

LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s second-to-last film finds the auteur reuniting with his Le Samouraï star Alain Delon for another romantically fatalistic, existential crime saga. The expansive plot involves Delon’s thief, who’s released from prison, promptly rips off his mob employer, and then enlists the aid of a fugitive murderer (Gian Maria Volonte) and a boozehound ex-cop (Yves Montand) for a jewelry heist. Melville’s orchestration of the robbery boasts his trademark efficiency and lucidity, though what resonates more forcefully is his loving portrait of male camaraderie, as well as his tough-guys’ adherence to male codes of honor and conduct. As in most of the director’s neo-noirs, Delon and company are defined by their professional rituals, by the scrupulousness with which they carry out their tasks. As such, they’re ideal stand-ins for Melville himself, a master of the cinematic form who – as ably illustrated by the prolonged, taut central swindle – blended formal rigorousness with off-the-cuff jazziness to create an entrancing movie’s-movie vision of hoods, dames and doom. (NS)

THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Broadway producer Max Bialystock used to live the good life. Champagne, limousines, and girls, girls, girls! But now he’s reduced to wearing a cardboard belt, avoiding his landlord, and hustling old ladies to get money to pay his bills. He’d become used to high living, and it’s an addiction he can’t shake. What’s more, he’s no spring chicken; he’s only about 20 years behind his elderly clients like “Hold Me Touch Me”. He’s the very definition of someone who needs to get rich, and quick. Lucky for him, into his life – and his office – walks nervous accountant Leo Bloom, whose nebbishy temperament and genius with figures are just what Max needs to hatch his plan: to produce a play so awful that it will close on the first night – thus allowing him to pocket all the money he intends to bilk his little old ladies into overpaying. Like most great get-rich schemes, its elegant simplicity is its appeal – and likewise its downfall. Max picks a play, a cast, and a crew so profoundly awful that there’s no way they can possibly succeed, which, naturally, they do, and watching how it all plays out is one of the great joys of 1960s comedy. (LP)

THE KILLING (1956)

Those of us who were introduced to the cinema of Stanley Kubrick through his later Baroque Period and worked our way backward may have initially felt like this tight, twisty crime picture was the work of another filmmaker entirely. Kubrick’s bleak view of humanity is already fully formed, however, in this case ably assisted by noir novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), and his technical proficiency – notably as it relates to the movie’s innovative and influential time-shifting structure – is unmistakable. The granddaddy of all “one last heist” movies, The Killing boasts a rock-solid cast of retro roughnecks (including Sterling Hayden, Ted de Corsia and the inimitable Timothy Carey), a well-oiled racetrack robbery that can’t possibly go wrong, and a vicious, noose-tightening sense of impending doom when it inevitably does go wrong. The final image is the essence of noir fatalism boiled down to a bitter punchline – a peerless visual representation of the get-rich-quick scheme gone awry. (SVD)

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951)

Henry Holland, the London bank clerk played by Alec Guinness in this dry British heist comedy, has spent twenty years working on the slow part of his "get rich quick" scheme -- i.e., building up a supremely boring image so that his employers will trust him implicitly with the gold bullion whose transportation he regularly supervises. Holland decides that he's waited long enough when he meets Stanley Holloway, the owner of a foundry that manufactures cheap souvenirs and the last piece of his plan clicks into place: how to smuggle the gold out of the country once it's been stolen. The two melt down their swag and use it to make little Eiffel tower-shaped paperweights, then race to Paris to intersect them before they're sold in the gift shops to lucky tourists. In the end, they must pay for their dastardly deed, but at least Holland gets to meet Audrey Hepburn. (PN)

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

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

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

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

SATURN 3 (1980)

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

WARGAMES (1983)

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

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

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

SERENITY (2005)

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

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Ron Howard’s Strange Adventure

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Ron Howard may be bringing The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft to the screen. Universal has purchased the rights to the Image Comics graphic novel for Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. The comic book “borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world,” Variety reports.

Isaiah Washington is set to play a legendary soul singer in a new biopic. Washington will play Lou Rawls, who “sang in a range of styles that included blues, soul, funk and R&B, selling millions of albums and earning legions of fans, as well as the accolades of Frank Sinatra. He also, according to the script, had a traumatic life, enduring a poverty-stricken childhood and, in adulthood, intense marital strife,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Vanilla Sky reunion? Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are eyeing a new romantic comedy from James Mangold, previously titled Wichita and Trouble Man, but now untitled. “Story revolves around a woman who has terrible luck with men but finds her path intertwined with that of a mysterious handsome man she meets on a blind date,” says Variety.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Frost/Nixon"
Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

Yesterday's Hits: Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s the pitch: a young man, reeling from the death of his father, drives across country with the brother he never knew who, as it happens, is autistic. Cast one of Hollywood’s most respected actors as the autistic brother and its hottest leading man as the younger brother, and even today the pitch sounds like something straight out of high-concept hell. Yet despite its premise, which jazzed up the bankable but disreputable formula of the road movie with a mental-illness twist, Rain Man was not only the most popular movie of 1988 but also one of the most acclaimed Hollywood releases of the year, winning both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the only film ever to win both of these prestigious awards.

Today, Rain Man is largely remembered for its awards, for Hoffman’s performance, and the memorable lines he contributed to popular culture, including such favorites as “I’m an excellent driver.” But like many surprise hits, Rain Man was initially seen as a somewhat risky project by Hollywood. Several directors and a number of studios passed on the film before Barry Levinson and United Artists ended up making it. And while the film was in production, both of its stars had doubts about its potential. The film’s opening weekend receipts were disappointing, but soon it began to generate ecstatic word of mouth among moviegoers, eventually raking in over $170 million domestically to become the highest-grossing movie of the year.

So what was the secret to Rain Man’s success? Well, the stars didn’t hurt. By and large, major Hollywood projects were more star-driven in the eighties than they are nowadays, and Rain Man followed the popular Hollywood formula of pairing a respected veteran actor with a hot young star. And in 1988, there was no young star hotter than Tom Cruise. Still riding high from the success of Top Gun, Cruise had earlier in the year turned the cheesy bartending drama Cocktail into a sizable hit. Yet even in his younger days, he had a tendency to seek out established talent. He had followed Top Gun with The Color of Money, which paired him off with Paul Newman under the direction of Martin Scorsese, and Rain Man gave him a similar opportunity to work with Hoffman.

But while Hoffman was the one who got most of the accolades, I think that the film hinges just as much on Cruise’s performance. Don’t get me wrong- Hoffman’s certainly impressive. But due to the nature of Raymond Babbitt’s autism, Hoffman doesn’t have much of a character arc to play- he doesn’t change so much as cycle, again and again, through his daily routine. Levinson and screenwriters Ron Bass and Barry Morrow wisely avoided the temptation to soft-pedal Raymond’s autism by miraculously having him “recover”, and they’re to be commended for this. However, a movie solely about Raymond would have quickly become repetitive (think Jeanne Dielman, which actually sounds awesome so never mind), and certainly would not have been made by a Hollywood studio.

Because of this, it falls to Charlie (Cruise) to drive the story, and Cruise was more than up to the task. Charlie is a complicated character who’s often selfish and unsympathetic. Consider how greedy he can be, especially when it comes to Raymond- he steals Raymond from an institution in an attempt to procure more money from his late father’s estate, and once he discovers Raymond’s prodigious memory and gift for quickly counting large numbers of objects, Charlie decides to take Raymond to Las Vegas to score money by cheating a casino. But Cruise’s refusal to make Charlie a saint makes him all the more relatable. Sure, he can be a self-centered prick, but we also feel his pain whenever we see him dealing with Raymond. After all, keeping one’s life together (especially when the bank is breathing down your neck) is difficult enough without having to plan one’s days around someone like Raymond, for whom the need to eat one’s meals on time, watch The People’s Court, or wear the correct pair of underwear supersedes all else.

Because we see Charlie struggling with Raymond, it becomes all the more heartwarming when he finally learns to love and appreciate his older brother. In many ways, Rain Man may contain Cruise’s most undervalued performance, since not only is he upstaged by Hoffman’s showier work, but he also plays the sort of role that was often associated with him, the yuppie hotshot with an overabundance of alpha-male charm. However, to call Charlie Babbitt a stereotypical “Tom Cruise role” seems reductive, since it overlooks the nuances of the character. Then as now, Cruise was a fine actor, and one who was often doomed to being underappreciated.

Rain Man isn’t a perfect movie. Occasionally, it gets a little too plot-driven, as when Charlie and Raymond make their stop in Vegas. But at its best, it’s as good now as it ever was, due to the performances of Hoffman and Cruise and the rhythm and chemistry between them. Cruise might have joked that it was “two schmucks in a car,” but I think that’s what works about the movie- it gives these two fine actors sufficient time and space to work together without pinning them down to too much plot. And while Raymond doesn’t get better in the end, at least now he has a brother to visit him in the institution.

For better or worse, in the two decades since its release Rain Man has become the dominant pop culture image most people associate with autism. A few years ago, the Onion A.V. Club critic Noel Murray- himself the father of an autistic child- posted his thoughts on the film, filtered through his own experience. In this post (which you can read in full here), he states that although the film gets many of the details of autism right, it suffers because Raymond feels less like a character than a plot device through which Charlie can find redemption, and that the subject of autism would be better served by a movie that followed him and found drama in his routines. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion of the film considering his circumstances, and I don’t disagree with him. As a movie about autism, Rain Man doesn’t quite cut it. But taken on its own terms, I’d say it still works pretty darn well.

Ed Brubaker: From Comic Book Lowlife to Hollywood Player

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

All the excitement over movies like Watchmen is likely to create an opening for younger writers working in comics; after all, somebody's got to provide the raw materials that Hollywood will pounce on after it runs out of classic comics series to turn into movies. At least, that's the hope of people like Ed Brubaker, who recently shared his hopes and dreams with Los Angeles Times blogger Greg Braxton. "Last summer changed everything, you could feel it," says Brubaker, who had no credit on The Dark Knight but ended up getting a payday out of it anyway: "I even got money for the Batman movie because DC felt like there were fingerprints of stories I had written in the movie." In a comics universe where "mainstream" superhero creators and "alternative" creators are generally assumed to have limited interest in each other's work and, in their grumpier moments, to wish each other dead, Brubaker is unusual in having started out in the grungiest of "alternative" circles and wound up writing about costumed crimefighters. In the early '90s, Brubaker was part of the autobiographical comics scene with his Lowlife series, which featured thrilling, two-fisted tales of ripping off his employer, having his artwork compared unfavorably to that of Chester Brown, and needed a haircut. (He also edited the superb, single-issue comics anthology Monkey Wrench.) Brubaker began to edge towards the mainstream, and away from illustrating his own scripts, with the story An Accidental Death, which was drawn by Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) and serialized in Dark Horse Presents in 1992, before being reprinted as a stand-alone volume by Fantagraphics. (That must have been sweet, given that it was the rejection by Fantagraphics' Kim Thompson that inspired the Lowlife story "You're a Good Man, Chester Brown.")

Brubaker had done work for DC Comics starting in the mid-90s, but he didn't start writing superhero comics until 2000, when he first started writing Batman. He's currently writing both Captain America and Daredevil for Marvel. But his real interest, from An Accidental Death to his Marvel Icon series Criminal, is in crime fiction, and much of his most interesting work, including his series Sleeper and the new Incognito (which is about a super-powered villain in the Witness Protection Program) has one foot in the world of superheroes and the other in hard-boiled fiction. Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise are reportedly interested in making a movie version of Sleeper, but in the meantime, Brubaker is testing the waters of live action with Angel of Death, a new web series he's created for Crackle.com, Sony's bid for your on-line entertainment fix. The series, which premieres this week and will consist of ten weekly installments, stars stunt woman and Death Proof star Zoe Bell as a hired killer who turns on her employers after suffering a traumatic head injury. (The cast also includes Doug Jones and Lucy Lawless, which must have made for quite an on-set reunion; Bell used to work as Lawless's stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess. Brubaker says that Sony "green-lit it before I even wrote it, and they started filming two weeks after the final draft. I guess that's the world we're living in right now." You can watch episode one below:

From Crackle: Angel of Death Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Stretch Armstrong’s Big Bounce

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Jason lives! Friday the 13th took the top box office spot with a whopping $42.2 million, meaning we can look forward to eventual remakes of Friday the 13th Part 3-D, Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell. He’s Just Not That Into You slipped to second with $19.6 million, followed by Taken and Confessions of a Shopaholic. Coraline rounded out the top five, while Paul Blart: Mall Cop crossed the $100 million dollar mark, which should ensure Blart a promotion, perhaps to Homeland Security.

Whatever happened to The Hardy Men, the comical update of the Hardy Boys with Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller? Well, the stars are still attached to the project, which has a new writer, Ed Solomon (Men in Black). “The Hardy Boys adventures revolved around the mystery-solving efforts of teenagers Frank and Joe Hardy, amateur detectives who often helped their father, a private investigator,” The Hollywood Reporter reminds you. “The film adaptation would explore the reunion of the estranged, grown-up brothers, who work together to solve a new mystery.”

It’s impossible to even make jokes anymore about the onslaught of Hasbro adaptations. Last week we told you about the movie version of Candyland, and now Steve Oedekerk (Bruce Almighty) has signed on to write Stretch Armstrong, based on the pliable action figure. “The toy, a 13-inch, blond-haired muscled figure whose limbs could be stretched to nearly four feet, was launched by Kenner in the '70s. He had a dog named Fetch Armstrong, and a sibling, Evil X-Ray Wretch Armstrong,” Variety reports.

Related:
Parcheesi: The Movie
Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

Morning Deal Report: The Cruise/Cronenberg Circle

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Robert Ludlum novel The Matarese Circle is attracting some big names. Denzel Washington is already on board, and now Tom “Eyepatch” Cruise is in talks to join him. “Cruise will go mano a mano with Washington as two bitter enemy spies who, after spending two decades trying to kill each other, grudgingly team up against the Matarese, a powerful group at the root of a conspiracy,” Variety reports.

Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan has set up his latest bat-free project at Warner Bros. His original script Inception is described as a sci-fi action film, but as The Hollywood Reporter notes, “one would suppose a treatment based on some poems he wrote in his fifth-grade journal would have gotten the green light.”

John Malkovich has signed on to play the bad guy in Jonah Hex. “Malkovich will play Turnbull, a wealthy Southern plantation owner whose son is killed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. He blames Hex, a former confederate soldier-turned-hardened bounty hunter and gunslinger,” per Variety.

Related:
Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch
Horton Hears a Hex

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Until Jack Nicholson’s kooky Colonel Nathan Jessep made fun of Tom Cruise’s faggoty white uniform over lunch in A Few Good Men, I’d never heard of America’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Oh, for those carefree days of yesteryore.

Today, of course, most of us are sick-to-death of (and mostly just sickened by) references to all the terrible, terrible shit that’s gone down at Gitmo since America went torture-happy in 2002 and turned the base into a slightly less awful Abu Ghraib, where (according to our terrible, terrible 43rd president) the Geneva Conventions, legality, common sense and human decency no longer applied.

As of this writing, our hopefully much, much better 44th president has, according to Reuters, ordered a 120-day halt to all pending Guantánamo Bay prosecutions “to give the new administration time to evaluate the cases and decide what forum best suits any future prosecution.”

In the meantime, your pals here at the Screengrab would like to commemorate President Obama’s pledge to shut down one of the worst prisons in our nation's history with a salute to THE BEST PRISON MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO (2006)

Time will tell if Barack Obama truly represents the hope and change upon which he campaigned, but it was a good sign when his first act upon assuming office was to begin the process of shutting down the prison camp maintained during the Bush administration at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Meant to detain enemy combatants and terror suspects captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Guantánamo did almost nothing to fight al-Q’aeda, instead becoming a symbol of the degraded state of civil rights during the War on Terror. Michael Winterbottom’s powerfully effective documentary The Road to Guantánamo tells, through a clever mixture of documentary interviews and dramatic reenactments, the story of young British Muslims who visited Pakistan for a friend’s wedding; through foolhardiness or naivety, they ended up taking a detour into Afghanistan, and before they knew what was happening, they were captured, turned over to U.S. forces, and ended up in the world’s most infamous prison camp. Eventually released without charge two years later, their story is especially harrowing not only because a true prison tale is always scarier than an invented one, but also because it’s illustrative of how little it takes to destroy someone’s life in an atmosphere of paranoia and political fear.

COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

Given the timing of its release, Cool Hand Luke will probably always have the aura of a counterculture artifact, although in many ways it's your basic meat-and-potatoes prison flick. The conflict between our anti-hero Luke and the establishment – that is, the Bosses who keep him and his fellow prisoners in line – is certainly emblematic of the cultural divide of the Sixties, but it's also a well-worn standby of the genre. What makes Luke memorable, in addition to Newman's iconic performance, is the sweat-soaked Southern atmosphere and the rogues gallery of rugged character actors lined up on the chain gang, including George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ralph Waite, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker and Wayne Rogers. Sure, they may seem a little too comfortable playing grabass in their underwear, but prison does strange things to a man. The horrors of the work farm, from the backbreaking labor to solitary confinement in "the hole," are so far out of proportion to Luke's crime of cutting the heads off parking meters out of boredom, we'd root for him even if he wasn't a lovable rogue who settles the great question once and for all: can a man eat 50 eggs?

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Pigeonholing the Coen Brothers' perpetually underrated Americana romp as a prison movie would be just as ludicrous as studying The Big Lebowski for bowling tips, but the plot is indeed set into motion by a good old fashioned escape from a chain gang, and those big bold prison stripes really bring out the best in George Clooney. Although the Coens draw some of their imagery from classic prison flicks like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (their sunglasses-wearing pursuer appears to have stepped straight out of the latter picture), none of these influences have ever delved so deeply into the importance of the proper hair care product. Indeed, O Brother was the first prison movie that dared to depict the potential danger of the escaped fugitive being transformed into a toad by bewitching sirens. For speaking such hard truths, O Brother deserves a better reputation than it currently enjoys.

GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir’s WWI opus about French and English pilots captured by the Germans is a film of startling depth and grace, a testament to the power of movies to reveal elusive truths about humanity, and a hell of a good time, to boot. I realize that critical opinion of this movie is such that the last statement is akin to affirming the wetness of water, but sometimes we have to acknowledge the waters in which we swim before we dive. It is hard to describe The Grand Illusion as a prison flick, even though most of the action takes place in various prisons. The movie is about class and prejudice and war and love and honor and this list could seriously go on for a while. At the height of his powers, Renoir was an artist of amazing scope, and his little prison flick manages to illuminate the contradictions at the heart of human psychology while judging no character for behaving as they have been taught to behave. The movie is a veritable who's-who of great European (and even American) cinema. It stars Jean Gabin, one of Renoir's favorite leading men, as Lieutenant Maréchal, the central figure of the movie. Renoir himself was an aviator during WWI, and the uniform Gabin wears was Renoir's during the first World War. Pierre Fresnay plays Captain de Boeldieu, the aristocratic aviator shot down alongside Maréchal. The director Erich von Stroheim plays Captain von Rauffenstein, the aristocratic German officer who shot them down and later acts as their warden. Marcel Dalio, credited at IMDB with 177 film appearances, plays Lieutenant Rosenthal, a Jewish French officer. The gorgeous Dita Parlo also appears, along with her L'Atalante co-star Jean Dasté. But the cast is only a component of the greatness; far more important is Renoir's sweeping vision of humanity, both in confinement and in freedom.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

In Other Blogs: Drinking in the New Year

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

It may still be too soon after New Year’s Eve for some of you to contemplate the subject of serious drinking, but the dawn of a new year does seem like the perfect time to introduce a new blog to our roster: Booze Movies! It’s the self-described 100 Proof Film Guide and its mission statement is one we at the Screengrab can get behind: “Alcohol--the fabric of film history is soggy with the stuff. Still, film historians have rarely given booze its due. This site is dedicated to setting the record straight.” The latest entry concerns - what else? – Sideways. “Most films have little cultural impact beyond diverting an audience for a couple of hours, but Sideways changed the drinking habits of many Americans. Liquor stores across the country suddenly saw their wine sales rivaling (and in some cases surpassing) their beer sales. Moreover, Pinot Noir, a grape that most consumers had never heard of prior to the film, enjoyed a huge upswing in popularity, while Merlot sales dipped slightly. This can only be attributable to Miles’ advocacy of Pinot and denigration of the latter varietal within the movie.”

Perhaps you read our year-end Top 10 lists last week and thought to yourself, “This is all well and good, but where is Vadim Rizov’s list?” Well, it’s at The House Next Door, and topping the list is A Christmas Tale. “I was so blown away by Desplechin's alleged crowd-pleaser that I stole home uncustomarilly psyched I had the rest of the night open (i.e. empty) to grapple with the film and tease out some explication, if only for my benefit. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I didn't even begin to unpack how much is going on here. At this point it'll take years of re-viewings and reading to get the full benefit of it. For now, the one thing I'll add is that I find Desplechin's broad frame of reference exhilarating: this is a film with equal time for Blackalicious and Mendelssohn, The Ten Commandments and Vertigo, Angela Bassett's ass and Nietzsche.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern has seen The Spirit, and its suckage has inspired some thoughts on the current state of our culture. “You know what it is, man? It's nerd overreach… I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the '80s and '90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of ‘geek culture,’ and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)…We're all used to these articles about, ‘Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He's a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes.’ And people on the internet would become protective of these "geek" filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.”

Roger Ebert wonders: “Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail?” Specifically, he wonders about Nicole Kidman and her ex-husband. “Now consider the case of Tom Cruise. Did you read the buildup before the release of Valkyrie? The picture was widely predicted to be the nail in the coffin of his career. On Nov. 18, 2008, before the film was first publicly screened, Courtney Hazlett of MSNBC.com breathlessly reported: ‘...those who've gotten an early glimpse say not only is the film nowhere near as exciting as a thriller, but Cruise's performance elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs.’…Hazlett did not see the film, and apparently did not see her first sentence (‘the film elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs’) before writing her second one (‘you almost start to laugh’). The story lists three sources: (1) ‘Those who've gotten an early glimpse;’ (2) ‘Sources;’ (3) ‘One person who saw the film.’ Help me out here. Are we referring to three different people, or the same person three times?”

And finally in List-o-Mania – and we apologize in advance – Cinemablend offers The 100 Most Likely People to Die in 2009. Let’s just say if Roger Ebert is reading this, he may not want to click on that link.

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Nominations (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon)

Heath Ledger was penciled in here even before The Dark Knight was released. Philip Seymour Hoffman's work as the Penguin…er, the potentially pedophilic priest in Doubt should secure him a nod. Michael Sheen is probably the lead in Frost/Nixon, but his publicist will push him for this category. Josh Brolin drinks your Milk. That leaves one spot for the other comeback kid, Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder.

WINNER
Ledger, who will not attend the ceremony.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire)
Leonardo Di Caprio, Revolutionary Road
Ralph Fiennes, The Reader

Being that Heath Ledger gave an excellent performance and then went and died, there is no way he won't be nominated for The Dark Knight. For the same reason it isn't unlikely he'll win. Otherwise Josh Brolin stands a fighting chance. Especially given that his performance as Harvey Milk's killer in Milk is the type of role this category was made for. Well, that and taking care of actors that for whatever reason didn't end up in best leading actor. Which would explain why we find Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire in here. Let's face it; he just isn't famous enough (yet) to get nominated for Best Actor. Ralph Fiennes seems like a perennial nominee; if he didn't get a golden man for Schindler's List there is no way he will this year, but consider the nomination a consolation prize. Leonardo DiCaprio will be in here too, but we all know he's just filler.

WINNER
Heath Ledger

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
James Franco (Milk)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

We all agree that this is Ledger’s to lose, right? Likewise, Brolin and Oscar perennial Hoffman are looking pretty locked at this point. With The Soloist moved to spring, Tropic Thunder is the best chance for the Academy to honor the clean-and-sober Downey, while filling the annual comic scene-stealer slot for this category. The race for the final nomination is pretty wide open. Nominating Dev Patel here would be the voters’ best shot at giving crowd-pleaser Slumdog an acting nomination, but while a Patel nomination would likely signal a Best Picture win for the film, the actor’s only major nomination to date has come from the SAG, who are generally more inclined to recognize youth performances. Besides, will the voters really go for his relatively colorless performance, which is really a lead? Other possibilities include Happy-Go-Lucky’s driving instructor from hell Eddie Marsan (who’s been cleaning up the critics’ awards), or such reliable character actors as Bill Irwin (Rachel Getting Married) and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road). But I’m predicting a second supporting nomination for Milk in James Franco, whose relationship with Sean Penn’s Harvey is the emotional center of the film.

WINNER
Heath Ledger

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
James Franco (Milk)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

So, yes, of course Heath Ledger will be nominated and win, resulting in a two-hanky “on-behalf-of” acceptance speech from...hmm...Michelle Williams? Christopher Nolan? Well, that’s a guessing game for another time. And the nomination for Ledger’s whiteface performance will book-end with Robert Downey, Jr.’s blackface role in Tropic Thunder (overshadowed in the comeback kid department by Mickey Rourke’s meatface role in The Wrestler, natch). Philip Seymour Hoffman and Josh Brolin seem like safe, SAG approved bets for their solid performances in Doubt and Milk respectively, and while I liked Tom Cruise’s what-the-hell performance in Tropic Thunder a lot more than some of my Screengrab colleagues (and think it would be a hoot if the Academy followed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lead and nominated him), I think the fifth nod will officially go to James Franco for Milk (but really for Pineapple Express).

WINNER
Heath Ledger

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS
Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey, Jr. (The Soloist)
Ralph Fiennes (The Reader)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Liev Schreiber (Defiance)

Schreiber, a terrific actor who’s long been ignored by most of Hollywood, will get the nomination Defiance earns. Fiennes will be a perfunctory pick, but Brolin’s nod as Dan White will be well-deserved. Downey gets the nomination for The Soloist because he’s had an amazing year, but they won’t nominate him for a comedy (Tropic Thunder) or an action blockbuster (Iron Man). In the end, though, who’s kidding who? Especially since The Dark Knight won’t be getting anything else, Ledger is – forgive me – a mortal lock for his unforgettable turn as the Joker. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: Though Brolin deserves his nomination, it’ll come at the expense of James Franco and Emile Hirsch in the same movie.

WINNER
Heath Ledger

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
JOSH BROLIN, ROBERT DOWNEY, JR., JAMES FRANCO/RALPH FIENNES (TIE), PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, HEATH LEDGER

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
HEATH LEDGER

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

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

2008 Highlight Reel: The Top Twelve Screengrab Posts of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Compiling the weekly highlight reels here at the Screengrab is not such an arduous task, but putting together a year's worth of the finest in film bloggery was a considerably more formidable undertaking. Using a complicated points system akin to the BCS in college football, I have surveyed my fellow Screengrabbers, weighted the page views and reader comments, and come up with the following dirty dozen: the best of the year in Screengrab.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Love it or hate, it's hard to deny The Dark Knight was the pop culture event of the year. Our man Osborne has some qualms.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Of course, as with any pop culture phenomenon in an election year, The Dark Knight was used to score political points, few of which made any sense to me.

Forgotten Films: The Oscar

Phil neatly dissects one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, and apparently gets legendary author (and The Oscar screenwriter) Harlan Ellison to comment. (L.P.)

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne knows that, just as there are only seven kinds of stories, there are only five ways to make the endings of those stories totally blow your mind. (L.P.)

Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

Leonard brings us the heartwarming tale of film critics engaging in a stimulating exchange of ideas.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul focuses on the single fiction film made by one of the cinema’s all-time greatest documentarians – a movie so bad I wasn’t even aware that it existed. (L.P.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden - or as we call him around Screengrab headquarters, "the breeder" - looks at the Brad Bird classic through the eyes of both child and Childs.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew asks the musical question, "Why so much digital crap, Hollywood?"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard evaluates the oeuvre of one of our most underrated schlockmeisters, Albert Pyun.

Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Enough with Indy, Rocky and Rambo. It's time for our favorite road warrior to make a comeback.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil prefers the later, loonier Cruise. Find out why.

Unwatchable: It's Pat

I had to include an Unwatchable on this list, and this one seemed to be a favorite.

(Special thanks to Leonard Pierce for an assist on the comments and to Phil Nugent for diligent research.)

DVD Digest for December 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! This week, the big studios drop a ton of new DVDs and Blu-Rays into the market to compete for your newly-acquired Christmas cash.

In recent releases, DVD shopping begins early this week, with three new Paramount titles: Shia Labeouf and Michelle Monaghan in Eagle Eye (also Blu-Ray); Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town (also Blu-Ray); and Keira Knightley in The Duchess (also Blu-Ray). Today brings us Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha (Image Entertainment), as well as a “head to head” match up (sorry) between Alan Ball’s Towelhead (Warner) and the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead (Sony).

In TV on DVD, today’s new releases include The Tudors Season 2 (Paramount) and Nip/Tuck Season 5 Part 1 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s bumper crop of new Blu-Ray-only releases includes: Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder (Paramount); the Shining-in-space thriller Event Horizon (Paramount); Demi Moore and the Swayz in Ghost (Paramount); Queen Latifah in Last Holiday (Paramount); Jim Carrey in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (Paramount); Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers (Warner); and finally, the Browncoats’ favorite, Joss Whedon’s Serenity (Universal).

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Dec. 13-26, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

I tell ya what, Santa's work is never done. I'm about ready for a long winter's nap here, but before I nod off, there's a whole shitload of Screengrab posts for me to catch up on. And as usual this time of year, it's all about me. You've got your Mexican Santa, your axe-wielding Santa, your skanky Santa, and of course, the usual undignified begging I have to put up with from grown-ass adults (Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We'd Most Like to See, Parts One, Two, Three and Four).

There's enough Christmas content here to choke a reindeer. You've got a sackful of 12 Days of Christmas reviews, from A Christmas Story to It's a Wonderful Life to The Muppet Christmas Carol. You've got a stocking stuffed with YouTube clips, including The Junky's Christmas, The Insects' Christmas and the 40 Inspiring Speeches of Christmas. You've even got the Christmas Unwatchable, The Perfect Holiday. But if you're anything like me, you're completely Christmas-ed out, so here are the posts I'll be curling up with before my long visit to the Land of Nod:

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Movie Audiences No Longer Necessary For Movie Success

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler Pleases Mankind, Annoys Iran

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Scarlett Johansson Blows. Her Nose! Blows Her Nose!

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Valkyrie doesn't open until the end of the week, but the movie has already been taking a pasting, much of it in the form of open mockery of its star, Tom Cruise, so scathing that the question of just what has gone wrong with the wonder boy's career, and how might it be righted, is likely to continue for quite some time. Some people may have problems remembering that, for a very long time--we're talking decades here--it was as hard to find someone in the mainstream entertainment press or the industry itself who was prepared to question Tom's magnificence as it's been, since around mid-2005, to find someone not eager to question both his appeal and his sanity. How did it come to this? Stephen Metcalf at Slate thinks he has it figured out. He has a theory that involves a close read of the movie that made Cruise a star, Risky Business (1983), and how it played its part in saddling the now 46-year-old Cruise with an image that leaves him no room to mature as an actor. Recognizing Cruise's movie-star image as "the '80s incarnate" (and accurately summing up his acting range in four words: "bark, glare, seethe, repeat"), Metcalf recalls how Risky Business's "distinctive pathos derives from its first half, from the nocturnal weirdscape emanating out of Joel's jumbled libido. As this Joel, Cruise allowed himself to be everything the publicity team has tried to convince us, for 25 years, he isn't: insecure, sexually confused, and as Brickman's camerawork takes no pains to hide, physically small. We are meant to dislike—or at least, feel queasy—in the presence of the strutting superabundant charmer of the second half of the film, as he bursts forth from, and destroys, the chrysalis of Joel Goodsen. When Joel's parents go on vacation, he teams up with Lana to bring his horny friends together with her scheming colleagues, and in Joel's transformation (into a pimp, but also into Tom Cruise), we see the emergence of the '80s as the '80s."

"The '80s," writes Metcalf, "did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying 'what the fuck' and thereby securing your 'future,' is simply no longer tenable." What this has to do with the Tomcat and his present situation, is that "The Cruise persona, like a junk bond, was never meant to reach maturity." It is possible to agree with the broad outlines of this and still find a way to argue with many of the specifics. I think that Metcalf, perhaps infatuated with the notion that something "beautiful and authentic" was lost when Cruise found his path to public super-success, is way too inclined to give Risky Business credit for being what its writer-director, Paul Brickman, has always claimed he wanted it to be. Brickman, who at the time was best known as the writer of Jonathan Demme's Citizens Band (and who in the quarter-century since, has directed only one other movie, the 1990 dud Men Don't Leave), has made no secret of the fact that he thought he was making a movie about the power of corruption, and that the Geffen Company pressured him into changing his original, downbeat ending, in which Joel emerged less than triumphant. Working from a blueprint of one of Brickman's interviews, one can now make out what a dark, troubling piece of work it was supposed to be.

But the millions of people who loved it because they thought it was the kick-ass party movie of the '80s weren't missing anything; Brickman did agree to the changed ending, and from the evidence onscreen, whatever he felt before and after making the movie, during the all-important shooting schedule, he was less interested in realizing his cruel vision than in showing that he had the slickest, most hyped-up visual style this side of a month of MTV. No one in the summer of 1983 was wrong for thinking the movie was just what it looked and felt like: the Flashdance of suburban pimp movies. As for the sexually inexperienced, awkward, not-yet-cocky Cruise of the first half of the movie, it may be that this was not the "authentic" acting of a talented young actor playing a human being but rather the way that a cunning self-promoter knew he had to come on before he could win the audience over and make his transformation into a strutting cocksman asshole seem like a happy ending rather than a sad comment on all humanity. It's true that in every other performance Cruise would give in his golden age, he would pick up where he left off at the end of Risky Business, playing the asshole from frame one, and never looking back. It could be argued that, since the point of Top Gun and Cocktail and all the rest was to give Cruise a chance to play the asshole, it showed a kind of respect for the audience that, once he had "evolved" once and turned from sweet boy to asshole in one movie, he never really had to do it again, just as Clint Eastwood didn't pretend to be Destry and act as if his characters were reluctant to draw their guns. (For Cruise, a "prestige" acting job was something like Born on the Fourth of July, where he started out as a cocky, swaggering, pro-war asshole and then got to chance into a different kind of self-dramatizing, anti-war asshole.)

In the go-go '80s, movie heroes in Hollywood blockbusters were defined as winners. It's not just that they were different from heroes of other movie eras, who were defined by their rebelliousness or their romantic charm or their inclination to question society or whatever, but that, at their purest, they had no characteristics besides their winningness. The Reagan years at their ripest were defined by a shiny, Crest toothpaste grin that seemed to be doing its best to hold up under tremendous, unacknowledged stress, and the biggest movie stars in those years were those who seemed dumb enough or sufficiently full of themselves to sell this. Cruise was the biggest movie star of the '80s because he was the one who best typefied the image of the Winner. He wasn't alone: Stallone was the winner with the big muscles, and Eddie Murphy, the big "comedy" star of the time, had his biggest successes in what were essentially action movies in which Murphy, when he wasn't winning by shooting people, killed time by insulting and otherwise lording it over bit players who hadn't been provided by the writers with any comebacks. (To remind you that you were watching a comedy, Murphy would frequently double over with hysterical laughter at how hilarious the movie was, meeting the audience halfway by serving as his own laugh track.)

If Cruise was bigger than his competition, it was partly because he seemed to embody these pictures more than his white-bread competition, maybe because he needed his success more than any man alive, and partly because he had no special talents or peculiarities like Murphy or the steroid freaks Stallone and his usurper Schwarzenegger. For the young dudes who bought movie tickets for themselves and their dates, he was as easy to project onto as Sarah Palin was for some trailer park mom with her hair in curlers and with two kids in her arms and one in the sink. He had no special qualities to distract the half-buzzed frat rat looking to pretend that was him up there on that screen drivin' that plane. There was a memorable moment in The Color of Money where Paul Newman tells him that he's "a natural character" and then has a good chuckle at the expense of his ignorant young sensei, who, misunderstanding, thinks that he's being paid the compliment of being told that he has character. The double-edged joke of this exchange is that Cruise wasn't even an unusual enough actor to successfully play a "character." But by then, the audience, knowing what to expect from him and what not to bother hoping for, understood that he was meant to seem like more of a live wire than usual because his hair looked weirder.

The real question is how Cruise managed to stick around so long, maintaining a pretty steady top-of-the-line career for so long that both Murphy and Stallone and flamed out and had comebacks, and Schwarzenegger went into politics, in the time it took him to experience his first real signs of career turbulence. Let alone how he earned all those good reviews--at least one critic, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice, actually got indignant back in 1990 when Daniel Day-Lewis won a critics' award instead of Cruise for having sat in that wheelchair in Born on the Fourth of July. The widespread incredulity in the face of his even having taken the role in Valkyrie is probably must greater than it would have been if Cruise's pretensions to being seen as a real actor hadn't been tolerated for so long. It's as if the world had just woken up from a collective fever, one made all the more confounding for just what they found themselves in bed with when sanity returned and the beer goggles came off. On a personal note, it kind of puts me in a funny place, because I could never stand Cruise when I was one of those college guys buying the tickets but have sort of warmed up to him since he went publicly batshit. (The movie in theaters when people started jumping off Cruise's bullet train was The War of the Worlds, and his performance in that was a lot better than some of the roles he's racked up raves and award nominations for. It was perfectly in his best range: he had to express resentment, run like hell, and convince you that he'd prefer not to be incinerated by alien death rays. And he got to share the screen with Tim Robbins, always a good choice if you want to remind people that sometimes, a "real" actor can be a hundred times more annoying than a movie star.) What next for Cruise? It may be a learning game, finding out what he can and cannot get away with now. As of 2008, the stats seem to be: Fat suit and bald wig yes, Nazi uniform and eyepatch, check please!

Morning Deal Report: Paul Schrader Goes Bollywood

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

“Saying he feels the U.S. film market has become ‘barren,’ the writer of classics Taxi Driver and Raging Bull is packing his bags for Mumbai to write and direct the Bollywood action movie Extreme City,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Paul Schrader is working on the script for this “cross-cultural tale that will center on an American man who travels to India to help resolve a kidnapping case for his father-in-law, only to get caught up in a gangster plot. There likely will be some musical numbers, and dialogue will be spoken in English and Hindi.” Call me crazy, but I’m intrigued.

Graphic novelist Joann Sfar will direct Serge Gainsbourg (vie heroique) for Universal – the first French-language picture in the studio’s history. Per Variety, the biopic of the French icon will follow Gainsbourg “from his youth growing up in 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris, when he was called Lucien Ginsberg, through to his transformation into the hard-living showman. He died in 1991 at age 62.” French model Laetitia Casta (pictured here) will play Brigitte Bardot.

File this one under K for “kill me now”: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are reportedly contemplating a remake of Last Tango in Paris. Maybe it’s not time to panic quite yet, however – according to Now magazine, “Tom’s looking for something that’s cutting edge and sexy, but also accessible. He’s thinking along the lines of Basic Instinct – a movie that has a mainstream plot, but also some intense sex stuff.” Pass the butter, please.

Related:
Take Five: Smut
Bollywood Bonanza: Shah Rukh Khan Breaks Big

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

Morning Deal Report: We Can't Stop the Three Stooges Revival

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The Farrelly brothers are doing their best to ensure that we never go to the movies again. Last week we reported their involvement in the farting dog movie. Now Variety reports that Bobby and Peter Farrelly “will renew their quest to channel the comic mayhem of the Three Stooges into a contemporary comedy.” If visions of Michael Chiklis as Curly are dancing (and slapping) in your head, Peter Farrelly would like to reassure you. “"It’s not a biopic. It takes place in present day, and they look, dress and sound exactly like the Stooges…When the economy started turning, we felt like the world could use a Stooges slapfest.” You know, he’s right. I do need a movie that won’t tempt me to spend any money.

Add another project to the 57 or so Steven Soderbergh already has in the works. With Che due in theaters and The Girlfriend Experience and Liberace on deck, Soderbergh will lend his name as executive producer to the mob movie Making Jack Falcone. Che screenwriter Peter Buchman will pen “the story of Joaquin ‘Jack’ Garcia, also known as Jack Falcone, a Cuban-American FBI agent who successfully went undercover in the Gambino crime family,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Charlize Theron may co-star with Tom Cruise in The Tourist. She’d play “a female Interpol agent who uses an American tourist in an attempt to flush out an elusive criminal with whom she once had an affair,” per Variety. Just do what she says, Mr. Cruise.

Related:
Steven Soderbergh's "Girlfriend Experience"
Charlize Theron is a Sexual Creature

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHIA LABEOUF

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

ROBIN WILLIAMS

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

EWAN McGREGOR

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

CLINT EASTWOOD

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

NICOLE KIDMAN

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

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Trailer Review: Valkyrie (Trailer #2)

Paul Clark — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last fall, back when Bryan Singer’s latest film was slated to open in July of ’08, I scoffed at the movie’s first trailer as being too high-toned and Oscar-baity. Interestingly enough, now that Valkyrie’s release date is smack dab in the middle of awards season, the new spot looks more like a potboiler than a tradition-of-quality period piece. Frankly, I like the new approach better. The true story of Operation Valkyrie would probably feel heavyhanded as a “courage in the face of ultimate evil” narrative, but as a thriller about a band of rebellious officers trying to bring down Hitler, it sounds a lot more interesting. Sure, it runs the risk of coming off as “Nazi kitsch,” but at least that would have some flavor. Will 2008 be the year that Tom Cruise regains his movie-star mojo? Hard to say, but I’m definitely more curious about Valkyrie than I was before.

DVD Digest for September 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week is a busy one for lovers of classic cinema- to say nothing of the folks at Warner Home Video.

DVD(s) of the Week: Continuing their ongoing commitment to spotlight film history’s greatest filmmakers, the good folks at Criterion fill a glaring hole in the DVD market with this week’s release of three classics by Max Ophüls- La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame De…. These three films, all made at Ophüls’ artistic and commercial peak, make a lovely introduction to the man’s work, with all the continental sophistication, exquisitely-wrought melodrama, and lavish production values that made his reputation. And stars? You bet- between the three films, you’ll find Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon. If you can only shell out for one disc, go with Earrings, whose DVD features not only scholarly commentary and a number of featurettes (including an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose complex camera movements were clearly inspired by Ophüls’ work), but also a new printing of the source novel, Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame De…. But really, they’re all worth your money. Now all we need is a Region 1 DVD of Letter From an Unknown Woman…

In addition, this week is a banner occasion for musical fans, led by a double dose of Oscar-winning Vincente Minnelli titles, An American in Paris and Gigi (both Warner), each presented in snazzy new Two-Disc Special Editions. There’s also Warner’s The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, which includes Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Variety Show. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner); young Tom Cruise and his Ray-Bans in Risky Business 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Ryko Distribution), which was spotlighted last week by our very own Phil Nugent; Glenn Close in the live-action 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians (Disney); and The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 (Fox).

This week’s roster of recent releases on DVD is headed up by The Wachowski Brothers’ financial and critical bomb Speed Racer (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which I believe is still the most underappreciated movie so far this year. Other recent titles coming to DVD include: Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Al Pacino in 88 Minutes (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mike Myers making an ass of himself again in The Love Guru (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the surprisingly affecting Young@Heart (Fox); David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (Warner); the acclaimed documentary Constantine’s Sword (First Run); and two direct-to-DVD titles, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (Disney) and Another Cinderella Story (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s new TV on DVD titles include: Chuck Season 1 (Warner); Criminal Minds Season 3 (Paramount); Dirty Sexy Money Season 1 (Disney); My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox); Private Practice Season 1 (Disney); and Pushing Daisies Season 1 (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only titles, this week brings 1408 (Weinstein), Hulk (Universal), Madagascar (Paramount), The Mist (Weinstein), and Shrek the Third (Paramount).

Thursday Morning Poll for August 27, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Now that Tropic Thunder has ruled as America’s top grossing movie for two straight weekends, it’s clear that the Ben Stiller name still means box office. Yet amidst the hype for Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise (and the free press courtesy of mental health advocates), it’s easy to forget that Stiller directed the film in addition to starring in it. But for all the audience love that Tropic Thunder has received so far, the Stiller-directed film that reigns supreme in the hearts of Screengrab readers is 2001’s Zoolander, which outpaced Tropic Thunder (35% to 25%) in last week’s poll. Coming in third with 20% was Stiller’s underappreciated dark comedy The Cable Guy, with Reality Bites and the pilot for the never-picked-up series Heat Vision and Jack bringing up the rear.

This week, in conjunction with the recent release of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we take a look at the Woodman’s European period. Following a long career as the cinematic spokesperson for the neurotic, affluent New York mentality, Allen’s has made his last four films overseas with predominantly non-American crews and casts, Scarlett Johansson notwithstanding. For this week’s Thursday Morning Poll, we’re asking you which of Allen’s European films you prefer, taking into account his last four completed projects and an “early, funny” classic that also got made primarily outside the United States. So, which is your favorite?

Favorite European Woody Allen film? | BuzzDash

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

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 16-22, 2008

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:17:00 GMT

Hello? Oh...Mr. Rooney...what? Uh, no...Scott's not here. This is Andrew...Andrew Osborne...yes, sir, I'm another one of the writers here at The Screengrab. You may have read my ongoing autobiographical posts about the summer I spent working for Troma ...no? Well, maybe you read my special 50th birthday salute to the films of Madonna or my review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona? No? Oh, well...

...uh, what's that, sir? Scott Von Doviak? You mean the author of "Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny," "Anna Faris, Honorary Bunny" and "Unwatchable #74: You Got Served"? Oh, well, he's not here right now, but...

...excuse me? You've heard rumors that Scott is singing "Twist and Shout" in the streets of Chicago with his colleague Leonard Pierce, author of "Video of the Day: Sharon Stone Bares All For Paul Verhoeven," "Summerfest '08: Corvette Summer" and that cool story about the state of DC Comics film adaptations? And that Sarah Sundberg, one of the hardworking contributors to "Screengrab Salutes The Top 20 Animated Feature Films" was riding around with them in a bright red Ferrari convertible?

Oh, no, sir, I'm afraid you must be mistaken. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Scott was just in here a few minutes ago...see, he and Paul Clark were both working on their individual Fall Movie Previews and...

...excuse me? Oh...I see. You're saying nobody posted the weekly Screengrab highlight reel on Friday? Well, sir, I'm sure there must be a good reason...in fact, now that you mention it, I remember Phil Nugent telling me his friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who's pretty sure that Scott passed out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

But I'm sure if Scott were feeling better, he would have reminded everyone about the memorial for Manny Farber, the cool trailers he saw for Rachel Getting Married, a reexamination of Passion of the Christ and...

...I'm sorry? Could you repeat that, sir? "Les jeux sont faits." Yes, sir, well, I'll be sure to pass the message along if I see him.

Gummi bear?

Morning Deal Report: Coen Brothers Get Serious

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I have misled you once again. The Coens’ follow-up to Burn After Reading is actually described as a black comedy in this Variety report, but it is titled A Serious Man. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg and former Spin City regular Richard Kind will star. (I know, not exactly Pitt and Clooney, right?) “Set in 1967, story centers on Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a Midwestern professor whose life begins to unravel when his wife sets out to leave him and his socially inept brother (Kind) won't move out of the house. Shooting is set to start at the beginning of next month in Minneapolis.”

Here’s a sentence from the Hollywood Reporter that shouldn’t exactly shock anyone: “As Tom Cruise goes about writing the next chapter in his career, he's developing an interest in comic book movies.” Cruise is teaming up with Spider-Man maven Sam Raimi for an adaptation of Sleeper, and we can all be thankful it’s not a remake of the Woody Allen comedy. “Written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, Sleeper, which ran from 2003-05, centers on an operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain and allows him to pass it on to others through skin contact. He is placed undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency and falls for a member of the group, named Miss Misery.” I smell Cruise’s Battlefield Earth.

Yet another graphic novel headed for the big screen is Julius, to be directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job). Sadly, it’s not a biopic about the founder of Orange Julius, but rather an urban crime thriller based on Julius Caesar. Per Variety, Gray “has a vision for this adaptation that will satirize obsessive consumerism while providing a thrilling ride for audiences.” Good luck with that.

Related:
"Freaky Little People": The Coens Burn On
Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

Scott Von Doviak — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Aside from the controversies over Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface and the use of the word "retard," the big pre-release buzz about Tropic Thunder had Tom Cruise revitalizing both his career and his public image with his hilarious turn as foul-mouthed studio mogul Les Grossman. That said buzz originated with Team Cruise has never been doubted by me, but the entertainment media has been only too happy to nudge it along. It's good for business, after all; everyone loves a redemption story, particularly one that humanizes what has been a cold, calculating persona for some time. Tom Cruise with a paunch and bald wig? He has no vanity! He's ready to let loose and have some fun! He really doesn't take himself so seriously after all. That's the narrative we've had rammed down our throats, but is there any truth to it? Let's find out after the jump, but be warned, minor Tropic Thunder spoilers may ensue.

So here's the deal: Cruise has maybe ten minutes of screen time as bald, bearded, bespectacled blowhard Grossman. Despite the prosthetics, which include huge hairy forearms as well as the chrome dome and pronounced (but not too pronounced) belly, Cruise does not exactly disappear into the role - he's recognizably Cruise all the way. The nose knows, and besides, he doesn't even do a voice. Conveniently, for him as well as the movie's marketing team, he gets to have it both ways. He's having fun and doing an "outrageous" character, but there's never a moment we feel like we're watching an outrageous character - it's clearly Tom Cruise Industries up there on the screen.

In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think director, co-writer and co-star Ben Stiller was having a little fun at Cruise's expense. After all, right here in the same movie we have Robert Downey, Jr. as a pompous, self-absorbed genius actor who undergoes an experimental process to appear African-American in the movie-within-the-movie. (Of course, since Downey actually is a talented actor, he disappears into both the role of Australian thespian Kirk Lazarus and that of platoon sergeant Osirus.) And we also have Jack Black as a desperate comic actor who dons a variety of fakey prosthetics for his multiple roles in The Fatties, Fart 2.

The joke is on somebody here, but I don't think it's Cruise, since he's buddies with Stiller, who actually thinks Cruise is funny - or at least that's what he told Entertainment Weekly. Unless I'm forgetting something, the last time Cruise made me laugh since Risky Business was his Scientology recruitment video leaked onto YouTube earlier this year - and that was the sort of nervous laughter I usually reserve for Charles Manson interviews. By my count, Cruise is the 12th funniest person in the movie, behind Downey, Stiller, Black, Danny McBride, Steve Coogan, Brandon T. Jackson, Bill Hader, Jay Baruchel, Matthew McConaughey, a kid playing a Vietnamese heroin mule, and even Nick Nolte, not generally regarded as one of our foremost humorists.

Cruise dances in character over the end credits, and we are reminded of Hollywood's second most famous Scientologist, John Travolta, and how his career revival in Pulp Fiction included a dance scene that echoed fond memories of Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Here I guess we're supposed to flash back to Cruise dancing in his underwear in Risky Business and remember why we used to love him. Honestly, I was more creeped out than amused. How hard would it have been for Stiller to find an actual bald, hairy fat fuck for this role? Jon Polito would have killed, or James Gandolfini. I mean, wasn't that the point of the Downey character - that it's probably a good idea to hire an actual black actor than an Australian in blackface? Instead it's just the latest chapter in the Tom Cruise psychodrama - the extended version of jumping on Oprah's couch.

Related:
Tom Cruise Parodies Someone Else for a Change
Citizen Cruise

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 9-15, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

You’ve had the dream. You find yourself in a classroom you’ve never seen before, sitting at a desk in your underwear. The professor is passing out the final exam. Your heart freezes, your fingers go numb as you suddenly realize – you forgot to read the Screengrab this week! Don’t let this happen to you. Catch up on all the highlights now, including:

The Top 20 Movies About Movies, Parts One, Deux, Three, Four and Five. These will definitely be on the test.

A moment of silence please for Bernie Mac, Bernie Brillstein, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley and his crappy movies.

You know you’ll be asked about new movies, like Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The Clone Wars and A Girl Cut in Two. But you should also be prepared for more obscure questions about Mad Dog Time, The Driver, The Last Sign and Summer Rental.

Remaking Rocky Horror: Bad idea or terrible idea?

Is Angelina Jolie playing Catwoman a more enticing proposition than Angelina Jolie playing Tom Cruise?

Woody Allen: Is he a better filmmaker or bronze figurine?

When is a documentary not a documentary?

Study hard or you may find yourself working for Troma.