vincent d'onofrio - The Screengrab

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Four)

MALCOLM X (1992)

There was an Oscar ceremony one year where Denzel Washington and Spike Lee were the co-presenters of some category or tribute, and while I may be misremembering the whole thing, it seemed very much like the two of them were pissed, huddled together, leaning over the podium and glaring at the sea of rich white faces before them as they bit through their teleprompter lines in tones of obvious displeasure. While I’m shaky on the particulars, in my mind, I like to imagine the two of them were reacting to the fact that Lee’s masterful, sweeping adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X only received one major Oscar nomination (for Best Actor)...and, adding insult to injury, Washington’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role somehow lost out to Al Pacino’s “hoo-hah” Scent of a Woman nonsense. I’m not always on Lee’s side when he cries racism (as in his recent dust-up with Clint Eastwood), but it’s hard to think of any other reason for such an obvious snub of the kind of period epic the Academy usually rewards (or at least frickin’ nominates). True, Malcolm X was and remains a controversial figure, but as cinema, Lee’s production is a stylistic masterpiece, capturing the shifting tides of his protagonist’s life as he evolves from Zoot-suited hustler to civil rights icon in a film as indelible and essential as Alex Haley’s canonical source material.

The "Full Metal Jacket" Files

Released late last year as part of the Stanley Kubrick Director’s Series boxed set, the latest version of the Full Metal Jacket DVD boasts a commentary and interviews with various members of the film’s creative team, from actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Lee Ermey to executive producer Jan Harlan and steadicam operator John Ward. Several voices are conspicuously absent: I’m not sure what Matthew Modine’s excuse is, but Stanley Kubrick is dead, and so is Gustav Hasford.

If that last name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve probably never stumbled upon Private Joker’s Homepage. Compiled and maintained by Hasford’s cousin, comic book writer Jason Aaron, this massive site is dedicated to the memory of the man who wrote The Short-Timers, the 1978 novel upon which Kubrick’s Vietnam epic was based.

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 1

There was a bit of brouhaha recently over Ryan Gosling's getting fired from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones for having packed on too much weight. The story has since been denied, so we don't know whom to believe in that dispute. It may have been apocryphal, but the incident did get us thinking about some of the more notable bodily transformations we've seen on film. And we're talking real transformations here. (Sorry, Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours and John Hurt's fake face in Elephant Man and Eddie Murphy's whole body in like every other movie.) We're talking De Niro eating his way through Italy to plump up for Raging Bull. We're talking Christian Bale starving himself silly for The Machinist. We're talking about actors so devoted to their craft (and, in at least one case, so utterly stupid) as to commit their bodies to real, physical changes for a part. Here are the Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film.

ROBERT DENIRO in RAGING BULL (1980)

When Robert DeNiro won an Academy Award for Best Actor in his role as tortured prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, he found that after the ceremony, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody was far more interested in discussing his role as would-be political assassin Travis Bickle in 1976's Taxi Driver – a role which allegedly inspired the actual assassination attempt of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley only days before. Now that things have lightened up a bit, and DeNiro isn't distracting everybody by making good movies anymore, his role as LaMotta has become the textbook case for total character immersion. To play the young, lean LaMotta, DeNiro worked his then-slender physique into even better condition, going through the actual workout regimen of a prizefighter (he even entered, and won, a handful of amateur bouts) and honing his body into a whipcord-thin, muscle-rippled wonder. Then, to play the older, decaying LaMotta, he put back all the weight and more, gaining a stunning sixty pounds and utterly transforming himself into a doughy blob of a man whose muscle had all collapsed into fat. There were many more sacrifices, mental and physical, made for Raging Bull: DeNiro really did bash his head into that concrete wall, and Joe Pesci broke a rib during an unsupervised fistfight. But it's the lightning-fast loss and gain of weight that's still remembered today, and which rang out like a challenge to other actors – one that would soon be answered.