President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding:  in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

Read More...

As usual, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the subject for the second of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

It’s practically become a running joke that biopics are catnip to Oscar voters. It’s not difficult to see the reasons why- the historical setting gives affords technicians plenty of chances to show off, while audiences enjoy seeing the lives of their heroes brought to life through movie magic. Most of all, playing historical figures often gives actors an opportunity to show facets of their talent that aren’t normally on display. Nowhere is this more apparent than in biographies of musicians or other live performances, in which actors get the chance to not only portray real-life characters but also perform their work- in character, anyway. And of all the acclaimed showbiz biopic performances out there, few are more beloved than James Cagney’s Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Read More...

OUT OF SIGHT



Most people remember Stephen Soderbergh’s 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight as the start (and, essentially, end) of J.Lo®’s serious acting career, and also the movie where George Clooney traded in the training wheels and became an official movie star. Yet, while the hunk-in-the-trunk romance between Lopez’s cop (Federal Marshal Karen Sisco) and the Cloon’s robber, Jack Foley, may be the heart of the story, the prison (and eventual jailbreak) scenes are the muscle. Doing time in the Lompoc federal pen, Foley protects a weasely businessman (the ever-great Albert Brooks) from the unwanted attentions of scarier convicts like the part-time pugilist, full-time sociopath Maurice “Snoopy” Miller (played to the scary hilt by Don Cheadle, a full 180 degrees away from his loveable porn star performance the previous year in Boogie Nights). When the men are eventually released back into the real world, Foley visits Brooks’ character in search of legitimate employment, only to be offered a lousy security guard job and a condescending pep talk: “You’re a bank robber. This is not a marketable skill...show me that you’re really willing to change and we’ll talk about something better.” Foley is not pleased, reminding his would-be benefactor, “Back in prison, guy like you, place like that, you were ice cream for freaks...I saved your ass.” And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Out of Sight one of the great modern prison flicks: in addition to all the endlessly quotable exchanges, the Leonard story (and screenplay by Scott Frank) is memorable for its depiction of jail as a funhouse mirror, reflecting back a distorted version of society where definitions of decency, morality and manhood get all wiggly and reversed.

Read More...

Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff.  We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy.  And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead.  Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life.  Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill.  Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life.  His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica.  Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany.  The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

Read More...

THE MOVIE: Directed by Gregory La Cava and based on a novel by T. F. Tweed, it stars Walter Huston as Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, an affable glad-hander and crooked hack politician who becomes a compromise candidate for president at his party's deadlocked convention. Hammond's election would seem to augur a quiet, complacent time in his country's history, but while driving himself through the streets of D.C., the Prez does his James Dean impression and winds up in a coma. He is not expected to survive, but he soon rises from his bed of pain, and when he does, he's a new man, fiercely committed to using the power of his office to fix what needs fixing and no longer interested in the sweet fleshy charms of his personal assistant and mistress, Pendie Malloy (Karen Morley). Fending off an attempt by the appalled jackals in Congress to impeach his newly honest ass, Judd gathers support from The People, threatens to declare martial law, and cloaks himself in powers that abolish the checks and balances system, making him answerable to no man.

Thus equipped, he takes charge of the banks and creates new work programs before turning his attention to the real problem vexing our nation: Da Mob. Judd abolishes Prohibition and then, in private communication with the criminal kingpin Nick Diamond, who's in charge of everything bad, suggests that he make plans to return to the land of his fathers, since he's just lost the raison d'etre for his bootlegging business and, besides, we don't cotton to foreigners in these parts. Diamond offers his counter proposal in the form of an attempted mob hit on the White House that leaves Pendie in the hospital and Judd in a state of high dudgeon. Taking the gloves off, he has all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed by firing squad in view of the Statue of Liberty. For his last trick, Judd gathers all the ambassadors from other lands aboard a yacht, informs them that he is rejecting the universally agreed upon limitations on naval power, oversees the bombing of a couple of abandoned American battleships as a demonstration of the power of American military might, and then muses that if all these jaspers could persuade their governments to immediately repay their mountainous war debts to the United States, which would destabilize their own national budgets to such a degree that Judd would have no need to fear that they'd be upgrading their own armies anytime soon, it sure would get them on his good side. Having threatened his way to guaranteed world peace, Judd collapses and, this time, finally cashes in his chips for good. The suggestion is made that perhaps he never really recovered from his accident but has been possessed by the spirit of a heavenly agent working through him to restore God's country to full strength.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It is clinically insane.

Read More...

What made Duel in the Sun a hit?: David O. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1930s, a decade that concluded with his production of Hollywood’s biggest hit of all time, Gone With the Wind. After that film’s runaway success, Selznick could pretty much write his own ticket, and he used his clout to make his dream project, a mega-budgeted adaptation of Niven Busch’s novel Duel in the Sun. Selznick spared no expense- the budget topped out at a then-unprecedented $6 million- to bring this Wild West melodrama to the screen in “Glorious Technicolor”, going through more than half a dozen directors (including Josef von Sternberg) before handing the directorial reins over to Hollywood veteran King Vidor.

Read More...

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)



Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him.

Read More...

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Read More...