The Screengrab : zelig

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

Like many new arrivals to New York City, Joe Morton’s character in John Sayles’ indie comedy is hoping for a fresh start in the strange, scary but not entirely hostile metropolis. The big difference, of course, is that Morton’s innocent mute is a three-toed extraterrestrial, an escaped slave from "another planet" being pursued by two vaguely feline (and white) Men In Black (who, ironically, are far more concerned with the number of toes on their quarry’s feet than the color of his skin). Sayles’ gentle parable of multicultural integration features a magic trick (in the scene above) that hinges on a still-timely sociological sight gag about urban race relations. Yet it’s interesting to ponder what the eponymous Brother would think if he made a return visit to our planet today: with the Disney-fication of Times Square and the ongoing gentrification of Harlem (not to mention the upcoming Obama inauguration), even the human characters from Sayles’ early ‘80s world might feel a bit disoriented in the strange land of 2008 Manhattan.

UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

Malcolm Lowry's novel of self-destruction is a force of nature. John Huston's film of the novel is, sadly, not. Sure, it contains moments of beauty and tragedy, but when things go wrong, they go wrong with a dogged determinism. Albert Finney plays the drunken Geoffrey Firmin, ex-consul of the British Empire in Mexico, with a grace rarely afforded cinematic alcoholics. The other actors are, sadly, not up to his standards (Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has the same problem, as leading man Brad Dourif's talents far outshine all other actors onscreen, save Harry Dean Stanton.) As Firmin stumbles further out of the relative safety of his regular haunts, Mexico becomes less like an exotic extension of his home and more like a seedy extension of the jungle, where Firmin's haughty imperialism will lead to a swift downfall.

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s most notorious creation, Borat Sagdiyev, isn’t really a stranger at all. He’s more of an infiltrator. And his America isn’t a strange land, either; in fact, it’s one the British comedian smugly believes he knows like the back of his hand. Whether you loved or hated Borat is largely dependent on how much tolerance you have for Baron Cohen’s assumption that he can easily get to the ugly creamed filling under the sweet exterior of America just by biting it in the right spot; there are those who find his style of humor hysterical and telling, and others who find it manipulative and condescending. But no one can doubt, after seeing it in action, how skillfully he wields it, not to inform, but to eviscerate. Borat is a butcher, not a surgeon, and we’re his meat. His Kazakhstan is funny because he correctly assumes that it’s distant enough from our daily lives that we’ll laugh at his fantastic portrayal of it; and his America is funny because he correctly assumes that we’re so far inside of it that we won’t even realize how he’s making it look until it’s far too late. The archetype of the man trapped in a world not of his own making usually derives its humor from the fact that he’s a holy fool, innocently reflecting our reality in his ignorance; Borat shows how dangerous it can be when the holy fool is really an unholy genius who knows exactly how to take advantage of the fact that people are likely to do anything if they think they’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t know any better.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

It’s no surprise that Terrence Malick’s name would show up on a list of great movies about culture clashes. Since the beginning of his career, he’s specialized in showing us the beauty and violence that grow out of peoples’ encounters with the strange, whether that strangeness is expressed as the dreary middle of the U.S., the uncontrollable vastness of the new west, or the tempting primitivism of the South Pacific in wartime. What’s shocking about The New World is that he manages to pull the same trick twice in one movie – and both times with spectacular results. Filming in modern-day Virginia, his conjuration of the lands that greeted John Smith’s men is so perfect, so unspoiled, so bountiful that it’s almost terrifying. His men were promised heaven, and to see it in this life fills them with an almost religious dread. But this quickly fades: if heaven is on earth, what need have they for law? The settlement soon devolves into a stunted, filthy savagery that stands in marked contrast to the gorgeous plenty of the New World. It’s all done with some of the most breathtaking camera work ever seen, but then the movie takes an astonishing shift – one that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would have shattered the tone of the film. We see England through Pocahontas’ eyes as no less strange and unreal a place than was America in John Smith’s eyes, a place of man without nature, of infinite variations of gray and wet, and it has no less devastating an effect on her life.

MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984)

Made at pretty much the exact last moment that Robin Williams was capable of doing anything likable, Paul Mazursky’s charming Moscow on the Hudson now seems like a relic of an ancient age, but it should be remembered that it came out at a time when the only cinematic method of interacting with the Soviet Union was with hails of gunfire and exploding rocket-bombs. Mazursky’s story of a simple and kind Russian musician who decides to defect during a state visit to New York had its bittersweet moments, as Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff discovered that life in America is not all smiles and sunshine even for those who have the rare opportunity to have sex with Maria Conchita Alonso. But it also managed to convey the belief, greatly underrepresented in theaters at the time, that Russians were actual human beings who might not deserve to be shot in the face; and it also suggested the possibility – which, as it happened, turned out to be disturbingly correct – that the best way to get the Commies on our good side was just to let them take a gander at a well-cut pair of blue jeans and a fully stocked shelf at the supermarket. Many of Moscow on the Hudson’s land-of-plenty/land-of-want scenes are cliché by this point, but at the time, they seemed fresh and earnest enough to work.

WOODY ALLEN IN GENERAL: PARTICULARLY SLEEPER (1973), BANANAS (1971) & ZELIG (1983)

I used to think of Woody Allen as an explorer of the well-known. He endlessly treads around his own expensively analyzed psyche to tell new truths about self-absorbed Manhattan professionals. Strange then, to realize that much of his early work deals with outsiders who are unable to cope with their surroundings, then suddenly find themselves in even more alien circumstances. In Sleeper he is cryogenically frozen, then thawed in a strangely familiar future where pot-smoking has been replaced by fondling an orb and sex by the Orgasmatron machine. In Bananas he's a hapless doofus who has no particular luck with the ladies. That is, not until he finds himself at the center of guerilla action in a small Central American country in a permanent state of coups and revolutions: an innocent abroad if there ever was one. Then there's Broadway Danny Rose, where Allen stars as a man who lives his entire life somewhat out of his element. (His buddies at the Carnegie Deli suggest a Danny Rose sandwich would be a bagel with Marinara sauce). In Annie Hall he is Alvy Singer, who is perpetually on guard against his familiar New York surroundings turning strange on him. Whenever he ventures outside of New York his suspicion that he is an alien in his own country are confirmed. He cannot function in L.A. and when he visits Annie's family in Wisconsin, he finds himself transformed to a Hassidic Jew. Finally, of course, there is Zelig, the story of the eternal chameleon, never at home, and always adaptable.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Andrew Osborne's Picks

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Not to sound morbid, but it occurred to me recently (whilst contemplating my own mortality) that someday – hopefully some far distant day -- I’ll read an Entertainment Weekly Spring/Summer/Fall/Holiday preview issue and/or watch a flock of coming attractions trailers for a whole bunch of movies I won’t, in fact, live long enough to see.

In Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon character dies with just one regret: that he never got to finish reading Moby Dick. Imagine Zelig’s disappointment if he’d been a Harry Potter fan in November, forever denied the opportunity to see the cinematic adaptation of Half-Blood Prince (let alone the Deathly Hallows)? And Lord knows at this point whether any of us will live long enough to see Zack Snyder’s much-litigated version of Watchmen. (Ironically, another movie that most of us seem destined never to see is Fanboys, about a cancer-stricken geek in 1998 determined, in yet another layer of sad irony, to see the as-yet-unreleased Phantom Menace before he dies...but I digress.)

Anyhow, with my wife and I both fighting various wintry ailments (and going on a solid week of sleep deprivation thanks to the itchy throats and sinus pressure of the damned), it’s hard to look forward to anything at this point beyond still yet more mucus...but if I should manage somehow to survive this relentlessly cold, snowy New England winter (good Lord...it’s only JANUARY?), then here are the five upcoming 2009 releases I’m most looking forward to:

5. HARRY POTTER & THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

I originally posted this in my 2008 Fall Preview before Warner Bros. saw fit to switch the release date of the sixth J.K. Rowling adaptation to 2009, but the following still holds true: I haven’t read a single word of Ms. Rowling’s fantastically popular and beloved series of novels, but I’ve followed the relatively unprecedented blockbuster cinematic serialization religiously. I’ll go on record here as a big fan of Christopher Columbus’ unfairly maligned adaptation of Sorcerer’s Stone, and I thought Alfonso Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban was bizarrely overpraised, but in general, the series just keeps getting better and better, and I can’t wait for the next episode.

4. STAR TREK

Yes, I’ve heard the Star Trek 90210 jokes, and no, the last few Star Trek movies have not exactly instilled fans with a lot of confidence in the franchise -- but as with J.J. Abrams’ day job, the increasingly ludicrous and exasperating Lost, I simply have no choice in the matter: I’m still going to watch. My Dad recently reminded me of the time he drove my geeky pubescent ass to a Star Trek convention through a full-scale Perfect Storm blizzard just so I could buy myself a Tribble and hang out with bosomy fangirls dressed like Yeoman Rand. So yes, good or bad, I’ll definitely be seeing this one – (alone, notes my wife).

3. WHIP IT!

I couldn’t find any clips of Drew Barrymore’s upcoming directorial debut about a misfit teen (Ellen Page) who joins an Austin, Texas roller-derby team. Instead, the trailer above is for Hell On Wheels, an astonishing documentary about the girl-powered rockabilly roller derby revival that sparked in Austin and spread across the nation. In the film, director Bob Ray captures the birth and hilarious, harrowing growing pains of the Lonestar Rollergirls, an all-female, D.I.Y. enterprise that transforms from weekend lark to serious business when big money and crippling injuries raise the stakes of a burgeoning start-up, leading to shattered friendships (and fibulas) and a fiery schism between two factions of fiercely independepent entrepeneurs. Short skirts + third wave feminism + breathtaking banked track action + Marxist/capitalist tensions + a fascinating cast of real-life characters & a kick-ass soundtrack = one of the best movies of 2007. I doubt Whip It! will be as good, but with Barrymore, Page, Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis strapping on the skates and kneepads, I’m more than willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt.

2. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

When I saw John Waters interview Quentin Tarantino on a panel at the Provincetown Film Festival last year, the erstwhile Mr. Brown said he’d set himself the goal of finishing his “guys on a mission” World War II spaghetti Western lollapalooza (starring Brad Pitt, Maggie Cheung, The Office’s B.J. Novak, Freaks & Geeks’ Samm Levine and...really? Mike Myers?) in time for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. With the exception of roughly 42 percent of Death Proof, Tarantino has never yet steered me entirely wrong (I didn’t even mind his segment of the disastrous Four Rooms), and when he’s on his game (as he could easily be with this project) he is, like the wallet says, a Bad Motherfucker. It’s possible, of course, he won’t finish the film in time for a 2009 release...in which case, be looking for Basterds at the top of my 2010 movie preview list.

1. THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS

As I mentioned on Thanksgiving Day in the 2008 Screengrab Holiday Special, I began shooting this ultra-low budget guerilla indie musical about screenwriters on the make and a drug deal gone bad (co-scripted by my esteemed Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak, based on a short story by Jim Dryden, with music by Eric Jacobson) way back in January 2008 (or possibly the late fall of 2007...it’s all a bit hazy at this point). Of all the releases I hope to see in 2009, this tops the list if only because it will mean (A) I’ve finally finished post-production and (B) it actually got released. Like Basterds, though, I’m not betting the farm on this one actually seeing the light of day before 2010...but if ever there was a year for hope, it’s this one!

HAPPY YEAR OF THE OX!

Related Stories:
The Top 50 Movies of 2009
Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds Unleashed

The Terrorists Win

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:45:00 GMT

We've lost a lot because of the terror attacks of September 11th. Thousands of lives; our sense of safety and security; odd little bits of the Constitution which seem to have fallen off and are yet to be located. Some would even argue that in a very profound way, we have lost our soul. But perhaps no loss is as incalculable, as tragic, as utterly horrifying as...Forrest Gump 2.

Yes, according to screenwriter Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his script to the feel-mawkish movie of 1994, he turned in a treatment for a sequel to the tale of a Zelig-like dullard -- which was meant to pick up immediately where the first movie left off, with Gump seated on a park bench eating drugstore candy and dispensing chain-restaurant-menu-ready platitudes -- on 09/10/2001. The events of the next day led to some serious soul-searching by star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis, who decided that "the world had changed" and "we don't think this is relevant anymore", as if it had been before a handful of maniacs flew planes into some buildings. Says Roth today, "Maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are." You'll never make it in today's Hollywood with that attitude, young man!

Not only do we now know the degree to which the terrorists truly damaged America, by depriving themselves of the right to hear an overrated actor mouth two more hours worth of wise-fool cliches, but we know that among the victims were Zemeckis and Roth, who had to find some other way to make a hundred million dollars, and, of course, Gump author Winston Groom, who was screwed out of the sequel money the same way he was screwed out of money for the original. Hollywood's sense of self-importance, fortunately, survived uninjured.

Related Posts:

Yesterday's Hits: Forrest Gump

Terror Hits the Heart of Bollywood

Take Five: Woody

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Boy, what's up with all the Woody Allen posts this week? I mean, sure, he's got a new movie opening today (Vicki Cristina Barcelona), and sure, a lot of critics are claiming it's his best work in a decade. But someone says that every decade, and have been doing so for approximately four decades. So who is this jerk who's so obsessed with the Wood-man, that he keeps forcing Screengrab readers to share his mania? Oh, right -- it's me. It may surprise you to learn that, given my fascination with the former Mssr. Konigsberg, I am not especially a huge fan of his work, and I'm certainly not one of his more vociferous defenders. I think he's mistaken about being a Serious Artist, which gets in the way of his being one of the funniest men of his generation; he's got a major Mary Sue complex; he's somewhat technically limited as a director and receives a lot of credit for work that is properly given to his cinematographers; and I agree with Joe Queenan that his work is literally sophomoric -- the intellectual, moral and emotional themes in his movies rarely get past the level of someone who, like Woody himself, dropped out of college his sophomore year. But in Annie Hall and Manhattan, he made two of the best movies of the 1970s; he's one of the finest comic minds on the planet; and he's managed to make a career for himself so robust that he's made an average of a movie a year for 30 years, which, no matter how similar the themes in said movies, is something like a miracle. So, after you've watched Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out in the Wood-man's latest masterpiece, why not rent five more of my favorites, and make it a festival?

WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? (1966)

The fact that the directorial debut of a man many people consider the greatest moviemaker of his generation was little more than a cheap Chinese action-thriler with jokey dialogue dubbed in over it is shocking to some people. It's as if someone told you that thumbocentric auteur/Kung Pow! Enter the Fist director Steve Oedekerk grew up to be Jean-Luc Godard. But it's true: for his very first film in 1966, Woody Allen got the rights to a junk chop-socky called Key of Keys from American International Pictures, who had judged its plot too elaborate. Woody and his cast simply chucked the damn plot out the window and turned the entire thing into a goofball James Bond parody, which the studio padded out with some extraneous nonsense and a couple of pop songs by the Lovin' Spoonful (the biggest brush that Woody would ever again have with modern popular culture), released, and went on to make a fortune off of. What's even more surprising than the fact that What's Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen's first movie as a 'director' is that it works so well -- it's tightly paced, contains tons of funny gags (many of which seemed a lot fresher than when bad comedians and internet wags recycled them 40 years later on the internet and in movie theatres). A fun, funny piece of detournment , no matter how you view Allen's later career.

ZELIG (1983)

Woody Allen's 12th feature film as director may be his most daring, in terms of visual style, formalist invention, and pure idea. Although technology, and the application of the basic notion in other, lesser films, has somewhat blunted Zelig's impact, at the time of its release, it couldn't have seemed more daring: an experimental psychologist is brought in to study the case of one Leonard Zelig, an insecure nebbish who has made his way through life -- and even entered the orbits of some of the 20th century's most famous and infamous figures -- without having a personality of his own. So much of a non-entity is Zelig that he takes on the characteristics -- psychological, moral, intellectual, and even physical -- of the people around him. It's an interesting treatise, in its own way, of the nature of celebrity and the way some peoples' whole lives are malleable thanks to their eagerness to please. But one of the problems with Allen's movies is that it's easy to get carried away with that kind of talk, and forget about whata funny, detailed, and sophisticated movie it is; and, beyond that, Woody did a good bit of stretching (uncharacteristic for him) in order to carry off the film's technical requirements and insert his nebbishy nuance in all of modern history. An outstanding film, one of his best.

HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986)

I've never been much of a fan of Woody Allen's 'serious' work. While I appreciate the effort to stretch, and the desire of a talented man to be thought of as something more than a clown, they've always come across as somewhat joyless and flat to me. To abandon what you're best at in favor of something a dozen people do better is an odd thing for an artist to do, and until Allen becomes a much better technical director and stops writing dialogue that means to sound impressive and instead sounds pretentious, I'll continue to be one of those cranky jerks who prefers his funny stuff, thank you very much. That said, Hannah and Her Sisters is a pretty terrific film, if for no other reason than the astonishingly good performances he coaxes out of his cast. It's not without typical Woody Allen drama flaws: the characters are generally unlikable, the dialogue veers into hootiness more than once, and it's yet another example of why the Wood-man shouldn't ever be allowed to comment on any American popular culture after 1965 or so. But it's got a strong script, a more steady than normal technical sensibility, great music, a handful of genuinely powerful emotional scenes, and some of the most stunning performances he's ever gotten out of his cast, especially from Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest.

RADIO DAYS (1987)

Right in between the excellent but heavy Hannah and Her Sisters and the rambling, disappointing bummer of September, Woody Allen decided to give us moviegoers a big, delicious, tasty candy treat in the form of Radio Days, an absolutely delightful little movie that doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves as one of his best films. A combination childhood memoir and loving tribute to the Golden Age of radio, it's one of his sweetest and most good-natured films, and possibly the funniest one he's done in the last 20 years. While his focus, as always, is on interpersonal dynamics, he doesn't get lost in it, as is his unfortunate tendency to do; instead, he opens up the stage just enough to let us see his neighbors, his teachers, and most importantly, the cast and crew of the radio shows that helped shape him, who come across as alternately admirable, chummy, and utterly absurd. Best of all, these winning characters are played by one of the best ensemble casts Allen ever assembled, and, for the first time, he gets out of the way and lets the script and the story do the heavy lifting. Radio Days is simply a charming, utterly likable movie, a gem in Woody Allen's catalog -- it's a genuine feel-good movie, not because it's full of sentimental treacle, but because you feel good after watching it, and when you aren't, you wish you were.

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY (1997)

It was the late 1990s when Woody Allen's reputation as a filmmaker started to take a lot of serious hits, and there aren't many critics -- myself included -- who are willing to step up and defend many of the films he's made in the last ten years. Sometimes he went to the same well a bit too often; other times, he accepted less-than-stellar performances out of his cast, or stretched a little further than his talent was willing to let him go. Other times, he just seemed tired and cranky and unsure of what he wanted to do. While Deconstructing Harry was guilty of all of these to a greater or lesser degree, for some reason, it resonated with me a lot more than did most of his work from the last decade. Perhaps it's the unexpectedly nasty edge to the film that suggests that Allen could be one of the great cynics if he wasn't already one of the great neurotics; perhaps it's the gleeful piss-take at his own public persona, which, although he ultimately lets himself off the hook, shows that he's a lot more self-aware than he might let on in his latter-day work; or maybe it's just that, while they don't always succeed, the metafictional conceits, surrealistic elements and extremely un-Allenish use of camera effects, quick-cut editing and other film trickery illustrate that he isn't entirely moribund. Whatever the case, while it's by no means a great film, Deconstructing Harry at least shows the old pro's still got some life in him.

Woody Allen Finds New And Exciting Ways To Embarrass Himself

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

In what is surely a preview of much, much more to come as the Wood-man becomes older, crankier, and more obviously lacking in genius, Variety reports that Woody Allen is suing American Apparel for $10 million as a result of their having used an image from Annie Hall without his permission on one of their billboards.

We're no fans of American Apparel or their borderline creepy advertising, and we suspect that a booze-fueled conversation between Woody and AA founder Dov Charney would find that they share a lot of interests that no one else would be particularly interested in hearing about. What's particularly ludicrous about the suit is how neatly it encapsulates some of Allen's prior, er, indiscretions while seeking monetary damages from a big, successful company which the lawsuit impugns for doing essentially the same thing.

It's ironic enough for the man who made Zelig to sue a company for using an iconic image without permission, and the lawsuit's huffy, snobbish insistence that Woody Allen does not sully his artistic purity with commercial endorsements — in the United States, at least — is pretty entertaining. But for Woody, who is married to a woman thirty-five years his junior (and with whom he is alleged to have been carrying on an affair when she was seventeen) to sneer in disgust at the titillating advertising used by American Apparel is downright asinine, and for the lawsuit to go out of its way to mention AA's "provocative photography" only serves to remind that Allen's affair with his then-adopted daughter was exposed when Mia Farrow discovered the naked pictures he took of the then-20-year-old. We wish Woody lots of luck with the suit and hope that it makes him so much money that he goes away while he still has a tiny shred of credibility left.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.