The Screengrab : Parker Posey

Forgotten Films: "The Daytrippers" (1987)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Greg Mottola's low-pressure charmer Adventureland hasn't done the business it deserved, but as a major studio release, it at least stands the chance of an afterlife on DVD. Maybe if the gods are kind, somebody will roll the dice on getting Mottola's debut film, The Daytrippers, back into print on home video. When this comedy first started drifting into theaters in 1997, it stood apart from the indie-film pack for its unflashiness and lack of condescension towards its middle-class characters. Seen today, it may inspire a certain nostalgia for its movie era: here are the indie-film all-stars of the late '90s in the full bloom of youth, before they started lining up to take on Wolverine or competing with each other to see whose new TV series could get cancelled quickest. The Daytrippers begins with Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as an apparently happily married couple living in Long Island. Tucci works at a Manhattan publishing firm, and after he heads off for work with plans not to be back home for a couple of days, Davis finds what seems to be a love letter that was written to him by someone named Sandy. Confused and nervous, Davis invites her family--including her parents (Anne Meara and Pat McNamara), her sister (Parker Posey), and the sister's boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber)-- to talk her into believing that it's nothing. The upshot is that the whole pack winds up venturing into the city to confront Tucci, piled into a broken-down station wagon with a busted heater on a late-November day that isn't getting any warmer.

The suspense is pretty much kept under control. Any questions about whether or not Davis has good reason to distrust her husband were answered as soon as Tucci nabbed the part. Nor is The Daytrippers what we film blogger types or others with working eyeballs would call "visually distinguished." Its pleasures come from watching so many gifted comedians shoved together and left to chew on each other. The cast also includes Campbell Scott (who co-directed Big Night with Tucci, and who would also co-star with Davis in The Secret Lives of Dentists, Duma, and the TV series Six Degrees) as a novelist, the writer-director Douglas McGrath as Tucci's boss, and Marcia Gay Hardin, who tears it up in a cameo as a woman who's come to a holiday party so she can make an elaborate show of not paying attention to her ex-boyfriend while asking strangers to check to see whether he's paying any attention to her.

As Carl, Liev Schreiber delivers a beautifully full portrait of a sweet, well-meaning intellectual pseud who, unless nothing is done to discourage him, is well on his way to becoming a full-blown asshole of fearsome proportions. "Let me tell you something," he says by way of making small talk as the car crawls past the architectural horrors that dot landscape along the L.I.E., "the Europeans may have been imperialists, but they knew how to make a building." Carl, whose need to declare his superiority to the rabble has inspired him to become Long Island's leading proponent of a return to a system of aristocracy, enlivens the road trip by describing the plotline of his novel, "an allegory about spiritual survival in the contemporary world" about a man born with the head of a dog. "What kind of dog?" asks Dad. It doesn't matter, Parker Posey says, but Carl jumps in happily to stress that it's actually a very important detail. It's a German short-haired pointer.

Good as the men are, The Daytrippers really belongs to its women. Hope Davis, not for the last time, demonstrates a special gift for seeming too depressed to think while simultaneously being funny and likable and even seeming rather lively. (Just standing still, she'd have been thrown out of an Antonioni movie for disturbing the peace.) She keeps you guessing about just how much emotional life there might be behind those heavy lids until the climactic moment when she catches sight of her husband across a crowded room, acting suavely goofy, and her face breaks out into a wide grin that life is about to take a sledgehammer to. Posey does a reverse spin on the same act, acting vivacious and flirty in a way that seems to hint that her character is a total bitch waiting for the moment to attack, only to reveal the defensive little girl (and supportive sister) hidden inside the attitude and layers of make-up and clothing. (With her lips a crimson slash and blue raccoon eyes, and wearing a green scarf and red thigh-highs with a heavy winter jacket, she's the most colorful thing to be seen on this fall day, and when she makes a run for it, she looks like a yard sale in motion.) And the eternally underused Anne Meara probably has the best movie role of her life; she's the essence of every parent whose zealousness to pound their children's lives into the shape they think they should be has turned them into a gorgon. She's Livia Soprano with a human face.

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

PARKER POSEY AS DARLA IN DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

The first time I ever saw Parker Posey on screen, a camera was swooping down on her ‘70s mean girl, Darla, as the dominatrix in bellbottoms screamed, “All right, you little freshman bit-ches!” in the midst of a bizarre Texas hazing ritual in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused...and for me, it was love at first sight, both for the character and the actress portraying her. Darla was the epitome of the smart, formidable high school queen bee nerds like me pretended to hate but secretly wished we were cool (or hot) enough to hang with...the sort of girl that fuels class reunion fantasies of all varieties. And Posey zaps every precious second of the character’s too-brief screen time with megawatt voltage, whether helping Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson keep L-I-V-I-N by grabbing a meaty handful of his aging stoner ass or advising some hapless underclassman to “wipe that face off your head, bitch!” Despite later good roles in the likes of Party Girl, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and the Christopher Guest oeuvre, Posey was never quite this incandescent again...not unlike the real-life Darlas of the world, who eventually graduate and somehow never recapture that brilliant spark of absolute adolescent power. (AO)

SEAN PENN AS JEFF SPICOLI IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

There have been a lot of stoner comedy routines in movies, but nobody has ever acted being toasted with the Method intensity of Penn as Spicoli, while making it funny. Penn is the kind of actor who aims to convince you he's morphed into whoever he's playing, but as Spicoli, who's "been stoned since the third grade", he doesn't just transform himself physically and spiritually, he declares his emancipation from gravity. Sweetly pledging that all he needs in life are tasty waves and a cool buzz, he blurs the line between being out of it and being in a state of grace. (PN)

WALTER MATTHAU AS COACH BUTTERMAKER IN THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Few things are funnier in the movies (though not real life) than adults being mean to children. And, with the possible exception of Billy Bob Thornton’s bad Santa, no adult character has ever gotten more mileage out of behaving unsuitably around kids than Walter Matthau’s Coach Morris Buttermaker in Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears. An ex-minor league ballplayer who takes a job as the coach of a lousy little league squad, Buttermaker is the exact opposite of a role model, showing up to work hungover, endlessly smoking and drinking beer in front of his young charges, and putting them down with droll callousness. Of course, Buttermaker and the Bears’ story is an ultimately redemptive one, a narrative arc which presumably goes some way toward excusing the coach’s early, improper conduct. But people learning and growing isn’t why Ritchie’s film endures as a comedy classic; the sight of the peerlessly cranky Matthau passed out next to the pitching mound, empty beer cans lying nearby, is. (NS)

REX HARRISON AS SIR ALFRED DE CARTER IN UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948)

Who doesn't love a movie where the fool is the pompous highbrow? As pointed out in the excellent commentary in the attached clip (the only clip of this movie on youtube, sadly), Preston Sturges directs this one fairly close to the heart. Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter (the "de" in the middle is an exquisite joke all on its own), a conductor who suspects his younger wife of infidelity. The movie proceeds with a fantastic comic plot: De Carter conducts three orchestral pieces, and in each imagines a different way of murdering his wife. In the final part of the movie, he heads home to put his nefarious plans into action, which is where the movie tips into some first-rate slapstick. That's what you call black comedy! Harrison plays an excellent upper-crust twit, being believably competent in his privileged artistic role but an inept bungler at the fairly simple crime of murder. There's hilariously great screwball dialogue throughout and a kneeslapper of an overwritten slice of purple cheese to cap off the movie. Skip the remake and go straight to the source for the good stuff. (HC)

MICHAEL SIMON AS BOUDU IN BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (1932)

Boudu is the holiest of holy fools, a vagrant who is unexpectedly drawn into a comfortable middle-class existence where he destroys every social rule he faces. It is a testament to the skill of Michel Simon, who played Boudu, that he remains a comic, and mostly sympathetic, force of nature even as his behavior ranges from merely obnoxious to outright felonious. Jean Renoir was a master of ripping asunder the veil of the French class system with the deftest of touches. Consider the scene above, in which Boudu eats sardines with his bare hands. The French public apparently rioted at this. And at the scene where he wiped shoe polish all over a fine bedroom. But the scene where he seduces/rapes his benefactor's wife? That left them unfazed. The movie ends with Boudu finding a way to yet again subvert his benefactor's attempts to give him the Eliza Doolittle treatment in a way that suggests that he never needed to be saved from drowning in the first place. Don't subject yourself to the awful remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills; stick to the original for the real comic masterpiece. (HC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Faking Farts with Olivia Thirlby

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

If you already have a crush on Olivia Thirlby based on her performances in Juno, The Wackness and/or Snow Angels – and of course you do – you may not want to read the new Papermag profile of the actress, which is specifically designed to instill or enhance such a crush whether you want it or not.

“With an urban sensibility that could only come from having grown up in New York City, Thirlby is the kind of girl that appeals to guys who might have a thing for Zooey Deschanel or a young Parker Posey (read: twenty-somethings who wear glasses, whether they need them or not),” writes Whitney Spaner, who obviously knows the Screengrab’s weaknesses all too well. But wait! She’s also “grounded and well-humored”! For example, Thirlby “has set her sights on playing Princess Fiona on Broadway in Shrek the Musical, if only to sing Fiona and Shrek's lovey-dovey song about, um, breaking wind, if you will. Fake fart noises are sort of Thirlby's M.O. "I saw it with my best friend, who's known me for years, and she grabbed my arm and said, 'Oh my god, it's you!' They were onstage farting for like a whole minute.”

But if a fondness for fake farting isn’t enough to sway your affections, how about the fact that she “operates on a strict monthly budget, depends on the subway and doesn't relish the idea of becoming so famous that she can't ride public transportation without being recognized. ‘I don't think it will ever get there,’ she says, genuinely hopeful. ‘Chris Noth rides the subway everyday, so if he can do it, I can do it.’” Obviously she has no idea which Screengrab personnel ride the New York subway.

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Sundance Preview: Five Movies to Skip

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of tonight’s kickoff of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I’ve been previewing the must-see films: Tuesday we looked at documentaries and yesterday we checked out the narrative features. But it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. Every film festival of note screens its share of duds, and you don’t want be wasting valuable time you could spend riding a giant inner tube down a snowy peak. (Seriously, if you’re in Park City this week, do this. It’s super fun.) Here are five movies I’d scratch off my list if I happened to be in town.

BLACK DYNAMITE

Sure, this could be entertaining. The trailer makes it looks like pure blaxploitation pastiche, as if it’s the missing third piece of Grindhouse. The Sundance guide does nothing to dissuade me from this perception: “Black Dynamite is a throwback with an attitude. Hilarious, campy, hot, and sexy, it plays with every cliché from 1970s film and television, with a few new ones thrown in for color.” Personally, I think that could get real old real quick, but then, I sat through both I’m Gonna Get You Sucka and Undercover Brother, so maybe I’m just burnt out.

THE INFORMERS

Less Than Zero and American Psycho have their defenders, I suppose, but none of them are currently typing these words. So this description doesn’t particular light my fire: “Sex, drugs, and new wave...Los Angeles in the early 1980s: a time of excess and decadence, and nobody captures it better than Bret Easton Ellis as he coadapts his own acclaimed novel for the screen.” That’s not a world I have any interest in revisiting, although given that the cast includes Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder and the late Brad Renfro, I wouldn’t mind seeing a warts-and-all making-of documentary. I’m guessing it was not a placid, well-oiled production.

SHRINK

In another time – it seems so distant now – I would have watched Kevin Spacey read the phone book. His string of ‘90s performances, including Glengarry Glen Ross, Swimming with Sharks and The Usual Suspects left me eager to see what he’d do next. Then he caught the worst case of Oscar-itis since Nicolas Cage. (Pay It Forward. K-PAX. The Fucking Life of David Fucking Gale!) Now I can scarcely stand the sight of him, and Shrink sure doesn’t sound like the movie that will change that. “What happens when the people we count on to hold us together…are barely holding it together themselves? Jonas Pate's Shrink is a striking, fast-paced exposé of the ‘other’ Hollywood, featuring folks living outside their comfort zone and the people who put them there. Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey) is a psychiatrist with an A-list clientele, including a once-famous actress (Saffron Burrows), an insecure young writer (Mark Webber), and a comically obsessive-compulsive superagent (Dallas Roberts).” Kevin – get help!

SPREAD

The Sundance guide’s description of Spread is simply overflowing with sentences that make me never want to set foot in a movie theater again. ‘Los Angeles is often the customary site for mythmaking in the American cultural iconography. It is a place, for instance, where the legend of the sexual exploits of the male gigolo seems perfectly at home in the decadent universe of Hollywood dreams and nightmares. Surely inspired by the classic tradition of American Gigolo and Shampoo, Spread is such a perfectly tuned, contemporary depiction of the trials and tribulations of sleeping your way to wealth and success that, guilty pleasure or not, it’s irresistible. Especially so since it’s driven by the iconic persona of Ashton Kutcher. – ” Aaaand, this is the point where I make a break for the bathroom and hug the toilet close to my face. I didn’t even get to the part about his romancing of “middle-aged client” Anne Heche. There are some visuals I don’t need in my head.

SPRING BREAKDOWN

I don’t want to hate on Amy Poehler or (especially) Parker Posey, whose big screen appearances have been all too scarce of late, but this looks like absolute dogshit. “For Judi, Gayle, and Becky, tragically unhip bosom buddies pushing 40, “make-your-own-pizza night” constitutes the pinnacle of revelry. But when Judi’s fiancé turns out to be gay, Gayle’s face repulses a blind guy, and Becky’s beloved cat kicks the bucket, they’re ready for real pampering. Dusting themselves off, the trio heads for some R&R;on South Padre Island, where Becky’s supposed to chaperone her boss’s daughter.” Seriously, try to get through the trailer above. This is a Sundance movie? Time to hit the slopes!

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I grew up right next door to Thanksgiving Town, USA: Plymouth, Massachusetts, former home of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and future home of Plymouth Rock Studios and a nice big casino.

My next door neighbors used to work at Plimoth Plantation, where docent actors dress up in 17th century drag and mosey up and down the streets of a life-size replica Pilgrim settlement, discussing crops and Calvinism, while modern Native Americans in traditional buckskin attire give their side of the story in a nearby encampment.

So I like to think I know a thing or two about Thanksgiving. And let me tell you: it’s not all about the yams.

In fact, before the Macy’s Day Parade and the advent of that delicious Brundlefly monstrosity known as Turducken, the fourth Thursday of November was all about chowing down eel and corn and celebrating a bountiful harvest. In fact, as I learned on a recent visit to Plimoth Plantation, the name for the annual kick-off to the Christmas shopping season is actually a compound word that literally means “giving thanks”!

And so, as we here at the Screengrab prepare our traditional Turkey Day feast of pretzel sticks, jelly beans, two slices of toast and a handful of popcorn, we’d like to just take a few moments to express our gratitude for the people, places and movies that made us the full-on film geeks we are today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE SCREENGRAB!

ANDREW OSBORNE IS THANKFUL FOR:

WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1950 & 1972)

Forget Mickey Mouse: Bugs Bunny was there from the start, teaching me the importance of carrots, proper directions to Albuquerque and a wised-up appreciation of life (for all its feathered frenemies, megalomaniacal Martians and gun-toting Fudds). So I was a bit disappointed when I realized What’s Up, Doc? (the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater) wasn’t a cartoon...but Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap screwball homage soon won me over with its igneous rocks and silly accents and, especially, that endless, blissful car chase through the streets, alleys and staircases of San Francisco (and, eventually, San Francisco Bay). All that (plus a gratifying act three cameo by Mr. Bunny himself!) made this goofy-smart romantic comedy my first favorite movie, and it only got better with time as I grew up and came to appreciate the chemistry of Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand (both at their cinematic finest) and the comedic brilliance of the irreplaceable Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton and Kenneth Mars. But the real reason this movie’s on the list is so I can say thank you to my film geek parents for always bringing me to whatever movie they went to go see on a Saturday night (even when it scared the bejesus out of me), thus instilling a life-long love of pop culture that’s guided my cinematic view of the world ever since. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

STAR WARS (1977)

I’ve already written an embarrassing number of posts about the life-changing religious experience of seeing this movie as an excitable, impressionable ten year old nerd, but looking back on it now, I can only say...George Lucas, all is forgiven. (And besides, what’s Thanksgiving without the Star Wars Holiday Special?)

THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Given the embarrassing Baby Boomer reverence for Lawrence Kasdan’s self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Love Generation touchstone of growing up and selling out (not to mention the way the film pretty much ruined all the songs on its mega-hit Motown soundtrack by making them go-to clichés for every subsequent entry in the “Diane Keaton dancing around a living room” genre), this one almost wound up on last week’s Guilty Pleasures list. But despite all the people who deride the film as just a shallow rip-off of John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven, I have no guilt and nothing but love for The Big Chill. I first saw it after a particularly painful orthodontist’s appointment in my junior year of high school, and though I may not have been the intended target audience, I took the movie instantly to heart, partly for its evocation of the sixties (an era I romanticized desperately in the Just Say No Reagan eighties), but mostly for its celebration of the enduring power of friendship.

JOHN WATERS & DIVINE

Then, after high school, I stopped Saying No and dove headfirst into the psychedelic wonderland of college, that freaky, institutionalized Rumspringa when America’s sons and daughters move away from home and go batshit crazy for a year or three. After spending the first eighteen years of my life as an upright goody two-shoes, I was itching to break bad and take a walk on the trashy side...and when it comes to desperate living, I quickly discovered there was no better tour guide than John Waters and his large and lovely muse, Divine. From Mondo Trasho to Hairspray, Baltimore’s favorite son and fake daughter warped my young adult mind with their glorious bad taste, healthy disrespect for convention and pre-punk aesthetic, while also serving as self-made role models of DIY ingenuity for those determined to live a life less ordinary.

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

In 1993, my then-girlfriend and I attended an L.A. cast and crew screening of Dazed and Confused (with, if memory serves, my future Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak). We didn’t know any of the soon-to-be-famous actors in the stellar ensemble cast (including Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck) when the lights went down, but when the lights came up, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by characters we’d only just met but felt like we’d known forever: hey, look! It’s O’Bannion and Darla! And over there! It’s Wooderson! (All right, all right, all right!) A few months later, I got dumped by the aforementioned girlfriend, but numerous subsequent screenings of Dazed and Confused helped to ease the pain, and today I remember Richard Linklater’s last day of school and first night of summer vacation at least as fondly as my actual high school experience.

PULP FICTION (1994)

Some movies you see and forget just as soon as the lights come up. Pulp Fiction was not one of those movies. In 1994, I spent every last dime I had (and a lot of dimes that I didn’t have) attempting to surf the Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes indie renaissance with my own no-budget 16mm production, Apocalypse Bop (starring the indomitable Mr. Von Doviak), which I’d spent the summer directing back in my home town near Thanksgiving Town, USA. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and so when the movie wrapped, I decided to road trip back to the West Coast with a couple of friends from the Bop shoot. Stopping for breakfast in Austin, Texas, one of those friends met a girl and couldn’t stop thinking about her, so when we finally reached California, he called her up and asked if she wanted to go see Pulp Fiction with him on opening night. She said yes, and so he turned around and flew right back to Austin. Meanwhile, my return to L.A. woke me up from my filmmaking fandango to the cold, hard reality that I was unemployed, with no prospects and no money to pay my rent. I had exactly twenty dollars to my name. And I’m happy to say I spent that twenty dollars on popcorn and a ticket to go see the opening night of Pulp Fiction with my pals in the San Fernando Valley, while my other friend was watching the same movie on the same night on his cross-country date in The Lone Star State. He wound up staying in Austin for the next several years, and days after watching Jules and Vincent Vega strut across the screen to the strains of “Misirlou,” my own bacon got snatched from the brink of disaster by an out-of-the-blue offer to go work on a war movie in the Philippines. And so I’m eternally grateful to have once been young and foolish enough to have those kinds of adventures, living in extremis at exactly the right time and with exactly the right people the night Quentin Tarantino got medieval on our ass.

SXSW, THE PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL & THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS (2009)

And speaking of Austin, the city of Slacker has been, at different times, my literal and spiritual home away from home for years now, and never is it more glamorous (or crowded) than the middle of March, when the capitol of Texas plays host to the South-By-Southwest music and film festival, a fantastic collision of pop culture, booze and barbecue that makes Thanksgiving look like Arbor Day. Every spring, it renews my faith in the vaunted “indie film” spirit (even though I’m old enough to know better), and then every summer, I take another, mellower sip of the indie Kool-Aid (not to mention the world’s best Bloody Marys) at the Provincetown Film Festival, with John Waters presiding as patron saint in the same way Richard Linklater is the Mayor of South-By...and with all that friggin’ indie spirit washing over me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed once again to its siren song, so I’ll just wrap up this list with thanks to my collaborators on The Meat City Beatniks, an indie film musical (co-written by me, Scott Von Doviak, Eric Jacobson and Jim Dryden) and starring Elliot Dort, Ben Gallant, Sheree Bass, Matthew Woodward, Rob McKim, Ms. Amar, Joe Gallo, Michael Sesling, Kellianne MacFarlane, Bill Christensen and Amy Jeglinski-Osborne...a production which (thankfully) I mostly managed to wrap in 2008 and which will (hopefully) premiere in 2009...so stay tuned! (And have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Click Here For More Thanks From Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

REAL GENIUS (1985)

If there’s one thing America hates, it’s smart people. Brainy elitists like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and that pencil-neck geek we used to beat up in gym class make us nervous, inspiring vague feelings of inadequacy that can usually be doused by voting for down-to-earth “real” people like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, who don’t know how to pronounce “nuclear” (and really couldn’t give a shit). But Martha Coolidge’s ensemble comedy about fledgling scientists at a fictionalized CalTech depicts a world where mental, not physical, strength is prized and knowledge (in the form of Val Kilmer’s fast-talking, wisecracking Chris Knight and Michelle Meyrink’s official Screengrab Sexy Nerd Jordan) is hot. The story’s teen prodigy protagonist Mitch Taylor (Gabriel Jarrett...largely MIA in recent years but reappearing soon in Frost/Nixon) and aging burnout Laslo (Jon Gries) embody the double-edged sword of intellectual aptitude, where intimate knowledge of chemical laser technology is no guarantee of success, happiness or intimacy with actual humans, while the surprisingly charming Kilmer offers a hopeful balance of “real” and “genius,” with the wherewithal to understand that light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation can also be used to blow off steam by pointing the way to the occasional pool party blow-out.

SCHOOL DAZE (1988)

Oh, college...where politics, drinking and date rape are never more than a quad away. This Spike Lee joint takes us to the Mission College campus, a historically black alma mater back in the "divest from South Africa, support ANC" days. It stars Giancarlo Esposito as a fascistoid fraternity leader, Laurence Fishburne as Dap, a righteous, wet-behind-the ears campus radical and Spike Lee as his vertically challenged cousin Half-Pint. Half-Pint is not so much into the politics, being more given to Greek life. The movie follows Dap's quest to get the college to divest and Half-Pint's quest to pledge with the Gamma-Phi-Gammas and get laid. Like any self-respecting college movie, School Daze, takes us through pledge week, a homecoming parade and a dance scene in which half-naked coeds get down to a band. All that plus musical numbers and parachute pants.

KICKING AND SCREAMING (1995)

I don't know about you folks, but my college experience was not a nonstop bacchanal of toga parties and panty raids (although that description accurately applies to the typical day at Screengrab headquarters), so the average college movie doesn't really speak to me. My memories of those days mostly involve bantering about matters great and small over a pitcher of beer with good friends, neurotic fretting about dysfunctional relationships and, towards the end, a sort of heart-freezing paralysis at the prospect of "life" awaiting me. That's probably why I've always loved Noah Baumbach's debut Kicking and Screaming, one of the few "Gen X" movies (along with Linklater's Slacker) that didn't make me want to set fire to the movie theater. (Let us not even speak of Reality Bites.) Baumbach's film covers the final day of college and the aimless months that follow for a group of friends finding it hard to move on from their routine of trivia contests, verbal jousting and picking up undergrads at the local pub. The ensemble includes Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton and the scene-stealing Carlos Jacott, all of whom clearly relish Baumbach's literate, martini-dry dialogue, as well as Eric Stolz in one of his best roles, a sort of intellectual doppelganger of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused ("Why would I ever leave? I am a student and that's what I chose.") Have fun with those slobs at Delta House – I'll be over here thinking up eight movies where monkeys play key roles.

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986)

Innumerable horror movies have taken place on college campuses or featured college students as the protagonists, but more often than not, this is just so the producers can film the movie on the cheap and have an excuse to put nubile twenty-somethings in front of the camera. The highly enjoyable 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps, on the other hand, not only makes full use of its campus setting (having the alien menace begin its rampage in a menacing corner of the biology lab), but with its campy tone, hilariously quotable dialogue, nerdy outcast protagonists, delightfully lo-fi approach, and innumerable film student in-jokes, it actually plays like a movie that was made by college students. Writer/director Fred Dekker wasn’t exactly that when he made Night of the Creeps, but he wasn’t far from it; he was only 26, and, having been rejected by both UCLA and USC’s film schools, he had something to prove. His later efforts didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but his debut remains one of the most enjoyable horror flicks of the 1980s – a movie that plays more like an admiring postmodern salute to the old B-movie fare of yesteryear than the grim misogynist slasher flicks that dominated the decade. (For those who are, ahem, of a certain age, the movie’s fashions and music will also bring back memories of college that may not be altogether pleasant.) The whole movie is sustained with its terrific sense of humor, much of which is dryly delivered by inimitable character actor Tom Atkins.

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

Sam Raimi’s second installment of the Spider-Man franchise isn’t just one of the best super-hero movies ever made; it’s a good solid college movie as well, that speaks to any busy student with or without radioactive arachnid powers. Think about it: Marvel Comics has always prided itself on mixing real-world angst with its crimefighting action; that’s the factor that made the Spider-Man comic such a success in the first place. And that kind of storytelling is very much on display here: Peter Parker, fresh out of high school and entering his first semester at Empire State (an institution of higher learning that, as a child, I was determined I would one day attend until I found out it wasn’t real), and the turmoil that so thoroughly futzes with his state of mind both in and out of costume all throughout Spider-Man 2 are familiar ones to anyone who’s ever been in college. He’s on a full ride, but his family’s not doing so well; he’s got to work a low-paying, demeaning job to help out, and that cuts into his study time. His girlfriend has eschewed college to pursue a successful career, and he’s not only barely got time to see her, but he’s even a little jealous. He’s drifting away from his only high school friend. His precocious genius isn’t as impressive to his college professors as it was to his high school teachers. And his educational mentor undergoes a horrible accident and rampages all over New York with the robotic limbs fused to his torso. Okay, maybe that last one’s a stretch, but still – you get the idea.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

John Waters + Johnny Knoxville + Parker Posey = Fruitcake!

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

What with the new Broadway version of his 1990 Johnny Depp vehicle, Cry-Baby, and the hit film of the hit musical of his 1988 indie hit Hairspray keeping him busy, John Waters hasn’t had a chance to actually write and direct a new movie since 2004...and considering said movie was A Dirty Shame and the one before that was Cecil B. Demented, I haven’t exactly been holding my breath.

But Perez Hilton blogged Thursday that Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey are now attached to Waters' next project, the Christmas comedy Fruitcake.

According to Perez and THR.com, the film (originally set up at Waters’ alma mater, New Line) is being produced by Killer Films, That Is That Productions and, possibly, ThinkFilm. The plot has something to do with “a boy named after his favorite dessert” who “runs away from home during the holidays after he and his parents are caught shoplifting meat, then meets up with a runaway girl raised by two gay men and searching for her birth mother.”

After more than four decades in the film business, it’s astonishing how amateurish Waters’ recent cinematic output has been, but here’s ho-ho-hoping the Christmas motif of Fruitcake will inspire him to raise the bar at least as high as Pecker (1998), arguably his last truly coherent film.

At the very least, Waters' talk-show P.R. tour should liven up the holidays considerably...so, God bless us, every one!