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• Screengrab’s Top Ten Baseball Movie All-Stars

  Spring is here! Okay, not in my apartment, but I've read that it's here, some places, apparently, and with it, the return of what's left of baseball, the American game. Sports in general, and baseball in particular, have a spotty history in the movies. I think I've been reading that sports movies are box-office poison since before I'd ever seen a sports movie and maybe before I had any clear grasp of the concept of "box-office poison." (Then I saw a trailer for Catwoman.) But anything that inspires the kind of passion, excitement, despair, and apoplexy that baseball inspires in its hardcore adherents has got to inspire some great characters. Here's a bullpen's worth of them. — Phil Nugent Posted Apr 10 2008, 06:09 PM by Nicole Ankowski with | with no comments Filed under: screengrab, Phil Nugent, bull durham, top ten baseball movie all-stars, susan sarandon, kevin costner

• Screengrab’s Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios

  Phil Nugent over at Screengrab writes: “Neil Marshall's new sci-fi action thriller Doomsday, starring the very hard-to-mind-looking-at Rhona Mitra, opens [today]. It is but the latest in a long and hallowed tradition of using the controlled, expensive technology of motion pictures to imagine how things will look as our planet, spinning out of control with its resources depleted, chews through its last nerve and prepares to breathe its last. We don't know for sure how the world will really end of course, but one thing's for sure; if the last person who's there to see it has seen the right movies, he's certain to spend his last minutes experiencing a powerful sensation of deja vu.” They may not mention global warming, or the fact that Nicole Richie is now a mom, but check out the “Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios,” conveniently packaged in Part 1 and Part 2. Posted Mar 14 2008, 03:12 PM by Nicole Ankowski with | with no comments Filed under: screengrab, Phil Nugent, movies, apocalypse

• New on Nerve, 10.26.2007: "The media has basically been co-opted and made rich" -- Brian DePalma

  Brian DePalma discusses his new film about the Iraq war, Redacted. From Phil Nugent's intro: The film takes off from an actual atrocity committed by U.S. soldiers in March of 2006: in the town of Al-Mahmudiyah, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl was raped and killed by five soldiers, who also murdered her parents and her five-year-old sister. The incident recalls the case of a Vietnamese woman whose rape at the hands of American soldiers during the Vietnam war served as the basis for De Palma's 1989 Casualties of War, a movie he struggled for years to finance. Seeing history repeat itself, De Palma decided to tap into his long-standing obsession with the filter of media and tell a story about soldiers in Iraq, driven psychotic by endlessly extended tours of duty, using his own mock-media syntax. The action of the film is seen through the camera of a soldier making his own video diary of his time in Iraq, through the footage of a French documentary crew, through various blog entries and YouTube postings, and even through security-camera feed.   Posted Oct 26 2007, 09:28 AM by Sarah with | with no comments Filed under: film interview, Phil Nugent, Brian DePalma