The Screengrab

THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS (1992 & 1995)



Even now, The Spirit of Christmas is funny as hell (and, uh, REALLY dirty...so if you haven’t been fired already, you might want to think twice before clicking the above clip at your workstation, unless of course you work in a Tourette’s ward). But way back in 1995, before Trey Parker and Matt Stone were famous, before South Park was a basic cable staple and before Stan, Kyle and Cartman were allowed to curse like cardboard cut-out sailors in their R-rated big-screen debut, this short (commissioned as a video Christmas card by a Fox TV exec who’d seen Parker and Stone’s college short “Jesus Vs. Frosty”) was a jaw-dropping revelation, a blend of comic provocation, pop culture geekery and relatable humanity that became the animators’ signature style when the cult popularity of their seemingly primitive debut catapulted them to infamy.

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SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999)



Oh, sure, The Simpsons Movie was funny...but it wasn't South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny. It wasn't even "Marge vs. the Monorail"-era Simpsons funny. After ten years of writing, The Simpsons Movie seemed no better or worse than an above-average episode of the show drawn out to feature length. (And, aside from the "Spider-Pig" theme, where were the musical numbers?!?!)  By way of comparison, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a chance to bring their consistently hilarious and subversive Comedy Central cartoon to the big screen, they pulled out all the stops: a full, Broadway/Guitar Hero-quality, Oscar-nominated musical score by future Tony-winner Marc Shaiman and Metallica frontman James Hetfield (!!!), a typically topical, economy-size blockbuster of a plot, some unobtrusively awesome voice cameos, impressively stepped-up animation and, most importantly, the swearing...oh, the wonderful, wonderful swearing, some of the most (literally) musical cursing in cinema history...and “Uncle Fucker” wasn’t even the funniest part.  Or the most shocking: that came later, when I actually felt a rare burst of affection for Robin Williams during his good-natured, who’d-a-thunk-it performance of “Blame Canada” at the 72 Annual Academy Awards ceremony.

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Isaac Hayes has died, at 65, at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. Hayes first came to prominence through his work at Memphis's legendary Stax studios, where, still in his early twenties, he became a keyboard player with the house band, worked as part of the production team, and developed a fruitful songwriting partnership with David Porter. The Porter-Hayes credit appeared on some two hundred compositions, including a raft of hits by the magnificent duo Sam and Dave, including "Soul Man", "I Thank You", "You Don't Know Like I Know", "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby", and "Hold On, I'm Comin'", whose title phrase is said to have been born when the hard-working Hayes was importuning Porter to return from the men's room. No ego as endearingly supersized as Hayes's could have been completely satisfied with working behind the scenes, and in 1967 he released his first solo album, the jazz-flavored Presenting Isaac Hayes.

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Most critics expected, when the anarchic, devotedly vulgar Comedy Central cartoon hit the big screen, that it would be pretty funny and remarkably foul-mouthed.  They were right on both counts, but what few people expected is that it would also be unexpectedly profound (or, well, as profound as a movie featuring Satan and Saddam Hussein as feuding gay lovers could be), with a message about censorship that was more practical than self-righteous, and that its parodic sensibilities would be so remarkable spot-on.  In fact, given the direction that the series took -- becoming increasingly more dogmatic and quite a bit more obvious in its political point-making -- it's easy to see the 1999 film as the pinnacle of the South Park experience, where everyone involved really hit their stride.

This is especially true with the movie's exceptionally enjoyable soundtrack.  Rather than going for a more contemporary feel, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in conjunction with Hollywood music vet Marc Shaiman -- decided to go whole hog with a big-screen musical parody, tossing everything from Disneyesque ballads of longing to amped-up schoolyard jingles that play like something out of a Busby Berkeley musical to battle hymns juiced with triumphal orchestral swells to big-screen Oscar bait weepers made of 100% processed cheese.  The remarkable thing about them was how perfectly the parodies worked:  so well, in fact, that the obnoxious bigot's anthem "Blame Canada" actually got itself nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song, leaving the show's producers with the difficult question of how to stage a musical number featuring language that wasn't allowed to be heard on television.  (They came up with the elegant solution of having Robin Williams sing the live version of "Blame Canada" during the Oscar ceremony, and he's capable of draining the funny out of anything, so nobody complained.)  The songs on the soundtrack are pitch-perfect parodies; if you strip away the relentlessly filthy language and the subversive bits of the lyrics, there's almost nothing whatever to set them apart from the cheeseball Elton John melodies in a first-tier animated Disney "modern" classic.  It's the pouring on of tons of formal sincerity -- and then the total upending with gobs and gobs of adolescent toilet irony -- that makes the whole soundtrack work so remarkably well.

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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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