The Screengrab : tropic thunder

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

And the nominees are...

Josh Brolin – Milk
Robert Downey, Jr. – Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt
Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road

Paul Clark Predicts: Heath Ledger

Probably the most iron-clad pick of the major nominees, giving Hollywood a chance to honor one of their brightest young talents who was gone far too soon. Although if by some chance there’s a sentiment out there to give it to someone who’s still around, I’d say Brolin would be the best bet -- Hoffman just won, Shannon’s lucky just to be nominated, and they’d never give Downey an Oscar for a performance that controversial. But yeah, this is Ledger’s all the way.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Heath Ledger

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Heath Ledger

Josh Brolin’s terrific performance in Milk may be diffused by the fact that he’s surrounded by other great supporting roles. Downey deserved his nomination, but won’t get it in a million years. But really, what are we even talking about here? If there’s ever been, forgive me, a mortal lock in the history of the Oscars, it’s Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.

Should Win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Will Win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Nick Schager Predicts: Heath Ledger

Iconic role in an immense blockbuster? And it’s his final performance? Ledger is this year’s sure bet.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Heath Ledger

Any other year, Philip Seymour Hoffman, since he's in enough high profile movies this year to warrant it. Rightfully, though the award belongs to Josh Brolin. This being not a normal year, but rather The Year Heath Ledger Died, he will get posthumously rewarded.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Heath Ledger

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: HEATH LEDGER

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

And the nominees are...

Amy Adams – Doubt
Penélope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis – Doubt
Taraji P. Henson – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler

Paul Clark Predicts: Viola Davis

I’d say this is between Davis and Cruz, but the role wins it for Davis. After all, the role has already brought home a Tony, and while it’s tempting to think Cruz could accept the Oscar from her boyfriend and Vicky Cristina Barcelona costar Javier Bardem, Davis’ Oscar clip will be hard to beat.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Viola Davis

I really, really want Penélope Cruz to win this, simply because she gave (for me, anyway) the most memorable Supporting Actress performance of the year...but the Academy hates comedy and loves drama, especially snot-running down the face “Oscar” moments like Viola Davis’ cameo in Doubt. Plus...diversity! And, hey, Viola ain't no slouch and totally knocked her scene outta the park, so no hard feelings. Taraji P. Henson doesn’t deserve it: she was likeable enough, but her performance was all about make-up, so I’ll be mad if she wins. Amy Adams doesn’t deserve it, either: she was fine, but the role was fairly bland. And I wouldn’t mind seeing Marisa Tomei win, but I’m guessing the Mickey Rooney wing of the Academy watched about five minutes of The Wrestler before snapping it off in disgust and reaching for that nice Benjamin Button screener again...

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Marisa Tomei

To hear a lot of the entertainment pundits tell it, Marisa Tomei is a stone cold lock for her role in The Wrestler, but I’m not convinced. She still catches a decent amount of flak from critics who don’t think she deserved her first Oscar. Viola Davis seems the most deserving for Doubt, but may suffer from a vote-split with Amy Adams. This one may be the most difficult of the major categories to call.

Should Win: Viola Davis, Doubt
Will Win: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Nick Schager Predicts: Viola Davis

Davis takes supporting actress honors, because Doubt has to win something. And because Woody Allen’s excruciating Barcelona-travelogue-cum-phony-threesome-dramedy can’t in any way be honored. Please.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Viola Davis

Because she was that good and because the Academy will want to throw something Doubt's way.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Penélope Cruz

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: VIOLA DAVIS

Stay tuned for no Miley Cyrus, no Bruce Springsteen, no Jon Stewart and some Indian guy called Gulzar as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues!

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

Morning Deal Report: Green Lantern Powers Up

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Casino Royale director Martin Campbell is in negotiations to helm a live-action version of the DC comics staple Green Lantern for Warner Bros. The power ring-wearing superhero is now “at the top of DC properties being set for movie treatment by WB,” Variety reports. “While the studio is hoping director Chris Nolan will follow its 2008 smash The Dark Knight with another Batfilm, DC projects such as Superman and Justice League were expected to happen quickly, but have stalled.” Aquaman – dissed again.

While we’re talking superhero movies, it looks like Ben Stiller and Tina Fey have joined Robert Downey, Jr. for another one – and it’s not Iron Man 2. The trio is “in negotiations to lead the voice cast for DreamWorks Animation's superhero lark Master Mind…The satiric film, with a screenplay by Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons, concerns a brilliant superhero villain who loses his life's purpose when he accidentally kills his good-guy nemesis,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

While Ridley Scott is allegedly interested in bring Monopoly to the screen, another board game has beat the venerable classic to the punch. Yes, it’s everyone’s very first board game, Candy Land. Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder) will write the script and Kevin Lima (Enchanted) will direct. I’m still holding out for Scorsese's Don’t Spill the Beans: The Movie.

Related:
Comic Book Legends
Parcheesi: The Movie

Reviews By Request: The Foot Fist Way (2006, Jody Hill)

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For the next three weeks, I’ll be reviewing three movies you requested in last week’s column. Polling for future Reviews By Request columns will begin again on January 30.

Over the past few decades, there has emerged in American popular culture something that can be called the “comedy of awkwardness.” In this style of comedy, which draws heavily from British humor, the comedy comes not merely from a character’s strange behavior, but also the discomfort their behavior causes. Often, in comedies of this sort, it’s the surrounding characters’ dumbfounded reactions that generate the most laughs. Comedy of awkwardness has become an integral part of some of the most popular and acclaimed sitcoms in this country like The Office and 30 Rock, and it’s begun making inroads into movies as well.

However, to successfully pull off the comedy of awkwardness, one must walk a thin line. To begin with, the character who generates the discomfort has to think he’s acting perfectly normally. If there’s any sense that this person is aware of how crazy he looks, the comedy is lost. In addition, the audience has to get a sense that the people who surround the crazy character acknowledge, if only to themselves, how strange his actions are. Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way gets only the first rule right, while ignoring the second altogether. So in spite of a fine and wholly committed performance by Danny McBride in the lead role, the film never takes off as comedy, coming off not so much funny as simply odd.

The Foot Fist Way focuses on the character of Fred Simmons (McBride), a boorish one-time tae kwon do champion-turned-small town instructor. Fred presides over his dojo with the authority of a drill sergeant, barking out orders and insisting that his students address him as “sir.” Meanwhile, Fred’s life begins to fall apart when he discovers that his wife cheated on him with the manager at her new job. Soon, Fred falls apart and becomes consumed with rage and grief, surely the last emotions one wants to see from a man who makes his living instructing people- children, even- how to fight. Fred discovers that his wife’s boss’ name is Mr. Fisher, and when he assumes that a student, also named Fisher, is the boss’ son, Fred decides to take out his rage on the boy, with predictable results.

But let’s look at that particular scene. A grown man beating the hell from a young boy is not inherently funny, but there are comic possibilities for such a scene if done right. Unfortunately, The Foot Fist Way doesn’t deliver. Hill shows McBride fighting the boy in long shot, but never takes the time to show us how the other characters in the scene feel about this. Just one well-timed reaction shot from a disbelieving onlooker could have salvaged some laughs, but that reaction shot never comes. The whole film is like that- plenty of promise, but very little end result. There are a few scenes that work, such as Fred’s misguided attempts to seduce a pretty female student or a weepy monologue in which he schools a young student in life’s harsh realities, but many more that don’t. By the time the story has become a mano a mano between Fred and karate movie superstar Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (played by the film’s co-writer, Ben Best), the movie’s comedic potential has long since been squandered.

It’s a shame, since McBride’s performance is really very good, in large part because he’s completely convincing in the role. I’ve never taken a martial arts class, but I can imagine that many of the instructors are more or less like Fred, attracted less to its traditions than to the power teaching gives them. Tae kwon do is rooted in self-discipline, but my guess is that most students sign up for martial arts so they can learn to fight, and when one is teaching people who are clearly weaker and less skilled, there can be a temptation to prove one’s superiority by cutting others down to size. In many ways, Fred is the flip side of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in David Mamet’s Redbelt, who is more of an old-school purist. Fred, on the other hand, enjoys being in control and doesn’t know any better way to go about it than by intimidating others, and McBride effortlessly projects the arrogance of a man who harbors no doubts whatsoever that he can kick your ass, while also showing occasional deference to those who are more powerful than he is. It makes perfect sense that when Fred’s wife tries to patch up their marriage, Fred insists on telling her, “I’m the stronger man, and you’re the weaker woman.” Although considering what a ringer she's already put him through, is he trying to convince her of this, or himself?

If nothing else, The Foot Fist Way should be remembered as that movie that introduced Hollywood to the brilliance of Danny McBride. McBride had previously appeared as the scene-stealing Bust-Ass in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls, but with this film, he quickly made fans of Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow, and has since been cast in such high-profile films as Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, and the upcoming big-screen version of Land of the Lost. But while McBride’s comic skills are undeniable, there are also moments in The Foot Fist Way that hint at darker undercurrents, leading me to think that he might become a fine character actor if given the chance. The Foot Fist Way isn’t much of a movie, but it announces McBride as a talent to watch.

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 in Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Movie Moments

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Starting tomorrow, the writers of Screengrab will be unveiling their lists of the top 10 films of 2008. But before that begins, I’d like to post a different sort of list of highlights from the past year. For those of you who’ve only started reading recently, I used to write a bi-weekly column called “The Movie Moment,” in which I’d explore in depth some of my favorite scenes from movies both old and new. This past spring, I had to put the column on indefinite hiatus for various reasons, but I wanted to bring it back for this week only so I could celebrate some of my favorite Movie Moments of 2008. However, I had such a devil of time trying to narrow down my list that I’ve decided to simply list all of the moments that made me laugh out loud, cry like a baby, bite my nails uncontrollably, or which otherwise rocked my world this past year. This list is by no means meant to be taken as comprehensive, but merely were the moments which readily sprang to mind while I was writing the piece. So without further ado, I give you…

2008: The Year in Movie Moments:

(in no particular order)

The little boy’s confession notes- In Bruges

“No-no-no. I kill the bus driver.” - The Dark Knight

The security guard makes his rounds - Man on Wire

Sidney’s musical vows - Rachel Getting Married

The kiss that launched a thousand lens flares - Silent Light (only one of several transcendent moments in the film- the swimming-hole scene or the epic rainstorm might just as easily have qualified)

Mike’s late-night visit (or really, anytime Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is played) - The Strangers

Peekaboo nudity - The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Harry unveils the machine - Burn After Reading (honestly, who could possibly enjoy THAT?)

Madame Gaudens’ confession - A Girl Cut in Two

Incident at the race track - My Winnipeg

Most hilarious random line of the year: “When it comes to women, you’re Michael Jordan. I’m… Bill Laimbeer.” - Baghead

The new army suits up for battle - Role Models

Alex takes a shower - Paranoid Park

Brandi forgets her cell phone - Stuck

Black Kold Medina puts on a show - Trouble the Water

Runaway penguin - Encounters at the End of the World

Jung-rae Kim diagrams his neuroses - Woman on the Beach

Alex’s sex surprise, both inevitable and strangely erotic - XXY

The director’s big exit - Tropic Thunder

Most unlikely tearjerking moment of the year: Fred Knittle sings “Fix You”, Young@Heart

Three-way fist fight: Seth Rogen vs. James Franco vs. Danny McBride - Pineapple Express

The Richard McGuire segment - Fear(s) of the Dark

Ninjas! - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (yes, really)

And finally, my five favorite openings and finales of the year:

Perfect openings: “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, WALL*E; Sunrise, Silent Light; The piano, The Silence Before Bach; The Jean-Claude Van Damme Stunt Spectacular, JCVD; The Legend of Po, Kung Fu Panda

Great final scenes (no spoilers): Synecdoche, New York, The Duchess of Langeais, Shine a Light, The Visitor, Burn After Reading

I would invite all of you to share some of your favorites in the comments section. After all, I’m surely missing at least a couple of really good ones.

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. in IRON MAN & TROPIC THUNDER (2008)

Like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, the seemingly indestructible Robert Downey, Jr. has pretty much been coming back from the dead again and again (sometimes literally) since the beginning of his career...and, frankly, I got tired of rooting for him sometime around the first Bush administration. For one thing, I never really thought he was all that talented: in movies from Less Than Zero to Natural Born Killers, he just seemed to keep recycling the same fast-talking hipster schtick that John Cusack did at least as well, if not better (and with far less off-screen drama). To my way of thinking, if an actor’s extracurricular lunacy eclipses their onscreen work, they either belong on Celebrity Rehab with Gary Busey and Corey Haim, or their performances had better reach Klaus Kinski levels of riveting, can’t-look-away intensity, but Downey seemed to be forever slumming, demanding endless sympathy for his problems and respect for his craft while never bothering to really try all that hard (except for the occasions, like Chaplin, when he tried too hard). And yet, for all that, whenever Downey managed to connect with a well-written part in his range (like the legal clerk in True Believer, the editor in Wonder Boys or the crime reporter in Zodiac), he’d generally knock it out of the park and make me like him again, pretty much against my will. Thus, in spite of everything, I was happy for Downey’s latest one-two punch career revival in a pair of films that knew precisely how to use (and reward) the actor’s self-deprecating, hard-won personal and professional maturity (while gently goosing all those skeletons in his closet): two redemption songs, one about an aging party boy who finally grows up and takes responsibility for his life and another about a talented but pretentious actor who learns the difference between real life and movies. Perfect. Now, seriously, Bob...don’t fuck it up again, ‘cuz you’ve been on borrowed time for way too long already.

MARLENE DIETRICH in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939)

In her seven collaborations with Josef von Sternberg from 1930-35, Marlene Dietrich embodied illicit foreign sexuality, allowing von Sternberg to go crazy visually in ways that probably wouldn't have been popularly acceptable with a less magnetic presence to anchor his increasingly baroque and unpopular ideas. Having gone too far, finally, Paramount fired von Sternberg, and both he and Dietrich went into professional tailspins. 1937's Knight Without Armour flopped, even with the British spelling tweaked for American release. It was 1939's seemingly low-rent Destry Rides Again that rehabilitated Dietrich. Now a small Western town's bar wench, Dietrich still embodies palpable, illicit allure: "You know that he would rather be cheated by me than married to you" she tells a staid biddy in the clip above. Shanghai Lily could've said that and had it taken at face value. The new, earthier Dietrich has to get in a cat-fight over it, though. Her new persona proved liberating, and Dietrich went on to more eclectic (if less iconic) turns in films like 1948's A Foreign Affair.

KATHARINE HEPBURN in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

Katharine Hepburn also got the "box office poison" tag, but she was fighting a harder battle — her no-nonsense, non-traditionally-feminine persona raised hackles from the beginning. A series of (now beloved) flops like Bringing Up Baby led to rehabilitation starting on the stage; conquering Broadway with The Philadelphia Story, she (along with ex-lover Howard Hughes!) purchased the rights and brought them back to MGM. A hit was born, but Hepburn begins the film with an almost painful forced apology, getting shoved in the face onto the ground by Cary Grant in an opening almost unthinkable in a modern comedy.

JOHN HOWARD DAVIES from OLIVER TWIST (1948) to MONTY PYTHON, FAWLTY TOWERS & MR. BEAN (PRODUCER)

One of the legions of children plucked out of obscurity, then promptly plunked back in, Davies appeared in a few more unremarkable films after Oliver Twist (in which, ironically, he had less memorable screen time than anyone else), but later found himself a TV director and producer for some of the most beloved staples of British TV comedy: Monthy Python, Fawlty Towers and (touchier) Mr. Bean all wound up on his resume. (He also fired Benny Hill, which might have earned him some people's eternal gratitude.) No idea if the clip above is one of his episodes, but it's especially timely in light of Frost/Nixon warping people's memories about what, exactly, David Frost has accomplished with his life and exactly how seriously he should (or should not) be taken.

GREGG ARAKI AND JOSEPH-GORDON LEVITT, MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004)

Two recent abortive comebacks can be traced to the exemplary Mysterious Skin. After a decade+ of callow provocations, Araki's series of increasingly-obscurely-distributed landmarks of New Queer Cinema (or whatever they were supposed to be) came to a halt with the freakishly mature Skin. Along for the ride was Joseph-Gordon Levitt, who hardly needed to prove himself (his comic timing on 3rd Rock From The Sun was as exemplary as the show was mediocre and he was well-received in little-seen films like Manic), but nevertheless delivered a knock-out performance as a small-town gay hustler turned big-city witness to AIDS' '90s arrival. In the scene agove, he and his BFFs course through a small town, blasting Araki's favorite alt-rockin' tunes; unlike a similar scene in the dreadful The Doom Generation, though, they don't just sit there and talk about what The Smiths meant to them, but live out the synthesis of memory and music on-screen. And since then? Araki made the underseen Smiley Face; Gordon-Levitt made the excellent Brick and then disappeared into crap like Shadowboxer. And something tells me his turn in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie isn't going to help anything.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years,” implored L.L. Cool J (shortly before his mother told him to knock us unconscious), raising an interesting point in the endless Hollywood parlor game of career perception: after all, the recent Golden Globe nominations for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem would seem to mark Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a return to form for Woody Allen...but what then to make of the fact that Match Point, Sweet & Lowdown, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Crimes & Misdemeanors, etc. etc. were all considered phoenix-like returns to form in the Woodman’s prolific (and sometimes crappy) oeuvre? How many times can a person come back if they never really go away?

Sometimes, though (as in the case of pugilist/thespian Mickey Rourke), the weepy entertainment magazine profiles and welcome home parties seem entirely appropriate. After all, the one-time heartthrob used to be a bona fide movie star (and light bondage icon) thanks to hits like Diner and 9 ½ Weeks, and though he’s done interesting work since then in films like Buffalo '66 and Spun, among others, there’s a big difference between co-starring with Eric Roberts and generating Oscar buzz.

Sure, Rourke essentially torpedoed his own career by stomping around like the Pope of Douchebag Village for years and years...but as the auto and financial industries have shown, everybody gets a second chance in America, no matter how bad you fuck up (unless, of course, you’re poor).

So, in honor of this week’s release of The Wrestler, we here at The Screengrab hereby salute...THE GREATEST COMEBACKS OF ALL TIME!

(And stay tuned next week as we ask Santa for THE COMEBACKS WE’D MOST LIKE TO SEE!)

JACK NICHOLSON in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

Though you could be forgiven for not believing it, there was a stretch there where it looked touch and go for the continued health of Jack Nicholson's continued career and reputation. After winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Nicholson jumped head first into a series of high-profile ventures -- The Missouri Breaks, Goin' South (which he also directed), The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, yes, friends, The Shining, which did disappointing box office and was badly mauled by most reviewers. However many fans it's racked up in the years since, the reaction to his performance in The Shining was typical: the conventional wisdom was quickly turning towards the direction that a man once capable of sensitive work had turned into an eyeball-rolling self-parodist, and in a Playboy interview published a year before his 1982 death, the gentle-spirited Henry Fonda criticized Nicholson for having thrown away his career and disgracing his profession. The actor's critical reputation began to recover around the time the magazine hit the stands, starting with his supporting performance in Reds and then with his starring role in the little-seen The Border, but it was Terms of Endearment that set the tone for Nicholson's successful reinvention of himself as a post-counterculture elder statesman who styled himself as a broad but soulful entertainer, someone who was still prone to go over the top but could usually make you love him for it. It could be argued that Nicholson lost something beautiful in the process -- as Anthony Lane later wrote, Nicholson rose to stardom as a man who seemed deeply pained by the state of the world, and sustained his stardom into old age by turning into someone who seemed very pleased with himself -- but it was still an audacious pull back from the career abyss. The role of the pear-shaped horndog Garrett Breedlove won him a second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actor, neatly bookending his time of trouble. It also established that he was smarter than Burt Reynolds, who famously turned the role down to honor his commitment to Hal Needham to do Stroker Ace, which in career terms was like honoring his commitment to show up in front of the firing squad at dawn with a cigarette in his mouth and the blindfold in place.

AL PACINO in SEA OF LOVE (1989)

This entertaining, twisty little thriller made the leap to event status on the strength of its announcement that Pacino had returned to functionability. Pacino had entered into a nightmarishly sustained slump after The Godfather, Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, starring in a series of movies that rank among the very worst of their time (Bobby Deerfield, Revolution), films so thoroughly mediocre and tinny that it was impossible to imagine what appeal they'd ever had for him (...And Justice for All, Author! Author!), as well as Cruising and Scarface, which, for whatever cult status they would come to enjoy, earned him more in bad press at the time than they did in good reviews or box office. Compared to some of those misfires, the relative modesty of Sea of Love was part of its appeal at the time: it was a relief to see Pacino, returning to the screen, after a four-year absence, in a clever little cop opera that gave him a chance to look worn-down and middle-aged but not romantically implausible, enjoying the Richard Price-scripted byplay with such solid pros as John Goodman and Richard Jenkins, and -- an eternal Pacino specialty -- demonstrating that he wasn't afraid to pitch on-screen woo with an actress (Ellen Barkin) who looked as if she could fold him up and stick him in her purse. His spirit refreshed, Pacino was back a year later as Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, happily gnawing the last traces of meat from the hambone.

CHRISTOPHER LEE in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) & STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)

Lee has scarcely stopped working since entering movies in the late 1940s, but his ghettoized stardom in horror movies failed to translate into mainstream screen prominence, and as the decades went by, he seemed most likely to appear in high-profile pictures when the director was someone like Joe Dante or Tim Burton, who'd cut his teeth on Hammer films and felt an affectionate debt of gratitude to the old gent. Which is nice, but self-paroding cameos in Gremlins 2 and Sleepy Hollow do not a comeback make. The first real sign in years that the then-78-year-old Lee still had strapping reserves of energy going to waste came when he turned up in the 2000 BBC version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, where he was dashingly costumed and looked and moved like a man twenty years younger. But the cherries on top of his career came with his villainous performances as Rings' malignant sorcerer Saruman and the abuser of the Force Lord Dooku -- subtle, George -- which, by drawing on memories of his screen past even as they threaded him into the texture of the two biggest multi-part fantasy series of the turn of the century, honored his career while tying it up with a handsome bow. After which, Lee being Lee, he called his agent and went back to work.

DENNIS HOPPER & DEAN STOCKWELL in BLUE VELVET (1986)

For most of his career, Hopper had led the league in blackballings, being driven out of the acting profession by the director Henry Hathaway, then remaking himself as a director and returning in glory with the 1969 Easy Rider. The box office success of that movie was so bewildering to the studios that Hopper was given a big bag with a dollar sign on it and absolute creative freedom to do whatever he wanted for his next movie as director, which resulted in 1971's The Last Movie...and cue blackballing number two. Hopper would spend most of the next fifteen years reeling from his intake of drugs and drink while working on a string of offbeat projects for European and American maverick directors, ranging from Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish for Coppola and Wim Wenders' The American Friend to Neil Young's Human Highway, Henry Jaglom's Tracks and Orson Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. His performances in most of them were pretty unsteady; Hopper seemed to have his notion of artistry boiled down to the actor's willingness to do anything, but nobody ever hesitated to hire Dennis Hopper because they were concerned that he might not be crazy enough. He's said that Blue Velvet, one of a string of films he appeared in around 1986 which also includes River's Edge, Hoosiers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part II, was the first job he'd gotten after getting clean and sober, though he apparently almost talked himself out of it by telling David Lynch that he had to play Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, after which Lynch considered hiding under the table. It's a measure of how impressed Hollywood was with both Hopper's performance and the sheer feat of rendering himself employable that Entertainment Tonight had a camera installed in Hopper's home when the Academy Award nominees were announced on television so that they could record his reaction, it being a forgone conclusion that his name would be among those read aloud. (It's a measure of just how freaked out Hollywood was by Blue Velvet that the E.T. cameras got to record Hopper's momentary confusion when it turned out that he'd been nominated instead for his work in Hoosiers.) Hopper's long shadow also obscured some of the triumph of his Blue Velvet co-star, one-scene wonder Dean Stockwell, who had also appeared with him in The Last Movie, Tracks, and Human Highway. A child actor back in the 1940s, Stockwell had kept his career going into adulthood, winning the Best Actor award at Cannes for 1959's Compulsion and co-starring with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in 1962's Long Day's Journey into Night. He went counterculture and turned his back on Hollywood in the late '60s and '70s, then slowly began creeping back with parts in Paris, Texas and To Live and Die in L.A., as well as Lynch's Dune, which he later told an interviewer was the only role he wanted badly enough to screen test for. (The interviewer next asked if he'd care to explain why he'd wanted it so badly. Stockwell replied that he'd rather not.) But it was his performance in Blue Velvet that made him hot enough that he could quit his second job hustling real estate.

JOHN TRAVOLTA in PULP FICTION (1994)

Travolta may have mixed feelings about having had his career resurrected by Quentin Tarantino, given that he's been known to insist to interviewers that he wasn't that far down the ladder when Pulp Fiction broke -- those Look Who's Talking movies made a lot of darn money, thank you very much! -- but most people who cared knew that Tarantino's dialogue and taste in hair extensions restored cachet and hipness to a star brand that had gotten badly devalued since 1981. Travolta cemented his comeback with Get Shorty, a project that he, yes, turned down before Tarantino called him up and advised him to snap to attention. His filmography since then has more than its fair share of stinkers, but it's better remembered now than it was in 1993 that he really is a terrific actor, and he retains the special dignity of a star who came back after being depicted as having been reduced to tending bar in a '70s nostalgia club on an episode of The Simpsons, an episode on which -- the ultimate indignity! -- he didn't even get to provide his own self-mocking voice. And, lest we forget, he did get to name Harry Knowles's site.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Year-End Roundup: AFI, Boston Critics…and Stephen King?

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Here’s your Monday afternoon update on the year-end award and Top 10 list derby. The American Film Institute has released its annual top ten list – I’m not sure I knew the AFI had an annual top ten list, but apparently they’ve been doing this since at least 2000 – and most of the titles are familiar from other such lists. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk and Frost/Nixon are among the predictable entries, but superhero enthusiasts will be pleased to see both The Dark Knight and Iron Man represented. The full list is here, along with the AFI’s top ten television shows, which include The Wire, thank you very much.

The Boston Film Critics had an indecisive year in 2008. They awarded ties for both Best Picture (WALL-E and Slumdog Millionaire) and Best Actor (Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler). No big surprises here, aside from maybe the Ensemble Cast award for Tropic Thunder.

The most idiosyncratic Top 10 list to date has to be that of Entertainment Weekly columnist and Screengrab 24-hour marathon inspiration Stephen King. “I'm not trustworthy when it comes to movies… This is almost surely the only 10-best list you'll read that contains not one but two Jason Statham movies.” Indeed, King singles out both The Bank Job and Death Race for praise (he hasn’t caught Transporter 3 yet), along with the craptastic The Ruins. “It could have been ludicrous. Instead, it's unrelenting.” Yes, unrelentingly ludicrous. Anyway, check out his full list here – it’s the scariest thing he’s written in years.

Related:
Roger Ebert Supersizes Top 10 of 2008
Film Threat Unveils Frigid 50 of 2008

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.

21 Stars We Hate (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SEAN PENN

Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High? Classic. Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking? Harrowing. Emmett Ray in Sweet and Lowdown? Hilarious. Milk? Looks great. And nobody’s better at playing sketchy, fidgety weasels like the coked-out traitor in The Falcon and The Snowman, the coked-out lawyer in Carlito’s Way and, uh, the incredibly annoying coked-out movie producer in Hurlyburly. But, ugh...it’s amazing how a guy capable of sporadically fantastic character performances can be such a humorless, pretentious tool in real life. I’m guessing he’s calmed down a lot since the Shanghai Surprise days when (as observed by Christopher Ciccone in his book Life With My Sister Madonna) the middle class white boy from the comfortable home enjoyed presenting himself as a tough street kid, trashing hotel rooms, assaulting paparazzi and hanging out with Charles Bukowski. But Penn still can’t take a joke, as evidenced by his humorless retort to Chris Rock’s joke about the low-wattage stardom of Jude Law during the 2005 Academy Awards, not to mention the stereotypical "serious artist" grim=quality aesthetic he brings to his directorial work (i.e., two films about dead children, one about feuding brothers and one about a completely egocentric guy who dies moronically ‘cuz he’s just gotta be free, man). Even when the actor pokes fun at his own self-serious image, it’s hard to believe it’s all just for laughs: his recent cameo in What Just Happened? paints him as the kind of actor who equates depressing bummers with integrity and...well, something tells me Penn takes that characterization as a compliment. As the old saying goes, it’s hard to make people laugh, but drama’s easy: just kill a puppy and you’ll get a reaction...which more or less describes Penn’s m.o. If you dare to mock his maudlin, manipulative performance as the mentally-challenged protagonist of I Am Sam, that just means you’re insensitive, dude (so many thanks to Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. for doing it for me in Tropic Thunder). If you’d prefer not to drag yourself through the boring slog of 21 Grams, it’s just that you don’t “get” it. And if you laughed out loud during Mystic River when Penn’s character discovers the latest dead child in his oeuvre, then screams “NOOOO!!!!” to the heavens in the type of overblown “ACTING!” moment that was already a parody of itself years before the movie was released...well, maybe you just can’t handle “serious” art.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS

Michael Douglas was born to be a movie star. Which is too bad, because he sucks at it. His father, Kirk Douglas, was an actor of limited talents, and too often prone to gassy overplaying, but he was also fortunate enough to work with a lot of great directors and get a handful of great scripts. No such luck for Michael: though he made tens of millions of dollars in his career and appeared in tons of hit films in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they tend to be forgettable (The Star Chamber), obnoxious (Wall Street), dated (The Jewel of the Nile), or downright terrible (The Game). Which, really, is only appropriate, since all those adjectives apply equally to Douglas himself, who resembles his father less as an actor than he does Charlton Heston. His personality and his performances also tend to be forgettable (surely no one remembers Basic Instinct because he was in it), terrible (he was the world’s least convincing action hero as Jack Colton), dated (who on earth isn’t deeply ashamed to watch Falling Down nowadays?), and, especially, obnoxious. Unless we know him – and hey, give the guy credit, he’s nailing Catherine Zeta-Jones and we’re not – we can never be sure if he just happened to pick about a hundred scripts in a row where he plays an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk, or if he just happens to be an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk who brings those qualities to every role he plays. But that’s not really the kind of micro-fine distinction you want to hang a career on.

JOHN WAYNE

Since I’m going to hell anyway, I might as well take this one. “Hey,” some of you asked when we posted our list of the all-time great leading men a few weeks back, “how come John Wayne didn’t even make the top 25?” Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. or Ms. Screengrab Reader: it’s because John Wayne was a miserable actor. While there’s no denying Wayne’s importance in Hollywood history, and without minimizing his role as a film icon, the fact remains that he was really bad at the thing he did for a living. He basically only played one role in every movie he ever made, and it wasn’t a very interesting one. It’s a role that could have been played better by any number of other actors, many of whom were appearing with him in those very films. And in his case, you can’t blame a short career or an inability to get good scripts: Wayne lived a long time, and by all accounts showed almost zero interest in playing anything outside his war/western tough-guy métier. By the end of his life, he was getting offered roles that would have allowed him to slightly redefine his image, but instead chose ones that let him stretch about a centimeter in every direction. He was either a miserable judge of scripts or had the world’s worst agents; for someone who made almost 175 movies, he sure didn’t make that many good ones. While I’m willing to concede that Wayne was an effective movie star, the distance between what he did on screen and what I think of as acting is abyssal; I remember getting into an argument with a friend that concluded with me saying that if John Wayne was a good actor, I obviously didn’t understand what acting means.

JAMES DEAN

We don't want to spend too much time here talking shit about the dead. Just because we Screengrab people are barely human doesn't mean we're vultures. But after more than fifty years, the upward trajectory of Dean's posthumous reputation is long overdue for a course correction. In his first two (of three) starring movie roles, Dean had the mixed fortune to play desperately troubled teenagers in material pitched directly at a teen audience that liked to project itself onto stories of the tragically misunderstood, under the guidance of directors (Nicholas Ray on Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan on East of Eden) who never saw an emotional flourish they didn't like and would have been reluctant to declare a performance over the top even if the fallout from it brought about nuclear winter. Dean's unrestrained, sometimes apparently uncontrolled exploration of the wronged-and-unloved theme made him a legend and a cult hero, but it also meant that what he left behind in the way of an acting legacy is very heavy on him breaking down into a shivering mess and howling, "You're tearing me apart!" For some of us, a little of this sort of thing goes a very long way, which makes it that much more remarkable that Dean's most devoted fans have watched those movies scores if not hundreds of times: we can barely believe that we made it throught them once. To Dean's credit, he seemed very ready to move on to new things if his last film, Giant, is any indication: there, as a cocky poor boy who becomes a self-made asshole, he's better-controlled, more winning, more resilient and funnier than he ever had a chance to be in a movie released during his lifetime. This is especially true because the movie, in which Dean has only a supporting role, is in a traditional-boring-prestige-epic mode that can just barely accommodate Dean's Method style, and the actor serves the same function in it that his character serves in the story. It's not just about Jett Rink getting up in the face of Jordan Benedict, Jr., and weirding him out with a scary taste of a new world in which he'll be an anachronism, but also about James Dean doing that to Rock Hudson.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Hopkins was in his early fifties and had been acting, and even sometimes starring in, movies since 1967, when Jonathan Demme made him a household name with The Silence of the Lambs. This was not a case of genius being discovered late. Hopkins is talented and hard-working and had already given a number of excellent performances, such as his sensitive but restrained Dr. Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man. But he was always more meticulous than exciting onscreen, and when he was cast at the center of a movie, whether it was a popcorn horror flick like Magic (1978) or a serious contemporary drama like the British film The Good Father (1987), he tended to veer so heavily into depressiveness that watching him could be like talking somebody in off a ledge. He had already been smoked in the Hannibal Lecter role before Lambs even came out: as all true connoisseurs of character acting know, Brian Cox's brief performance as Hannibal in the 1986 Manhunter had a rich, convincing creepiness that sank into viewers' bones. By contrast, Demme spoon-fed viewers Hopkins' Hannibal with frozen close-ups of his face held in a jack-o-lantern gaze, with just a suggestion of the raging ham behind his features. The results somehow passed for realistic, but there was enough camp in the recipe that it's no wonder the monstrous Lecter ultimately struck audiences as so enjoyable as to be strangely endearing, to the point that Hopkins would not only reprise the role in Hannibal, the movie version of the sequel that author Thomas Harris felt obliged to write in response to the success of the Lambs picture, but in a paralyzingly unnecessary remake of Manhunter (filmed under Harris' original title, Red Dragon), in which, adding insult to injury, he had more screen time than Brian Cox did back in 1986. By then, Hopkins had become Hollywood's go-to guy for a leading role as a classy middle-aged or older male in a prestige film, be it Nixon or Picasso or Van Helsing or (in The Human Stain) an African-American professor passing for white. But Hopkins had never had the range this kind of resume suggests, and he could still be a dull lump when he was too much at the center of things and wasn't cast just right. (And, having been richly rewarded for having laid it on thick as Hannibal, he was now as much in touch with his inner ham as William Shatner.) He's still an ingenious actor who has his moments, and after his long apprenticeship, it feels churlish not to wish him well. But after he and Antonio Banderas co-starred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998's The Mask of Zorro, the young Zeta-Jones informed a TV interviewer that she couldn't decide for sure which of her two leading men was sexier. And by God, that shit ain't right.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The fake trailers from TROPIC THUNDER (2008), GRINDHOUSE (2007) & KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977)

Of course, no tribute to the art of coming attraction trailers would be complete without a nod to the art of FAKE coming attraction trailers. Tropic Thunder recently delighted many and outraged some with its fake preview for Simple Jack, a dead-on parody of the odious, manipulative genre of faux-inspirational retar...I mean, “mentally challenged”-sploitation potboilers like I Am Sam. And last year, the interstitial glimpses of fictional schlock classics like Machete, Thanksgiving, Werewolf Women of the SS and Don’t (by Robert Rodriguez and cameo directors Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright, respectively) were the best reasons to sit through the entire 191-minute cut of Grindhouse in one sitting. But perhaps the granddaddy (or granddaughter?) of all fake trailers is the "teaser" for Catholic High School Girls In Trouble, one of the definite hits in John Landis’ hit-or-miss cult classic, Kentucky Fried Movie (but, uh, you might not wanna watch this one at work).

The trailer for BUFFALO ’66 (1998)

Whether you love him or hate him, you have to agree that Vincent Gallo doesn’t make ordinary movies. Gallo’s taste for the strange extended to his trailer for his first directorial effort, Buffalo ’66. Cut by Gallo himself, the trailer is a montage of still images from the film, set to the opening passages of Yes’ “Heart of the Sunrise.” As a montage it’s pretty irresistible, with the percussive cutting matching the rhythm of the song, down to the way Gallo animates the stills of Anjelica Huston gesticulating at the dinner table. But what makes this trailer even cooler is that it’s one of the few that show more or less everything in the movie without giving it away. We see the characters, the style, the grey and dingy setting, but we’re wondering how it all fits together. And thanks to how well Gallo sells it, we can’t wait to find out.

The trailer for MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

The Python boys never met a phenomenon they couldn’t satirize, so it was only natural that with the trailer for their first feature, they’d hold the art of movie advertising up to scorn. This epic three-minute spot begins with a panoramic shot that’s meant to underline the majesty of the film that’s ostensibly being advertised, accompanied by properly stentorian narration. Naturally, the boys soon pull the rug out from under this seriousness, revealing it to be merely auditions for a voiceover artist. Eventually, we end up with narration in subtitled Chinese (this at a time when studios were avoiding non-English dialogue in trailers), after which the trailer goes to work on the self-important rhetoric of studio marketing. The narrator calls the movie “run-of-the-mill” and says, “compared to something like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, it’s all rather silly.” In addition, the editing of the trailer is reminiscent of the work of fly-by-night distributors who more or less assembled highlights from the film with little regard for coherence. But here, that’s all part of the magic, although it may be difficult to notice while you’re laughing at the trailer’s version of a rave review or the abrupt segue to an advertisement for a nearby Chinese restaurant. So few classic movies have the trailers they deserve, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail definitely does.

The trailer for COMEDIAN (2002)

When it was announced that Don “The Voice” LaFontaine had passed away, many movie lovers flashed back to this trailer, only to discover that its featured talent wasn’t LaFontaine at all, but fellow voiceover titan Hal Douglas. No matter: we’d like to think that LaFontaine would have approved of this “anti-trailer”, still the most succinct and priceless distillation of the deathless voiceover clichés that he spouted so many times over the years. But while on the surface this teaser has nothing but contempt for the inane catchphrases that get recycled by the studios, there’s also a real affection for the men whose job it is to give them authority. By giving a face to the usually faceless voiceover artist, we gain respect for him, and for the way he forges on even when he realizes that the things he’s made to say are completely absurd. As much as lines like “in a world…” have become a joke to trailer watchers, they’re also a kind of comfort, and when Douglas responds to his being fired with, “No, I like it in here,” we can’t help but think that, yes, we like you in there too.

The trailer for SLEEPER (1973)

This trailer for Woody Allen's futuristic "love story about two people who hate each other" parodies the convention by which the great filmmaker is caught by the camera crew and an unseen interviewer while busily working on his next masterpiece. The trailer itself benefits from clips drawn from one of Allen's few films to include both vivid cartoon imagery and an elegant production design. And the scenes in which Allen promises a movie "with very little overt comedy" and scenes "of a cerebral, almost didactic nature" look even funnier now, considering that they could pass as an accurate description of any of a dozen stink bombs he's made since this slapstick classic came out.

The trailer for ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Instead of emphasizing popular stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, early promotions for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind featured supporting player Tom Wilkinson – if you knew to look for him. This teaser trailer mimicks the low-budget aesthetic of commercials for the local dentist’s office, but the service they’re offering – a selective memory erasure – is purely the stuff of Charlie Kaufman’s imagination. The poker-faced buzz campaign for Eternal Sunshine was entirely based around Lacuna, Inc., including a website with coupons.

The trailer for LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

You can keep your big explosions and breathtaking panoramas. This trailer for Todd Field’s Little Children holds everything in, and the mounting tension – symbolized by a child’s toy train chugging through a dozen ordinary suburban moments – is almost unbearable.

The trailer for THE SHINING (1980)

Often the most memorable and effective trailers aren't those that sweat to cram in the movie's every high point and plot point but those that boil a picture down to an especially striking image and sell it in a way that sutures it to the viewer's imagination. Stanley Kubrick provided an especially choice example with this early and mysterious look at his 1980 horror movie. It consists of a single shot that turned up late in the film, tricked up here with electronic music and mechanical-sounding voices chanting "Redrum." (Did Kubrick bring in HAL 9000 to work on the soundtrack?) It appeared several months before the movie itself was released, and played briefly before being pulled in favor of a more conventional and far less disturbing trailer.

Click Here for Part One!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

Morning Deal Report: Calling All Ghostbusters

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Summer is definitely over as far as the weekend box office is concerned. When the top movie of the week is Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous, you know things are a little slow. Taking in only $7.8 million was still good enough for first place, as Tropic Thunder fell to second with $7.5 million. The total weekend gross is expected to be around $66 million, which is what The Dark Knight was taking in at lunch hour just a few weeks ago.

Who ya gonna call? Well, if Ghostbusters is the answer, I’m not sure I even want to know the question. But Variety reports that Columbia Pictures is serious about rounding up the old gang for another round of spook hunting. “The studio has set The Office co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson…The scribes just wrote Year One, a comedy that was directed by Ramis.” I can see Bill Murray being hard up for cash given the news of his divorce but, really, do they expect to be able to lure Ernie Hudson back?

Ed Norton, Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfus will star in Leaves of Grass. It’s not an adaptation of the Walt Whitman poetry collection, but rather “a comedic thriller actor-turned-filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson wrote and is directing.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Norton is portraying twin brothers, one an Ivy League philosophy professor, the other a small-time and brilliant marijuana grower. The professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown for a doomed scheme against a local drug lord (Dreyfuss) that unravels his life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous
Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

Morning Deal Report: Can Pee-Wee Herman Find Happiness?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Dark Knight joined the exclusive $500 million club with its weekend take of $11 million. It’s still nearly $100 million behind the only other member of that club, Titanic. Tropic Thunder remained on top of the box office for a third straight week, taking in $14.3 million and keeping the Vin Diesel vehicle Babylon A.D. down in second place. In a sign that we may soon be free of the tyranny of the spoof movie, Disaster Movie finished in seventh.

For some reason, I have failed to mention Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness in this space. Let me rectify that immediately. Todd Solondz is making a sequel to Happiness. Actually, Variety describes it as “an untitled part-sequel, part-companion piece to his controversial dark comedy Happiness.” Take that for whatever it’s worth. To me, not much, but your mileage may vary. Emma Thompson, Demi Moore and Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens are rumored to be attached. Attached to the movie, I mean; I’m not trying to imply some sordid love triangle.

Now that you’ve lost your breakfast, take heart in the news that the Poltergeist remake has found its director. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes) is in negotiations to take the helm. “The film's exploration of an ordinary family's reaction to an extraordinarily intense situation likely appealed to Perelman,” claims the Reporter.

Related:
A Hobbit, a Gnome and a Poltergeist Walk Into a Bar
How Batman is the New Beatles

Face/Off: Judd Apatow and "Pineapple Express"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

["Face/Off" is an irregularly scheduled recurring segment in which two Screengrab regulars have an exchange of views on some recent fixture of the movie scene. In the exclusive behind-the-scenes photo below, taken at a typical Screengrab "pitch" session, Andrew Osborne [l.] and Phil Nugent [r.] persuade their delighted editor to allow them to revive this much-loved feature.]

PHIL NUGENT: Andrew, I might as well come right out with it. I grew up as one of the most socially maladjusted members of our society: the comedy geek. So I feel a certain kinship with Judd Apatow. In some ways that do not include material success and worldly achievement, we're even kind of alike. We share the same birthday and have both had dirty thoughts about Leslie Mann. He actually got to marry her, so he may have gotten to act on some of his by now. And as a fan, I go back quite a ways with him. And I'm not talking about no Freaks and Geeks, neither! I'm talking The Ben Stiller Show, baby! It was on that series and the longer-lived The Larry Sanders Show, both of which appeared at a time when I was about to be greeted at my door by a mob wielding flaming torches who had dropped by to suggest that my presence might no longer be welcome at grad school and so was sorely in need of a few chuckles, that Apatow developed his chops as a producer and screenwriter and started making the lasting connections that continue to appear in his work. And last year, when Knocked Up made him an official Hollywood player and Superbad made him a name brand, I was happy for him. After all, for a long time, this was a guy who was best known for creating TV shows (also including Undeclared) that inspired devoted cult followings but couldn't stay on the air for more than a year, or (as with the case of Sick in the Head and the other Apatow pilots that became staples of the "Brilliant but Cancelled" phenomenon) couldn't get on the air at all. Although the Internet has given us a great many wonderful things, I still think that the single best use of it that anyone has ever made came when it was used to publicly disseminate the notorious e-mail exchange between Apatow and Mark Brazill, the small crawling thing best known as creator of That '70s Show, and who thought that, by including a mash-up parody of The Monkees with a stereotypical '90s grunge band on an episode of The Ben Stiller Show, Apatow had ripped off his hackish notion of doing a similar show as a "real" sitcom. It's still a hilarious exchange between a clueless dolt with too much money and a genuine and humane wit (who, okay, probably also already had too much money). But I remember when part of the context of the whole thing was a world in which the dolt was seen as more successful. Not anymore.

Apatow has out his name on a lot of stuff since then, and some of it has been, well, a lot less successful than his best stuff. Pineapple Express was preceded into theaters by Step Brothers, which mostly serves as an announcement that it's time for John C. Reilly to, (A.) put some clothes on, (B.) get back to straight acting roles for a while, and (C.) put some clothes on! Last fall, Reilly was unable to hold together Walk Hard, which tried its damndest to sustain the parodic-skit nature of The Ben Stiller Show for the length of a feature film. One of the most discouraging things about Pineapple Express is that it reminded me of that e-mail exchange, but this time, it's Apatow playing the Mark Brazill role. The idea--and it's what we used to call real "high concept" back before someone decided that it would be the honorable thing to bury that phrase with Don Simpson--is a conventional action comedy with conventional L.A. locations and conventional gunplay and chases and explosive fireballs and shit, but with these stoned doofuses at the center. The movie works best when it suggests pure parody: when Seth Rogan and James Franco stay up late babbling about the plan they're going to implement the next morning, and wind up oversleeping by ten hours, and when they then walk off to begin the busy work of saving their asses, only to get distracted by playing leapfrog and trying to get a caterpillar high. (This lyrical interlude may be the only part of the movie that's as fully charming as the movie's trailer, which made phenomenal use of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes", and which was edited in a way that suggested more visual freshness than you get from the film itself. I am of course familiar with the standard criticisms that have been made of Apatow and the work he's been sponsoring as a producer: that he's running a boys' club, that it's politically tone dead and too insular by half, that John C. Reilly really fucking needs to put some clothes on!! But this is the first thing of his that I've seen that strikes me as struggling to meet the conventional halfway, to just take some of his and his performers' quirkier interests and skills--which here basically just comes down to stoner antics--and trying to shoehorn them into a tired action-comedy formula that neither he nor the hired-gun director, David Gordon Green, could care less about even executing with any degree of skill. Yet you, my man, have gone on record as liking this thing! In the name of Cheech and Chong--have you heard they're threatening a comeback movie, which may be something else I'll decide to blame on Judd when I catch my breath--why, sir, why!?

ANDREW OSBORNE: Since you started your critique with praise, I’ll start my defense of the Apatowniverse with my own critiques. For one thing, I thought Superbad was funny but wildly overpraised, and actually (more than Pineapple Express) a prime example of the strained, one-joke dangers of a too-limited thematic range. Jonah Hill’s Seth, Michael Cera’s Evan and, of course, Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s McLovin were all funny and charming, but sophomoric boys club humor without a corrective balance of mature XY and XX perspective eventually just feels like hanging out with sophomore boys (which got old pretty quick even when I was fifteen). A related criticism and possible symptom of Apatow’s more facile bent is his tendency to work with the same dudes over and over again while leaving his female actors (with the notable, understandable exception of Ms. Mann) out of the loop. Busy Phillips was just as funny and awesome as James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel on Freaks and Geeks, but she’s doing TV guest spots ever since while her former male co-stars are headlining one Apatow project after another. Ditto Sarah Hagan, Linda Cardellini (who’s got a steady gig on ER, but still...) not to mention poor Carla Gallo from Undeclared, who at least got cameos in later Apatow projects, although one of them (“Toe-Sucking Girl” in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) I don’t remember and the other (“Period Blood Girl” in Superbad) actually made me feel embarrassed for her. (And, really, would it have killed them to find a place for Knocked Up’s hilarious Charlyne Yi in Pineapple Express?)

I mean, there may be any number of perfectly good reasons why Apatow’s boys keep showing up in movie after movie while the girls fall by the wayside, but it does raise certain troubling questions (except maybe in the case of Katherine Heigl, who got a nice career boost with Knocked Up, only to later denounce the whole notion of a hot chick hooking up with an ugly guy as sexist before reaffirming her feminist street cred by starring opposite dreamy James Marsden in 27 Dresses as a strong, independent woman whose life revolves around fantasies of Prince Charming whisking her off to a perfect wedding).

Yet here’s why I defend the Apatowniverse in general: for one thing, it’s rare for anyone to be associated with even a single outstanding TV show or movie, let alone two of the greatest TV shows in the history of the medium (Larry Sanders, Freaks & Geeks) and a slew of smart, funny, eminently quotable and wildly popular comedies like The 40 Year Old Virgin that aren’t just funny but also have a distinctive personality and philosophy (as opposed to high-concept, anything-for-a-laugh joke factories like the Scary Movie franchise).

Even relative misfires like Walk Hard are fairly innocuous, with occasional classic moments (like Jack Black, Justin Long, Paul Rudd and Jason Schwartzman riffing as the Beatles, a scene I could have watched for hours). But it’s the egalitarian humanity of the Apatow brand I find most appealing (and most troubling when it’s missing): in his best work, there are no real villains or laughingstocks: everyone’s an asshole, everyone is foolish, everyone gets a moment of glory. The laughter is with, not at. Mintz-Plasse may be a pencil-neck geek, but he is McLovin, dammit. Mann may come across as shrewish in Knocked Up, but she’s also righteously, hilarious indignant and vulnerable by turns.

There’s much less empathetic character development in Pineapple Express, of course: Craig Robinson’s walk-on performance as a bouncer in Knocked Up was considerably more nuanced than his larger role as a drug dealer in Express, Gary Cole and Rosie Perez (both generally excellent) are essentially wasted as cardboard cartoon characters and the less said about the film’s regressive sub-Long Duk Dong Asian stereotypes the better.

But Apatow’s other strengths are on full display (and by Apatow, of course, I mean his influence on collaborators like director David Gordon Green and writer/star Rogen). Most importantly, the movie had me laughing the whole time, with nary a squirm of boredom or impatience. The action scenes may have been artless when compared to real action movies...but, first of all, Express is a parody and, to be honest, with all the CGI excesses of most 21st century action movies, it’s nice to reconnect with the simple old school pleasures of, say, a simple, straightforward car chase (especially one with distinctive but suspenseful just-this-side of realistic elements like James Franco’s panicky attempt to navigate a speeding vehicle with one foot stuck through a windshield he inadvisably attempted to kick out).

Another Apatow trademark is a certain respect for his audience: unlike any number of movies that cynically recycle tired clichés, situations and phrases (“You the man, dog!”) as if we’re too dumb or lazy to notice, Pineapple Express makes a concerted effort to be as entertaining as possible, surprising us and/or tweaking expectations whenever it can. Rogen’s character doesn’t just survive a near-miss gunshot: there’s also the ickily amusing aftermath. Conversations veer off in loopy, unpredictable directions. And did I also mention it’s just plain funny?

Sure, That ‘70s Show had funny moments despite its flaws, too, and Judd Apatow may be something of an asshole (like many if not all rich, successful people)...and indeed, I’m even willing to believe the humor and humanity of his projects may drop and his asshole quotient may rise the longer he swims with the sharks of Hollwood...but I think it’s still way too early to equate him with a genuine douch-nozzle like Mark Brazill (or at least Brazill’s evil e-mail alter ego)...so let the Apatow backlash backlash begin!

PHIL NUGENT: Your point about the way that Apatow has failed to demonstrate the same stubborn devotion to such female talent as Linda Cardellini and Carla Gallo that he's shown, say, Seth Rogen and James Franco, is well taken, so much so that I regret that I, in my role as the guy trying to start some shit here, didn't mention it myself. When it comes to some comedy writers, I don't feel like complaining about a boy's-club atmosphere because I sort of dread the results if they were to try to write about women, just because they felt they should. (I might think more highly of them as artists and as human beings if natural curiosity compelled them to experiment in that direction, but politically mandated inclusiveness is no friend of comedy.) In Apatow's case, though, there's plenty of evidence that there's a much broader side of himself that he hasn't been exploring. It happens to be the same side that didn't pay the bills for many years. There are many ways to fail in show business; with Freaks and Geeks, Apatow failed the My So-Called Life way, with Internet petitions and reruns on basic cable and reviewers decrying the stupidity of an industry that would just throw away this gem. That's got to be one of the nicer ways to go down, but at the end of the day, you're still someone who couldn't provide job security for all the people who'd turned down other offers to work with you. (Of course, many of the people who are now rich celebrities thanks to their association with Apatow will be quick to tell you that before they met him they couldn't get arrested, but still.)

Looking at the flurry of activity that Apatow has initiated in the last couple of years--including getting projects green-lighted that were based on scripts that had been waiting in the back drawer for some time--I get the impression that he's been trying to create work for his "family", paying them back for sticking with him through the rough times. (Superbad was written so long ago that Seth Rogan had orginally conceived the Jonah Hill role for himself.) In the process, he may be spreading himself, and not just himself, a little thin. You mention Craig Robinson, who in his scene with Leslie Mann outside the club in Knocked Up was able to create a surprisingly full character in one cussword-filled monologue. I expect that he was much happier when he got the script for Pineapple Express and saw that he had a lot more screen time in it, but it comes to so much less. Apatow still has moments of startling inspiration in deciding how best to use these performers; he reportedly made the call that Franco should play the role in Pineapple Express that Rogen had, again, written with himself in mind, and the result is easily the best work that Franco has done in movies, probably the best he's been since, yeah, Freaks and Geeks. And the movie makes terrific use of my man Danny McBride, who in less than three months--the period of time bracketed by the release of The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder--has emerged as the new bad-hair king of Hollywood. (I have a hunch that if Ben Stiller had invited Apatow to the read-through of the Tropic Thunder screenplay, McBride would have walked out of the room with Jack Black's part.) But in his recent productions, there only seems to be two kinds of casting--the outrageously inspired and the by-the-book routine. The cast of Pineapple Express consists of a few people who are squarely in the zone and several talented performers who look as if they're in denial about this being the final draft of the script.

Almost everybody I know loved Knocked Up while confessing to having had "a problem" with it. My own biggest problem with it was a little different from the usual ones I've heard expressed, such as that it gave short shrift to abortion as an option, or that it was implausible that a woman who looked like Katherine Heigl could ever get drunk enough to fuck Seth Rogen. My problem was that, while I had no objection to Rogen's character growing up enough to take on his share of responsibility for raising the child, I didn't think they should have gotten married. I couldn't imagine that union turning out in any way that wouldn't be hellish. Not because Rogen wasn't conventionally attractive enough for Heigl, but because Heigl, unlike everyone else in Rogen's circle, and indeed unlike just about everyone else in the whole movie, her own sister and brother-in-law included, didn't seem to have a funny bone in her body. It says a lot about the cult of standardized beauty that a lot of people felt comfortable saying out loud that Rogen wasn't good-looking enough for her but that I heard very few people ask what the hell he was going to do to keep from dying of boredom after they'd been trapped together for awhile. The fact is, movie audiences have traditionally accepted romantic partners in comedies who looked physically mismatched, such as Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, if both of them were funny; that's the real soul partnership. Heigl herself must have belatedly realized this, since her offscreen complaining about the movie has largely come down to the fact that she didn't get any laughs in it, but based on how eagerly Apatow has jumped to the task to serve funny women when he had them to work with, I have to believe that he sized her up as nice, pretty packaging and choose not to tax her. (You want to see what it looks like when a gorgeous-looking performer who's also gifted and funny is wasted by filmmakers who just want to exploit those physical assets, look at James Franco in thr Spider-man movies.) Since Apatow isn't one of those jackasses (like Al Franken) who's on record as believing that women just aren't funny--he probably gets a reminder of just how funny they can be every time he pisses off his wife--the casting of the dull but handsomely assembled TV soap star as the "normal" one in Knocked Up must be his commercial side talking; it's the part of him that probably thinks that the mass audience won't accept a romantic comedy in which the woman can hold up her end in the quirky wise-cracking department. In Pineapple Express, the commercial side of him is the part that thinks that more people will turn out to watch two comedians doing a stoner routine if somebody is firing machine guns at them, and I think that this time, the commercial side clearly outbalances the quirky, personal side. Which is an ominous development, in my view. Because if Apatow doesn't get back in touch with the side of him that once cared less about audience share and more about making the best use possible of his talents, he's never going to get around to making the movie I really want to see from him: a romantic comedy in which the woman is every bit as funny, maybe as indifferent to conventional definitions of success, and maybe even as much a challenge to conventional standards of attractiveness as the man.

ANDREW OSBORNE: First of all, let me offer you a hearty cyber-handshake for providing the definitive closing argument in the case of Heigl vs. Rogen. It’s so absolutely dead-on, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it myself, but I intend to correct that mistake by taking credit for the idea in every single future argument I have with anyone, for the rest of my life, who bitches about the Rogen/Heigel pairing in Knocked Up. I myself refused to wed 'til I found myself a comical lass who could banter with the best of ‘em...and, frankly, I can’t imagine any better qualification for spousal consideration than a solid sense of humor (which Heigl's Alison Scott definitely lacked, though Rogen’s character, Ben Stone, at least wound up with some pretty cool in-laws)!

And, since you brought it up, I feel the April 2008 Vanity Fair article, “Who Says Women Aren't Funny?” more or less gave the definitive closing argument in the whole tiresome case of “Women Vs. Humor.” As Nora Ephron says in the piece, ““There is no question that there are a million more funny women than there used to be...but everything has more women. There are more women in a whole bunch of places, and this is one of them.” Sounds good to me, though I also agree with the sociological wisdom of a later quote from humorist and Harvard Lampoon alum Patricia Marx: ““Maybe pretty women weren't funny before because they had no reason to be funny. There was no point to it—people already liked you.”

So, there are funny women out there, and I’d like to see Apatow do a better job of utilizing them, because his best stuff isn’t the bad boy buzz of exploding cars and gunplay (however entertaining some of those moments may have been in Pineapple Express, though I thought the entire “crazy cops” subplot in Superbad was tedious)...no, Apatow’s gift is capturing modern day relationships with spot-on, up-to-the-minute clarity: Franco and Rogen hanging out in Express, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera hanging out in Superbad, Busy Phillips and Linda Cardellini hanging out in Freaks & Geeks, etc., etc.

And, while I agree I’d like to see Apatow do MORE comedies where the male and female relationships are evenly matched in terms of comedy chops, I wouldn’t say he’s NEVER delivered those particular goods. Steve Carell was a scream in The 40 Year Old Virgin, but Catherine Keener was certainly no slouch in the funny/unconventional department (and, in the supporting cast, Jane Lynch went toe-to-toe with Rogen, Paul Rudd and Romany Malco without breaking a sweat). And Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Apatow produced for his boy Jason Segal, featured pretty funny turns from Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis (the dirtiest name in show biz).

Were Keener, Bell and Kunis as funny as their respective romantic comedy co-stars? Well, no, not quite: by way of comparison, my ultimate celebrity crush, Alyson Hannigan, was far more outrageous and funny playing off Jason Biggs in American Pie (a movie that would fit quite snugly into the Apatow-verse, come to think of it). And, yes, in the first American Pie, Hannigan wasn’t exactly a romantic lead, but rather a funny supporting player, like Lynch in Virgin, Leslie Mann and Charlyne Yi in Knocked Up and Amber Heard in Express.

So, okay, point taken: let’s get Apatow, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd together for a remake of Barefoot In The Park, stat!

But in the meantime, I’m not even close to giving up on Judd Apatow (yet), because, while some of his projects may fare better than others, he’s never really burned me as a viewer, meaning he’s built up quite a lot of credit in the ol' Bank of Osborne.

And I can’t really fault the man for trying a bunch of different genres (romantic comedy, action, parody, etc.) and using his newfound (and, given the nature of Hollywood , no doubt ephemeral) power to launch a bunch of projects (some good, some not as good, same as with any producer) that would never otherwise get made. Nor can I fault the man for possessing commercial self-preservation instincts...though it’s not like he’s Michael Bay, for God's sake, or even the aforementioned Nora Ephron, who gives good quote, yet also hacks up soulless Hollywood hairballs like Bewitched and Hanging Up with depressing regularity. (And, if you think about it, “stoner action comedy” isn’t exactly a sure thing/sell-out commercial genre anyway...even with all the blanks and explosions, Pineapple Express was still a personal movie, in that it directly reflected the distinct sensibility of Apatow and his collaborators.)

So, in conclusion, yes, I think Judd Apatow certainly has the capacity to go to the Dark Side – but aside from an executive producer credit on the odious Will Ferrell “comedy” Kicking and Screaming, I don't really see any evidence that he’ll be picking out a secret Sith name anytime soon. His upcoming projects (including a biblical comedy, a Sherlock Holmes comedy and a semi-dramatic film about stand-up comedians) seem to indicate a healthy willingness on his part to experiment. But, most importantly, Apatow's name on a movie poster usually means I’ll be entertained, either a little or a lot...and there are VERY few names in Hollywood that inspire that kind of brand loyalty these days.

As for Pineapple Express, which got this whole discussion rolling in the first place, my definitive closing argument is simple: "it brought the funny" (as the comedy geeks would say)...

...and for a fellow comedy geek like Apatow, that's pretty much the point.

--Contributors: Phil Nugent; Andrew Osborne

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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!

Tony Stark (i.e., Robert Downey, Jr.) to Bruce Wayne: "I Got Your Dark Knight Right Here, Pal!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.' I loved [Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan's] The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight. Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so f--king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

The first thing to be said about this is that if anyone finds that their college education helps them to better understand why Jim Gordon didn't dispatch a SWAT team to surround that boat that the Joker was aboard after Eric Roberts tipped him off, then that lucky viewer must have gone to a hell of a school. (Personally, my college education wasn't even enough to keep me from pissing away eleven dollars on a ticket to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Of course, Downey's harsh words for DC Comics will set off little tremors in the minds of comics geeks who remember bitter wars of words on the playground between self-styled DC fanboys and Marvel zombies. However much he means it, it's fun when these companies' star employees pretend to be infected with the virus, as anyone who ever saw Alan Moore take custody of the microphone at a comics convention in the 1980s, before he adopted a "plague on both their houses" attitude. It's kind of like professional wrestling without the folding chairs. Downey himself seems to get a giggle out of his bad-boy act. "You know, you're never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone," he said. "I think I've got a couple more.

On the subject of his other summer hit, Tropic Thunder, Downey has one thing he wants to make very clear: he is not Kirk Lazarus, the looney, Oscar-festooned Method actor he plays, who vows to remain in character until he's recorded the picture's DVD commentary. Speaking of the character, Downey says that "I think his fatal flaw is pretty much any and everyone's who's in entertainment, which is, on a certain level: 'Oh if they believe they're a fraud and that's creating this neurotic state,' when the truth is, you are a fraud because you've gone too far into buying into your own hype and now you're, literally crazy. I think Kirk Lazarus is nuts." Discussing his decision to make Kirk Australian, Downey adds, "I just think that the Australian phenomenon reminds me more of American as with the British invasion from the '60s. But when I was thinking about Kirk Lazarus I was thinking about Colin Farrell, about Daniel Day Lewis and about Russell Crowe and whoever was the most effective tool for whatever my thing was, I would use." When it was pointed out to him that a lot of viewers sure do see a lot of Crowe in there, Downey permitted himself a smile. "Now do you think he would see it as the highest form of flattery or do you think that he would be less than pleased?"

Morning Deal Report: Superman Goes Dark

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Tropic Thunder is tops at the box office for a second week, taking in $16.1 million for a total haul of $65.7 million. Our Screengrab Bunny of the Week Anna Faris took second place with $15.1 million, leaving Death Race in the dust at third. The Dark Knight closes in on $500 million, adding another $10.3 million to the Bat-coffers.

That being the case, the news that a new, “darker” Superman movie is in the works is perhaps the least surprising development in recent Hollywood history. According to MTV.com, the new Man of Steel offering will be “a complete reimagining along the lines of this year's The Incredible Hulk.” And we all know how well that turned out. “We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the character allows it,” says Warner Bros. chieftain Jeff Robinov. Great – The Dark Dork.

But what you’re really wondering is, “What’s that lovable hobbit Sean Astin up to these days?” It says here in The Hollywood Reporter that he’ll be starring alongside David Cross, Michael Vartan and Sara Foster in the indie comedy Demoted. As you may recall, the movie “centers on two tire salesmen (Astin, Vartan) who delight in playing cruel pranks on their co-worker (Cross). When the victim unexpectedly becomes their boss, he places the humiliated duo in secretarial jobs.”

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Morning Deal Report: Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Release Date

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Dark Knight has finally been dislodged from its perch atop the box office charts. Tropic Thunder took over the number one slot with a weekend total of $26 million. Batman and company fell to second place with $16.8 out of a total of $471 million, which means it has passed Star Wars on the all-time list just as The Clone Wars debuts with $15.5 million. Vicky Cristina Barcelona had a blockbuster opening by Woody Allen standards, finishing the weekend in 10th place with $3.7 million.

Bad news for Hogwarts fans: the sixth movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been bumped from its November release to next summer. As this AP story notes, Entertainment Weekly didn’t get the memo, despite being owned by the same parent company as Potter distributor Warner Bros. In other kid lit news, a live-action Goosebumps feature is headed for the big screen. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Problem Child) are adapting the R.L. Stine series, per the Hollywood Reporter.

Finally, the Moulin Rouge is returning to the silver screen. Toulouse Latrec fans need not apply, however, as Variety reports The Fabulous Moulin Rouge concerns a short-lived Las Vegas casino “that sprang up in 1955 and closed six months later under mysterious circumstances just as it was gaining momentum and attracting singers such as Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.” We suspect the involvement of Danny Ocean.

Related:
Trailer Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
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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.

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

According to conventional Hollywood wisdom (which, of course, is never wrong), movies about the moviemaking process are bad box office bets, since the subject is far too esoteric for mainstream audiences, too “inside” for Joe Multiplex. Never mind that Americans are obsessed with pop culture, with every other person in the nation either writing a screenplay, uploading their own mini-masterpieces to YouTube and/or tracking box office returns, buzzworthy coming attractions and day-to-day movie star minutiae in every form of media from Entertainment Tonight and our own humble website to CNN and Cigar Aficionado magazine. And never mind the fact that movies about movies are just as likely to succeed (Get Shorty, The Blair Witch Project...yes, The Blair Witch Project! They were making a movie, remember?) or fail (that awful Alec Baldwin/John Cusack movie I rented a few months ago about a fake movie financed by the FBI...ugh) as any other genre.

Naturally, as film geeks, we here at The Screengrab have always had a special place in our black little hearts for stories about the high-powered moguls and desperate hustlers drawn like doomed moths to the lights, cameras and especially action of the Dream Factory (in all its forms).

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be rushing out to see Ben Stiller’s latest comedy (about a group of spoiled actors who start off shooting a war film and wind up in a real shooting war), but the release of Tropic Thunder does give us a chance to reflect on past favorites from our favorite post-modern genre: movies about movies!

AMERICAN MOVIE (1999)

As Spinal Tap is to rock and roll, so American Movie is to the world of low-budget independent filmmaking. Detailing working class Wisconsinite Mark Borchardt's failed attempts to launch production of his dream project Northwestern and subsequent determination to complete the 35-minute horror film Coven, Movie is both hilarious and thoroughly moving. The pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking provide some of the most uproarious moments, such as a Coven scene in which Borchardt's character shoves his support group sponsor's head through a non-breakaway cabinet door, but the film's surprising emotional depth derives from Borchardt's relationships with his family and friends, including gentle burnout Mike Schank and the increasingly decrepit and fatalistic Uncle Bill. Schank's maniacal screeching during a sound effects dubbing session and Uncle Bill's repeated attempts to nail his single line of dialogue leave some doubt as to whether Borchardt will be able to pull off his project, but the finished product reveals flashes of wit and an eye for the sort of harsh, gloomy compositions he professes to admire (as well as some admittedly Ed Wood-level writing and acting). Last time we checked, Borchardt was still hoping to make Northwestern, but even if he never pulls it off, the essence of that dream project informs this documentary, investing it with an indomitable spirit and passion for life.

STATE AND MAIN (2000)

When David Mamet set his poison pen to a Hollywood satire, the result was far from the scathing warts-and-all expose one might expect from the author of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Instead, State and Main is a frothy, good-natured screwball comedy pitting the cast and crew of what appears to be an earnest period melodrama, The Old Mill, against the residents of their filming location, the quintessentially picturesque New England town of Waterford, Vermont. William H. Macy is the exasperated director, Alec Baldwin is the leading man with a weakness for underage girls, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is the screenwriter forced to rewrite his script when it turns out Waterford doesn't have an old mill after all. The usual course of events would have the simple but good-hearted natives teaching the soulless Hollywood invaders a lesson or two about small town values, but that's not what Mamet is up to here. He knows media-saturated America has reached the point where everyone's a show biz insider; thus a scraggly pair of diner denizens chew over Variety's weekend box office figures while the cook ponders the trajectory of Warner Bros. stock since 1985. Locals and La-La-landers alike get their fair share of jabs, but the tone is generally more affectionate than condescending or malicious.

THE STUNT MAN (1980)

Richard Rush's kinetic action comedy -- in which a possibly crazy Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) on the run from the law takes refuge among the crew on a location film shoot and discovers that, compared to a bunch of Hollywood professionals, he doesn't know from craziness -- features maybe the greatest depiction of a big-time movie director ever caught on film: Peter O'Toole as Eli Cross, a megalomaniac and a madman but not a bad guy. Eli, who's trying to keep the people working under him simultaneously entertained and cowed while doing whatever he can think of to inject some purifying "madness" into the stock World War I movie he's shooting, makes his entrance in a helicopter and is often perched seated on a crane, so that he can dip into the frame from on high; "If God could do the tricks we can do," he cackles, "He'd be a happy man!" As Rush's reward for having made one of the best movies about moviemaking, he got to watch as his picture became semi-legendary for the efforts of the studio to declare it unreleasable despite fawning reviews and solid business when they booked it into a West Coast theater for a weekend just to prove that it would bomb.

THE BIG PICTURE (1989)

This was the first feature film directed by Christopher Guest, but it's not a "mockumentary"; it's a scripted comedy starring Kevin Bacon as an eager, idealistic young director whose award-winning short film gets him snatched up by a big studio, which promises him carte blanche to make his first real movie. He goes straight into the shredder head first. Far superior to Guest's more recent For Your Consideration, it features a stellar rogue's gallery of Hollywood phonies, including J. T. Walsh and Tracy Brooks Swope as revolving-door studio heads, Teri Hatcher as a starlet looking for the right shark to hook onto, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a confused young would-be artist, and most amazing of all, Martin Short as a scumbag agent. With his frizzy 'do and lying eyes, he looks like a Hobbit who found the One Ring and pawned it for a ticket to L.A.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

"Tropic Thunder" Plays the "Retard" Card

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Once upon a time, there was a big-budget movie satire called Tropic Thunder, which was co-written by its director and star, Ben Stiller, along with actor Justin Theroux and Etan Coen (not to be confused with Ethan Coen, but the Mike Judge associate who worked on Idiocracy and th Beavis and Butt-head movie). As those with really long memories may recall, the "controversy" regarding this movie was going to be about a character played by Robert Downey, Jr., an obsessively committed Method actor who is cast in a role that had originally been written as an African-American and who insists on playing it in blackface. (Some have speculated that the actor's Aussie background is meant as a slap at Russell Crowe. In a recent New York Times Q & A with the movie's director-star-co-writer Ben Stiller and one of his co-writers, Justin Theroux, Stiller insists, "He was always an Irishman, and then when Downey came on, he decided to play him Australian because he said he could improvise better in Australian. I don’t know where that came from." We're guessing that it came, at least in part, from this..) But now, in an unexpected twist, the movie is instead being targeted by advocacy groups for those with mental disabilities, several of which are threatening an organized boycott.

The objections stem from a joke involving the Stiller character's attempt to win some respect as an actor by starring in a movie called Simple Jack, which was spotlighted in a website meant to publicize Tropic Thunder; it boasted the fake tag line, "Once there was a retard." The site, which was pulled last week after criticism started coming in, may have cost the joke a little something in the way of context. But the idea is clearly to mock the trend among Hollywood actors, ranging from Sean Penn (I Am Sam) to the likes of Rosie O'Donnell, to seize upon such roles as the actors' equivalent of sitting on the sidewalk with a begging bowl and a hand-lettered cardboard sign reading, "Will Talk Goofy for Awards." (In Tropic Thunder itself, the punch line is that Stiller's character has the shamelessness to take on such a role but not the commitment necessary to carry it off; the demented genius actor played by Downey scolds him for "never going the full retard.") Oddly enough, people seem to be having an easier time of it grasping the logic behind Downey's role, and when Paramount and DreamWorks arranged a screening for advocacy groups, it amounted to throwing gasoline on the fire. Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, walked out of the theater proclaiming, “It was even worse than the hateful stuff they used in promoting it.” Other groups planning to send picketers to protest outside theaters include the Special Olympics and the National Down Syndrome Congress. This has the makings of the biggest unnecessary fake outrages of its kind since stutterers' groups came down on A Fish Called Wanda.

In Other Blogs: Faster, Britney...Kill! Kill!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny is skeptical about a rumored remake. “A couple of my esteemed colleagues have expressed slightly guarded enthusiasm over the extremely shaky prospect that Quentin Tarantino will direct Britney Spears in a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, but I can't say it pushes any of my buttons, personal or otherwise. Of course the argument that, for what it's worth, Pussycat got made but good the first time isn't gonna cut any ice if in fact a remake is in the cards. But really...Britney Spears. Who cares. Her cultural currency—which is entirely distinct, as I'm sure you know, from tabloid currency—is as low as it's ever been…Having Tarantino hand-hold her through a turn as a loudmouth psycho drag-racing lesbian stripper will do exactly what for her at this point?” I don’t think this one’s worth worrying about. It’s taken how many years to get Inglorious Bastards going? Cooler heads will prevail.

Flickhead checks out some obscure DVD releases from restoration house Legend Films. “Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, ‘A Changing World,’ rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’”

At the House Next Door, Andrew Johnston revisits Risky Business. “As much as I loved them, teen sex comedies didn’t exactly make me feel good about being the kind of kid I was in 1983, the year I turned 15. They all took place in a world where smart and sexually inexperienced kids (i.e., guys like me) were always laughably pathetic, and rich ones (me again) were universally evil and arrogant. Here, finally, was a movie that didn’t pass judgment on those qualities. In the opening scene, our hero Joel Goodson recounts a dream in which he’s riding his bike home through his affluent neighborhood and winds up inside a neighbor’s house where a nubile girl invites him to join her in the shower, a dream that turns into a nightmare when the shower stall turns into a classroom full of his peers taking the SAT, for which he’s three hours late. How could I not identify with the guy?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson becomes the last film blogger on earth to see The Dark Knight. “When we were in college, a music critic friend of mine who delighted in making "best ever / worst ever" statements proudly (and sincerely) proclaimed that Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks was the single greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind. We teased him about the hyperbole, but I admit I liked him all the more for saying it. Unguarded, unbounded enthusiasm is a wonderful thing to behold, to feel, and to share…I waited a couple weeks to see The Dark Knight and I even though I felt lukewarm about the movie, I couldn't wait to talk about it.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, in honor of the Tom Cruise cameo in Tropic Thunder, Spoutblog presents the 10 Best Small Roles for Big Stars. Some are fairly obvious (no such list would be complete without Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross), but I admittedly had forgotten all about Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days. “Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio.”

Morning Deal Report: The Unholy Steven Spielberg/Diablo Cody Alliance

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Readers of the Morning Deal Report (or any of my other nonsense), take note: vacation beckons me, so I will be posting sporadically over the next two weeks or so. Please, for the sake of the children, keep your grieving to a minimum. Now on with your regularly scheduled briefing.

As you may know, Steven Spielberg and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody are collaborating on a Showtime series, The United States of Tara. Now, Variety reports that Cody is scripting an untitled comedy for Dreamworks that, like Tara, is based on an idea by Spielberg. No details are available, but I do have to wonder how Spielberg came to the conclusion that Diablo Cody is the vessel through which all his wondrous notions shall be realized. There seems to be a distinct difference in sensibilities here, but maybe it’s just me.

Meanwhile, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Iron Man 2 started revving up, especially once Jon Favreau started whining on his MySpace page that he hadn’t been hired to direct it yet. (This has since been rectified.) Now the super-sequel has a screenwriter. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Justin Theroux has been tapped to pen the follow-up due in April 2010. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because Theroux is best known as an actor. David Lynch fans will recall him from Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, but Theroux also has a screenwriting credit on the upcoming Tropic Thunder.

Finally I have to tell you about the Billy Joel documentary Last Play at Shea, which will capture the piano man’s upcoming concert at the soon-to-be-demolished Shea Stadium. Why do I have to tell you about this? Only because of this great Variety quote from producer Steve Cohen: “We wanted to approach this like a Ken Burns documentary, looking at Billy and Shea Stadium’s place in the pantheon of New York.” Yep, the Civil War, baseball, jazz…and Billy Joel. That, my friends, is America.

Related:
Diablo Cody Unwraps "Jennifer's Body"
Adams v. Marvel: Iron Man Turns to Crime?

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Studio executives, like TV weathermen, can be wrong half the time and still make a pretty fine living. One major difference, of course, is “The Suits” in Hollywood spend zillions on publicity and advertising campaigns to attempt to make their forecasts come true...and even then, they’re only right about half the time when it comes to cinematic hits and misses.

We here at the Screengrab will take that action. With the 2008 Blockbuster Season bearing down on us LIKE A RADIOACTIVE SPACE BUS THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A GIANT ROBOT LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES, we hereby offer our predictions for the summer’s Top 5 Hits and Misses, in hopes of scoring ourselves sweet development deals based on our uncanny pop culture pulse-fingering prognostication abilities.

For the purposes of this experiment, “HIT” and “MISS” will refer not to the critical reception or cinematic quality of the films in question (because, really, who cares about that stuff?). Instead, we’ll calculate the accuracy of our predictions based on each film’s domestic box office gross in relation to its marketing/production budget and the hype/expectation surrounding it.

Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Hits, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS A BRAND NEW IMAGINARY CAR!

And now, our picks for the Top 5 HITS of Summer 2008:

5. KUNG FU PANDA

This one's pretty easy to explain: (1) Kung fu. (2) Pandas. It's got something for everyone! (LP)

Plurality Opinion: Dreamworks' annual summer animated movie doesn't have the built-in audience of the Shrek franchise, but it should still do good family business for the three weeks before Wall*E hits screens. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I haven’t seen that Panda on any big plastic soda cups yet, but maybe I haven’t been hanging out in the right fast food restaurants or convenience stores. This movie just squeaked onto our list as a result of numerous split votes elsewhere...but who knows? Maybe panda is the new penguin! (AO)

4. IRON MAN

Another gamble here, but one worth betting on due to it being the first high-profile summer release. Iron Man isn't an icon like Batman or Spider-Man, but Paramount has done a bang-up job promoting the film, and the re-emergence of Robert Downey Jr. as a high-profile leading man is the kind of story that can do wonders for a movie's public awareness. (PC)

3. INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

Come on, like it could possibly be anything else. Indiana Jones is one of the iconic characters in cinema. Who's not looking forward to this? Add to that the fact that the film's got next to no competition for the month or so after it's released and this is the one to beat. Here's hoping it's actually good. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I'm going to call this as a slight box office disappointment that nevertheless cracks the top five. Indy's heyday was a long time ago, and even Lucas and Spielberg seem to be trying to downplay expectations. (SV)

Dissenting Opinion: First of all, that title is just way too long. Titles more than 20 letters long are for artsy foreign movies. Second, is there really that big an audience for this outside of hardcore geek circles? The key demographic for summer action flicks wasn't even born when the LAST Indiana Jones movie came out. (LP)

2. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN

Advance word is that the second in the Narnia series outdoes the first in terms of pacing, script, and special effects, but my guess is that it'll succeed because conservatives bitched so much about the previous movie not getting enough attention that America will guiltily drag themselves to see it just to shut them up. (LP)

Dissenting Opinion: The last installment in the Narnia franchise was a blockbuster, but that was released in December. In a more competitive summer season, it should have a solid opening weekend before getting trounced by Indiana Jones. (PC)

1. THE DARK KNIGHT

There's pretty much no way this thing will bomb. Even if it had a bad director, a crummy script, an unpopular main character, and a poorly-designed set, geeks would flock to it in droves. But it doesn't have any of those things, AND one of its stars died mysteriously during filming! That's money in the bank, people. (LP)

Let's see: blockbuster sequel, over a solid year's worth of hype, extensive viral marketing campaign, hugely popular hero and villain, and to top it off, a much-buzzed final complete performance by Heath Ledger. Even non-Batfans are going to want to get a load of his Joker, which should push The Dark Knight to the top of the heap. (SV)

Batman is back in the public's good graces after the awesomeness of Batman Begins, and this one's got the most popular of Bat-villains, The Joker. And sad to say, but the hype around the late Mr. Ledger's performance will only help the movie's chances at the box office. (PC)

HONORABLE MENTION:

HANCOCK:

Will Smith. July 4. Action, comedy, superheroes, you name it. It's got practically everything one could ask for from a midsummer release. (PC)

WALL*E

Here's where things get a little less certain. Sure, WALL-E is a Disney/Pixar release, with all the family cachet that implies. However, it may not be as cuddly as some of the family favorites Pixar has made in the past. Still, this is the highest-profile family-friendly release of the summer, so this is the one to beat. Besides, if Pixar can strike box-office gold with rats in a kitchen... (PC)

TROPIC THUNDER

Historically, August is the time when comedy re-emerges as box-office gold. After months of blockbuster bloat, audiences will want to laugh again, and this movie- starring Ben Stiller and newly-hot Robert Downey Jr.- looks to have the most potential for success. (PC)

AMERICAN TEEN

An instant America’s sweetheart cuddly “rebel” poster girl and a trailer that’s so John Hughes accessible that megaplex audiences may not realize it’s a documentary until it’s too late to get their money back may turn this Sundance fave into an indie hit (at the very least) and maybe even a real live mainstream smash. (AO)

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

If the rabid anticipation of this flick by the teenage dudes at my last family gathering bears any relation to the feelings of teenage dudes across the nation, this could be a sleeper hit. Plus: Apatow. (AO)

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

With a combination of everyone's favorite annoying jackass, Ashton Kutcher, and a title drawn from an ad campaign predicated on date rape, fatal drug overdoses, and dead hookers, how can it miss? (LP)

***

The above list reflects the combined, weighted picks of four of our resident Screengrab know-it-alls. Below, our original ballots:

Leonard Pierce

1. The Dark Knight

2. Kung Fu Panda

3. Speed Racer

4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

5. What Happens In Vegas

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Dark Knight

2. Iron Man

3. Hancock

4. Prince Caspian

5. Indiana Jones

Paul Clark

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2. Hancock

3. The Dark Knight

4. Wall*E

5. Iron Man

Andrew Osborne

1. Indiana Jones

2. The Dark Knight

3. Prince Caspian

4. The Pineapple Express

5. American Teen

-- Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Halle Berry Loses Her Mind

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Forget all the controversy about Robert Downey’s blackface turn in Tropic Thunder. Halle Berry believes she’s got at least one more hysterical Oscar speech in her, and since Catwoman somehow didn’t get the job done, she’s following one of the tried-and-true paths to award season glory: mental illness.

No, we’re not referring to her announced plan to shave her head on camera in the romantic comedy Nappily Ever After, although that may earn her some bonus points if she goes through with it. ("I still struggle with this hair issue," she said. "I'm going to get the lesson on film, and hopefully other women will get it, too.") It’s her next project that sounds like a crazy cocktail of Sybil, Fight Club and American History X.

Variety reports that Berry will star in the psychological thriller Frankie and Alice, which “follows a young woman struggling with multiple personality disorder and torn between who she is and a racist Caucasian alter-personality that preys upon her mind.” Folks, this could be a camp classic for the ages. We can only hope Berry’s alternate personalities are visualized onscreen – not because it would be a great directorial decision (no director has been named so far), but just to see what sort of outcry might develop over the prospect of Berry in whiteface. And if her racist alter ego is a skinhead, well, shaving her head shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Tom Cruise Parodies Somebody Else for a Change

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Some good news, finally, for Tom Cruise: his cameo in Tropic Thunder brought down the house at an industry screening of the summer comedy. It's a time-honored show business tradition for stars who have encountered image problems to get back in their fans' good graces by showing that they have a sense of humor about themselves, though it doesn't always work, as Sylvester Stallone found out with Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. Cruise's deep-inside turn, in which he dons a fat suit to play "a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools" apparently works like gangbusters, especially among those who recognize it as a bitch slap at Sumner Redstone, the Paramount executive who cut his studio's ties to Cruise after speculation began building in Hollywood that the star's increasing reputation as a geek show on wheels might be killing his box office appeal. It also sounds as if the cameo might be enough of a live wire to entertain viewers in the heartland who managed to enjoy Shrek without knowing that the sort-statured, bullying royal villain was widely seen as Jeffrey Katzenberg's way of telling Michael Eisner, thanks for the memories.

As for the movie's director-star, Ben Stiller, he was reportedly unhappy when pictures of Cruise in costume made it onto the Internet and spoiled the surprise, but by now he may welcome the buzz about Cruise for giving people something to write about his movie that doesn't involve Robert Downey, Jr.'s appearance in blackface. (One more time, he's not playing a black man, he's playing numbskull actor who thinks he can give a straight dramatic performance as a black man in blackface. I think it sounds like a promising joke myself, but I often get these things wrong. For what it's worth, the New York Times reports that the consensus after the screening was that, between the two of them, Downey and Cruise are easily the best things in the movie.) Cruise and Redstone are said to have recently patched up their differences. It remains to be seen whether this latest development will compel Redstone to demand his records back, but if Cruise is doing favors for Ben Stiller, he must find it hard to stay mad at anybody, given the ruthless impression of him that Stiller used to do on Saturday Night Live and his own sketch comedy TV show. In fact, this isn't the first time the two have worked together; witness this clip, which dates from a time (oh, it seems so long ago) when Cruise's image was still so straight-laced and boringly normal that he could get away with calling somebody else a weirdo--though if you watch it all the way to the end, you can see a sign of the emergence of the scary freak we've come to know and love, maniacal laugh and all.

Confusing Indecency With Originality? Robert Downey Jr. in TROPIC THUNDER

Paul Clark — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

A few days ago, my colleague Scott Von Doviak weighed in on the recently-released photo from Tropic Thunder that's been making the rounds of late. More specifically, he sounded off on the casting of Robert Downey Jr., which has had the blogosphere all a-twitter this past weekend. Given the small but vehement protests among certain people both on and off the Web, I thought I ought to post my thoughts here as well.

First off, it's not as simple as Downey playing a black man. According to a "First Look" feature in this week's Entertainment Weekly, Downey "plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam War film ever. Problem is, Lazarus's character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically." Stiller, who also wrote and directed, has gone on record stating that Downey's character (and the film itself) is skewering blinkered, insufferable actors rather than African-Americans.

Yet that hasn't stopped some folks from criticizing the film and Downey for "pulling a Danson" and invoking that dreaded "B" word: blackface. Frankly, I don't see it. The purpose of blackface was to get cheap laughs from white people by exaggerating the prevailing stereotypes of African-Americans for the purposes of comedy, and I don't see Downey wearing an enormous shit-eating grin or sneaking around a watermelon patch, Bamboozled-style. Also, the makeup is loads more realistic than any blackface ever was — be honest, if I hadn't told you the black guy in the photo was Downey, would you have guessed it? Me neither. If Stiller and Downey maintain that the film isn't trying to lampoon African-Americans — which would be a stupid, career-killing idea in this day and age — I see no reason why we shouldn't take them at their word.

In addition, the recent revelations about Tropic Thunder have made me pretty darn excited to see it. While part of me wishes Stiller could have convinced Daniel Day-Lewis, the most famously Method of contemporary actors, to play Lazarus, you'll certainly hear no complaints about Downey, a personal favorite and a genius-level comic actor. But what has me really pumped is the edginess of this particular storyline, an edge that's been mostly absent from Stiller's work since — well, whaddya know — his last directorial effort, 2001's Zoolander. After a decade of mostly wishy-washy roles, it's good to see Stiller taking chances again, both onscreen and behind the camera. I'll resist making further pre-judgments about the film until a substantial trailer is released, but for now I want to say that Tropic Thunder has become one of my most-anticipated big-budget releases of the 2008.

To tide you over until March 17, the pre-announced premiere date of the trailer, here's the online-only teaser, which gives us a glimpse of Downey "in character":

Robert Downey, Jr. Blacks Out

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Here’s one from the “Are You Sure That’s a Good Idea?” department. Entertainment Weekly has our first look at Tropic Thunder, an action-comedy co-written and directed by Ben Stiller, who also stars as an actor prepping for a role in a war movie. According to the report, “when the film's director (Steve Coogan) and writer (Nick Nolte) get fed up with their prima donna cast, they drop them into the jungle to fend for themselves. The actors think they're doing some sort of full-immersion filmmaking, but the danger they're in is very real.”

So far, so…well, not so tantalizing. But the rest of the casting news is worthy of a raised eyebrow, at least. It’s not co-star Jack Black that has folks all a-twitter; he plays “a comedian known for performing multiple roles in a single film — his latest is called The Fatties: Fart 2,” which sounds par for the course. Rather, it’s the actor playing “Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam War film ever. Problem is, Lazarus's character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically.” It’s none other than Robert Downey, Jr.

Sounds dicey, but Downey doesn’t seem worried. ''At the end of the day, it's always about how well you commit to the character,'' he says. ''I dove in with both feet. If I didn't feel it was morally sound, or that it would be easily misinterpreted that I'm just C. Thomas Howell in [Soul Man], I would've stayed home.''

Poor C. Thomas Howell. He’ll just never hear the end of it, will he?