JEFF GOLDBLUM AS MICHAEL IN THE BIG CHILL (1983)



Following an especially painful round of orthodonture during my junior year of high school, my father brought me to The Big Chill to cheer me up, and I immediately fell in love with the movie, which celebrated the type of close-knit friendship that had sustained me through the many dateless nights of my adolescence. On the verge of young adulthood and the dissolution of those (mostly platonic) hometown relationships, I was also drawn to the film’s evocation of the big, chilly world I’d be facing after graduation, far from kith and kin, and started imagining myself as a cool, mordant loner not unlike William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet, Nick (except without the war injury impotence) -- the type of guy likely to attract weirdly sexy free spirits like Meg Tilly’s Chloe in droves once I got to college. Yet, in truth (as my friends were always happy to remind me), I was never really the Nick in our little group, but rather the Michael: i.e., Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy, needy motormouth, the guy with the painfully obvious motives and the total lack of game with the ladies -- but then again, at least he wound up with most of the best lines (and a pair of functioning testicles)! (AO)

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I understand why Robin Williams movies suck. Sure, he’s done good (or at least interesting) work in everything from Moscow On The Hudson and The Best of Times to The Fisher King and even creepy, icky One Hour Photo (part of the “dark Robin” trilogy along with Insomnia and Death To Smoochy). For the most part, though, Williams is primarily known for some combination of annoying, "look at me!  look at me!" over-the-top wacky (Mrs. Doubtfire, Toys, every single talk show appearance ever) and/or shameless, cloying, dewy-eyed schmaltz (Jack, Patch Adams, Fathers' Day...oh God, I’m choking on my own vomit)...

But I get that. Williams is a needy, hyperactive mental case. Sure, he’s talented and seems like a sweet, well-meaning guy, too...but I’m also guessing he’s been to a LOT of Narcotics Anonymous meetings full of weepy, life-affirming speeches and “I love you, man” hugs. On some level, I’m willing to believe Williams actually enjoyed his own performance in License To Wed.

But Steve Martin knows better...doesn’t he?

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This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue.

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