The Screengrab : Christopher Reeve

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The Best:

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

An expansive entertainer with a midnight movie background trying to break into the grown-up big-studio world, Sam Raimi was a good boy while directing the first Spider-Man movie; he delivered the origin-story installment of the franchise with as much imagination and style as it could handle, all while maintaining the clear, easy-to-read line of a man trying to get a job done. The sequel gave him more of a chance to cut loose, and good man that he is, he availed himself of it. Tobey Maguire remains a perfect Peter Parker, but the real surprise here is Alfred Molina, who, assigned the role of one of the most repulsive supervillains in the union, renders him scary, understandable, and weirdly likable in about equal measure, a fit character for a tragic opera if tragic operas had chain saws in them. It remains the most successful movie not just in this particular franchise but in the brief history of Marvel Comics movies, and it deserves to be.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

Marjane Satrapi’s alternately charming and harrowing memoir of growing up in Iran after the fundamentalist revolution may have seemed like an odd choice for a successful movie adaptation. But it’s really not that hard to figure out: her simple, descriptive lines and curves proved to be perfect for animation. Persepolis also showed the wisdom of allowing the original author of a comic to take the helm of a film adaptation; Satrapi proved to have excellent instincts as a screenwriter, and as an animator, she knew just when to keep it simple and when to make it more elegant and elaborate. It’s a beautiful-looking movie, considering how little it cost and how simple it comes across on screen. But the story at the heart of it all is what sustains Persepolis; despite its setting at such a grim and tumultuous time, it’s still very much the story of a little girl who grows too quickly into a young woman, with all the pains and pleasures that could happen to such a woman anywhere in the world. Satrapi leavens the story (acted with top-shelf casts in both the English and French versions) with humor and historical perspective, and she nicely embraces sentimentality when remembering her family while refusing it for herself. It must have been quite difficult to pull off all these complex balances in such a short running time, but Satrapi and her collaborator Vincent Parronaud accomplish the feat nicely.

The Worst:

THE PUNISHER (2004)

Movies and comics have long had an incestuous history -- the original Batman comics drew on memories of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Cat and the Canary, and Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs just for its basic character designs -- but few major comics characters have so clearly been the result of the comics companies trying to keep pace with changing standards in movie heroes as the Punisher. First appearing in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1974 -- a time when action stars such as Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were redefining the American tough guy as a remorseless vigilante and blood murderer -- the Punisher doesn't have super powers. Instead, he has an arsenal of weapons, a black muscle shirt with a skull logo on it, and a chip on his shoulder. He's a killer -- which at the time of his debut set him apart from traditional superheroes -- but he only kills gangsters, which is supposed to complicate things. Even so, the powers that be were uncomfortable enough with him that they could never quite make up their minds whether he was supposed to be an edgy good guy or a conflicted villain. (His mere presence on the cover of a comic book guaranteed monster sales, though, so he was assured of many, many opportunities to return and make the bosses uneasy. Even so, it would be a dozen years before the company swallowed deep and gave him his own series.) Starting with the first, direct-to-video version in 1989, starring Dolph Lundgren sans skull T-shirt, there have been three attempts at a Punisher movie, with three different actors playing the Punisher, and they all just look like grade-B killing-machine flicks. As for which of them is the worst, well, there's really not a lot to choose from, but I'm giving the second one, starring Thomas Jane, the nod over the first one and last year's Punisher: War Zone, starring Ray Stevenson (of the HBO series Rome), if only because it probably got seen by the most (unlucky) people and wasted the time of some talented actors. That last category is not one that the colorless lug Thomas Jane belongs in, but even after all these thousands upon thousands of hours spent watching rotten movies and rottener comic books, we're still human enough to blanch at the sight of the late Roy Scheider getting a paycheck for being gunned down at a family picnic or a flailing John Travolta being dragged by a bumper through an exploding car lot.

SUPERMAN III (1983)

This was the third and last of the Superman films produced by the father-and-son team of Ilya and Alexander Salkind; after it was released, the Salkinds unloaded the franchise onto the notorious team of Golan and Globus, which produced a cut-rate entry, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, having obtained Christopher Reeve's continued participation by agreeing to shape the script around a timely anti-nuclear weapons message. That movie is, conceivably, even worse than this one, but at least it's an underfunded, half-assed Superman movie. This is an overblown, ill-conceived Richard Pryor movie with Superman along for the ride. Or maybe it's a Superman movie that was hopelessly twisted out of shape by the effort to shoehorn Pryor into it after he'd agree to do it. (Pryor was just coming off a year where he was listed as the number one box office attraction in America; if he'd agreed to it, he'd have been shoehorned into The French Lieutenant's Woman.) The filmmakers never did figure out how to use Pryor; they might have worried that audiences wouldn't want him to be the bad guy, so they cast him as an employee of the bad guy (Robert Vaughan), and never fully made the leap to having him switch sides and become Superman's friend. Other plot developments and details, such as having Superman turn bad after exposure to near-beer Kryptonite (requiring an intervention by the spirit of Clark Kent), and the jazz singer Annie Ross' role as Vaughan's sister, suggest that the Salkinds tried to economize by hiring the writing staff one morning, firing them at the end of the day, and assembling the script from notes that they'd scribbled down on their lunch wrappers.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE SHADOW (1994)

There are movies I remember as terrible, and then there are movies I simply don’t remember at all...as if a mysterious vigilante with the power to cloud men’s minds had simply erased all traces of this pre-intentionally-funny Alec Baldwin snoozer from my consciousness. The plot synopsis on Wikipedia sounds far more entertaining than the actual film, what with its dirty hypnotism, 1930s Genghis Khan revivalism and Phurba, the living knife (no relation to Furby or Flowbee). But even after reviewing the plot and rewatching a few YouTube clips, there are still only three things I really remember about the film. One, it co-stars Penelope Ann Miller...almost never a good sign. Two, the villain (played by John Lone) uses mental powers to make New Yorkers think his luxury hotel is invisible...a neat trick somebody oughta teach Donald Trump. And finally (and most memorably), my old pal Radmar Jao has the best line in the movie, advising someone not to light up in the hero’s secret lair: “No smoking in the Skull Cave.” Oh...wait a minute...that was that OTHER completely unmemorable 1990s adaptation of a 1930s comic: The Phantom, starring Billy Zane and Kristy Swanson (easily winning the bland-off with Miller). But, hey...at least Radmar was good.

ROAD TO PERDITION (2002)

Based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, Perdition takes a simple revenge tale, adds a dollop of sins-of-the-father melodrama, and inflates the flimsy result to Biblical proportions. Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hit man working for Paul Newman's John Rooney, mob boss of a Chicago suburb in the era of Al Capone. When his son Mike witnesses a gangland execution, Sullivan is forced to hit the road with the kid in tow, and soon father and son are bonding over a bank-robbing spree. Despite the pre-release speculation that Perdition would serve as the vehicle for Tom Hanks' first "bad guy" performance, the star delivers another of his flawed but noble saints. Sure, Michael Sullivan is a killer, but since almost everyone else in the movie is more vicious, and they're all out to get him, he comes off as a guy who's just doing what he's gotta do to protect his son. If you didn’t know Sam Mendes directed this tedious would-be epic, you'd swear it was a movie by master of bloat Frank Darabont. Nearly every scene is leaden, weighed down with portent and production designed to death. Torrents of rain are always pouring from the brims of fedoras while grim-faced men fire tommy guns into other grim-faced men who tumble to their doom in artful slow motion. It’s designed to be Oscar bait, but fortunately no one was biting.

HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)

This jaw-dropper, which was proudly emblazoned with the name of George Lucas, and which was the last movie directed by American Graffiti co-writer Willard Huyck -- he's still alive, but trust me, he's never going to direct another one -- belongs to what may well be the most select of all groups, movies that were catastrophic box-office and critical failures that nobody will now argue is actually a misunderstood work of genius. Heaven's Gate, Myra Breckinridge, At Long Last Love, Ishtar, hell, maybe Battlefield Earth -- each of them has some crackpot out there who'll keep you up all night explaining what's really so great about it. Not this thing. It's not even worth discussing its failure to in any way represent what's good, or even what sucks, about its alleged source material, an uneven but gorgeously cranky and weird Marvel series that writer Steve Gerber spun off from a supporting character he once threw into a Man-Thing comic, reportedly just to annoy his bosses. All you can do is stare at the thing and wonder what in God's sweet name they thought they were doing, until the noise becomes too much and you have to tune out. Howard was the first Marvel Comics-based movie to make it to theaters, and it is in fact harder to sit through than any number of subsequent Marvel-based projects that went straight to video. The only evidence that the people who made this had any sense at all is that, in the trailer and other publicity materials, they did their damndest to keep prospective ticket-buyers from getting a clear look at the poor bastard in the duck suit. If they'd found a way to keep people watching the movie from getting a clear look at it, they might have made some of their money back.

ELEKTRA (2005)

I’m pretty sure no one wanted Marvel Studios to resurrect Elektra, the hot ninja assassin (played by Jennifer Garner) who died in the dreadful Daredevil. But with Garner’s star on the rise, the fetching killer rose from the grave for this 2005 spin-off, a tiresome dud in which we learn that Elektra suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder but doesn’t mind tussling with (and spilling the blood of) yucky villains, is a trained murderer-for-hire who nonetheless has a pesky conscience, and likes to prance about like a runway model when not dispatching superpowered goons. Rob Bowman’s film has no energy or depth but plenty of turgid drama involving Elektra’s grief over her mother’s death and her tutelage under blind mentor Stick (Terence Stamp), unimaginative nonsense that – like the PG-13 ogling of Garner’s buff (but always clothed) body – unfortunately takes precedence over the heroine’s clashes with a group of intriguing baddies like Tattoo, a man whose body art comes to deadly life.

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

It certainly didn’t take long for the Superman franchise to bottom out. While many superhero legacies merely drop in quality, becoming disappointments after the first few installments, the Superman movies went from first to worst in the twinkling of an eye, and by the time the fourth installment rolled around, fans were praying for a hailstorm of kryptonite to kill the damn things off for good. When Superman IV was made, a combination of factors practically ensured it would be a disaster: the non-participation of many of the supporting players, the demands by Christopher Reeve to have more creative input, and the passing of the rights to the franchise from the Salkinds to the deplorable hacks at Golan-Globus. Reeve was given his script input, and the result was a well-meaning pile of shit so rank that he eventually pretended he didn’t have anything to do with it; and while Sidney Furie gets the official blame for directing this incoherent, overlong, and utterly incompetent disaster, most people believe that the real responsibility lies with uberhack/swindler/bad movie mogul Menahem Golan, who apparently spent most of the filming screaming at anyone who bothered to stick around the set. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was made for a fraction of what the previous films had cost, and it shows; if nothing else, it serves as a potent reminder to those who were so disappointed by Superman III that things can always get worse.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager & Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s Watchmen Week here at The Screengrab as the greater Geek-iverse (and the studio executives who love it) await the opening of Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated, much low-expectations-generating adaptation of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ beloved, game-changing graphic novel about a bunch of asshole “super” “heroes” fighting crime, mental illness and erectile dysfunction in a scary alternate reality where Richard Nixon never went away. (And by the way, does everyone out there already know Silk Spectre II: Electric Boogaloo is portrayed by the same actress who played Valerie Cherish’s little blonde protégé on The Comeback? I just found that out, like, yesterday and was momentarily confused because I thought all the Watchmen were supposed to be kinda middle-aged -- but then I checked the Internet Movie Database and, much to my surprise, Malin Akerman’s actually 31, which is somewhat middle-aged, I suppose)...

Anyway, our own Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark have already weighed in with their reviews of Hollywood’s latest attempt to wring a little KA-CHING! out of the POW! ZAP! BAM! of the funny book aisle, a strategy that’s been serving the Suits pretty well in recent years. I could pontificate here on the way America’s fascination with caped crusaders panders to infantile, imperialist empowerment fantasies, crowding more intelligent, adult material from the multiplex...but not only would that be annoying, it would also be hypocritical, since (A) I like a good funny book movie as much the next geek, (B) another movie about masked superheroes battling supervillains is a helluva lot better than another movie about masked sadists chopping up teenagers and (C) I keep hoping they’ll someday finally make that Wonder Woman movie I’ve been waiting for since I was 12. Mmm...magic lasso...

In the meantime, though, please enjoy the following list from Nerve.com’s very own Legion of Doom as we salute truth, justice, the American way and THE BEST AND WORST COMIC BOOK MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

The Best:

IRON MAN (2008)

True, it’s only been a few weeks since I wrote about Jon Favreau’s rock ‘em sock ‘em revival of the venerable Marvel Comics rust magnet for my Best of 2008 list...but (unlike certain awards-distributing Academies I could mention), I wanted to make sure this excellent film was recognized among the best of the best!

V FOR VENDETTA (2006)

Don't tell Alan Moore, who has never seen it but took the trouble to bad-mouth it anyway, but this adaptation of his Thatcher-era anarchists' fable, directed by Wachowski brothers proxy James McTeigue, does better than pretty good by its source material. The most important changes the filmmakers made from the original text, notably the transformation of Eve's (Natalie Portman) blokey boyfriend into a sardonic gay TV host played by Stephen Fry, actually work well: Fry's performance gives the film some heart, and film is clearly better suited than the printed page when it comes to paying gratuitous tribute to Benny Hill. The movie even inspired David Denby to apoplexy by seeming to present a terrorist as a political hero. Annoying David Denby is always a public service.

HULK (2003)

Remember how last year’s Edward Norton re-boot of The Incredible Hulk was going to prove that the relatively disappointing box office take of the 2003 Hulk was all Ang Lee’s fault? That audiences would embrace a louder, faster, dumber Hulk movie in a way they never did Lee’s artsy-fartsy one? How’s that working out for ya? The 2008 edition racked up almost exactly the same box office total as the 2003, so maybe it’s just that nobody likes poor ol’ Hulk. Or maybe the 2003 version wasn’t so bad after all, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Yes, it has its flaws; Eric Bana doesn’t exactly light up the screen, the CGI star isn’t quite up to snuff in some scenes, and things do take a little longer to get percolating than was perhaps necessary. But Lee brings a lyrical, haunting tone to the picture that may seem at odds with the whole “HULK SMASH!” ethos, but actually taps into a vein of melancholy the character has always possessed. The innovative editing scheme, with its cascade of digital wipes and split screens, is a far more clever and entertaining cinematic analog to reading a comic than anything Zack Snyder does in Watchmen, and the CGI effects do mesmerize at times. Hell, I could have watched this Hulk bouncing his way across the desert for hours.

X-MEN 2 (2003)

Ushering in the modern age of Marvel superhero films, Bryan Singer’s X-Men helped prove that the sight of men in tights – or, in this case, men and women in leather body suits – didn’t have to doom a comic adaptation to cartoonishness. It was Singer’s 2003 sequel, however, that truly elevated the genre by cannily marrying romantic drama, vigorous action and social-intolerance subtexts (here reconfigured from the source material to address sexuality more than race). Aside from Halle Berry’s still-awful wig and Alan Cumming’s grating Nightcrawler, X2 is sharper, smarter and more exhilarating than its predecessor, remaining true to the spirit of its heroes, villains and Dark Phoenix-ish storyline, buoyed by Brian Cox’s superbly villainous William Stryker, and smartly placing as high a premium on character as on spectacle. Which isn’t, however, to say that the spectacle itself isn’t reason enough to check out Singer’s sequel, since an early Stryker-led attack on Professor Xavier’s school, as well as Wolverine’s climactic throwdown with Lady Deathstrike, more than ably deliver the super-skirmish goods.

BATMAN (1989)

A genuine pop culture behemoth in the summer of '89, Tim Burton's blockbuster comic book movie probably did more than any other to make comics adaptations an accepted Hollywood genre, if only for proving that the success of the first couple of Superman movies hadn't been a fluke. This is not one of those accomplishments that nobody can see a downside to, and despite its hellacious popularity, the movie has always had enough attackers to count as controversial, including those who think it's a clumsy piece of storytelling to comics geeks (including Kevin Smith) who think it blasphemed its source material in any number of ways. But Burton's graphic sense and gothic sense of humor always made it a striking, strikingly funny piece of work, and facts are facts: no actor has ever been more compelling or convincingly haunted in a superhero role than Michael Keaton. The passage of twenty years and umpteen sequels and reboots (including Burton and Keaton's deeply flawed but often lovely Batman Returns) has thrown its defects and pluses into sharp relief: it's hard to remember that, in 1989, when Christopher Nolan was all of nineteen years old, many critics were appalled because they thought this picture was too dark.

SUPERMAN II (1980)

The 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman was an outlier, and probably the earliest example of filmmakers at least trying to make a genuinely good superhero movie. But it wasn’t entirely successful, and one sticking point for a lot of fans was the performance as Lex Luthor by Gene Hackman. The role has as many passionate defenders as detractors, but many thought that it was overly campy and unserious, and a superhero movie is generally only as good as its villain. The 1980 sequel would change all that. Introducing three Kryptonian supervillains escaped from the Phantom Zone – the hulking Non, the ice-cold Ursa, and best of all, the fantastic Terence Stamp as the megalomaniacal General Zod – Superman II gave us villains for the ages, and culminated in one of the most exciting fight scenes we’d seen to date. But it still wasn’t a great movie, and longstanding rumor placed the blame on the firing, when production was nearly complete, of Superman director Richard Donner and his replacement with Richard Lester. Lester, while a talented director, didn’t much care about the job and had little affection for the material, and the results are right there on screen. A few years ago, however, the Richard Donner cut was released commercially, and it finally became clear how good Superman II could have been if its original director had been allowed to pursue his vision all along.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

DEATHTRAP (1982)

One set, five characters, a couple of twists and a few good, juicy murders: that’s the formula for success in Ira Levin’s puzzle box of a murder mystery about a struggling veteran playwright desperate for a hit. Add a nervous spouse with a weak heart, a gay lover, a weird psychic, a cagey agent and a wall full of handcuffs, pistols and crossbows and you’ve got one of the few stage plays with the power to make audiences scream and jump like a creature double-feature. The movie version wisely sticks to the basics, letting the cat-and-mouse triple-double-cross plotting speak for itself while sticking mostly to the confined but never claustrophobic Long Island home of the plotting protagonist (Michael Caine at his very Michael Caine-iest, having a helluva time). And though certain naysayers here at the Screengrab may say nay, I also give kudos to Christopher Reeve’s performance in the film, which tweaks his goody-two-shoes Superman image while letting him exercise the underutilized mischievous side of his (admittedly limited) range. Meanwhile, Dyan Cannon gives good scream as the wife, and if all that doesn’t win you over, the movie has at least one immortal line, delivered by a snarky critic (Joel Siegel) after Caine’s playwright Sidney Bruhl premieres a hackneyed whodunit nowhere near as clever as Deathtrap: “I'll tell you who done it. Sidney Bruhl done it. And he done it in public."

THE RULING CLASS (1972)

Adapted for the screen by Peter Barnes from his own deeply subversive play, The Ruling Class was sort of a last gasp for the British “Angry Young Man” movement. But its demise was also its salvation: the play – and the subsequent and very successful film – kept in place the elements of class warfare, generational conflict and family drama and turned them on their heads. It replaced rage with whimsy, a tone of rebellion with a sense of absurdity, and an overall tone of Pythonesque lunacy that proved the movement wasn’t entirely devoid of humor. The story of an upper-class family of British aristocrats forced by fortune into restoring as its head a deranged son who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ (played with delightfully silky craziness by Peter O’Toole, in one of his greatest roles), The Ruling Class is, even today, as vicious as it is hilarious. It expands on the play by adding a few memorable characters and trading up in the players (most especially Nigel Green as McKyle, “the Electric Christ”, and the unforgettable Alastair Sim as the bewildered Bishop Bertie Lampton) as well as taking the sets out-of-doors, but what made the stage version so great was its devastatingly funny and fiendish dialogue. Barnes and director Peter Medak are wise enough not to change a bit of that.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

Tim Burton’s first full-blown attempt at a musical is so successful, it’s a wonder that he never tried it before. Without sacrificing the elements that have made him famous – the gloomy atmospherics, the high gothic sensibilities, the manic pace, the deft blend of dark humor and absurd violence – his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s notorious musical gives him the perfect format. Why? Because musicals are infinitely forgiving of the qualities that, in many of Burton’s other films, can rightly be considered weaknesses: his overblown dialogue, his clumsy grasp of the dynamics of storytelling, his slight characterization, and his love of style over emotional substance. Everything really comes together for him here, and the result is one of the most enjoyable musicals in decades. Dismissals of the lead actors (Johnny Depp as the vengeance-addled Victorian hairstylist and Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as the vendor of unhygienic meat pies) as unable to sing at the level expected from a big-screen musical somewhat miss the point: Sweeney Todd is a fiendishly difficult production, its songs and structure much more akin to an opera than a musical comedy, and it contains precious few toe-tappers, so putting the words in the mouths of those not well-suited to the old school of musicals doesn’t sink it one bit.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Almost fifty years down the road, there are a lot of problems with the Stanley Kramer adaptation of the then-controversial play (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, no relation) about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s excessively stagey; Kramer doesn’t bother to open up the set very much, and too many scenes are given no chance to work in the very different medium of film. The casting is problematic; Spencer Tracy and Frederic March are terrific in the lead roles (as stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively), and there are some good supporting jobs, especially by Elliott Reed as the county prosecutor, but Dick York and Donna Anderson as the romantic leads are flat as pancakes, and Gene Kelly playing a thinly-veiled H.L. Mencken is one of the biggest botch-jobs in casting history. It’s unfair, imbalanced, and historically inaccurate. And in a certain sense, it’s simply not as relevant as it once was; Inherit the Wind isn’t about what it’s about, but rather a Cold War narrative about the long-faded dangers of McCarthyism. But there are still some gorgeous speeches in this moldy oldie, and since America is, astonishingly, still debating the rightness of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools some eighty-odd years after the Scopes Trial, it maintains a relevance its authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

While many directors attempt to open up adaptations of stage plays for the big screen by taking the action up and out, Mike Nichols helps make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a masterpiece by doing the opposite. Although he does take us outside once or twice, what makes the film so visually arresting is his camera’s perfect pace with the legendary dialogue: instead of going out, it circles endlessly in and around, like a shark. It darts in and out of scenes, whirls around like the heads of the characters after a stinging rejoinder, and creeps in for powerful closeups that reveal faces as ugly as the words they’re speaking. Who exactly gets credit for the screenplay has been the subject of endless disputes, arguments and lawsuits, but really, it’s as simple as going to the source; almost all of the hypnotic dialogue that takes place between timid, repressed college professor Richard Burton and his domineering, disapproving wife Elizabeth Taylor is present in Edward Albee’s original stage play. Not for nothing is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a sort of literary shorthand for viciously feuding married couples: as Burton and Taylor go for each other’s throats, the camera matches them slash for slash, portraying a couple so sick of each other – but so used to each other – that the object of their hatred fills their eyes and becomes all that they can see.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

JESSICA ALBA

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I like sexy women. Sometimes, I like to hear them discuss foreign policy in a purring Greek accent (Arianna Huffington...mrowr!), while other times I've been known to enjoy a more prurient visual display of nubile hips and boobies. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this interest. Unlike, say, my lonely passion for Whit Stillman films, which can apparently no longer be satisfied, the demand for sexy women has glutted the market to the point where it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. Everywhere you look (in pop culture, if not my local gym) there are sweaty, well-toned H-O-T girls and women gyrating their pelvic muscles and shaking their butts in thongs and Daisy Dukes and whipped cream bikinis...so WHY, out of all the sexy women in the world, from Arianna to Miss November 2008, does Jessica Frickin’ Alba get to be in so many movies? Yes, she has a nice bod, and I enjoyed watching her undulate in Sin City as much as the next straight guy...until, that is, the camera panned up to her completely vapid expression, on a face completely devoid of mystery, personality or even the lusty carnality of supporting co-star Brittany Murphy. In real life, Alba may be a sweet, darling lass who bakes pies for orphans, but onscreen she’s got less acting talent and charisma than Ryan Gosling’s sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl...and yet Alba is somehow considered an A-list player, who gets to appear not just on the cover of Maxim, but in major motion pictures, in multiple genres, from action and horror to romantic comedy, while far more interesting and far sexier actresses like Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Mila Kunis, Thora Birch, Marley Shelton (and, no doubt, a huge percentage of the rest of the female S.A.G. membership) bob along under the surface, crossing their fingers in hopes of landing some of the high profile lead roles currently going to America’s favorite bleach-blonde void.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Oh, boo yourself. In the years since his unfortunate death, it has become distasteful bordering on offensive to say anything even remotely critical about Christopher Reeve. And certainly, it’s not my intention to impugn him as a man – he was, by all accounts, a decent human being, a loving husband, and a fine father to his children. The tragic accident which cost him his health was an event to be lamented, and he became a hero in its wake by advocating relentlessly for the rights and dignity of the disabled; and the comeback he made from his paralysis was very nearly a miracle. But before he took that unlucky tumble from a horse, a lot of people already knew what no one is now willing to say: Christopher Reeve was a terrible actor. Wooden, clumsy, and extremely limited in range, he started out as a pretty boy who might have been a modest success if he’d stuck to what he was good at. But Reeve was an ambitious man who soon discovered that his ambition led him to places his talent wasn’t able to go. He was laughable in Somewhere in Time, embarrassing in Monsignor, and, matched up against genuine heavyweight Michael Caine in Deathtrap, he just looked like he wanted to go home. His reputation as an actor, such as it is, rests on the Superman movies he did in the 1980s, but a lot of that adulation is vested in the character he played, and a lot more in the man who was playing him; looking at Reeve’s actual performances in the movies, it’s hard to believe anyone got very excited over that.

HALLE BERRY

It must have taken a phenomenal amount of determination and perseverance for Berry to work her way up through decorative eye candy roles in such movies as Strictly Business, Boomerang, and The Flintstones to more challenging dramatic parts in Losing Isiah and Bulworth, and then to her landmark win as the first African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actress for Monster's Ball and all the attention about her becoming the first black Bond girl in Die Another Day. But Monster's Ball is still a ridiculous movie, and Berry is hardly the least ridiculous thing in it. And her Bond girl made a great entrance, walking in from the surf, but then, as is so often the case with Berry's characters, wore out her welcome as soon as she started talking. Berry can be off-putting because, like Demi Moore, she seems to be less interested in entertaining the audience than in daring them not to respect her; at her worst, she radiates a defensive insistence on her own stature as an actress that is way out of proportion to her proven abilities, which in moments of high drama seem to consist mostly of a tremulous, anxious quality combined with a "Who farted?" expression. And that's when her mouth isn't even moving: her big line from the first X-Men movie ("Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lighting? The same thing that happens to everything else.") has the special distinction of being both the lamest-written and the lamest-delivered line in the history of superhero movies. It's just too bad that her need to be taken seriously may preclude her from doing more comedy. Because if the clip above is any indication, we do have to give her props for having a sense of humor.

ORLANDO BLOOM

Did Peter Jackson have him grown in a lab? In the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings pictures, most of the cast can be seen with hair and sweat flying while Bloom, as the elf Legolas, always looks as if his smooth plastic surface had just been wiped clean with a damp cloth. When I saw the movies, I assumed that he'd been CGI'ed to look that way, on the theory that elves never have a hair out of place even when they go on the flume ride at the water park, but Viggo Mortensen has since told interviewers that he used to stare at Bloom in disbelief while they were filming, wondering how the little bastard kept looking like a fashion spread no matter what got thrown at him or what exertions were required of him. Will Bloom ever find another role as perfectly suited to his lightweight, poreless quality as that of an arrow-shooting elf? He hasn't so far. He was cast as the romantic hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, only to have the movies use his inability to hold the screen with Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley as a running in-joke. It was fun getting to see Brendan Gleeson slap the pluperfect shit out of him in Troy, but the directors who've given him the chance to carry a picture -- in Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown and the barely released Haven -- have only succeeded in putting nasty dents in their own careers. So far, he hasn't done enough damage to otherwise promising projects to qualify as a menace, but that could change: he's supposedly threatening to play the Alain Delon role in Hong Kong action master Johnny To's planned remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 French gangland classic Le Cercle Rouge. If he pulls that off, all will be forgiven. If he screws it up, film geeks of many kinds will want to lasso his balls and leave him hanging upside down from a Times Square billboard.

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

Where did Renée Zellweger come from, and what did she ever do to earn her keep in the gallery of semi-major starlets? She has the acting abilities and charisma of a lutefisk. There is little that is redeeming about her in any of her movies. Especially not her uhm, "method" act as "fat" in Bridget Jones's Diary. Whose hand she greased to win an Oscar for Cold Mountain we will never know. And speaking of Oscars, a nomination for her role in Chicago? You must be joking. Just about every other actor in that movie swept the floor with her. And that includes Mr. Cellophane. All this is quite aside from the fact that she perpetually looks as if she just bit into a lemon.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

There’s a certain amount of humor in the notion of a big fat guy playing an indestructible martial arts machine. But Steven Seagal isn’t laughing. Ever. In fact, he may not even have the physical capability. And if watching close-ups of his portly mug intercut with shots of an obviously thinner stunt man kicking ass on the roof of a speeding train in Under Siege 2 didn’t get the man to laugh out loud, I guess he never will. Which is probably all for the best: based on the witty one-liners in his godawful body of work (as evidenced in the clip above), the only thing worse than Seagal’s “enlightened” action flicks would be a string of inspirational Zen comedies. Speaking of which...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, Mike Myers (despite his loveable Wayne’s World and Austin Powers personas) is a hellacious douche, largely despised in Hollywood for both the right and some of the wrong reasons, by good and evil people alike. As if beating the Powers franchise to death and helping Jim Carrey and Theodore Geisel’s money-grubbing widow to destroy the wonder and magic of Dr. Seuss’ legacy weren’t enough, Myers actually said The Love Guru was “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas,” a statement that’s actually funnier than anything in the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

The Rep Report: September 5--10

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives commences its salute to Jerry Schatzberg tonight with screenings of the director's firat features, the 1970 alienation-fest Puzzle of a Downfall Child (starring Faye Dunway) and the 1971 The Panic in Needle Park, costarring Al Pacino, in his first starring role, and Kitty Winn as a young couple of heroin addicts. Schatzberg, who seems to be more or less retired, had an erratic career, and to his other problems, he'll probably have at least one chance during his personal appearance at this retrospective to patiently explain that, no, he isn't Joel Schumacher. But as a filmmaker he had a broad curiosity about different milieus and kinds of characters, and his pictures have generally had texture and weight. Needle Park retains interest as a deep quaff of '70s New York at its most confoundingly ungovernable, and Schatzberg can boast of having directed Pacino in both his last performance before The Godfather made him a star and the first picture he made afterwards, the 1973 road movie Scarecrow co-starring Gene Hackman. When Schatzberg made the New York-set Street Smart fifteen years after Needle Park, he had to shoot it in Toronto, but once again he helped launch the movie career of a major star, this time someone who'd been working for decades and would turn fifty the year the picture was released: just a couple of years earlier, Morgan Freeman had been reduced to holding down a job on Another World, but his terrifying performance as a pimp who emerges like a monster from the id to turn pampered reporter Christopher Reeve's life into a pretzel earned him his first Academy Award nomination and a long-belated measure of the industry stature he'd long deserved. Also showing: Honeysuckle Rose, a 1980 country music remake of Intermezzo starring Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon, which introduced Willie's theme song "On the Road Again," and "Reunion," a sadly overlooked 1989 film starring Jason Robards, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Raindance, the British company responsible for the Raindance Film Festival (which opens October 7, by the way), is bringing its educational program to the New York Film Academy. Aspiring filmmakers looking to drop a few bucks towards their futures might want to check out Elliot Grove's "99 MInute Film School" on Tuesday, September 9 and the "Lo to No Budget Filmmaking" seminar on the weekend of September 13 and 14, which bears a recommendation blurb from director Christopher Nolan, whose most recent film, The Dark Knight, has been well-received. This marks the first time the Raindance people's first venture into America, and it might be nice if it wasn't their last, so for God's sake, behave yourselves.

LOS ANGELES: Every Thursday in September, the Silent Movie Theater hosts "Word Is Born: Hip Hop at the Movies, 1979-1984". Included are Hollywood exploitation jobs such as Breakin' and Beat Street, the solid period documentary Style Wars, and on September 25, Beat This! Hip Hop Rarities, winner of this month's Rep Report Award for Promotional Copy That We Have No Intention of Trying to Re-Word: " We've dug even deeper for our closeout night, and we're bringing you some of the rarest cuts in a fantastic mix of rarities from the old-school hip-hop era. Watch them one after the other, obscure odds and ends from the Golden Age, ending with Beat This! A Hip-Hop History! Yup! It’s the history of hip-hop! And it was made in 1984! And it’s all in rhyme! And it’s vocoderized by Afrika Bambaataa! And it’s sci-fi! And it stars BS-ing punk-impresario-turned-double-dutch-promoter Malcolm McLaren in all his patronizing glory! And it was made for Granada TV! And they forced director Dick Fontaine to slip in McLaren against his will, but he couldn’t do anything about it!"

SAN FRANCISCO: Sean McCourt of the Bay Guardian has the dirt on this weekend's Lebowski Fest.

NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth Hi Mom! Film Festival, festuring an international, family-friendly selection of fifty-one animated and live-action shorts, runs this weekend starting tonight, at the Art Center in Carborro. Please note that the outdoor screenings planned for Chapel Hill have been moved indoors due to a "strong threat of rain."

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

5. Steve Carrell as Andy Stitzer in The 40 Year Old Virgin

The poster said (and showed) it all: the painfully earnest expression, the terrible haircut, the little kid shirt and, of course, the no sex. For 40 years. Long past the point when even the nerdiest of nerds have usually managed to score at least a mercy jump from some kind soul, Andy is still living in a lonely geek paradise of pop culture, complete with an incredibly bad-ass video game chair that may, in fact, be even better than sex. But, in his isolation, Andy has also developed a tender soul and some not unimpressive pectorals (beneath a thick pelt of manly chest hair) that, combined with the stealthy square-jawed good looks beneath all the silliness, is sheer catnip to Catherine Keener’s E-Bay entrepreneur (not to mention my wife and most of her friends).

4. Michael Cera as Evan in Superbad and Paulie Bleeker in Juno

My sources inform me that Michael Cera is more cute than hot, although his junk-accentuating yellow shorts in Juno and the fact that he manages to attract Ellen Page’s titular wise-ass are mitigating factors in the case of his performance as teenage Tic-Tac enthusiast Paulie Bleeker. Of course, the geek side of the equation is more obvious...neither Paulie nor Evan seem to be especially popular in their respective high schools, but they earn their spot on this list by personifying exactly the sort of unspoiled misfits who are just on the verge of coming into their own as confident young adults (i.e., a tasty morsel and/or excellent boyfriend material for perceptive partners like Juno and Martha MacIsaac's teen temptress Becca.)

3. Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in all those damn Harry Potter movies

And speaking of manly transformation...to quote blondychik1 over on YouTube regarding a certain nude scene from a certain notorious West End revival of Equus: “When did Daniel grow into a MAN?!?!” Meanwhile, over at Hogwart’s, the Harry Potter Nation has been watching the slow cinematic transformation of their favorite wizard from bespectacled young misfit to post-pubescent master of his wand in a mounting hormonal frenzy that even Muggles can feel way down deep in their Bertie Botts.

2. Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent in Superman I-IV

Respect.

1. Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in Spider-Man 1-3

My wife and my female friends think he’s hot. My gay friends think he’s hot. Mary Jane Watson (personified by smokin’ hot, soakin’ wet Kirsten Dunst) thinks he’s hot. But he’s not JUST hot...he’s also a smart, sweet romantic superhero who’s nice to his cloying, annoying Aunt May...hell, he’s even nice to frenemies like Harry Osborn who try to kill him...AND he can deliver a stack of pizzas to your door from just about anywhere in just over ten minutes. Ladies and gents, I think we have a winner...(but please be sure to let us know who we missed)!

Click here for part 1.