The Screengrab : Penelope

Thursday Poll for November 13, 2007

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

With a little more than two months left until Oscar nominations are announced, who stands the best chance of being nominated from the movies that have already gotten released? If the predictions of Screengrab’s readership hold any water (and we like to think they do), then Anne Hathaway should be very happy come nomination day. Once best known as the star of the Princess Diaries franchise (and later as the girl who gets topless in the otherwise regrettable Havoc), Hathaway’s revelatory lead performance in Jonathan Demme’s near-masterpiece Rachel Getting Married has made a real impression on our readers, nearly half of whom voted for it in last week’s poll. In second place was eternal paparazzi-magnet Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, followed by The Jenkins for his performance in this spring’s word-of-mouth hit The Visitor. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the scant 7% of the vote received by Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, if only because a decade ago she would’ve been practically a shoo-in to get nominated, given Woody Allen’s awards prowess during the nineties.

This week, we presented our list of our favorite 007 movies. Now we leave it to you- which of our top five choices leaves you the most shaken… or stirred?

Which of these 007 movies is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

DVD Digest for July 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a comedic visionary gets the Criterion treatment, Jack goes nuts on Blu-Ray, and the unholy pairing of Martin Lawrence and Donny Osmond hits DVD.

DVD of the Week: Jacques Tati was one of the greatest comic filmmakers ever to man a camera, a brilliant visual filmmaker whose skill at engineering gags was only matched by that of Buster Keaton. Criterion has previously released Tati’s classics M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time, and now they’ve made available a snazzy new edition of Tati’s final theatrical feature Trafic. In Trafic- also the final onscreen appearance of Tati’s signature character Monsieur Hulot- Tati takes on car culture, as Hulot takes to the highways in a souped-up camper and encounters all sort of automotive mishaps and outrageous technology. Compared to the almost impossibly ambitious Play Time, Trafic’s humor is quirkier, but Tati’s sense of timing and gentle humanism are as present as they ever were. The DVD also includes the two-hour documentary In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot from 1989, as well as a number of interviews with the filmmaker and a new essay from critic Jonathan Romney. Trafic may not be as well-known as many of Tati’s beloved classics, but it’s nonetheless an important title in his filmography, definitely worthy of the attention Criterion has lavished on it for this release.

This week’s recent releases on DVD include: College Road Trip (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the aforementioned Lawrence/Osmond vehicle; Jason Statham in the true-crime inspired The Bank Job (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Step Up 2 the Streets (Disney, also Blu-Ray), a sequel no one actually asked for; Aaron Eckhart in Meet Bill (First Look); the Christina Ricci-starring fractured fairy tale Penelope (Summit Entertainment); and the Brazilian Oscar submission The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (WEA). In addition, this week brings a trio of horror releases- Asylum (MGM), Shutter (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the omnibus film Trapped Ashes (Lionsgate), whose participants included Ken Russell, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante.

TV-on-DVD releases this week include Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (Warner) and Saving Grace: Season 1 (Fox).

Finally, the week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Warner).

Christina Ricci’s Happy Meal

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When last you saw Christina Ricci on the screen, she was either sporting a pig snout (Penelope) or chained to a radiator in her panties (Black Snake Moan). She’s made a career of playing “dark, damaged young women,” but as Robert Downey, Jr. might say, she’s about to have her first opportunity to appear on a Slurpee cup. “What's really funny is that people for years had been saying to me, ‘You know, they're going to make a Speed Racer movie and you should totally play Trixie’,” Ricci says in a revealing interview with The Telegraph. “And I do look a little bit anime when I have dark hair with my white skin.”

Like Downey, she has put some personal darkness behind her as well. “Today she looks fighting fit - her skin is clear, her huge hazel eyes are bright, and she is slender but not scarily so. It's a far cry from the well-publicised extremes of her troubled youth when she cut herself and battled with anorexia. At one point she shrank to six stone and so disliked her appearance that she covered all the mirrors in her house.”

Not that Ricci is entirely without worries. As the interview begins, she frets that the paparazzi may have caught her in a compromising position. “I stopped at the pharmacy on the way here and I wasn't very careful getting out of my car. I just didn't think. But this dress is so short… I'm pretty certain there's going to be some crotch shots. At least,” she sighs, “I was wearing underwear.”

At Least I Was Wearing Underwear – it sounds like the perfect name for Ricci’s autobiography. She wore underwear and not much else for her role in Black Snake Moan, which she considers to be her best work to date, even if she wasn’t crazy about the ad campaign. “I thought I was getting into a part where I could really show the gritty reality of someone who had post-traumatic stress syndrome - what we call rape trauma syndrome…then it's sold in this exploitative, objectifying manner, so that I look like I'm part of some 1970s porn, when I'm making a movie about what happens to a f-ing rape victim.”

Ricci can at least be thankful that the image never appeared on a Slurpee cup.

Brand X: Sexy Beast Russell Brand Storms America

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

British comic Russell Brand is the secret star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, playing the oversexed yet hard-to-hate rock star who takes up with the ex-girlfriend who the hero can't get over. Brand recalls that his character "was originally meant to be an author, very bookish. They very kindly, and fortunately for me, rewrote the part on our first meeting, when I was dressed thusly, in this sort of sexy-licorice, S&M, Willie Wonka, rocket-scarecrow attire. That worked out incredibly well for me." Brand, who was encouraged to improvise in the role, admits to having modeled his performance in part on the battling brothers of Oasis, Noel and Liam Gallagher. He also modeled it in part on himself. As Jay Clendenin of the Los Angeles Times summarizes his career highlights, Brand is "a proud three-time winner of PETA's Sexiest Vegetarian of the Year, the Sun's two-time Shagger of the Year and GQ's Most Stylish Man in 2006 and Least Stylish Man in 2007. He's also a recovering heroin and crack abuser whose bestselling memoir, My Booky Wook, opens in a clinic for sex addicts -- or, as he wrote, 'the terminally saucy.'" Always eager to push the outside of the envelope, Brand was once booted off MTV UK after appearing dressed as Osama bin Laden one day after the 9/11 attacks. (He and the network have since kissed and made up.) Asked about the incident today, Brand only shrugs: ""I was a drug addict then, and I thought it was funny. In comedy, I think one has no other obligation than to be funny. Now, on that day, I did not fulfill that basic obligation."

Since attracting attention during the Hackney Empire theater's annual "new talent" competition in 2000, Brand has built a career for himself as a stand-up comic and TV and radio personality, often using his own tabloid exploits as fodder for his act. He broke into American movies last year with a small role in Penelope, and is now filming a part in Bedtime Stories, starring Adam Sandler as a man who entertains his niece and nephew with stories that magically start to come true, and which, you know, sounds just horrible. More intriguingly, he's also said to be adapting his memoir with director Michael Winterbottom, whose sobersides reputation may have to be rehauled if he keeps launching British comedians onto the screen. Will the film verson include the scene at the GQ awards where Rod Stewart, of all people, in what may or may not have been a joke, talked trash about Brand from the stage in retaliation for Brand's having claimed to have shagged Rod's daughter? And if it does, will Steve Coogan play Rod?

2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming.

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

By this time last year, I’d already seen four of the movies that wound up on my 2007 Top Ten list: the fine, Oscar-neglected Zodiac, a sneak preview of Knocked Up at the South-By-Southwest Film Festival, along with two outstanding documentaries, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the lesser-known but equally awesome roller derby-umentary Hell On Wheels.

Even the first quarter cheese I saw last year was pretty entertaining: the silly sexploitation of Black Snake Moan, the gay-panic-at-the-disco iconography of 300, and the A.D.D. chaos of Smoking Aces, a fake Guy Richie movie I enjoyed at least as much Snatch.

So far, at the quarter-mile mark of 2008, the only truly Top 10-caliber flick I've seen is Full Battle Rattle, a SXSW Special Jury award-winning documentary (reviewed here by Mr. Von Doviak on March 17) about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq.

As for the rest of the year-to-date...feh. Cloverfield had moments, but no characters. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Penelope and 21 were all pleasantly unobjectionable but instantly forgettable, and I Am Legend’s deserted Manhattan streets were compelling until the director filled them with boring video game ghoulies.

But, hey, maybe things are looking up for 2008...only three more shopping days ‘til Zombie Strippers!