The Screengrab

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied:  "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies."  So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers.  We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even.  While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud.  The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir.  When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things:  the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane.  As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

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The soundtrack portion of David Fincher's 1999 cult-favorite adapatation of the pseudo-subversive Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club receives its fair share of praise, and justifiably so.  It features great songs like Tom Waits' "Goin' Out West", terrific vocals courtesy Persian electronica songstress Azam Ali in Vas' "Svarga", a brilliant detournment of Andre Previn's main theme from Valley of the Dolls, and, of course, the stunning post-credits blast at the end of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?".  Unfortunately, you won't find any of those songs on the movie's official soundtrack release; fortunately, what you will find there -- the movie's score, perfectly realized by the Dust Brothers, is even better. 

The Dust Brothers -- known to their moms as Mike Simpson and John King -- started out as Los Angeles-based DJs with a keen sampling sensibility and a knack for deftly combining the best qualities of hip-hop and rock.  It was this quality that followed them throughout their successful careers producing huge hits for everyone from Tone-Loc to Hanson to Young MC to the Rolling Stones, and nowhere was it better realized than on their innovative and memorable production of the second Beastie Boys album, Paul's Boutique.  But the Fight Club soundtrack -- their first full-length solo effort -- was a different animal altogether.  Sounding much more like their rivals (and onetime namesakes), the Chemical Brothers, it was much more saturated in techno and electronica than most of their previous work, and given that it was meant to set the mood for one of the blackest, bleakest comedies of the 1990s, they couldn't rely on the sunny, open feel they usually brought to the hits they produced for other artists.  Faced with the biggest challenge of their careers, the Dust Brothers came through like champions, putting together an insanely tense, claustrophobic record of unstoppable beats barely hemmed in by dark, sinister synthesizer buzzings and clangings, and schizophrenic ambient noises that perfectly suited the movie's nasty, crooked-grin postmodernism.  In many ways, it was literally the peak of their career -- they never put out another solo record, concentrating instead on production, and possibly admitting to themselves that nothing they'd ever do could possibly top the creeping death of the Fight Club score's innovative blend of dance, ambient, trip-hop and drum 'n' bass mayhem.

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A while back, a friend of mine and I -- neither of us members of the odd species of paranoids usually referred to as 9/11 conspiracy theorists -- were discussing that, just the same, there were some troubling questions about the aftermath of the attacks, like the shifting story of what happened on Flight 93, the all-too-convienient discovery of one of the terrorists' passports in the wreckage, or the fact that several of the men identified as the 9/11 attackers have since turned up alive, well, and innocent of any wrongdoing.  When I asked why, given that this was one of the most important historical events in the history of the modern world, so few people seemed interested in getting the facts straight, he said, essentially, no one cares about giving murderous terrorists a fair hearing.

Jacques Vergès does.  The subject of Barbet Schroeder's latest documentary film, Terror's Advocate, Vergès is one of the few people in the world who believes in defending the indefensible.  Having first defended and later married an Algerian woman accused of terror-bombing French civilians during the war against occupation there, the notorious attorney has gone on to represent people most of the world would just as soon see buried alive in a deep, dark hole:  Carlos the Jackal, Klaus Barbie and Khmer Rouge bigwig Khieu Samphan.  The question at the heart of Terror's Advocate is a compelling one:  is Vergès as he describes himself, a dedicated anti-colonialist who believes in his heart that even the worst people deserve a fair defense, an adequate trial, and a chance to make their voices heard?  Or is he, as Schroeder describes him, a decadent aesthete and a monster whose clients are little more than devils in human shape?

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Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)



Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

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Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater.  An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures.  Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today.   A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise).  But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

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No one likes a celebrity stalker story, but speaking personally, I am particularly outraged by the unfolding story of 37-year-old Jack Jordan, who is currently on trial for harrassing Uma Thurman by sending her bizarre letter and menacing doodles, breaking into her trailer, and generally acting all creepy around the Kill Bill star.  Hey, pal, not only is stalking Uma Thurman evil and wrong, it's supposed to be my job.  I haven't invested 20 years of my life on this celebrity crush just to have some punk like you steal my thunder.

The Jack Jordan story is filled with icky little details, such as the Henry Darger-esque clippings he left in Thurman's trailer during the filming of My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Uma Thurman stalker tip:  a better thing to leave in her trailer would be a note imploring her to pick better scripts), the stick-figure drawings of himself giggling and leaping off a razor blade into a grave (Uma Thurman stalker tip:  hire a professional illustrator), and the midguidedly tender notes reading "If you think you love me, then how sad that your kids and you and me would have to spend another holiday apart.  Now it's the end of September and I live in my car." (Uma Thurman stalker tip:  it's never a good opening gambit, with any woman, to mention that you live in your car.)

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With Iron Man looking to be a runaway success, Marvel Comics' film production arm is naturally looking to capitalize on the box office take to move ahead with production on future superhero franchises.  So what comic book superhero is next for the House of Ideas?  How about...all of them?

In its quarterly earnings report, Marvel discloses (among other things, including that it made enough money this year to buy Stan Lee a Silver Surfer-themed iron lung) that it's in the process of developing a boatload of new multimedia projects for release in the next four years.  In addition to a plethora of video games, TV shows, animated series and direct-to-DVD animated features, Marvel Film -- the company's in-house production unit -- has scheduled for release The Incredible Hulk, an Iron Man sequel, a Thor movie, a Captain America solo adventure, an Avengers team picture, and, of all things, a feature film starring perennial sad-sack second-stringer Ant-Man.  (We're hoping that this one sticks to the current comics approach to the character and plays as straight-up satire.)  In addition to all of that, Marvel has two licensed properties set to release in the next year:  a Punisher sequel, entitled War Zone, is releasing through Lionsgate this Christmas, and an X-Men prequel, entitled Wolverine, drops a year from now through Fox.  All that, and no Dr. Strange?  I guess no one wants to take on the supreme challenge of out-acting Peter Hooten.

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Usually, Hollywood is a tad standoffish about tackling the great novels. If they do it right, they win the admiration of critics, but risk losing the mainstream audience, who will think of their project as snooty and highbrow. If they do it wrong, people still won't go see the movie, plus the critics will turn the whole thing into a laughingstock. Producers are generally willing to let someone take a crack at one of the classics once and only once, and then only if they're an established filmmaker and there's nothing too controversial about the book. How, then, did not one but two movie versions get made of one of the most inflammatory, misunderstood and potentially dangerous books of the 21st century — a book that not only quite openly asks us to identify, to a certain degree, with an effete intellectual pederast, but which was written by one of the pioneers of postmodernism? Some might suggest that certain producers and/or directors simply jump at the chance to cast a movie starring a hot nymphet, but we are not so cynical here at the Screengrab, oh goodness no. We will not speculate how it came to pass that two high-profile film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant, subtle, subversive and daring story came to pass — one of them, by a titan of the silver screen, made less than a decade after the novel's publication and the other, by a flaky British director whose movies have always been a heartbeat away from softcore porn — and instead focus on the respective qualities of the two films.

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Naomi Klein's trenchant, brilliant, and sometimes alarmist book about the use of 'shock and awe' tactics to push through free-market economic reforms during times of national trauma was released late last year, but it's just now seeing wide publication in paperback.  At the time of its release, Klein released a short film via YouTube to serve as both a teaser for and audiovisual explication of the book.

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Today, there are more film festivals all over the world than ever before.  (Hell, Marfa just had one, and they don't even have a movie theater.)  This is indisputably a good thing for moviegoers, as it gives them a chance to hobnob with filmmakers, get a little touch of cinema magic wherever they happen to live, and catch a glimpse of movies that probably aren't otherwise going to be playing at a theater near them anytime soon.  But more and more, business insiders, from producers to filmmakers to the press, are starting to ask the question:  is it a good thing for the movie business? 

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Welcome to yet another new weekly feature here at the Screengrab. Hard as it is to believe, our research shows that there is actually some miniscule percentage of our reading public that misses the occasional post during the week. We can’t stand the thought of any of you being deprived of our wit and wisdom, so every Friday the Highlight Reel will round up the best of the week in Screengrab.

You like film festivals? We’ve got your film festivals covered! Phil “Tolstoy” Nugent has seen and written about seemingly every movie at the Tribeca Film Festival, while Andrew “Dropkick” Osborne has the Independent Film Festival of Boston covered.

While those guys are out loading up on art, I’ve been sitting home with the 100 worst movies of all time. You might say they’re Unwatchable.

Art schmart. What you really want to know is which movies will be the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008 and which will be the Top 5 Bombs.

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And now, The Screengrab’s predictions for the Top 5 box office disappointments and/or outright disastrous flops of Summer 2008!

(Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Bombs, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS AN IMAGINARY FANTASY DATE WITH MIKE MYERS AND/OR SARAH JESSICA PARKER!)

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

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

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

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

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

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More than any other decade of the 20th century, the 1970s get a bad rap.  Unfairly judged by the worst of its excess and constantly degraded by shorthand stereotypes, the seventies have come to mean cheesy, tacky, and pre-fab -- the very worst of American popular culture.  It's really hard to figure out why this should be so; both high and low culture were extremely well-served by the years from 1971 to 1980.  If people want to judge the whole era by "HONK IF YOU'RE HORNY" bumper stickers, avocado-green refrigerators, and the collected lyrics of Rupert Holmes, that's their own lookout -- the rest of us can enjoy one of the richest periods in all of American film, as well as the ascendant periods of funk and jazz fusion and the arrival on American shores of the high-energy cinematic candy known as chop-socky.

Those characteristics all came together on the soundtrack to Bruce Lee's first American-produced martial arts film, the legendary Enter the Dragon.  The movie itself, while lacking some of the more elegant formal qualities of other great films of the decade, features some classic setpieces and wall-to-wall dynamite in the action sequences.  Lee had never looked more invincible, and some of his demonstrations of his style of jeet kune do are still breathtaking 35 years after the movie's release.  When it came time to commission a soundtrack, producer Fred Weintraub brought in longtime pro Lalo Schifrin to do the job.  A classically trained Argentine who was already well-established as a highly skilled jazz pianist when he came to Hollywood in the late 1950s, he wrote some of the most memorably TV themes of the following decade before shifting to the big screen.  He'd just made a big splash in the business in 1971 by penning the theme music to his friend Clint Eastwood's megahit Dirty Harry, and Enter the Dragon was meant to be little more than an easy paycheck between projects.  For some reason, though, Schifrin chose to really pull out the stops on the Bruce Lee vehicle; working with an ad hoc mini-orchestra equally comprised of Warner Brothers studio pros and hot session jazz musicians, the soundtrack is a wonderful, energetic, thrilling, sometimes dirty but never trashy thrill-ride that combines classical cinematic sting with some incredible jazz and funk overtones that are prominent from the very first notes.  Schifrin peppers the score with pseudo-'traditional' Asian music cues, but their transparent bogosity never overwhelms the propulsive soundtrack to the point where they become cheesy; they're just loud little splashes of color on a vibrant canvas of sound.  

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We here at the Screengrab absolutely adore IMDB, the Internet Movie Database.  It's the film writer's best friend, an indispensible tool that we scarcely know what we'd do without.  Its comprehensive movie schedules let us plan our filmgoing weekends, its incredibly detailed entries tell us all we need to know about movies, actors and directors; and its highly amusing message boards allow us to while away the hours reading what two angry people with poor grammar skills think of whether or not Nutty Professor II:  The Klumps was racist.

One of IMDB's oddest, yet most appealing, features is the "keyword search".  Let's say you want to see a movie about surfing:  just type 'surfing' in the keyword search field, and up will come a list, sortable in any number of ways, of movies, TV shows, video games, and direct-to-video porn films in which someone is seen riding a surfboard.  The problem is that, much like Wikipedia, IMDB's keyword searches are user-controlled, so the resulting entries can give you a rather, er, idiosyncratic view of what qualities in a film IMDB readers think are important.

To help you pass the time on a long Wednesday afternoon, we've prepared a list of ten summer 2008 releases, identified by their IMDB keywords.  Can you guess the movie?  And can you fathom the depths of the mind that created such an odd set of descriptors for it?  Answers are under the cut -- enjoy!

1.  "Avant Garde", "Sheep", "Nun", "Airplane Accident", "The Three Stooges"

2.  "Black Eye", "Casino", "Screwball", "Marriage Counseling", "Courtroom"

3.  "Independent Film", "Nazis","Paris France", "Severed Hand", "Burnt Face"

4.  "American Abroad", "Niagra Falls", "Professor", "Humor", "Hat"

5.  "Country House", "Swings", "Flower Petals", "Axe", "Psycho Thriller"

6.  "Slacker", "Unlikely Hero, "Confidence", "Kids and Family", "Snow Leopard"

7.  "American", "Shoe", "Ineptitude", "Phone Booth", "Character Name in Title"

8.  "Very Little Dialogue", "Dark Comedy", "Part Live Action", "Space", "Robot"

9.  "Federal Bureau of Investigation", "Cigar Smoking", "Soul", "Nazi Experiment", "Demon"

10.  "Girl Power", "Heavy Rubber", "Moody", "Ice Cream Parlor", "Torso Cut in Half"

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With so many superhero movies set to come out this summer, one of them is bound to suck.  Well, that's not true -- chances are pretty good that all of them are going to suck.  But the folks over at New York magazine are ever the optimists, and they're handicapping the cape-and-cowl movies of the hot months to determine which one to avoid.

They peg Iron Man as most likely to succeed (despite the fact that ol' Shell-Head "has nowhere near the Q-meter rating of Spidey or Supes", but The Incredible Hulk is their even-money choice to bomb out: "The initial trailer made the movie seem exciting but shallow and somewhat humorless.  And if a legitimately great director like Ang Lee can't make the Hulk story into a good movie, what chance does Louis Leterrier (previous credits:  The Transporter, The Transporter 2) have?"

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Up until now, the "No, But I've Read the Movie" has focused on great works of western literature, and assessed the movie versions to see if they can possibly stand up to the titanic reputations of the novels upon which they are based.  That ends today!  For today, we will focus on one of the most successful, and yet overrated and overblown, works of the western canon:  Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  It's a novel that helped launch her career as one of the preeminent authors and philosophers of our time, but as a novel, it's hokey, overlong, bloated, and filled with characters one dimension short of being one-dimensional; and as philosophy, it's incomplete, inconsistent, and unable to look past its own epistemological shortcomings.  Rand's ideology of Objectivism became hugely popular, just as her novels became huge best-sellers, but whereas most literary adaptations were doomed to failure because what makes a great novel rarely makes a great movie, anyone daring to tackle her endlessly preachy books would be faced with the prospect of improving on the original, rather than dumbing it down for the format.  Given the runaway success of The Fountainhead -- Rand's story of an incorruptible architect who refuses to compromise his craft to satisfy the demands of the masses -- it was inevitable that there would be a film adaptation.  The question is, how would it handle such a patently unworkable premise and fundamentally unbelievable storyline?

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One of the most hotly contested superhero properties on the market, with virtually every other big-name crimefighter already appearing on the big screen, is Wonder Woman.  The upcoming Joel Silver production, slated for a 2009 release, has already gone through a multitude of changes, and fans crawl the internet for any word of what's to come:  who will play the Amazon princess?  Is there a completed screenplay?  With Joss Whedon bailing on the project, is there any truth to the rumor that the Wachowski Brothers are next in line to direct?

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As Tribeca kicks into high gear, New York filmgoers brace themselves for a spate of the strange and unsual, and they don't get much stranger than the fact that Guy Maddin, Canada's master of the bizarre, has apparently made a documentary.

Well, maybe that's going a bit too far -- in this brief interview with the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis, Maddin makes it clear that his new film debuting at the festival, My Winnipeg, isn't exactly a documentary so much as it is a "docu-fantasia", and that the idea of a documentary as little more than straight-up representation of the sort he says could easily be made with a security camera doesn't really appeal to him that much. 

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We were going to call this Take Five "Buddha", and then, like, totally blow your mind by not including Kundun, but frankly, we're just too, you know, we're too, uh...what were we talking about?  Oh, right!  That weed!  The chronic!  Sweet Mary Jane!  A favorite in Hollywood for so many years that it doesn't even seem like a vice to some people (remember Tom Hagen warning the movie producer in The Godfather that one of his stars was about to 'graduate' from marijuana to cocaine), it was a while before social pressures eased up enough to portray herb in anything but the most hysterical terms.  How far we've come, bros!  Today, only a few scant days after 4/20 (the national stoner's holiday), we can each of us get nicely toasted and ditch work early for a matinee of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which posits that even our Commander-in-Chief enjoys a good bong hit now and again.  The noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success contained a plot point that expected us to believe that a jazz musician -- and a white one, at that! -- might see his career ruined by the mere possession of the devil weed, while the new Kal Penn/John Cho vehicle implies that toking up on a regular basis is the best career move you can make.  Here's five more films that deal with the sweet leaf in all its hazy glory.

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

This absurd scare-flick is typical of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s; it's only exceptional in that it's exceptionally over-the-top in its woozy narrative, lurid dialogue, and bizarrely sensationalistic vision of what marijuana will do to you.  (Apparently, it turns you into a murderer or a sex fiend instead of a lazy Xbox-addicted dolt.)  Directed by French-born Louis Gasnier (whose other major claim to fame was the Perils of Pauline serial), it's unintentionally hilarious to the degree that it's been reissued endlessly in every format imaginable for new generations of potheads to giggle at.  In fact, for a film that did poor business, featured no stars, and is incompetently made at every level, it very well may be that Reefer Madness is the most-watched film of the 1930s.  Ah, irony.

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In this week's Guardian film section, blogger/critic John Patterson reminds us that, amongst the other debts we owe to Judd Apatow, we can also thank him for helping shred one of the last remaining bougeois taboos in cinema:  the one that state that the human penis cannot be seen at any cost. 

Patterson reports that it took a string of comedies, from Superbad to Forgetting Sarah Marshall to the upcoming Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, to shatter the ironclad reluctance of American bluenoses to the merest suggestion of the national generative organ.  The penis is, after all, as Patterson notes, a comical thing -- "just ask any woman."   Prior to the recent proliferation of the dick as joke (not to be confused with the dick joke), big-screen appearances of the little man were confined to pornography, well-meaning art films, and any movie starring Harvey Keitel.  

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Genre films are something of a trap for actors and actresses.  One memorable role in a movie franchise beloved by one flavor of geek or another, and they're pretty much set for life -- as long as sequels keep getting made, they'll keep getting steady work, and the sun will set on their acting careers about five weeks after they die.  On the other hand, as long as they're best known for genre parts, those are the parts they're likely to keep getting ad infinitum; there's a reason it's called the genre ghetto.  Unfortunately, actors who take up residence there are awfully reluctant to leave because the paychecks are good, but they soon find out it's not easy even when they decide to move to a ritzier neighborhood.  More than a few actors of some talent and range have found themselves, after cashing in off of a big genre-character role, being judged for the rest of their careers not on how well they can act, but how well they can still fit into their old costumes.  Such an actor is the big, hearty Welshman John Rhys Davies:  a man of impressive range and flawless credentials playing the classics on stage, his portrayal of a handful of unforgettable characters in sci-fi and fantasy films has somewhat derailed his career while at the same time ensuring that he'll always have work.  He's gone from being the poor man's Brian Blessed to being one of the innumerable people who pays for his house by spending half the year in New Zealand filming syndicated sci-fi television shows.

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It’s no surprise that the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange would prove to be almost as great a firestarter as the movie itself.  After all, music plays a huge – and hugely divisive – role in the movie:  music is all that the nihilistic, savage street thug Alex DeLarge truly loves; music is what makes one of his most vicious attacks so unbearable, as he brutally attacks an innocent while crooning the main theme from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain; and music is what makes his brainwashing ‘treatment’ at the hands of the government so objectionable, as the Ludovico Technique not only robs him of his ability to do violence, but fills him with nausea when he hears the gorgeous strains of Beethoven’s 9th.

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Disney, as Disney is fond of reminding us, is not just a movie company or an entertainment conglomerate:  it's a kingdom, a lifestyle, almost a religion.  And if that's true, its position on the major issues of the day are more than just fodder for the back pages of their annual stockholder report:  they're front page news, or even the subject of scholarly tomes. 

Such, as the New York Times reports, is the case with Disney's environmental record.  Throughout its history, Disney has played both sides of the ecological fence:  it recently announced the formation of a new film unit exclusively dedicated to creating nature documentaries, while its theme parks are denounced by environmentalists as resource-draining, pollution-spewing nightmares; its previous science films have sparked the interest of children in wildlife and conservation, while attracting charges of exaggeration or outright fakery; and its beloved animated children's classics have cemented a protective attitude towards nature in the minds of entire generations, while both hunters and animal rights activists claim that they present a distorted and dangerous view of animal life. 

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One of the niftiest features of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen comic was its fully realized fictional world:  every aspect of the near-future alternate-reality America was fleshed out, from the names of the newspapers to the look of the pop fashion trends of the moment to the fast food joints and retail stores.  Even the televisions were populated by cleverly thought-out commercials, many of them for products manufactured by Veidt Enterprises, the monolithic corporate giant run by ex-superhero Ozymandias.

Director Zack Snyder is determined to recreate this depth of field as much as possible, but he can't be bothered to actually make the commercials himself, since he is busy filming the movie and blogging endlessly about filming the movie.  So he's making you do it!  Or, more specifically, YouTube.  Snyder is running a contest on the video-hosting site, inviting fans to create their own Veidt Enterprises commercials.  If yours gets picked, you'll get thousands of dollars from the makers of this hugely expensive Hollywood blockbuster film! 

Ha ha, no, just kidding. But you do have a chance to get your commercial featured in the movie -- for free!  It's not exploitation if you enjoy it!  Me, I'm picturing an ad for Veidt's "Nostalgia" cologne featuring an 80-year-old Wilford Brimley muttering, "You can smell like it's 1956 again."

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