The Screengrab : vadim rizov

Th-Th-That's All Folks: THE SCREENGRAB CURTAIN CALL!

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:00:00 GMT

So, th-th-that's all folks. Enjoy the last precious remaining hours of the Screengrab while you can, and be sure to look for us here at Nerve.com, in the archives at www.thescreengrab.com, at our new blog the Screengrab In Exile, and also...

Andrew Osborne:
Look for me at The Ol' Bait Shop, The Ol' Blog Shop, New England Screenwriters, and if The Meat City Beatniks ever comes to a theater near you, be sure to buy a ticket!

Scott Von Doviak:
Check out Scott's blog, his tweets, his book Hick Flicks and the continuation of his journey into Unwatchable madness!

Leonard Pierce:
Look for Leonard at A schediastic hootenany and the Onion A.V. Club!

Phil Nugent:
The Phil Nugent experience rolls on at The Phil Nugent Experience!

Hayden Childs:
Read Hayden at From Here To Obscurity, and check out his book, Shoot Out The Lights!

Paul Clark:
I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to write for the Screengrab for the last two years or so. In the future, I’ll be devoting more of my energy to my blog Silly Hats Only, where I’ll be carrying on a few of my favorite Screengrab traditions- including the reincarnated Famous Last Words, starting in June- and exploring some new ideas as well, I hope. I’ll also continue to be involved in The Muriel Awards, and you can follow me on Twitter under the username “opalfilms”. Be seeing you.

Nick Schager:
Nick can be found at Lessons of Darkness, Slant magazine, IFC News, Cinematical, and on Twitter.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg:
For more Sarah go to: http://www.sarahclynesundberg.com/

Vadim Rizov:
Vadim lives on at The House Next Door.

Lauren Wissot:
Lauren's work can be found at Beyond The Green Door.

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

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

UNFORGIVEN (1992)

To my way of thinking, the best Best Pictures are both flawless examples of their genre and also communicate something about the era that produced them. Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western scores on both counts. Not only does the film offer blue ribbon acting from a Master Class ensemble featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Frances Fisher, Jaimz Woolvett, Richard Harris and the Man With No Name himself, but Unforgiven also draws on the audience’s familiarity with Eastwood’s (and America’s) history of violence to reevaluate those legacies after twelve years of the Republican Party’s '80s go-round with faux-cowboy heroics. The beautifully constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples is a sharp rebuke to the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Reagan/Bush years (not to mention a fair handful of Eastwood’s earlier films): drunken cowboys in the town of Big Whiskey maim one of the local whores, the whores seek retribution by hiring gunmen to kill the cowboys, and the town’s sadistic sheriff beats and kills the gunmen who show up. In the end, a lot of people are dead, nobody’s better off and justice has not been served. Sadly, the film’s grim portrayal of the futility of violence is just as timely now as it was at the dawn of our last “hope and change” administration.

AMADEUS (1984)

For starters, Amadeus is probably the best of the four other films nominated in 1984 (A Passage To India, The Killing Fields, Places In The Heart and A Soldier's Story), so it passes that basic test. Oddly enough, Amadeus is also one of the few movies that won Best Picture that I'd consider one of the ten best of its year — or at least close — and for a year that included Stranger Than Paradise, Once Upon A Time In America and The Terminator (just for starters), that's not bad at all. Amadeus probably won because it hit a number of reflexive buttons: it's a period costume drama where all the production and costume money is on-screen, it genuflects before Culture in the form of classical music without losing anyone with something truly alienating, it's based on a hit play, and it comes from a respectable, previously-lauded producer-director team. But the reasons Amadeus is actually pretty great have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the typical dry intelligence Milos Forman brought to the film. Forman treats this like a gigantic Brechtian exercise, paying meticulous attention to physical verisimilitude, then blowing it out with the likes of Jeffrey Jones and Tom Hulce — unmistakably American, out-of-place types. As in his later (not as good, still misunderstood) The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, Forman scrupulously obeys the biopic formula, hitting all the high points of his subject's lives while refusing to shed any light on what made them tick. Point being: who/what could possibly explain that? It drives Salieri crazy that he can't figure out why God would waste his music on a drunken, disrespectful buffoon, but to Forman, that's just par for the course.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

Arguably the first action movie to win Best Picture, The French Connection really announced (along with 1969's Midnight Cowboy triumph) a shift in what was considered acceptable award-winning fare; only a few years before, it was all treacly musicals and your occasional "serious" film. (In 1971, it was up against Nicholas And Alexandra, whose makers badly miscalculated the changing zeitgeist at some point.) But it wasn't a permanent shift: The French Connection — absolutely lean, more reliant on atmosphere and street grit than characterization or take-home morals — is as anomalous-seeming a Best Picture winner now as it was then, which speaks badly of the Academy's heavy suet-pudding tastes. (Cue outraged Dark Knight fans here.)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

David Lean is perhaps the only filmmaker whose natural inclinations and talents coincided perfectly with exactly the kind of material the Academy responds to: big, splashy physical filmmaking, heavy on conspicuous visual coups and visibly virtuoso acting. As it happens, Lawrence is one of my favorite films, and therefore the most important time the Academy got it right. Lawrence actually is the Best Picture of 1962, a beautiful film that (without getting too heavyhanded about it) uses exterior landscapes as a mirror for its otherwise unknowable protagonist. But surely it helped that it's long, launched Peter O'Toole in an instantly starmaking performance, and somehow managed to avoid taking a single meaningful political stance. Lawrence Of Arabia wears its ambitions plainly in every aspect — title, length, subject matter — but it lives up to them, too.

REBECCA (1940)

Hitchcock’s first American film was a contentious one, as the Master of Suspense famously quarreled with mega-producer David O. Selznick over myriad issues regarding his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Such squabbles may have resulted in a film that feels somewhat more conventional than Hitch’s prior British works, but its preoccupation with emotional and psychological traumas nonetheless ultimately helped pave the way for the director’s future daring psychodramas. In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine takes up residence in the Brontë-esque home of her wealthy husband Laurence Olivier, where the specter of his deceased first wife looms large thanks in part to Judith Anderson’s unsettling manor servant, who remains devoted to her dead employer. Although devoid of significant aesthetic inventiveness, the director still generates a sumptuously creepy, unreal atmosphere that’s equally indebted to Wuthering Heights and Val Lewton’s horror classics. A technically superb thriller, it’s also an enduringly resonant depiction of societal expectations for, and demands on, women.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

CRASH (2004)

I didn’t actively hate Crash when I first saw it. Paul Haggis’ schematic, artificial examination of race relations in Los Angeles was a pleasant enough way to pass an evening: I enjoyed watching Sandra Bullock play against type as a sour yuppie, and the vignette with Michael Peña and his daughter was sweet (in a Six Feet Under subplot kind of way). But the whole storyline with Matt Dillon’s Racist Cop® was nothing more than Haggis the mainstream milquetoast trying way too hard to provoke, like a suburban teen buying a Slipknot hoodie at Hot Topic with his mom’s credit card and then wearing it to church. The really annoying thing about Crash, though, was the way it allowed Academy voters (after pretty much ignoring films like Hoop Dreams and Malcolm X) to pat themselves on the back for their willingness to confront “the race issue” by rewarding Haggis’ toothless paper tiger of a film while simultaneously snubbing the superior (and timely) “gay cowboy” movie that apparently made them feel icky and uncomfortable.

BEN-HUR (1959)

If David Lean is the best-case scenario for a filmmaker who can hit Oscar's Pavlovian reflexes with deadly aim and still produce something worthwhile, Ben-Hur is pretty much the silliest, most bloated example of "epic" filmmaking there is. As it happens, Ben-Hur is a "milestone" in "Oscar history" because it's one of only three movies to win 11 Oscars; the other two are Titanic and Lord Of The Rings: The Film That Never Ends, which pretty much proves that running way over three hours (and the usual budget) are non-negotiable prereqs. Have you watched all of Ben-Hur lately? It's leaden, endless gay camp (Gore Vidal did it on purpose, but it's still not very funny). The chariot race is great, only because William Wyler ceded directorial duties to Western cowboy-stunt specialist Yakima Canutt, who thankfully had zero interest in propriety or "good" directorial values. On the plus side, this makes Spartacus look faultless.

TOM JONES (1963)

With the tail-end exception of 1969's Midnight Cowboy and this film, the Academy did its darndest to ignore changing cinematic mores in the '60s. So: Tom Jones. Henry Fielding's comic genius is boiled down into a series of too-cute reflexive, winking gestures in a long, overcooked souffle. No surprise: Tom Jones was adapted by John Osborne — the angry young man par excellence, so humorless he was buried with a copy of Hamlet in his pocket, with everyone but Hamlet's lines crossed-out — and clunkily directed (per his usual "form") by Tony Richardson. Together, they water down Godardian gestures for farce, toying with every possible distancing device (it's a silent movie! It's an undercranked Keystone Kops moment!) without any real effect or exuberance. Rarely has jollity seemed this excruciating.

THE STING (1973)

Like Tom Jones, The Sting is another would-be light entertainment that's actually incredibly boring and way too long; the highlight is when Paul Newman says "crap." The best part is the old-school Universal logo at the start, and that's over in thirteen seconds, embedded above for your viewing pleasure. Seriously, why do people like this movie? You can listen to Scott Joplin on your own time and there are many much better Redford and Newman charm vehicles (separately, anyway). One side note: somehow, in 1973, Cries And Whispers was also nominated for Best Picture. Really?

CHICAGO (2002)

Chicago isn't the worst musical of the decade (Moulin Rouge! is hard to beat), but it is kind of magnificently dull. Hollywood always loves a good circle-jerk, and this thinly-veiled "condemnation" (read: winking celebration) of celebrity and the glamor of wrong-doing obliges. Criminal justice is like showbiz, because obviously everything is like showbiz, because everything is like Hollywood. The single most memorable moment in the entire movie isn't any of the murder/juicy stuff; it's Richard Gere dancing in his underwear. Rob Marshall's direction is impressively unimaginative — something most people finally caught onto with Memoirs of a Geisha — and let's not even get into what a disservice this does to the memory of the late, great Bob Fosse: he of the original choreography, he who didn't wait for someone to call him a bastard but interrogated himself for real with All That Jazz. Fosse played for keeps, for better or worse; Chicago plays for winks.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Forget Christmas: for movie geeks, the period from New Year’s Eve to the third week in February is truly the most wonderful time of the year, from the endless Best of Lists and Golden Globes straight through the Saggies and Spirit Awards to the reddest carpet of all...Mama Oscar.

As per recently made-up tradition, the Screengrab will be live-blogging the Academy Awards this coming Sunday...and while we’re on the subject, can we please call a moratorium on bitching about the length of the show? Do sports fans cry every year about the length of the Super Bowl? Do they squeeze all the punt returns into a 65-second medley to streamline the running time? NO! If you’re a sports fan, you want the Super Bowl to last all day. And if you’re NOT a sports fan, then why the hell are you even watching? Just check out the highlights on the news and leave the rest of us in peace, ferchrissakes!

Sorry...just had to vent. And, if you think about it, strong opinions about trivial nonsense is pretty much the lifeblood of Oscar season. Arguments about who deserved to win and who got robbed have livened up the annual ceremony ever since Sunrise totally stole Best Unique and Artistic Production from Chang in 1928.

Sadly, our recent calls to reinstate the Best Unique and Artistic Production category have fallen on deaf ears (sorry, Synechdoche, New York), but there’s plenty more Oscar opining ahead as we here at the Screengrab salute (and condemn) THE BEST (AND WORST) BEST PICTURES OF ALL TIME!

THE BEST:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

This wasn't supposed to happen. While they might win the occasional token screenplay award (as they did for Fargo), the Coen Brothers were never going to be respectable and mainstream enough to take home the top Oscar honors. Perhaps emboldened by their belated coronation of Martin Scorsese, however, the Academy saw fit to award this dark, ultra-violent neo-noir with the coveted Best Picture prize. Maybe the literary pedigree helped – after all, even Oprah had given her seal of approval to Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel No Country for Old Men. The film is certainly the most faithful adaptation of the book imaginable, and yet it couldn't be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. Much of McCarthy's story unfolds through the sort of sardonic, deadpan dialogue that's always been right in the Coens' wheelhouse, and the more action-oriented scenes are rendered with such an uncanny grasp of McCarthy's evocative and precise geography, readers of the book may experience severe déjà vu. Javier Bardem, himself an Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor, is a uniquely malevolent presence as the killing machine Chigurh. While there are several suspense sequences destined for the Coens greatest hits reel (notably an attack dog's pursuit of Josh Brolin's doomed Marlboro Man into the Rio Grande, and a deadly game of 'musical rooms' at a rundown motel), in its final lyrical moments, No Country for Old Men transcends genre and lays waste to any notion of the Coens as the sniggering egghead pranksters of cinema.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)

In truth, The Last Emperor is kind of a silly movie: its take on China's 20th century political landscape is kind of vacuous and unenlightening, and it centers around an appropriately blank protagonist played by a totally undistinguished actor who seems to have been cast only because his last name, almost too conveniently, was "Lone." But it's also an apex of Bernardo Bertolucci's unhinged formalism (or, more accurately, of Vittorio Storaro's insane but effective color schemes), and as a lush, consistently gorgeous aesthetic exercise, it's pretty untoppable. If the Academy wanted pretty and inoffensively political, at least they got one out of two.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

Michael Cimino’s reputation was so tarnished by the epic financial and critical failure of 1980’s (unjustly vilified) Heaven’s Gate that it’s almost impossible to watch his preceding film, 1978’s The Deer Hunter, without thinking about the once-promising director’s impending fall from grace. Purely on its own merits, however, Cimino’s Best Picture winner holds up remarkably well as a marriage of New Hollywood authenticity and Old Hollywood scope, and as a portrait of not only the Vietnam War’s toll on those who fought it, but of war’s careless misuse of human life, the latter point epitomized by the iconic Russian Roulette finale involving Christopher Walken’s battle-scarred vet. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a haunting, melancholic loveliness that’s at odds with much of the material’s harrowing grimness, Cimino’s film (partially indebted to the work of Visconti) plays like a messy, sprawling novel, intimately evoking its characters’ Russian heritage and Pennsylvania steel town roots, poignantly utilizing rituals and ceremonies to express their bonds of love and friendship, and ably casting its tale as emblematic of America’s post-Vietnam moral and emotional disarray.

OLIVER! (1968)

This adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage musical version of Oliver Twist is one of those Oscar winners that isn't especially well-remembered these days and may be regarded as a fluky choice at best, which is unfair. It represents a late show of mastery by the great British director Carol Reed, who had suffered through a lousy decade since his last successful production, the 1959 Our Man in Havana. Working with a first-rate cast that includes Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and non-singing (thank God) Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Carol Reed managed to use the rather undistinguished musical as a way to create a stylized version of the Dickens story, utilizing the energy and wit of the performers and his own cinematic brio to compensate for the limitations of Bart's songs. The movie also has its place in history for marking the last moment when Hollywood felt comfortable declaring that an all-ages movie was the best of the year; the next year, the Best Picture award would go to the adults-only Midnight Cowboy.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

There’s a case to be made that David Lean’s early, more modestly sized efforts were superior to his later epics, though if the legendary auteur ultimately sacrificed emotional and dramatic tautness in favor of marathon distension, it occurred at some point after 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a peerless example of larger-than-life filmmaking. As the British military commander who, in a Japanese POW camp during WWII, spearheads the construction of a bridge that his British compatriots plan on destroying, Alec Guinness brilliantly personifies the destructive folly of pride. His army officer, determined to complete the bridge as a means of proving British cultural/political supremacy, is opposed by Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese colonel, driven to break his Western prisoners’ spirits and terrified that the British will humiliate his own men (and nation) by successfully completing their bridge-building task. Their one-on-one conflict is enlivened, rather than dwarfed, by Lean’s grand direction, culminating in a finale that’s memorable not just for its scale, but for the unforgettable look of sudden awareness, and regret, on Guinness’ face.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

HARVEY & JACK, MILK (2008)

Most every straight guy I know has tangled at some point with the Sexy Crazy Girl (y’know, the one that stole your wallet and set your bathroom on fire but looked so damn good in that little plaid miniskirt), and most straight girls have their horror stories about that Hot But Psycho Bad Boy all their friends warned them about, to no avail. From Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Leslie Mann in The 40 Year Old Virgin to Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and Mark Wahlberg in Fear, Sexy Crazy Girls and Hot But Psycho Bad Boys have been well-represented in mainstream cinema over the years. And while independent films (not to mention six seasons of The L Word) have provided numerous rainbow-flavored versions of the aforementioned archetypes, the gay characters depicted in most Hollywood films are usually too sexless and/or noble to fall into the sorts of messy romantic entanglements that pit brains and common sense against libido, heart and instinct. Gus Van Sant’s Milk, of course, was a recent and notable exception, dramatizing not only Harvey Milk’s heroic struggle for gay rights, but also the concrete realities of the complicated human relationships beneath all the abstract rhetoric. Like Hillary and Julia Goodridge, who recently got divorced after helping to pave the way for same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (yeah, MA!), Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is only human as he fights for human rights. Like any number of hard-working professionals before and since, he has trouble balancing his personal and professional life, and falls into a mid-life crisis affair with Diego Luna’s clingy, troubled good-time-guy Jack Lira. For those who haven’t seen the movie, let’s just say that, in the tradition of countless real world and cinematic Crazy Girl/Bad Boy relationships, it doesn’t end well.

BOBBY & HELEN, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971)

Not giving your characters last names to make them more universal is always generally kind of a cheap trick, but Joan Didion co-wrote this, so I suppose we should just let it go. The Panic In Needle Park outdid Requiem For A Dream by nearly 30 years through a really simple expedient: just show people shooting up in needle close-ups. You don't need the anal dildo or hallucinations then. Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) don't use at first; he just deals, and she stares adoringly. Then he starts "chipping," she sneaks some while he's sleeping to see what it's all about, and much OD'ing, jail time and bad decision-making ensue. They're a couple who accelerate each others' downward spirals; thanks to one of Pacino's early galvanizing performances (before the ham set in) and Winn's essentially passive, worshipful gaze, it works.

MIMI & OSCAR, BITTER MOON (1992)

Oscar, an older American expat writer meets Mimi, a hot young French girl on a bus in Paris. After the initial meet-cute hot romance ensues. Years later we meet Oscar again, a broken man, as he tells his story to an awkward young Brit (Hugh Grant) on a Mediterreanean cruise. Don't let the presence of Hugh Grant fool you. This is a Polanski flick. The gist is that a man hasn't truly loved a woman unless there were animal masks and water sports invoved and he treated her like shit. Conversly, a lady never really loved a man unless she let him dismantle her self-confidence brick by brick and then took her revenge by putting him in a wheel chair and flaunting her magnificently muscled lover in front of him. Sounds like fun, no?

GEORGE & SHERRY PEARY, THE KILLING (1956)

There may be no film genre richer in sordid, back-stabbing, and generally unrewarding relationships than that of film noir, and they never got nastier than when Marie Windsor, star of Cat Women of the Moon, was in the room. With her heavy lids, bottle-blonde Wilma Flintstone 'do, a nose that she seemed to be looking down at men from even when they were taller than her, and a voice that could make any line sound withering, Windsor was born to nag, and in Stanley Kubrick's classic caper movie, she's partnered with an actor who was such a natural sucker that he first made crime movie history getting sold out by Sidney Greenstreet. Loitering around their apartment, Windsor casually reduces her short hubby to asking why she married him --"You used to love me. You said you did, anyway." -- to which she responds that he hasn't exactly delivered on those promises he made about hitting it big and setting her up in style, adding that she doesn't mind the lack of money so long as she has "a big, strong intelligent brute like you" to be down with. Even Homer Simpson would have trouble missing the sarcasm. The final proof that this marriage cannot be saved comes when she finds out that her husband George is involved in a million dollar racetrack robbery scheme; rather than just wait for him to pull off the heist and show up at home to wave the dough in her face, she just can't resist getting her boy toy -- Vince Edwards, all muscles and smirk -- to oil his own gun and go try to rip off the robbers. Poor George finds out that his lovey-dove has set him up for the last time when he hears Edwards break into the room, look around for him, and ask, "Hey, where's the jerk?"

STEVE BOLANDER & LAURIE HENDERSON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)

When American Graffiti begins, the plan is for Steve and his buddy (and Laurie's sister) Curt to go off to the East Coast and attend college; this means that his relationship with Laurie will be going long-distance, but not to worry -- Steve has thought about that and proposes to Laurie that they strenghten their bond to each other by seeing other people. This goes down about as well as you could expect. Bad as this is, those of us who actually know people who saw the momentous event of their high school graduation as a cue to marry their first serious dating partner will recognize that the real sign of horror to come arrives when Steve and Laurie take to the dance floor, and she clings to him with such fierce tenacity that his bare back must look as if he'd gone a couple of rounds with Lon Chaney, Jr. She then forces him to recognize the depth of his "true feelings" for her -- defined here as his acquisitive male jealousy -- by flouncing off and landing in Harrison Ford's lap. Come dawn and they're so solidly committed to each other that Steve isn't going away to college anymore, which means that in a few years, he'll have someone handy to blame for the fact that he's stuck in a shitty job in the same podunk town he grew up in, and she can't look at him without thinking about the twenty minutes when she was Indiana Jones' girl.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)

If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)

Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.

ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)

When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.

ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)

An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.

ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)

The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.

DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.

ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day! Huh! What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask: it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

PROF. IMMANUEL RATH & LOLA LOLA, THE BLUE ANGEL (1930)

A sort of preemptive riposte to the 20th century's literary canon of professors effectively leveraging their intellectual heft for the purpose of seducing their students, The Blue Angel has stuffy Rath (Emil Jannings) falling for cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) when he goes down to waggle his finger in her face and tell her to stop distracting his students. Instead, she captivates and reduces him to a pathetic spectacle, as pathetic in the public's eyes as he is in hers. If Rath had at least a little touch of submissiveness in him, maybe he'd enjoy being constantly humiliated in a sub-dom 24/7 way; as it is, Lola reduces him to a man with no free will. Dietrich's star was made in this first collaboration with Josef von Sternberg; meanwhile, Jannings' performance is frequently looked down upon as an anachronistic acting style from another age. Which actually makes perfect sense for the character he's playing. As a depiction of a May-December, intellectual-emptyheaded, pompous-earthy, and every other kind of mismatch possible relationship, The Blue Angel isn't painful only because it's more conducive to distanced contemplation and sarcastic laughter than visceral empathy. Should you have extra time at work (should you still be employed, in fact), some kind soul has uploaded the whole German version to YouTube, but the embedding has been disabled, so enjoy the trailer above, then click here to watch the whole thing.

GEORGE & MARTHA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

There may be bloodier couples in the history of cinema, but there are none whose hatred burned brighter. George and Martha – a small-time failure of a college professor and his crude harpy of a wife, played by real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – may not want to kill each other, but it’s only because dead they would be past inflicting pain, which is all that keeps them going. Considering that Martha speaks of their marriage in terms of total warfare, and George’s idea of whimsical banter is to point a rifle at his wife’s head during a cocktail party, it’s no surprise that this movie has become shorthand for violently feuding couples. This is a couple that’s beyond mere feuding, but whose initial passion has never soured: it’s been transformed into something just as fiery, a loathing built on complete knowledge of, and complete dependence upon, one another. The film shocks us right out of the box by presenting us with a couple whose fury and loathing for each other is deeper than the love in an any big-screen romance; it then shocks us even further by showing how deeply, albeit bizarrely, they care for each other, and how much more profound their relationship is than the seemingly happy couple that contrasts them.

MICHAEL & KAY CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

There's a lesson here that a lot of you girls would do well to heed: when your boyfriend runs off to Sicily without a word, gets married to a perfect stranger he met over there about ten minutes after he got off the boat, and then, after somebody sticks dynamite under the hood of the car and blows her sky high, he shows up where you work, again without a word, and announces that, lucky you, he's looking to fill the position of second wife and he's prepared to consider your qualifications -- honey, take a breath. If you feel swayed by his liquid brown eyes and passionate words, try and think about how you're going to feel waking up next to him in a few years, when the face is set off by a toupee like an earth-tone fireworks display and that insinuating voice keeps erupting "HOO-hah!" Then you tell Casanova that as much as you appreciate the offer, you feel that you might be overqualified on account of your ability to count above ten without taking off your shoes. Unless you've got some kind of fetish for having doors slammed in your face.

JACK & WENDY TORRANCE, THE SHINING (1980)

If you've seen The Shining as many times as I have – and there's very little chance of that – you've probably spent some time speculating about the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance. How did they meet? What was the attraction? When did they decide to get married, and didn't they have any friends or family to talk them out of it? Some would point to the obvious incompatibility of the brooding, hot-tempered Jack (Jack Nicholson) and the frail, skittish Wendy (Shelly Duvall) as a flaw in the movie, but to those people I would pose this query: Do you know any married people? Because if you do, surely you are aware that for every couple that seems inevitable and perfect for each other, there are at least three that make no sense whatsoever on any rational level. It's easy to blame Jack for the eventual dissolution of the relationship. He is the guy who starts talking to ghosts and running around with an axe, after all. But let's not let Wendy entirely off the hook. She did go along with a plan that entailed living in total isolation with a man who has a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence (no matter how much she may have tried to downplay it), and she brought her young son Danny into it. At the very least, she's guilty of poor judgment, but at least it all works out in the end.

FRANK BOOTH & DOROTHY VALLENS, BLUE VELVET (1986)

Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens, the two emblems of maniacal deviance and defiled virtue (respectively) in David Lynch’s surrealistic neo-noir Blue Velvet, may share things...but love isn’t one of them. Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is a nightclub singer with a daughter and an air of mystery, which – as Kyle MacLachlan’s amateur sleuth Jeffrey peeps after being shoved, post-blowjob, into a closet – is due to her association with Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank is a sociopath holding Dorothy’s husband hostage so she might sexually gratify him, and the twisted sadomasochistic tryst (replete with helium inhalations and erotic asphyxiation) that Jeffrey witnesses while hiding in that closet may stand as some of the most disturbingly unsettling material ever shot by the peerlessly out-there Lynch. The couple’s relationship ultimately ends when Jeffrey shoots Frank dead, but this being Lynch, the ensuing happy ending is laced with perversion, due in part to the earlier suggestion that Dorothy, conditioned to Frank’s beatings, has been warped into associating pleasure with pain.

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

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

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Five)

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

DEAD MAN WALKING (1995)

The funny thing about Dead Man Walking (and, admittedly, “funny” doesn’t come up a lot in discussions of Tim Robbins’ excellent but grim 1995 adaptation of the memoir by Sister Helen Prejean) is the way its tale of a nun (Susan Sarandon) driven to become an activist against capital punishment in the wake of her experiences with death row inmates (embodied by Sean Penn’s fictional composite, Matthew Poncelet) did nothing to change my own views on capital punishment at the time. In the film, Sarandon (as Prejean) is contacted by Poncelet, a convict facing execution who swears he was only an innocent bystander to the crimes he’s been charged with and needs help with his final appeal. Yet for all her Christian charity, it’s hard for Prejean not to see Poncelet for what he truly is: an arrogant, ignorant, self-pitying racist thug...not to mention, as it eventually turns out, a rapist and cold-blooded killer. When his appeal is denied and Poncelet eventually gets lethally injected for his senseless, brutal crimes, I remember my thought at the time was...good. True, with death staring him in the face (and after weeks of selfless work by Sister Prejean), Poncelet finally starts acting like a human being and feels bad for his evil behavior, but...so what? Without the catalyst of his own looming execution, it’s doubtful Poncelet would have shown any remorse at all, and his jailhouse conversion is too little too late: the victims are dead and even a last-minute call from the governor would only upgrade Poncelet’s remaining time on Earth to life in prison (while offering no closure for the victim’s families). Recounting my initial reactions, I realize I’ve mellowed a bit since 1995: given the inequities of the American legal system, I’ve come around to a generally anti-capital punishment perspective (except in extreme cases involving no-doubt-about-it Hall-Of-Fame assholes like Timothy McVeigh and...well, I'll get back to you on Cheney). But it’s a tribute to Sarandon, Penn, Prejean and Robbins (not usually known for his subtlety in political matters) that Dead Man Walking is even-handed enough to credibly illustrate both sides of a difficult issue without preaching exclusively to any particular choir.

BRUTE FORCE (1947)

Most film noir dealt with men doing everything possible to stay out of prison. But master noir director Jules Dassin was never one to do things the easy or predictable way, so he set Brute Force -- one of the most memorable, intense, and violent post-war crime dramas -- inside the walls of the big house. Crammed with character actors who had worked with Dassin in the theater (and who, like him, would soon be victims of the anticommunist blacklist), Brute Force is also noteworthy for making a star out of Burt Lancaster, in only his second film after The Killers. Lancaster plays a nihilistic con who stages a prison riot, putatively to escape, admittedly to get out from under the thumb of a brutal yard boss, but really just to feel alive in a prison that feels to him like a living death. Hume Cronyn, as the prison guard, is likewise locked in a power struggle with a reformist administrator, and the three-way clash sets up a denoument that is as brutal as it is surprisingly human. Unsurprisingly, the director and his actors find a way to cast the whole thing in a political light until its doomed finale. It’s a powerhouse film with gorgeous William Daniels photography that deserves to be counted with Dassin’s best.

SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941)

Joel McCrea’s pampered director John L. Sullivan has his heart in the right place. He wants to make an epic about how tough it is for the little guy. He can see it all already. It will be called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and it will tell the truth in a way that movies so rarely do. His producers, however, would prefer that he make another comedy, because let's face it, those make lots of money for everyone. All Preston Sturges comedies come with a swift punch to the gut, a remedy highly recommended for all moviegoers on occasion. We can be a lazy bunch when we’re not watching out for that fast right. When Sullivan finally gives up on his dream of living like a hobo, the movie spins on a dime and hard times catch up with him faster than he expected. He learns the hard way how tough it is to be the little guy. He winds up with a sentence of six years of hard labor in a Southern prison camp, a brutal and bitter place in which even Cool Hand Luke would work to avoid any failures to communicate with his captors. The scene in the clip above is from that sequence, where Sullivan figures out what charity really is and what people really want from the movies. Fat lot of good it’ll do him, though, unless he figures out how to get sprung from jail. Luckily for him, despite all his boneheaded doofery, Sullivan is a clever guy. At least, he's written by a very clever guy, that Preston Sturges.

THIEVES LIKE US (1974)

Thieves Like Us isn't a prison movie -- it's about criminals trying to stay out of jail -- but it does have one of the all-time great prison escape sequences. With Chicamaw (John Schuck) in the pen once more, it's up to Bowie (Keith Carradine!) to break him out. Bowie drives straight into the prison: it's the South in the 1930s, and with rampant inequality everywhere (Thieves Like Us presses way less heavily on this point than Bonnie And Clyde, which is all to the good), the warden is sitting down mid-day to a sweat-inducing fried chicken feast. The rail-thin Bowie has no trouble outfoxing and tying him up.

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (1979)

Don Siegel's second great prison movie owes a lot (maybe too much) to A Man Escaped, but it also owes a lot to Clint Eastwood's fully-developed badass persona. The best parts aren't the methodical depictions of how Eastwood breaks out of the unbreakable, but his laconic assertions of selfhood. If you haven't seen Gran Torino yet (and you should!) and wonder how Clint Eastwood being racist sounds, watch the (possibly NSFW) clip above. What Escape From Alcatraz doesn't do is offer hardly any social context; it's just Clint versus the world, and it happens, almost incidentally, to be set in a jail.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

Depending on when you check the IMDB, The Shawshank Redemption is either the first or second greatest movie of all time as elected by we, the people. (It duels back and forth with The Godfather.) How this came to pass is one of those mysteries that will never be answered. No one really expects IMDB users to be our most reliable cultural curators (see the #5 greatest film of all time: The Dark Knight), but one of those things that drives my cinematic acquaintances nuts is trying to figure out how a movie that performed only moderately on initial release has managed to somehow assume top rank in many people's hearts. The movie's fine -- it's nice and slow, bolstered by patience, a generous dose of well-judged sap and a rare non-smarmy turn from Tim Robbins -- but it cribs egregiously from basically every prison movie ever made without offering a whole lot back. Still, the people have spoken: it's the greatest film of all time, hence easily the greatest prison film of all time. Enjoy yourselves, folks.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

OUT OF SIGHT

Most people remember Stephen Soderbergh’s 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight as the start (and, essentially, end) of J.Lo®’s serious acting career, and also the movie where George Clooney traded in the training wheels and became an official movie star. Yet, while the hunk-in-the-trunk romance between Lopez’s cop (Federal Marshal Karen Sisco) and the Cloon’s robber, Jack Foley, may be the heart of the story, the prison (and eventual jailbreak) scenes are the muscle. Doing time in the Lompoc federal pen, Foley protects a weasely businessman (the ever-great Albert Brooks) from the unwanted attentions of scarier convicts like the part-time pugilist, full-time sociopath Maurice “Snoopy” Miller (played to the scary hilt by Don Cheadle, a full 180 degrees away from his loveable porn star performance the previous year in Boogie Nights). When the men are eventually released back into the real world, Foley visits Brooks’ character in search of legitimate employment, only to be offered a lousy security guard job and a condescending pep talk: “You’re a bank robber. This is not a marketable skill...show me that you’re really willing to change and we’ll talk about something better.” Foley is not pleased, reminding his would-be benefactor, “Back in prison, guy like you, place like that, you were ice cream for freaks...I saved your ass.” And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Out of Sight one of the great modern prison flicks: in addition to all the endlessly quotable exchanges, the Leonard story (and screenplay by Scott Frank) is memorable for its depiction of jail as a funhouse mirror, reflecting back a distorted version of society where definitions of decency, morality and manhood get all wiggly and reversed.

THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)

Howard Hawks' famous dictum about a good movie being nothing more than three good scenes and no bad ones gets its purest expression here, because that's all this is. Idealistic warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston) gets a new prison and proceeds to shake things up. There's a real plot — the script is exceptionally clever, building in a more-than-usually-convincing happy ending with a clever plant, making both audiences and the production code happy — and also young Boris Karloff, but as usual Hawks doesn't seem terribly invested in the mechanics. The three great scenes: an opening bit where cops debate the finer points of a card game while inspecting a crime scene (beating The Wire by some 70 years; it's just as sophisticated), Walter Huston walking through and staring down an entire prison yard through sheer force of will, and Karloff intentionally getting himself sent into solitary confinement by announcing to the first guard unlucky enough to pass him, "Hey! I don't like you!" None of these scenes are available on video (or DVD, for that matter), so enjoy as best you can the above context-free clip of dubious quality with Italian subtitles, which still gives you a feel for Huston's masterful underacting. Here, as in Capra's American Madness a year later, Huston was way ahead of the naturalistic curve.

RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (1954)

The first of Don Siegel's two archetypal prison movies, Riot In Cell Block 11 is better as a social document than a movie. Character actors (Neville Brand! Frank Faylen!) wait the minimum amount of time before everything explodes into a frenzy. It's strong stuff, if not particularly revelatory or fun; still, Siegel got there way before Attica and made it fairly plausible. There are no clips on YouTube, so here's a completely context-free excerpt from Private Hell 36, the frankly superior noir he made the same year. Siegel would have the clout and confidence to increase the overt stylization in his movies as he made more films; here, he's still working in a fairly traditional '50s-problem-film/exploitation potboiler mode.

LE TROU (1960)

Jacques Becker's brilliantly terse prison-break movie is longer than A Man Escaped, and hence inevitably somehow even more oppressive and claustrophobic; Bresson is concerned with transcendence, while Becker shoots down that possibility entirely. (Becker has more in common with Jean-Pierre Melville's fatalistic male cameraderie.) They're both invested in physical actions speaking much louder than words, though; the highlight is a riveting one-shot of the men pounding through the floor of their jail cell in a go-for-broke one-chance-only action. Becker's film is a notch below — wince in pain at symbolic spider-webs — but it's still a classic of the genre. Here's an amazingly long trailer in unsubtitled French; after decades of bootlegs, though, this was recently made available by Criterion, in another selfless act of public service.

THE ROUND-UP (1966)

This isn't really a prison movie; it's a prison-camp movie, which might conceivably make a difference to someone. Ruthless formalist Miklos Jancso (Bela Tarr's stylistic father) is trying to make a movie about oppression by the state; what he comes up with is an open-air equivalent to Kafka, reducing concrete political problems to a grimly amusing all-purpose absurdism. Prisoners are herded from one part of the open-to-the-sky grounds to another, without any discernible point or rhyme, except to serve as compositional elements for Jancso's immaculate tracking shots. [MAJOR SPOILER] Our ostensible protagonist is killed with half-an-hour to go, which makes the point better than any overt speech could've. There's no clips available from this film on YouTube, so here's a clip from the previous year's The Red And The White, which is stylistically pretty much the exact same movie.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

THE DARJEELING LIMITED (2007)

I still haven't seen "The Hotel Chevalier," a (by all accounts great) short companion film that preceded The Darjeeling Limited at some (but not all venues) during its theatrical run, and I'm still a little ticked off at Wes Anderson for that...but considering how much I hated The Life Aquatic (after loving The Royal Tennenbaums and Rushmore), I was just happy to see one of my favorite directors back in fine, peculiar form with this dreamy, visually gorgeous tale of three newly fatherless brothers grieving their way across India in search of the inscrutable mother who abandoned them. Lighter and funnier than its synopsis would indicate, the film is nevertheless steeped in quiet melancholy (personified by the mournful, meta presence of Owen Wilson, pre-suicide attempt) and a timely sense of hopeful fatalism. Like any number of strangers in strange lands before them, the brothers find relief from alienation in the alien landscapes of their journey as those simultaneously indifferent and transcendent surroundings help draw their collective gaze from their own navels. (Great soundtrack, too.)

THE MAGGIE (1954)

A slightly bitterer precursor to Local Hero, The Maggie has American businessman Calvin B. Marshall (Paul Douglas) hiring a grossly incompetent boat to carry his furniture to a prospective summer house in Kiltarra. Led by one Mactaggert (Alec Mackenzie), it's not so much a fair fight between wealthy American and wily Scots as an absolute walkover. The crew are fun, but they're actively incompetent and opportunistic; what they do to a Marshall willing to pay them more than reasonably is hilarious but also kind of unconscionable. And he likes it! Phoning home at one point, he announces "I'm developing a very strange sense of humor." There are no clips on YouTube, so the one above features the wonderfully character-actor-ish Douglas on What's My Line?, adopting a Cockney accent for no justifiable reason.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964)

"If they're afraid of the sand, have them tackle it scientifically" announces exasperated entomologist Niji Jumpei (Eiji Okada) after he's forced — for seemingly the rest of his life — to live in a pit of sand with the titular woman. Jumpei isn't so much a stranger in a strange land as a stranger in no man's land, surrounded by blatantly allegorical, hostilely indifferent locals and no explanations. Much of Woman is disorienting to watch as well: in a square frame, sand piles up, slips and slides in kinetic, snaky ways at least as interesting to watch as the people. (It might quite possibly be an even better movie about sand than Lawrence of Arabia, though that film otherwise wins.) For a film about being trapped — Niji's pinned down like the insects he studies — there's an amazing abortive escape across the sand, an action release across strange territory before being trapped again.

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970)

Tony Musante was one of those actors who flourished in the late '60s/'70s, when actors willing to travel and work in cheapie international co-productions in ludicrous scenarios would be compensated for their troubles. Here, the truly Italian-American Musante is the oddly named American Sam Dalmas (!) — although, depending on which dub you see, everything happens in either equally fluid Italian or English. Sam sees a murder in an art gallery and spends a lot of time trying not to get shot and traveling around the country he's supposed to be leaving in a few days. Though Dalmas has been in Italy for a while (working on a book about birds), he seems to have no familiarity with the city's layout, which makes it hard for him to elude killers effectively. Dalmas gets the job done but, in truth, Musante is never once convincing as an American abroad: he just looks too at home, matching all the real Italian players physically. (Just two years before, he'd been playing Mexican mercenary bandit "Paco Roman" in The Mercenary. Go figure.)

THE OUTSIDE MAN (1972)

One of the films highlighted by Thom Anderson in 2003's undervalued Los Angeles Plays Itself as an example of a French director bringing a better eye to LA location shooting than Angelenos themselves (Jacques Demy's equally obscure 1969 Model Shop is also cited), The Outside Man is a textbook gritty '70s guilty pleasure that deserves to be better known. The plot's pretty rote — Jean-Louis Trintignant comes to town to knock someone off, double-crosses and hits on his life ensue — but it's just an excuse to gawk at a metropolis growing into urban crappiness way too fast. Director Jacques Deray (an action specialist who really should be better known in the US) gawks at all the right mundane things (new supermarkets, Venice Beach) his protagonist ignores, which now look totally alien. Best of all are Trintignant's assassin freres, who arrive in town to help him out. "Why are we wearing all black?" one whinges. "How will we meet women this way?"

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007)

I've been an Adam Goldberg enthusiast since Dazed and Confused, but if you don't appreciate the actor's neurotic, hyperarticulate humor, then 2 Days In Paris may not be your cup of Pernod. On the other hand, even Hebrew Hammer haters may find themselves charmed by Julie Delpy's performance (in a movie she wrote and directed) as the distaff half of a bi-national couple facing relationship meltdown during the titular 48-hour period. After all the France-bashing during the (still not over yet!) Bush administration, it's interesting to see Delpy's warts-and-all depiction of The City of Lights, while her lived-in, heartfelt insights into love and family breathe fresh life into the ill-used romantic comedy genre. But Goldberg is the fish-out-of-water focus here, in a performance for anyone who’s ever been sick and disoriented on vacation while desperately wishing for the comforts of home.

COMING TO AMERICA (1988)

Probably Eddie Murphy's finest moment. Also, one of those big box office-y 1980s comedies — like Back to the Future — that, while seemingly silly, get at the very heart of America. Hard to say how much of it is intentional but damn it, it works. Eddie Murphy doesn't just star as the pampered Prince Akeem of Zamunda ("The royal penis is clean your highness"). He also wrote the story. One imagines his train of thought went something like this: if the enslaved Africans brought to America were once kings and queens, then what would an African king seeking a wife in Queens think of America? Natch, hilarity ensues.

THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

The director-star Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider (1969) begins with a Hollywood crew shooting a Western in Peru. Hopper plays Kansas, a stunt man who continues to hang around after the movie wraps. The film is insanely overedited, and Hopper the auteur got more than a little carried away with the possibilities of movies within movies and illusion versus reality games. To the degree that the movie has a plot, it seems to involve the Peruvians getting so excited from having watched the moviemakers at work that they build their own (non-functioning) cameras and other equipment out of bamboo and use them as an excuse to stage violent scenes, which in turn may be real. Hopper himself seems to have rendered the movie unintelligible because, out there on location, he got so into the heady atmosphere (and, it's said, some of the local mushrooms) that he couldn't stop tinkering with his baby, cutting and re-cutting it and throwing more and more monkey wrenches into its motor. His movie about the deranging effects of a clash of cultures thus also became an example of it. Luigi Pirandello would be proud. Jeff Spicoli might want to tip his hat, too.

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Strangers in a strange land is something of a pet theme of Graham Greene, whether he's charting the course of the well-meaning but destructive title character of The Quiet American in Indochina or the crooked international financier of "Across the Bridge" who finds himself stranded in a dusty Mexican town. This classic may serve as his most enduring movie exploration of his mixed feelings about the good man -- in this case, American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) -- who thinks he's being a nobly stalwart hero when he's really just in way over his head. Martins arrives in Vienna after World War II, at a time when the city is divided into zones ruled over by representatives of four different countries and corruption runs rampant, only to be informed that the friend who summoned him there, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was recently killed in a lorry accident. Naturally, Holly recognizes that something must be up and raises hell trying to find out what it is, until his friend, who faked his death to evade the consequences of his horrible crimes, comes out of the shadows and threatens his life. It would seem that Holly has been running himself ragged to avenge the death of a man he hadn't known at all. But the girls in Heavenly Creatures had his number.

PEPE LE MOKO (1937)

The strangers here are multiple: there's Pepe himself (Jean Gabin), a mythical French criminal hiding out in Algiers' Casbah, the police detectives sent over to track him down after his many successful years of hiding, the visiting woman Pepe seduces with a combination of his criminal allure and knowledge of an area off-limits to tourists, and — not least of all — director Julien Duvivier and his crew. Pepe Le Moko isn't entirely location-based, but there's very real exterior footage — especially in the opening sequence above — frequently from cameras far shakier and more obviously documentary and on-the-fly than most '30s narratives would allow themselves. Pepe is some kind of classic, at least in part because its relationship to its status as colonial filmmaking is constantly unsettled. "Algiers isn't Pigalle" announces a local cop before giving an overview of the area — including people "descended from barbarians, honest traditionalists but a mystery to us." Pepe's more at home with the natives than the French authorities pursuing him, and not in a way that's condescending or self-conscious either. Rough filmmaking at times, but containing more ideas than most movies know what to do with. Many of the same locations were used for The Battle of Algiers, if all that isn't weird enough for you; those traditionalists wouldn't remain a mystery for much longer.

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)

Albuquerque. NM: into town comes a man so urbane he reads a newspaper while sitting in the car he's being towed in. The man is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a veteran reporter already fired from 11 metropolitan dailies. Tatum's here to give the sleepy little town the shot in the arm it needs and thereby rebuild his disgraced career, but Albuquerque won't give him the material for the yellow journalism he practices. Tatum's an urban hustler in the land of rural innocents — until a man's trapped in a cave and Tatum brings him to the world stage. Deliberately endangering Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) by needlessly delaying his rescue for a bigger story, Tatum transforms the area around the cave into the kind of oppportunistic carnival land of free-floating capitalistic enterprise and gaudy spectacle he's used to. Buried for years after its initial brutal reception, a recent restoration and release on Criterion have brought one of Billy Wilder's greatest films back into the spotlight it deserves.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab's Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.

Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”

And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!

WALKER (1987)

And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)

Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)

There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

DVD Digest for January 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, Criterion and Eclipse’s salute to the late films of an Italian master takes the top spot, opposite a handful of notable classics and a bunch of recent junk.

DVD of the Week: Having finished yet another holiday season, most of Hollywood’s high-profile recent releases aren’t due on DVD for another few months yet. In other words, it’s the perfect opportunity for Criterion to roll out some of their most interesting work yet. Case in point is this week’s release of several of Roberto Rossellini’s historical films. The most noteworthy of the bunch is his film The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Criterion), which invests the “historical drama” genre with Rossellini’s trademark realism, turning the genre on its ear by refusing to succumb to its usual picturesque tendencies. In conjunction with this release, Criterion’s sister company has created the box set Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films- Renaissance and Enlightenment, which contains three more of Rossellini’s historical films, including The Age of the Medici, Cartesius, and Blaise Pascal, which our own Vadim Rizov praised here a few months ago. In the middle of an Oscar season dominated by biopics and period films, the Rossellini DVD should provide a reprieve from the usual bloated reverence.

The most notable recent release coming to DVD this week is the Ed Harris-directed oater Appaloosa (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Kevin Costner in Swing Vote (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Dane Cook and Kate Hudson in My Best Friend’s Girl (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Keifer Sutherland in Mirrors (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys (Lionsgate); the India-set drama Brick Lane (Sony); and the Evelyn Waugh adaptation Brideshead Revisited (Disney).

In the classics department, this week sees the release of Eagle Pennell’s seminal proto-indie The Whole Shootin’ Match (Koch Entertainment Distribution). Also this week are two more Paramount Centennial Collection DVDs both starring Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Funny Face.

Finally this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Reba Season 5 (Fox) and ’Til Death Complete Second Season (Sony).

The Top Ten Screengrab Top Tens of 2008 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:30:00 GMT

5. THE GAY PRIDE TOP TWENTY

Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

4. THE TOP TEN UNCOMPLETED MOVIES

Part One & Part Two

3. THE TEN WORST HAIRDOS IN MOVIE HISTORY

Part One & Part Two

2. THE TWELVE GREATEST OPENING CREDITS IN MOVIE HISTORY

Part One & Part Two

1. JAILBAIT CINEMA: 16 FILMS THAT MAKE US NERVOUS

Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Click Here For Part One of the Top Ten Top Tens!

The Top Ten Screengrab Top Tens of 2008 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

As you may or may not have noticed (given our recent Best of 2008 orgy), we sure do loves us some lists here at the Screengrab.

And as you further may or may not have noticed, Thursday is typically List Day on this blog, with a rotating Top 10 (or 11 or 12 or 16 or 20, etc.) of various cinematic categories, from The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies to The World's Greatest Animated Shorts.

With a New Year dawning, we'd like to ask YOU what lists you'd like to see in 2009...just post your comments down yonder in the Comments section and we'll do our best to get to as many of them as possible!

Meanwhile, it seemed only fitting to wrap up the current annum with our final list of the year (based on hits received)...THE TOP TEN SCREENGRAB TOP TENS OF 2008!

10. COMING SOON: A SCREENGRAB SALUTE TO MOVIE TRAILERS

Part One & Part Two

9. THE 12 GREATEST MOVIES BASED ON TV SHOWS

Part One & Part Two

8. THE 10 GREATEST PSYCHIATRISTS IN MOVIE HISTORY

Part One & Part Two

7. FITTING FAREWELLS: THE TOP TEN GREAT FINAL FILMS

Part One, Part Two & Part Three

6. SCREENGRAB PUB CRAWL: THE TOP 15 BARS OF CINEMA

Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Click Here For Part Two of The Top Ten Top Tens

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

SHERYL LEE

Lee was originally cast as the face (and corpse) of bewitching, self-destructive prom queen Laura Palmer on the equally bewitching and self-destructive TV classic Twin Peaks, yet David Lynch was so captivated by the actress that he created a recurring role for her on the show (as Laura’s doomed cousin Maddie), then later placed her at the center of the feature-length Peaks prequel, Fire Walk With Me, a critically-scorned movie that made Lee (and her iconic character) seem, to many, like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome. And yet, even if you’re one of the haters who viewed the film as an unnecessary, self-indulgent folly (rather than an undervalued masterpiece), take another look at Lee’s performance: yes, she gobbles like a turkey at one point (a moment frequently and too easily mocked), but she also commits herself to the role of an abuse victim on the brink of madness with the kind of frightening, vulnerable intensity that would have earned praise and awards buzz if not for the small screen (and Log Lady) associations. Since her fifteen minutes of fame (and undeserved ridicule), Lee has largely flown beneath the radar in projects more interested in her capacity for physical (rather than emotional) nakedness onscreen, but even so there have been some diamonds in the rough: the innocent in This World, Then The Fireworks, the innocent turned deadly in John Carpenter’s Vampires and, most notably (if least interestingly), in her almost comeback roll as the German girlfriend in Backbeat. Lately, Lee’s found a home back on television (most recently on Dirty Sexy Money...remind me to set my Tivo!), but I’d be fascinated to see what she’d bring to a meaty film role now that she’s been seasoned with all these extra years of rejection, experience and wisdom.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA

After years of a steadily increasing profile on the arthouse circuit, Michael Almereyda made his best film yet, 2002's Happy Here And Now. After some festival showings, it promptly disappeared, only to be cynically resurrected by IFC after Katrina rendered its New Orleans setting suddenly marketable. The truth is that Almereyda's abstract feature doodles are even less marketable than those of his patron David Lynch, but — if you're on the right wavelength — they can also be totally ethereal and enveloping. Since Happy, he's made two documentaries (one of which I've seen — This So-Called Disaster, which lives down to its title), and which decidedly aren't his element. 2006's Tonight At Noon remains in some kind of post-production hell, and this year's New Orleans, Mon Amour didn't even get the token post-Katrina bounce after dropping at SXSW. What gives?

OWEN WILSON

This has nothing to do with Owen Wilson's personal life, which is frankly none of my business. But should he — after finishing what appears to be a contractually-mandated stint in A Night At The Museum 2 — still have any kind of relish for acting or film in general, it would be nice to see not the return of the Wilson who made lazy craptastic vehicles like Drillbit Taylor or You, Me & Dupree, but the thoughtful co-writer of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and/or the brilliantly limited slacker comedian who single-handedly rewrote and saved films like Shanghai Noon and (yes, I'm serious) The Big Bounce. Hell, he can even make another The Minus Man if that's what it takes.

TOM GREEN

This one's purely personal. I think Freddy Got Fingered is a very funny movie (which is generally not even true for fans of The Tom Green Show). I even think Freddy Got Fingered is a surprisingly emotional and deeply felt examination of poisonous father-son bonds, a deeply felt apologia from Green to his dad for being so awful to him on the show, fueled by a totally sincere desire for reconciliation. You, on the other hand, may be with the majority of the planet, which finds it to be an abomination. Whatever the case, it's time to rescue Green from whatever web-interview-show purgatory he's fallen into. If nothing else, he can keep reminding dudes of the importance of testicular self-exams.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

This one's utterly universal; is there anyone who wasn't amused by Chappelle? Chappelle hasn't disappeared completely; he's known to show up in comedy clubs with little more than 24 hours' advance notice, and he interviewed James Lipton in November for Inside The Actor's Studio's 200th episode. That's all we get? No one can blame Chappelle for the entirely understandable qualms that led him to shut down his show, and it's totally fair if he wants to retreat to the "Fuck Hollywood" ranch. But Dave Chappelle's Block Party wasn't just a joyous neighborhood tribute (and Michel Gondry's best film); it showed a way out for Chappelle, a post-comic persona that allowed him to drop irony and prove a surprisingly affable host to 21st-century race relations. Whether as a comic or simply as a good guy to spend time with on-screen, we could use him back.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

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 Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until A-list director Steven Zaillian, in the kind of wet dream moment that (usually) never comes true, just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, he was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying himself in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and he should instead train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks & Comebacks We’d Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until (in the kind of wet dream moment that never really happens) A-list director Steven Zaillian just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and, of course, the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, Huston was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

EVITA (1996)

The Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice pop-rock opera tells the story of a breathtakingly ambitious woman who sleeps her way to the top, then demands to be taken seriously (to the point of deification), yet no amount of money, power or adulation can ever satisfy her ravenous ego. For some reason, Madonna thought she’d be perfect for the part, and even learned to sing (fifteen years into her career as a singer) to hit the high notes of theater geek staples like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Unfortunately, the Material Girl’s participation in the project didn’t end with acting: while the Broadway production was about a flawed despot’s wife who embodies style-over-substance “truthiness" (imagining herself as a savior of the common people while really serving no one but herself), Madonna apparently insisted on scrubbing away her character’s flaws, transforming the story into a historically dissonant La Isla Bonita version of A Star Is Born, featuring a scrappy, sexy gal who uses her moxie to make it big (and wear a lot of swanky ‘40s fashion), robbing the musical of most of its thematic purpose and resonance and rendering Antonio Banderas’ role as Evita’s antagonist essentially pointless.

HAMLET (1969)

The movie versions of John Osborne's "angry young man" plays Look Back in Anger (starring Richard Burton) and The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier) -- plays that Richardson himself had staged in the theater -- are marred by clumsy film technique and the deadness one associates with inept efforts to "open out" stage plays, but they remain valuable records of great performances by legendary actors working with material that changed the face of theater. But Richardson's Hamlet, which wears its staginess on its sleeve and stars Nicol Williamson in the title role, is an embarrassing relic of its moment: a disastrous attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to the 1960s by pimping it out with sexual overtones (some of them supplied by Marianne Faithfull, who plays Ophelia, and who comes across as sweet, hard-working, and very confused) while emphasizing the generation gap angle (despite the casting, as Hamlet's stepfather and mother, of performers, Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt, who were younger than Williamson). Williamson's performance itself is some kind of landmark in bad Shakespearean acting: too self-contained to connect with the other performers and wearing a fresh layer of varnish on his popping eyeballs, he gives a demonstration of how it's possible to use the lines to show off the speed of one's word rate and the showiness of one's delivery without using the words to express a thing. From several years' perspective, the whole thing may be best seen as an inside joke done in preparation for Williamson's performance, two decades later, as John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. Which had its own problems.

KING LEAR (1971)

Peter Brooks' controversial, celebrated 1960s production was reportedly modeled on Samuel Beckett, with a resigned attitude towards the horrors that befall Lear and the other characters, and with the star, Paul Scofield, employing what Susan Sontag described as "arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines." "Deadened" is an accurate term for the production as it comes across in this black-and-white movie version, which seems to be an attempt to "modernize" the text by making it as far from moving as possible.

MACBETH (1948)

In his greatest Shakespeare movies, Chimes at Midnight and Othello, Orson Welles managed to draw inspiration for striking and powerful images from the desperation caused by his lack of funds, but he came a cropper here, working on too tight a budget and shooting schedule for Republic Pictures. In his cutting and reshaping of the text, Welles sometimes made dramatic logic subservient to his requisite Big Idea, that the witches and their cat's-paw, Macbeth, represented a barbaric, Druidic religion at war with the coming of Christianity. (He didn't do himself or the ears of his audience any favors with his other big idea, that the actors should attempt Scottish accents.) Other problems were beyond his control, such as the cheapo costumes that Republic supplied him with: the movie may be most notorious for its headgear, especially the sight of Welles in a "crown" that looks like a square box with three triangular points glued to the side, which Welles himself acknowledged made him look like he was playing the Statue of Liberty. It must be said that, as befits a play with a curse on it, Macbeth has probably inspired more rotten movie adaptations than any other great play, the most recent being a 2006 Australian movie, directed by Geofrey Wright, which was set among modern drug dealers in Melbourne, with leads who might have stepped out of a photo spread in Maxim; it plays like Miami Vice spoken in verse, with an Aussie accent. And that's not even taking into account all the movies that dump the bard's dialogue while, with a wink to the audience, using his plot. (These include the 1990 gangster movie Men of Respect, starring John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, and the godawful Scotland, Pa., in which James Le Gros and Maura Tierney attempt to rise in the fast-food industry by feeding their boss, Duncan, into the deep-fat fryer.)

LOVES LABOUR'S LOST (2000)

When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V opened months after the death of Laurence Olivier, critics rushed to embrace its young director-star as Olivier's heir apparent. But though Branagh has certainly had his moments since then, his directing career has been heavier on the Princess and the Showgirls than on the Hamlets. Bad as his attempts to experiment outside his Shakespeare roots (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter's Friends) have been, he really found the worst of both worlds with the first-ever movie version of this Shakespeare comedy, staged as a musical and crammed with actors who lacked experience in both classical theater and singing and dancing. Miramax Studios took one look at the results and flushed its three-picture deal with Branagh down the toilet, thus establishing once and for all that Harvey Weinstein is a Friend of the Theater.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Norman Jewison is a lousy director, and his thoroughly inept Fiddler On The Roof (source material I don't really care about one way or the other) did me a great service when I was a teenager by demonstrating (years before I'd seen Kevin Smith movies) exactly what inept mise-en-scene looks like. Early on, Topol is dancing in the barn. The frame is widescreen, and Jewison has so little idea of how to fill it that one half of the screen is Topol; the other half is a cow's ass. This is one of the crowning insults in the long history of rejected visual innovations on-screen. Why, if only I could find an amateur video of a Japanese stage production, even that would be an improvement. Oh wait, there it is!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Two)

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

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954)

Harold Brighouse's 1916 comedy was a staple of Northern English comedy, which made everyone nervous when David Lean — "in every fibre a Southerner," notes Kevin Brownlow's biography — took it on. Fortunately, his cast — scenery-chewing Charles Laughton, John Mills (saving his career from impending disaster) and bitchy Brenda de Banzie — carry things nicely. Lean was never much good at comedy, but Hobson's Choice isn't much of a knee-slapper in the first place, so — unlike his awful, rhythmless Blithe Spirit, a mean-spirited, clunky travesty of Noel Coward's play (who responded "You've just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote") — it works. Lean's main contribution comes between dialogue, as in the clip above — continually grounding the mild, leisurely jokes in Manchester's real industrial sprawl. Co-writer Norman Spencer recalls Brighouse never really cared: "He was an old man who was a bit deaf and rather stunned by the whole thing. He said, 'I hope it'll be a nice film,' lost interest and went back up North again."

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)

It's nearly impossible to imagine Rock Hunter as a play — Frank Tashlin's movie is so aggressively cinematic, and its satirical points on celebrity's corrosive effects and so on kind of uninteresting. But it pops with Looney Tunes energy, mostly courtesy of Tony Randall: he's occasionally overrun with unexplained evil spirits that take over his body, lower his voice, and make him act as rudely as possible, an effect closer to the cartoons Tashlin started out in than any play. In the clip above (0:53 in), Randall interrupts the movie's action to address the audience directly while the screen loses its Cinemascope boundaries for all manner of TV-simulation; it's the cinematic equivalent of Todd Rundgren's sarcastic diatribe of in-house problems, "Sounds From The Studio," which showcased clipping, weird pitch-shifting and every other '70s analog problem in great detail. Here we get static, snow, and V-hold problems. It's the film's most exhilarating moment, and utterly irrelevant to theater.

THE HOMECOMING (1973)

"Didn't you hear what I said, dad?" sneers Ian Holm in the clip above. Pinter's clipped menace has translated to the screen better and more often than most, but The Homecoming is probably the best attempt to translate a play to screen with as little flash or changing as possible (including, at a mere 111 minutes, an intermission). Aside from one memorable handheld POV shot for the first act's climax — a nervous charge attempted by both character and camera — Peter Hall finds angles that sometimes find visual equivalents for what's being said, but mostly do the one thing that can't be accomplished in theater: have everything happen in a realistically crappy suburban house, without otherwise changing the tempo or performances one bit.

HAMLET ('96 Branagh/'00 Almereyda)

Five years apart, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda offered near-definitive, completely opposed takes on Hamlet. Branagh has the whole text uncut; to get through everything in a relatively speedy four hours, whole monologues are delivered in breathless rushes. Out of either necessity or bravado (or both), Branagh overplays wildly at times, rendering his every intonation explicitly theatrical; it's a big help for the novice viewer though: arguably the most instantly comprehensible on-screen Hamlet, making everything clear. Updated to the 19th century, it seems, purely to enable lusher visual overkill, Hamlet is both intelligent Shakesperean interpretation and grand Hollywood entertainment. That Branagh stocks all the main parts with theatrically trained actors with basically no marquee value and all the minor parts with way out-of-their-depth Hollywood players (Billy Crystal! Jack Lemmon!) creates an inadvertant but fascinating form of tension and comic relief. Almereyda's version, on the other hand, goes fin de siecle, slashes the text remorselessly and spends a lot of time amusing itself with its updates (the ghost first appears in front of a vending machine on a security camera) and punnish ways to change things by implication without changing the words (Denmark is no longer a country but a corporation avoiding takeover). Within all the jokes, Ethan Hawke's slacker prince is convincingly callow, moody and self-absorbed, but Almereyda knows the text is strong enough to make even this young idiot's plight finally empathetically comprehensible.

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

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

BLAISE PASCAL (1972)

Part of Rossellini's massive trove of biopics done for Italian TV in the last part of his career (and considered the best by J. Hoberman), Blaise Pascal respects the form but not spirit of biopics. Rossellini dutifully covers the 17th-century philosopher's life from infancy to death. There's no hint of a personal life though: it's 130 straight minutes of argumentation and disputation, with Pascal's greatest philosophical hits recited — conversationally, but barely — almost non-stop. Tension comes from an ominous, decidedly anachronistic synth score, whose constant hum reminds the viewer that death is coming for Pascal, and it does. Like Zodiac (albeit at a much lower intensity), Blaise Pascal gains power from tunneling deep into work and pointedly ignoring the outside world. Rossellini only stops to observe the uninflected past in non-dramatic moments: a silent sequence of a nobleman waking up, soaking his feet in water and being dressed by his servants tells us more about 17th-century class behavior than any dialogue could. No stories of how Pascal fell in love with a girl or had problems with his parents; the man's legacy, the film makes it quite clear, is solely an intellectual one, and that's all anyone should care about. It's oddly exhilarating: you're asked to simply step up and think hard for a while, without gratifying your emotions. In this (unsubtitled) clip, Pascal schools Descartes. Coming to DVD in January.

PATTON (1970)

The rare movie equally beloved by hardcore cineastes and testosterone-addled football-loving guys who could care less about movies, Patton is best remembered for the surreal opening monologue (above), a real Patton speech delivered straight to the audience in front of a giant American flag. (Vincent Canby called the effect "almost Rauschenberg.") But Patton is the rare movie whose central ambivalence never seemed to bother the public. He's presented straight-up in the middle of combat scenes presented with elaborately gorgeous clarity; it's a question of perspective whether he's a loon or whether he has a point. It's also frequently hilarious, as in the scene where Patton arrives to take charge of a camp that's in a total state of disarray. He finds a man slumped over in a hallway. "What are you doing?" he barks. "Sleeping, sir" the man answers. "Well keep sleeping! You're the only one who knows what he's doing around here!"

LAST DAYS (2005)

In my experience, people who are die-hard Kurt Cobain/Nirvana fans tend to hate Gus Van Sant's impressionistic take on Cobain's mentally deranged final hours. On the one hand, Van Sant gets some major iconographic images right (Cobain's body in the gardener's shed); on the other hand, there's no Nirvana music and zero attempt to convey anything about Nirvana. If you find Van Sant's long-tracking-shots-and-lighting-experiments aesthetic annoying (and you love Cobain), it looks like total disrespect. It's just Michael Pitt (in a career playing largely the psychotic and the damaged, a stand-out still) stumbling around, mumbling, ineptly preparing Kraft Mac 'n Cheese and — only twice — making music. I love it because it's a gorgeous formal exercise, but there's also plenty of comic scenes in the opening (see above, where a real Yellow Pages salesman steadfastly attempts to sell "Blake" a spot in the book and Blake's too out of it to figure out what he's talking about or tell him he's got the wrong guy). As a biography, the most intriguing bits are hypothetical glosses on impossible but intriguing music geeks what-ifs: what if Rivers Cuomo (Lukas Haas, writing his own dialogue just like everyone else) whined about touring in Japan to Cobain and inadvertently began working out Pinkerton that way? (Does this make Weezer the heir apparent to Nirvana? Discuss.) What if Kim Gordon came to give him a stern talking to? In its own odd way, Last Days finally gets around to nailing some of the most frustrating aspects of how '90s indie-rock spiraled into a mini-parody of mainstream rock, with its very own drugged-out casualties and insular, petty rivalries.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

Some people think this is the best movie about Nixon ever made; pending further evidence, I'll concur. It's mostly a master class in direction: given an impossible source (a one-man stage play), Robert Altman somehow makes the whole thing non-stagy. Finding as many different angles and set-ups as Lumet did for 12 Angry Men, Secret Honor is as much a pleasure for its resourcefulness as for Philip Baker Hall's career high: short on impersonation, long on paranoia. Filmed before Nixon's '80s rehabilitation as an acceptable and even valued foreign policy commenter, Secret Honor is a fuck you to the man (just as the clip above is a fuck you from Nixon to everyone else; be warned, the multiple monitors do not mean this was directed by Altman in De Palma mode). As such, even though its climax is kind of disappointing — Nixon was paranoid, but not enough for the nightmarish caricature the film has him explaining himself through — it's as much a great performance as an index to early-'80s feelings about Nixon.

LAURENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

My most conventional pic for great biopic doesn't follow the rules as we've come to know them. The title's quite literal: this is everything to do with T.E. Lawrence in and around Arabia, and nothing more. No childhood, no steady decline (though Ralph Fiennes gave filling it out a shot with a TV movie, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia). David Lean comes closer to making a '00s art film than anyone (including he, probably) would like to admit: with its long, contemplative shots of desert and tiny human specks against the sky, Lawrence unsubtly but effectively makes the exterior landscape a reflection of Lawrence's internal turmoil at all times.

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

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Five)

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

VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

KILLA SEASON (2006)

I guess I'm kind of ridiculously humorless, because the whole idea of "guilty pleasures" strikes me as part of the reason people are getting dumber: it's easier to recognize bad material, sit back and mock it than try to engage with anything serious and remotely challenging. For some people, the whole genre of "guilty pleasures" takes over entirely from the non-guilty kind and they surrender. Which is fair enough if you're working a demanding job or have a tough life and don't really care about movies and just want the laughs. But if you have the time and leisure (unemployment induced or otherwise) to want a guilty pleasure that actively challenges your endurance, say hello to Cam'ron's directorial debut Killa Season. Not technically a direct-to-video film (limited tri-state area screenings were scheduled for its release), Cam'ron's endless ode to gangsta life begins with a back-alley craps game which turns into a man getting whacked over the head with an empty bottle for a minor betting infraction, then everyone cheering as Cam'ron pisses all over him while chanting "No homo." Killa Season's main achievement is being consistently morally depraved and technically incompetent at all times. If the amateur videography and dialogue that makes mumblecore sound like the snappiest film noir you ever saw (Juelz Santana: "They trying to take over the block"; cut to random guy: "Yo, let's take over the block") aren't enough to entice you, stay for levels of moral filth surpassing Salo. For sheer grossness, the close-ups of coke pellets being shat out by mules are hard to beat, but less-extreme scenes like the ones where Cam'ron spits on a little girl are constantly forthcoming. At well over two hours, Killa Season will make you question your dedication to unintentional hilarity. Me, I watch it once a year.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 treats real-world physics with less precision than your average Looney Tunes cartoon. Over the course of Louis Leterrer's film, Jason Statham, when not systematically evading and defeating various goons and hirelings (including a hired assassinatrix who, for good kinky measure, shoots up a hospital in her lingerie — Transporter 2 defeats subtext by being even dumber than you'd expect) — consistently test-drives cars in ways I've never seen. My favorite is when, to get rid of a time-bomb on the car's underside, Statham's character hooks it on a construction crane as part of a perfect 360 that lands him on the opposite roof just as the bomb explodes. But there's also the completely nonsensical climactic fight, where Statham and his Euro-foe (Alessandro Grassman) duke it out, bullets and all, while a plane plummets into the ocean, and even after. With such sublime visions of human possibility, why carp about the real world? There's also a smaller pleasure here: anyone fond of the Europudding productions of the '70s — where a bunch of awkwardly accented actors were brought together into an under-written film calculated for nothing so much as maximum exploitation of every country the cast came from — should dig the awkward polyglot cast. When Grassman hisses (in relation to his evil plot to disseminate air toxins) "That's right. Breathe, my friend, breathe" — well, if you're not amused, I can't help you.

HANNIBAL (2001)

The Silence Of The Lambs is a well-crafted and compelling film, but it's basically kind of a drag: with every year, the sexual tensions driving Buffalo Bill seem a little less compelling and defensible, and the sexism card seems like more of a time capsule. Hannibal, on the other hand, is just stupid. Although Ridley Scott's come a long way since Alien, it takes a truly brain-dead mind to settle on his unique way of expressing conflict. When Hannibal's on, the "Goldberg Variations" play; when his nemesis (Gary Oldman) is chewing the screen, the "Blue Danube" plays. And when they meet, they both play at the same time. Hannibal is mostly remembered for its final gross-out brain-eating scene, but it offers more than that: if the sexism seems a little dated in Silence, the leering misogyny of Ray Liotta here is entirely, uh, Liotta-esque, and the constant shots of Florence are pretty without getting all Merchant-Ivory.

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

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Critics Make Lists, Give Awards, Close Book on '07

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

It's nearing the end of the moviegoing year, and you know what that means- a heaping portion of top ten lists and awards from critics around the country. We here at Screengrab plan to post our best-of-2007 lists over the next week or so, but until that happens there are plenty of other year-in-review pieces all over the Internet that should tide you over. We won't link to every one of them here, but you can find two of our favorites after the break.

First off, there's the Critics' Poll over at Indiewire. Indiewire polled 106 critics for this survey of the best cinematic achievements of 2007, with participants including quite a few very cool critics, such as former Screengrab editor Bilge Ebiri, Screengrab contributor Vadim Rizov, and Nerve.com critic Mike D'Angelo. The Critics' Poll also does away with a longstanding awards tradition by refusing to separate awards by gender- the acting categories are simply "Best Performance" and "Best Supporting Performance." Best of all, there's plenty of commentary from the participating critics, providing plenty of fun for all you inveterate list junkies out there. You know who you are.

But for the more visually-oriented among you, deliverance has arrived in the form of Jim Emerson. Not content with simply banging out a list, Jim has cut together a short video of shots from his top ten movies of 2007, and invites everyone to try to guess the movies in question. As most of the shots Jim includes feature architecture rather than actors, this is harder than it sounds. I was able to identify 9 out of 10- see how you fare over at Jim's blog, Scanners.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

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

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

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

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

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

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

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

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

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

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

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

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

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

Arthur Bremer Killed Jesse James

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Friday's AP report that Arthur H. Bremer, George Wallace's would-be assassin, was being released after serving 35 years out of his 53-year sentence for good behavior brings out the best in Glenn Kenny, who responds with a curious point you could probably make in the blogosphere without getting angry, ill-informed letters: Bremer's the biggest pop culture influence you never thought about. "Paul Schrader's revelations about the creation of the screenplay of Taxi Driver show us that the screenplay and, by extension, the film, would never have existed had not Schrader melded his own personal torment with the diaries of Bremer," Kenny notes, going on to draw out how that, in turn, might have inspired John Hinckley's far more warped, Jodie Foster-worshipping attempt on Reagan — and how Bremer is probably unaware of how his attempt (generally remembered after successful assassinations on more beloved types like Robert Kennedy and MLK) has warped the culture. I'd go Kenny one better — without Bremer and Hinckley, we lose the assassin-as-scorned-fan template. If you haven't seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford yet, now might be a good time. — Vadim Rizov

Die Mumblecore Die

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Well, it had to happen sometime. What with two weeks' worth of crushing hype mid-summer, the mumblecore kids were due for a backlash, but who knew Amy Taubin would be the one to do it? Taubin, after all, went on record in 2005 with a "Distributor Wanted" for Mutual Appreciation, exceeding all the hype two years ahead of time by calling Andrew Bujalski's work "Rohmer without subtitles." The tide turns, viciously, in a Film Comment jeremiad that goes viciously ad hominem in record time, from an opening shot bidding goodbye to "the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding." Studiously ignoring her own early championing (Matt Zoller Seitz correctly points out that Taubin seems to be suffering from "buyer's remorse"), Taubin taunts the movement for not making enough money at the IFC Center, accuses all involved of racism for not inviting So Yong Kim's In Between Days to the party "because the filmmaker is a Korean-American woman and her heroine is a Korean immigrant," and calls Joe Swanberg a "lout." These aren't criticisms of film; seemingly the spirit of political campaigning in the air has infected Taubin, whose article is as ridiculously mean-spirited as any negative ad.

Gradually, it emerges that Taubin doesn't seem to hate mumblecore (a vast umbrella of filmmakers more disparate than they initially seemed), just Swanberg. Now, there's plenty of reasons to get annoyed by the queasiness-inducing auteur; I've only seen Hannah Takes The Stairs, and frequently wished that Swanberg would learn what a camera does besides recording images. (Some framing would be nice, in other words.) But I'm also struck by his knack for turning potentially ruinously indulgent improv bull-sessions into something like emotional truth, and the fact that he's the weakest out of the four filmmakers I've sampled (which includes Bujalski, Aaron Katz and the Duplass brothers) speaks strongly of everyone. And only in Taubin's insular, privileged world (one, frankly, I'd like to be a part of) could mumblecore count as some kind of overwhelming "film movement," one which she inexplicably feels compelled to note has nothing on "the French New Wave or the postwar American avant-garde." Follow the growingly uncivil controversy at Greencine's comments section, which has swelled to thirty-six indignant missives, including a rightfully pissy riposte from SXSW honcho Matt Dentler. — Vadim Rizov

Correction: We originally reported that Joe Swanberg had himself posted comments on the Greencine page. He hadn't. Sorry, Joe.

Dude From Man Of The House Not To Be Messed With

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

One of Greencine's sporadic-but-excellent interviews finds Sean Axmaker tackling Tommy Lee Jones in advance of Friday's release of No Country For Old Men. The interview isn't that interesting for what we learn — not much, aside from that he's planning to make Islands In The Sun into his next directorial effort — as for the interview's ebb and flow. Most Q&As strive either to eliminate the interviewer or, failing that, to eliminate discord and make it all seem like one friendly conversation. Not so for Axmaker, who breaks the ice with "You have a reputation for being tough on interviewers. Is there a reason for me to be worried?" only to be met by withering scorn from Jones, who proves just as tough in person as on-screen. Questions are thereafter met with non-commital grunts ("I guess both," "Yeah, I suppose so"), until Axmaker butters him up about The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and suddenly gets paragraph-length answers. It's a pretty fascinating dynamic, and a confirmation that, much as I love him, I'd never mess with Tommy Lee Jones. — Vadim Rizov