The Screengrab

This is it, gang. The long goodbye is over and it’s just about time to roll the credits and bring up the house lights, but before we go, let’s take one last moment to look back at the good times. Here are some of our favorite posts from throughout Screengrab history:

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For

Face/Off: Breaking the Waves

The 13 Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time

Take Five: We Love the 80s

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Andrew Osborne Reviews T.V. Party: The Documentary

Phil Nugent's "Don't Forget The Flaming Arrows!"

Paul Clark Promises Famous Last Words To Return!

Scott Von Doviak Reviews Sons Of A Gun

And more to come at the Screengrab In Exile...stay tuned!

NEW YORK: Of all Akiri Kurosawa's films, Rashomon (1950) may not be the one that's nearest and dearest to anyone's hearts, but it's the one that added a word to the international language and opened the floodgates of Japanese movies to the West. A two-week revival at the Film Forum starts today, showcasing a handsome new 35 mm. print. Don't sit in the front row or it'll feel as if Toshiro Mifune is chewing on your leg.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. For three days in August of 1969, thousands of people converged on a farm in Bethel, New York for a three-day celebration of peace, love and music. Consequently, all gun owners voluntarily turned in their firearms, an international conference agreed to ban war forever, and the United States Marine Band was replaced at all official functions by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. If you just don't feel like dropping acid and rolling naked in mud for fear that your kids will call the cops, there are a couple of ways you can celebrate the occasion in the air-conditioned comfort of a movie theater. One way is to see Ang Lee's comedy Taking Woodstock, but by now most of us have seen the trailer, and doesn't it look as if it blows? The other way is to attend the June 3 screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center of Woodstock: The Director's Cut!. The classic '60s time capsule is now four hours and five minutes long; it'll be shown with an intermission and with the promise of "free popcorn and soda", which in this economy would strike me as reason enough to check out a six-hour director's cut of Freddy Got Fingered. Director Michael Wadleigh will present in case anyone wants to ask him what the hell he was thinking when he made Wolfen.

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Once again, thanks to Scott Tobias from the Onion AV Club for recommending this film, which he previously selected for his weekly column “The New Cult Canon.”

One of Christopher Walken’s greatest assets as an actor is his unpredictability. Watching Walken onscreen, it’s hard to tell how he’s going to deliver even the most mundane bit of dialogue, much less predict how his characters will behave under pressure. But while Walken’s off-kilter presence has garnered him a sizable cult following, it’s easy to overlook what a fascinating actor he can be in more complex roles. In many of his character roles, Walken has fun with his image, but he’s not afraid to play it straight when the part calls for it. Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is one of those parts, and consequently one of his best performances.

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DANA HILL (1964-1996)

Hill started working as a child actress on TV in the late 1970s, then gave a smashing dramatic performance in her 1982 movie debut as the oldest daughter of Albert Finney and Diane Keaton in the classic divorce movie Shoot the Moon. She was almost as good as Rip Torn's daughter, a year later, in Cross Creek. In 1985, she took on the mysteriously ever-shifting role of Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's European Vacation. However, she was still playing characters at the vaguely pubescent stage while Hill herself was by now in her early twenties; she suffered from diabetes so serious that it stunted her growth and which, by the mid-80s, was affecting her health to such a degree that, except for a cable TV production of Picnic and Jack Fisk's Final Verdict, she shifted the focus of her career entirely to voice work. Her distinctive rasp kept her much in demand until her death from a stroke in 1996.

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I don't know if you all got the memo, but today is lights out for the Screengrab. It's been fun. We'll never know for sure whether we were cut down in the prime of life just as we were about to ascend to undreamed-of heights or five minutes before we finally wore out our welcome for good, but either way, I'm going to miss the place when I'm dancing for nickles in front of the bus station. We could go down all stoic and stiff upper lip as if it weren't killing us inside, but who the hell are we, Clive Brook? (That's one of the beloved obscure movie references that have made us such a blockbuster hit.) But if we're going to get maudlin, at least we can show a little class and get maudlin about the loss of something grander than our own paychecks. So, before we leave some cheese on the table for the student loan collection officers and slip out the back window and over that hill there, we'd like to burn off some bandwidth by listing our precursors: some of the people who had barely begun to show what they could do in movies before they were cruelly yanked away.

Two points: Jean Harlow, Jean Vigo, F. W. Murnau, James Dean, Phil Hartman, River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Natasha Richardson-- all the prematurely departed who have taken on legendary status or seem well on their way to claiming it, aren't here, not as any implied put-down of them but because we wanted to concentrate on some people who perhaps haven't had their full fifteen minutes of public mourning. And if we missed somebody, the comments box is right there. Do the right thing.

PHILLIP BORSOS (1953-1995)

Borsos built up a strong reputation in the '70s based on his documentary shorts (Cooperage, Spartee, and Nails) before hitting a home run with his first feature film, the 1982 Western The Grey Fox, a Canadian production that won seven "Genie" awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and, for its American star Richard Farnsworth, "Best Foreign Actor." More recently, it was selected for preservation by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. The movie was a cult success when released in the U.S., and Borsos went to Hollywood, though the high-profile pictures he made there in 1985, The Mean Season and One Magic Christmas, failed to keep up the momentum. He made two more features, Bethune (1990) and Far From Home: Adventures of Yellow Dog; it was around the time he working on the last one that he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died before the picture was released in 1995.

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This fanciful British movie boasts one of the unlikeliest collaborations of the last twenty-five years, Dennis Potter and Jim Henson. Potter wrote the script, which is built on a culture-clash factoid from 1932: that year, the 80-year-old Alice Liddell--who, many decades earlier, had been Alice Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll's heroine and the original audience for his Wonderland stories--sailed to the United States to visit Columbia University as part of the celebration of Carroll's centennial. (She died two years later.) Alice is played, by Coral Browne, as a grumpy, out-of-sorts old woman at odds with the new world and a trial to her hired companion, a waifish young girl named Lucy (Nicola Cowper). When they arrive in New York, the two women become attached to Jack (Peter Gallagher), a motormouth newspaperman who decides to serve as Alice's promoter. He also begins a romance with Lucy, which distracts the girl from her usual focus on her employer's every whim and leaves the increasingly befuddled Alice more unmoored than ever. Life is slipping away from Alice, and as it does, her memories, which are ever more indistinguishable from her fantasies, rise up to engulf her.

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With two awesome Beltway comedies in two years, it's pretty safe to say that David Rasche is back with a vengeance. Is it too much to hope for a new Sledge Hammer series? Wait, it is? Oh well- at least this trailer is pretty hilarious.

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When thinking of those who, in our lifetimes, have made major contributions to the shape of pop mythology, let no one forget the name of George Romero. When I was a kid, growing up between the time that Romero's first and best movie, Night of the Living Dead, planted the seeds of his achievement, and the release of its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, cemented it, I spent maybe half my young life watching and reading about horror movies. Partly this was research: at the playground, the jury was still out on whether monsters actually existed, and if they did, I wanted to be ready for them when they stormed the house. Mummies didn't occupy my thoughts to any special degree: they were easy to outrun, and besides, so long as you didn't go violating any Egyptian tombs, it was easy to stay on their good side. Vampires and werewolves were a lot worse, but at least there were clear, set-in-stone guidelines for dealing with them: daylight, wooden stakes, silver bullets, full moons, everybody who dipped a toe into the horror genre knew the drill. But zombies? Now there was a disappointing monster. There weren't many zombie movie classics, and those seemed to be vague on the rules regarding zombiedom. Basically, a zombie was a big, reanimated dead guy with bugged-out eyes and no personality who, under the distraction of the voodoo master who had resurrected him, stagger up and throttle you. No zombie ever looked as if he enjoyed his work, and there was no consensus on how to deal with one, or even if it was the zombie you wanted to target or if you should go over his head and take it up with his boss. Vampires, werewolves, and even most mummies were free agents. Zombies were the hired help.

All that changed thanks to Romero. With two movies and some help from a few enthusiastic Italian imitators, Romero completely changed not just the rule book but the contemporary identity and meaning of zombies in horror movie culture.

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It's possible that Joe Don Baker's name is as well known as his face, which sort of goes against the grain of those featured in the "That Guy!" franchise. However, one reason the name is well-known is that, in the last several years, it's picked up some currency as a punch line. Any name that starts out "Joe Don" and keeps going for another couple of syllables is apt to strike some people as that of a thuggish redneck hick, and that's how Baker was caricatured by the wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when they ran a couple of his tackier starring vehicles in the 1990s. Is it out of deference to the fine tastes and sensibilities of the robot critical community that Joe Don has yet to appear on Inside the Actors Studio? This is one thing that sets him apart from, say, Billy Joel and Ricky Gervais. Another is that Joe Don actually attended the Actors Studio.

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I should probably use this final installment of In Other Blogs to suggest alternatives to the Screengrab for our fans about to go into withdrawal. (This is it folks, the last day, closing time, 50% off all posts, everything must go!) But let’s get real – there’s no replacing the Screengrab! Oh, if you must keep up with ongoing developments in the world of cinema, I suppose there are some alternatives (and I remind you to bookmark this page, which has a whole passel of ‘em). Instead, I’m going to take one last opportunity to pay tribute to…well, us.

At The Phil Nugent Experience, Phil Nugent takes aim at Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer.

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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...

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The Worst:

A.I. (2001)



One of my day jobs is teaching various screenwriting courses, and I always use A.I. as a prime example of how NOT to end a movie. Of course, Steven Spielberg pretty much deserves his own wing in the terrible ending hall of fame: Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Schindler’s List and the tacky, tacked-on “Special Edition” ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which pretty much robbed the original ending of all its original mystery and wonder by not freakin’ knowing when to leave well enough alone. Of course, this unnatural, Brundlefly amalgam of the director’s flashy Hollywood huckster instincts and the Kubrickian darkness of the project’s original father (who died while the project was still mired in development hell) is pretty hapless throughout its running time, but it does manage a nice, poetic moment when David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot programmed to yearn for love from a mother who despises him, winds up trapped beneath the ocean, staring at a statue of the Blue Fairy, wishing endlessly for something he can never have. Hmm, I thought watching the movie for the first time, not a bad little dramatization of the human condition there, Spielberg...for don’t we all wish for things we’re programmed to want but can never achieve? Yet Spielberg, being the kind of guy who DOES get everything he wants, apparently has no use for the bittersweet frustrations of the great unwashed. Nope, Spielberg’s all about happy endings...and, apparently, mommy issues, because the movie doesn’t stop there: instead, it goes on and on and interminably on, getting sillier (and creepier) with each passing moment, as millennia pass and magical future robots allow little David to finally get what he always wanted...alone time in bed with a mother who LOVES him and ONLY him, dammit! C.G.I. + T.M.I. = ick. (AO)

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The Worst:

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)



Some comedian, possibly Seinfeld, did a routine once that perfectly captured my own pubescent experience during the final moments of The Empire Strikes Back, that sinking, slowly dawning realization that...holy shit! To Be Continued? Is THAT where this is heading? Are you fucking kidding me, Lucas? You’re gonna make me wait THREE YEARS to find out what happens to Han Solo? Last time around, the big finale was the Rebels blowing up the Death Star and this time it’s...Luke getting a new hand?  As an adult, of course, I eventually learned to accept years-long gaps between, say, seasons of The Sopranos and Lost (and...uh...girlfriends), but way back when, it seemed like George Lucas was pulling a cruel prank on his faithful fans.  (Little did we freakin’ know...) (AO)

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And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)



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

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JAWS (1975)



Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

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SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Sometimes, bringing a movie to a transcendent stop just comes down to the right sign-off line. Take it away, Joe E... (PN)

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EASY RIDER (1969)



I remember this one time a friend of mine was running behind on an elementary school creative writing assignment, scribbling the last lines of his composition just before the teacher collected our papers, and so his otherwise well-written tale of Old West adventure ended with a coyote suddenly popping up and devouring his cowboy protagonist. The abrupt, nihilistic climax of Easy Rider has a similar slap-dash quality (and why Peter Fonda’s Captain America would follow the gun-toting rednecks who just shot Dennis Hopper’s Billy the Kid rather than, say, driving away from them must have something to do with them funny cigarettes he was always smoking). On the other hand, gun-toting rednecks aren’t exactly known for their tolerance or decision-making skills, so a couple of yahoos taking potshots at hippies doesn’t exactly challenge my willing suspension of disbelief, even today. And considering the apocalyptic culture wars of the 1960s (which claimed RFK towards the end of the film’s production phase) and the outlaw mythos deep in the story’s marrow, some kind of fatal downer was probably inevitable. But Easy Rider’s characters don’t even get the dignity of a last stand. “We blew it,” Fonda’s biker states in a prescient epitaph for the end of hippie optimism and the rise of Nixonian neo-conservatism, just before Captain America gets killed by his own gas tank and his life savings goes up in smoke while he and his buddy die like dogs on the side of a road to nowhere.  (AO)

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FAME (1980)



To me, nothing says “ending” like an all-singing, all-dancing grand finale...and while there are dozens of great movie musicals that climax with memorable showstoppers -- from Hairspray’s “You Can’t Stop The Beat” and Hair’s “Let The Sun Shine In” to the painterly tableau of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence at the end of 1776 -- I’ve always had a special place in my heart for “I Sing The Body Electric,” which features most of the major characters from the original 1980 version of Fame (as opposed to all the moist, crappy knock-offs that followed).  The number gives me chills every time I hear or see it performed, capturing as it does that terrifying, exhilarating moment of maximum potential when young graduates teeter on the verge of their leap of faith into adulthood. (Plus, it’s nice to see Coco with her shirt back on, none the worse for wear after the icky photo shoot of a few scenes earlier.) (AO)

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THE GRADUATE (1967)



As I noted in our list of the Top Ten Best Movies Of All Time, The Graduate is pretty close to perfect, right down to its classic finale. All by itself, the climactic rush to the altar made our list of great “race-against-time” scenes, and the sequence where Dustin Hoffman’s character pounds the church window and wields a crucifix against the older generation to rescue his lady love from bland suburban mediocrity still feels cathartic today. But the final moments truly seal the deal in one of the greatest ambiguous fade-outs of all time as Katharine Ross’ Elaine stares at the man she’s chosen, suddenly wondering what exactly comes after “happily ever after,” while Hoffman’s Ben stares straight ahead, the lost expression of the opening scenes returning to his face as he clearly wonders, “Now what?” Considering Charles Webb, the author of the source material, spent the next several decades in cash-strapped obscurity, tending a clinically-depressed lady with painted-on eyebrows named Fred while trying to get a Graduate sequel off the ground, maybe Ben and Elaine had reason to worry. (AO)

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REPO MAN (1984)



Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

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PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)



Okay, first of all...how cool is it that John Waters was the officiant at David “The Wire” Simon’s wedding? But, of course, a certain brotherhood between the seemingly unlikely pair makes perfect sense, given their shared warts-and-all love of Charm City, a.k.a. Bodymore, Murderland. And before he became pop culture’s deviant bon vivant uncle, Waters also shared the hustler rebel aesthetic of Simon characters like Omar and Bubbles, conceiving Divine’s infamous shit-eating grin at the end of Pink Flamingos as more of a calculated publicity stunt than an attempt to pervert the fabric of decent society. As the director says in his book, Shock Value, “I knew I only had $10,000 to work with, so I figured I had to give the audiences something no other studio could dare give them even with multimillion-dollar budgets. Something to leave them gagging in the aisles. Something they could never forget.” Mission accomplished. (AO)

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So, in case you somehow missed the news, our beloved little blog will be ending at the end of the month, meaning THIS (sniff...sniff...) will be the very LAST of Screengrab’s Thursday lists.

Yet, in the classic words of Supersonic (heavy-rotationed into my very DNA by the good people of alternative radio), “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end,” which means that while this blog will be pushing up daisies soon, you’ll still be able to get your fix of the Screengrab All-Stars at our new blog, Screengrab-In-Exile, featuring new (if somewhat less frequent) writing and links to writing from the usual gang of idiots...we may even pop up from time to time hereabouts writing for Nerve.com. Meanwhile, all your favorite Screengrab posts will be preserved in amber for future generations at www.thescreengrab.com (and stay tuned for the end of today’s list for links to all our individual websites).

Anyway, I have to say I’ll miss the ol’ place, and I’ve really enjoyed organizing and contributing to these lists. Heck, I’ll even miss getting called a douche by anonymous internet hecklers.

But all good things must come to an end, so once more for auld lang syne, let’s fade out together with THE BEST & WORST ENDINGS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for (the final?) installment of Unwatchable.

Barring a last minute call from the governor, this is the end of the line for Unwatchable here at the Screengrab. We made it two-thirds of the way through the 100 worst movies ever made…but is there any hope of finishing this very important project? Hit the jump for a very special announcement concerning the future of Unwatchable!

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Duncan Jones's Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the sole human being employed at a mining station at the title location by a corporation called Lunar Industries. Sam is weeks away from completing a three-year stint that will end with the arrival of his replacement and his return to Earth. He's settled into a hermit's existence, kibbutzing with "Gerty", an all-purpose computer gofer with the voice of Kevin Spacey, letting his hair and beard grow out for weeks at a time, then getting a shave and a haircut to check in with his family and company masters back on Earth via telescreen conferences. Then...something happens. It would be unfair to give too many plot details away, since Moon, with its limited cast and scenic options, needs all the surprises it can hold in reserve. But the movie does turn on the idea that, in the future, technological advances will make work in space routine, grubby, even tedious, and that the corporations on whose behalf this work is performed may regard their intergalactic labor force less as Buck Rogers heroes than as insects whose air supply can easily be cut off if they present any inconveniences. In interviews, Jones has gone out of his way to pay tribute to the movies that plowed this line of speculation in the past, including 2001 but also such later sci-fi films as Silent Running, Alien, and Outland. Back in Kubrick's day, the idea that anything about life in outer space could ever become so routinized that it might become boring was a fresh joke, and even then, there were scenes in 2001 that maybe went beyond the call of duty in showing just how boring things in space could get. (There's a reason that it's not easy to recall, just of the top of your head, what's the second best movie starring either Keir Dullea or Gary Lockwood.) It takes a special kind of genius to depict tedium without seeming tedious, and in fact, tedium is something that Moon has plenty of.

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The French director Jacques Deray had an international hit with the period gangster film Borsalino, starring Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. That probably helps account for his getting to make The Outside Man, a thriller whose special appeal derives in part from its outsider's look at both Los Angeles and the kinds of movies that grow there. The movie, whose script is credited to Deray, Jean-Claude Carrière (who also worked on Borsalino as well as Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Return of Martin Guerre, and Godard's Every Man for Himself) and Ian McLellan Hunter (an English writer best known for serving as a front for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo on Roman Holiday), is notable for being the only movie I know of to lure Jean-Louis Trintignant to the States. (The only other English-language production I've ever seen him in, 1983's Under Fire, was set in Nicaragua and shot in Mexico.)

Trintignant plays a hit man who is seen arriving in L.A. and taking a cab from the airport to the accompaniment of a blaxploitation-worthy song, with a vocalist named Joe Morton braying a catalog of the never-ending headaches that go with being an outside man. (Despite extensive research, I have been unable to determine whether this is the Joe Morton, star of stage and screen. But based on the sound of the singer's voice and the state of Morton's career circa 1972, I will list the possibility that it is him as "plausible" until given reason to believe otherwise.) He has been flown in to dispatch a leathery old gangster (played, in his final performance, by the veteran movie tough guy Ted de Corsia, of such second-string noir classics as The Naked City, The Enforcer, and The Big Combo), a task he performs before the movie has hit the fifteen minute mark. For a minute there I thought this was going to be one short movie. Luckily, Trintignant has been hired by the kind of people who think that allowing the smart professional killer who has done the job you flew him in from Paris to do simply get on the next plane and go back home makes less sense than hiring Roy Scheider to run all over creation trying to kill him. No wonder that former gangsters ranging from George Raft to Henry Hill in professional experience have had no trouble making sense of how they do things in Hollywood.

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The writer-artist Edward Gorey is probably a special favorite of plenty of movie freaks who sometimes have to turn away from the screen and let their heads cool off with a book. A legendarily omnivorous cultural consumer, Gorey himself poured into his work images inspired by his intake of silent movie serials, Gothic art design, early horror films and and stylish B pictures such as Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. The awesome Ed Park (author of the awesome novel Personal Days, writes in the awesome Moving Image Source: "Gorey also claimed to have exhausted the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art. There he immersed himself in the multipart crime epics of Louis Feuillade (not just the famous Fantômas and Les Vampires but the all-but-unseeable Tih Minh and Barrabas, “the greatest movie ever made”) and encountered one of his 'great influences,' 'a film that no one ever put together': 'The Museum of Modern Art just had all the footage of it. It was Italian, it was a serial, it was called Grey Rats. But it was completely out of context. You’d be watching and say, “Oh yes, that happened half-an-hour ago.” Somebody had thrown it all together in a big box, on reels, and we watched it that way, it took about two weeks.'" Park adds, "This is the dream life: obsessive eyeball mileage, movies as long as a night’s sleep, scenes shuffled out of order, cause following effect, sustained silences in which mouths move and every title card seems to crystallize the swarming drama into koans."

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

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz will reunite for James Mangold’s Wichita. It is not the story of a lineman who’s still on the line.

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Amy Madigan has been one of my favorite actresses for twenty-five years now. She's maintained her place in the rotation even though I've managed to see less and less of her as the years go by. A quick peek at IMDB confirms that she's never stopped working for very long, but it became clear pretty fast in the 1980s that she wasn't going to become a movie star, partly because she's never done "kittenish", and she's spent an awful lot of the past ten years working in movies that nobody saw and in TV shows about doctors that I didn't see. (I'm a hypochondriac. The last thing I need is to spend my down time learning about new symptoms.) Her last good role in a movie worthy of her time was in Gone Baby Gone, and it's probably not a coincidence that the picture also featured Ed Harris--her husband, who she met on the set of Places in the Heart and with whom she also co-starred in Louis Malle's Alamo Bay, Winter Passing, the TV film Riders of the Purple Sage, and Harris's own directorial debut, Pollack. One interesting aspect of her having been married to Harris for most of both their film careers may be that Madigan always has an easy reminder of how much easier it is for men to slide back and forth between a (relatively) great variety supporting and ensemble roles and character leads than it is for a woman.

Madigan has always had such strength and power onscreen that it must have cost her some roles--big roles that were being cast by people who find such power in a woman intimidating (and who extrapolate from that that folks in the audience will have trouble "relating" to her) and also small roles where the worry is that she'll stand out too much, as if it's supposed to be a bad thing when an actress is cursed with having such an effect on audiences that they can't take their eyes off her. This may be something that Madigan can't do much about, since she doesn't seem to be one of those performers who disappear into the woodwork when they're not acting. At the 2001 Academy Awards, when Elia Kazan tottered out to collect his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the camera picked her out, sitting in the audience, next to her husband, not clapping. I mean, she was not clapping up a goddamn storm, and glowering silently at the spectacle onstage. I remember the sight of her better than I remember most of the movies that were nominated that year. (I also remember looking at Harris and thinking, My God, son, if you know what's good for you, you'd better not clap!)

Where to see Amy Madigan at her best:

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Here's a trailer for an upcoming release we've posted about a number of times here at the Screengrab. I must admit, the first time I saw this, I did not see the punchline coming. Can you figure it out before the titles appear? Hint: It's not The Wicker Man 2.

Hit the jump for the mystery trailer...

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