The Screengrab : aaron eckhart

Morning Deal Report: Jon Hamm on the Howl

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:30:00 GMT

Fans of Mad Men’s Don Draper may see some irony in the fact that the actor who portrays the beatnik-scorning ad exec has taken a role in Howl, the upcoming movie centering on Alan Ginsberg’s obscenity trial. “Hamm will star as defense attorney Jake Ehrlich, whose life was the inspiration for the TV series Perry Mason,” Variety reports. The cast also includes James Franco, Mary-Louise Parker and Jeff Daniels.

Another alien invasion is on the way. Aaron Eckhart will star in Battle: Los Angeles for director Jonathan Liebesman (The Killing Room). Scott Silver (8 Mile) will rewrite “Chris Bertolini's original screenplay, about an alien invasion pulverizing its way across L.A.” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Anyone heartbroken over the news that Zac Efron has dropped out of the Footloose remake – all is not lost. Efron is negotiating to star in The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, “about a caretaker at a cemetery who manages to have weekly meetings with a younger brother whose accidental death he feels was his fault.”

Related:
James Franco Will Howl
SXSW Review: Me and Orson Welles

Morning Deal Report: Aaron Eckhart Hits the Rum

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Aaron Eckhart and Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins are the latest to join the cast of Rum Diary, adapted from the novel by Hunter S. Thompson. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are already aboard. Diary “is the tale of a washed-up, hard-drinking journalist named Paul Kemp (Depp) in 1950s Puerto Rico. Eckhart would play Sanderson, a wealthy landowner who believes everything has a price and introduces Kemp to a different standard of living,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood may have a new Maid Marian. Liz Smith reports in Variety that “Cate Blanchett (she can play anything!) will take over the Maid Marian role in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood movie titled Nottingham. They decided Sienna Miller was too young for their Robin, the somewhat rotund, weighty and contentious Russell Crowe.” So Crowe is both rotund and weighty, which means Miller is too young for him. Makes sense.

Queen of mumblecore Greta Gerwig “has landed the lead role opposite Ben Stiller in the latest Noah Baumbach relationship dramedy,” per THR. The plot of the film, entitled Greenberg, is “under wraps, but it is expected to be set in L.A. and center on relationship intimacies in the manner of past Baumbach pictures.”

Related:
Russell Crowe Will Not Wear Tights
Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

Given its date of release – my senior year of high school – you might think that my unrepentant love of this middling John Carpenter action flick is just geek hangover from my formative years. But really, it’s all down to Buckaroo Banzai. I have a lifelong adoration of pulp fiction, the sort of trashy mass-market literary and cinematic entertainments popular from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, which would occasionally yield surprisingly resonant characters like the Shadow or shockingly talented writers like Raymond Chandler. For the same reason, I’m a fan of modern attempts to conjure that rare era, and one of my all-time favorites is the charming, funny, and utterly inimitable 1982 flick The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. At the very end of the movie, a sequel was promised, but it never materialized; however, its director, W.D. Richter, was hired by John Carpenter to punch up a screenplay called Big Trouble in Little China – a B movie he wanted to turn into an A picture. It wasn’t quite that; in fact, a lot of Big Trouble in Little China can’t even aspire to B quality and settles down somewhere around Z. But it occasionally shows flashes of that demented Buckaroo Banzai genius, and while I normally can’t stand Kurt Russell, his insane John-Wayniac performance as two-fisted trucker Jack Burton (who Russell correctly points out is a hero who never does anything remotely heroic) adds an enjoyably louche element to the whole affair. Big Trouble in Little China is a perfect example of a movie that’s better than it has any right to be.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

As my esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak can testify, Stephen King is responsible for a lot of movies. And many of them are very, very bad. (He doesn’t even seem to like the ones that are good; this is a man who’s on record as liking Maximum Overdrive more than Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.) His collaboration with zombie auteur George Romero – and one of the few major adaptations of his work where he actually wrote the screenplay himself – isn’t a very, very bad movie, but it isn’t a very, very good one either. Like the EC horror comics that serve as its inspiration, it’s unapologetic camp, with all that this implies: when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s worse. With an extremely iffy cast, no particular structure or emotional stakes, and Romero directing like a man who’s looking to buy a summer home, Creepshow has a lot going against it; add to the mix the fact that it features an infamous segment involving a man whose home is overrun by cockroaches, and you’d think I’d hate it more than I hate traffic jams. But, as it happens, Creepshow is one of my all-time guilty pleasures; I can’t say that it’s a good movie, exactly, but I watch it again and again, with some of its flattest, lamest scenes – including King’s own extraterrestrially over-the-top acting debut – being numbered among my favorites. Plus, it has an unbilled cameo by my all-time favorite That Guy!, B-movie king Tom Atkins! How could I not love it?

NURSE BETTY (2000)

There’s plenty of people who don’t even like the good movies that Neil LaBute makes; his early work, like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, has plenty of detractors. But while it’s no Wicker Man, his third full-length feature, Nurse Betty, is widely considered a low point in his career. And, to be honest, I can see why. He didn’t write the script (a meandering thing about a small-town nurse who, stricken with a sort of traumatic amnesia, goes to Hollywood to hook up with the soap opera surgeon she has come to believe is real), which is often flat and more than a few times carries suspension of belief beyond the breaking point. The role of a damaged naïf is suitable to Rene Zellweger, but she’s still a bad actress even when she’s in her comfort zone. And Greg Kinnear and Aaron Eckhart, two actors who have never done much for me, continue to not do much for me here. And yet, and yet…I return to the movie a lot more than I ever thought I would on the first viewing. Most of it has to do with the film’s villains: Morgan Freeman, taking a break from his normal Magical Negro gig to play a veteran hit man, is terrific as a consummate professional who can’t see his own fatal weakness, and Chris Rock is downright astonishing as Freeman’s hotheaded protégé – it’s the only thing Rock has ever done that suggests to me that he might have a pretty goddamn great dramatic actor buried in him somewhere. Thematically, the movie promises a lot more than it can deliver, but for some reason Nurse Betty has always been one of those movies where I forgive the wasted potential, because there seems like so much of it to waste.

SPICE WORLD (1997)

Why all the hate for the Spice Girls? They only wanted to zigga zigga, after all. The massive outpouring of hate directed at them smacked of bad faith, and the claim that they represented the death of music clearly came from people who weren’t paying much attention to the rest of the dross on top 40 radio in 1997. And while I’ll be the first to admit that Spice World is no A Hard Day’s Night, it’s not from lack of trying: if the band, the cast, and the crew lacked the genius and charm of the Beatles, they certainly didn’t lack good intentions, and at heart, they were making the exact same kind of movie. The biggest band in the world bond with each other, drop wisecracks, engage in wacky hi-jinks, and avoid their rabid fans while having a good time doing it. If the Spice Girls weren’t a patch on the Fab Four musically, they did have a similar cultural cachet (albeit for only about five seconds), and who can begrudge them trying to have fun with the movie that was inevitably going to get made about them? And if they lacked the pure charisma of the lads from Liverpool, Mel B and Mel C looked better in skimpy outfits than Ringo Starr looked in anything. The girls came up with the idea for the movie themselves, which makes them more praiseworthy or more blameworthy depending on your perspective, and the producers, knowing that they didn’t have a John Lennon or a Paul McCartney on their hands, at least stuffed Spice World with ringers like Mark McKinney, Stephen Fry, Bob Hoskins and Richard E. Grant. Like the band, Spice World is a fun, ultimately irrelevant little pop gumdrop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, damn it.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Review: “The Dark Knight”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Christopher Nolan’s 2005 franchise re-launch Batman Begins ended with a tantalizing tease (lifted from Frank Miller’s comic book reboot Year One) that all but guaranteed a sequel: Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) revealing the calling card of the new freak in town – a Joker, of course – and implying that by his presence, Batman has raised the stakes for theatricality and large-scale actions among the criminal element in Gotham City. To mostly satisfying results, the highly anticipated and insanely hyped follow-up, The Dark Knight, takes that idea and runs with it. The only problem is, it runs a marathon when a 10K would have sufficed.

As The Dark Knight opens, a new day has dawned on Gotham, with fresh-faced District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) leading the charge. Along with his assistant and girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes, an upgrade in every conceivable way), he has put mob boss Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts) on trial and is closing in on the underworld’s money laundering operation. But he requires a little clandestine help from the city’s resident masked vigilante, who he doesn’t realize is, of course, Rachel’s “psycho ex-boyfriend” Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale).

Crashing the party is a much more dangerous psycho, his scarred face smeared with greasy clown makeup. He cuts a deal with the mob to rid them of the Batman in exchange for half their assets, and the wiseguys are forced to take this Joker seriously once he starts eliminating high-profile targets, including the current police commissioner. It soon becomes clear that the Joker isn’t in it for the money; he’s an unpredictable agent of pure anarchy, looking to reshape Gotham City in his own twisted image.

The Joker, you may have read, is played by the late Heath Ledger in his final full performance. Last week I wrote this cranky post about the somewhat unseemly hype surrounding Ledger’s Oscar chances. I’m still not crazy about all that, but there’s no denying that Ledger delivers the goods. He’s a mesmeric force burning through The Dark Knight like a shooting star – you literally can’t take your eyes off him, and when he’s not onscreen the movie misses him terribly. His Joker isn’t Nicholson’s baggy-pants comedian or Cesar Romero’s hooting harlequin; he has no name, no past, no future, no rules and no reductive “mommy never loved me” back story (or rather, he has a bunch of them, and they all contradict each other). He’s pure, unfettered chaos, and in Ledger’s portrayal, the comic book icon finally becomes one of the great screen villains.

Through its first ninety minutes or so, The Dark Knight is a worthy showcase for him. Nolan manages to keep a lot of plates spinning at once, using the insistent, earworming score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard to make action in disparate locations seem like it’s all part of the same epic sweep. But he has the same problem here as he did in Batman Begins; he’s really good at getting all the parts of the engine tuned up and revving at full force, but he has a much harder time shutting it all down. In its protracted final act, The Dark Knight blunders down some blind alleys and runs through a series of false climaxes en route to the finish line. There’s the matter of introducing another supervillain late in the game, a temptation the Batman series has rarely been able to resist. Here it’s the coin-flipping Two-Face, who has been given short shrift twice now, although admittedly he fares better here than when Joel Schumacher turned him into Jim Carrey’s cackling sidekick in Batman Forever. He does have an arc, but honestly, we don’t care about it as much as we should – which leads to the other big flaw Knight shares with its predecessor.

Nolan and his co-screenwriter (and brother) Jonathan Nolan want to make sure we’re aware that what we’re watching is a cut above the usual summer superhero fare – that it has layers of psychological depth that set it apart from your Hulks and Iron Men. To that end, they have a bad habit of explicating their themes in the dialogue, so that every character becomes an armchair psychologist or amateur sociologist at one time or another. This results in some ponderous musings on morality, madness, fate and the nature of heroism, all of which weigh down the movie in the home stretch. The filmmakers would like to think The Dark Knight is about the battle for Harvey Dent’s soul, and by extension, that of Gotham City, but we know better. It’s all about the Joker, and every minute he’s not on the screen is a minute we’ve been robbed. Heath Ledger left us wanting more, but the same can’t quite be said of The Dark Knight.

Related:
Batman: The Lost Years
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?

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).

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 3-9, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This was the week that was at the Screengrab:

We offered free career advice to the 21st century Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds.

We watched Nicolas Cage, Michael J. Fox and Bruce Willis debase themselves in the Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials.

We compared two versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, two versions of Lolita, and the two faces of Aaron Eckhart.

We climbed The Towering Inferno and floated down the Apocalypse Now river.

We saw a naked Bo Derek drenched in honey and milk in Bolero, the latest entry in the Unwatchable series of 100 worst movies ever.

We expressed concern for Christina Ricci, hailed Jonathan Pryce and looked forward to seeing Bardot’s ass in high definition.

We told you about the 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows and you told us we forgot about Serenity. Sorry about that.

And finally, we got sweet, sweet revenge.

What a week, no?

Trailer Review: The Dark Knight Trailer #3

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Continuing this week’s spotlight of brand new trailers for the summer blockbusters, here’s the brand spankin’ new trailer for the Screengrab team’s predicted #1 hit of the summer. I must say, it looks awfully tasty. As with the last trailer, this one is very Joker-heavy, but for good reason, as Ledger’s final performance looks positively scorching. But at the same time, there’s plenty of room for the other characters, especially Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent, who finally get some screen time as well as a tantalizing final line. The only thing that seems strange to me is how little we actually see of Christian Bale’s performance- most of the shots of him are reaction shots of stuff with him in the suit, which makes me wonder what Christopher Nolan intends to do with the character. But I’m guessing that’s the point- Batman at his best is something of an enigma, and while he’s the hero of the movie the villains (especially the Joker) are much easier to sell. But who am I’m kidding? I’m there opening day, if not before.

The Two Faces of Aaron Eckhart

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Those members of the moviegoing public who aren’t steeped in Batman lore may be wondering why Aaron Eckhart’s turn as seemingly upstanding but bland District Attorney Harvey Dent is getting so much play in the ever-expansive Dark Knight marketing campaign. That’s because one of the most indelible members of Batman’s rogues gallery has never gotten his due on the screen.

“On the campy 1960s Batman television series, the writers imported pretty much every major villain from the namesake comic book -- the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin and Catwoman, etc. -- but not Two-Face,” writes Geoff Boucher in the Los Angeles Times. “He was simply too gross.” Two-Face is the villain Harvey Dent becomes after half his face is scarred with acid. You may or may not have gleaned this from Joel Schumacher’s overstuffed Batman Forever, in which Tommy Lee Jones…I don’t want to say acts, exactly, but at least appears onscreen as Two-Face. If you blinked, you missed the brief clip explaining the character’s origins and were left to wonder who this cackling doofus playing second fiddle to Jim Carrey could possibly be.

In theory, The Dark Knight will rectify this slight, but so far the marketing team has shown rare restraint, keeping the character under wraps while letting the Joker run wild. There’s plenty of Dent in the trailers, but no Two-Face. “That's right, people don't really know yet," Eckert told the Times. “I can tell you that, basically, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stomach. Being the guy under all that, well, that was a lot of fun for me. It's like you would feel if you met someone whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. I can't talk about it beyond that because I don't want to give away too much of the plans by Chris.”

It’s probably too much to hope that the character will remain incognito until the movie opens, which is a shame. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get sick to our stomachs together?

Trailer Review: Meet Bill

Paul Clark — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Isn't the world sick of midlife crisis comedies yet? You would think so, considering that the basic template is almost always the same — man gets fed up with life/job/family, his wife cheats on him (or at least he thinks she does), he rebels against his job, he gets in shape, and starts chasing a younger woman. Yet for some reason or other, filmmakers keep making these movies, perhaps because Hollywood is full of struggling middle-aged screenwriters who feel the need to fob their trite insights off on the world in the name of fiction-as-therapy. Judging by its trailer, Meet Bill doesn't seem to have many new wrinkles on the formula. I like Aaron Eckhart, but unfortunately he doesn't appear to transcend the same-old-same-old feel of the proceedings, and the generic-ass title doesn't inspire much hope either. Also, to Jessica Alba — enjoy your stardom while it lasts, because once you can't coast on your looks anymore, you're going to be in a world of trouble.

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE BLACK DAHLIA

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Although much more commercially successful, the "L.A. Quartet" novels by the disturbed but fascinating noir novelist James Ellroy — consisting of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz — didn't represent the great artistic leap forward that his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and the upcoming Blood's a Rover) did. The latter books were the ones that really lifted Ellroy from skilled genre specialist to ambitious and near-brilliant American novelist, representing both his own development as a writer and his desire to see the noir novel shed its genre restrictions and take its place amongst great literature. Even if one argues that White Jazz is the real transition — and many people have, convincingly — The Black Dahlia is a rough piece of work, somewhat formless and definitely formulaic in a way that his later books would avoid. While it features many of the same themes of sexual obsession and moral ambiguity that would mark his later work, it remained somewhat inextricably bound in the bad parts of pulp and the tendency to police-prodedural tropes. That said, the "L.A. Quartet" books are far more straightforward narratives, with less emphasis on the black depths of psychology and more to carry the narrative than chopped-up internal monologues. No one has yet attempted to film any of the "Underworld U.S.A.", but if it ever happens, the results will likely be a less successful film than L.A. Confidential; the qualities that make it a lesser novel — overemphasis on plot, weaker internal monologue, and a grounding in the archetypical qualities of film noir — are the same ones that made it a better film. The Black Dahlia, for all its faults, is an eminently more filmable book than The Cold Six Thousand. Or so you might have thought until Brian De Palma showed up in 2006 and proved you wrong, wrong, wrong by burping out this mishandled disaster of an adaptation. WHAT IT HAD: Good intentions, and not much else. It's not as if De Palma doesn't know how to handle film noir — he's proven on many occasions that he's adept at the genre, and had illustrated his affinity as recently as his previous movie (2002's underrated Femme Fatale). Even though he wasn't able to hold his post-modernist trickster tendencies in check, The Black Dahlia could have worked as simultaneous tribute to and subversion of classic noir, the only possible way to read the way it came out that makes any sense, if he'd assembled a better cast, better script, and. . . well, different director. Mark Isham provides some nice, moody music for the soundtrack, and, as one might expect from the man who brought you The Untouchables, it's a gorgeous-looking film with some great Vilmos Szigmond cinematography.

WHAT IT LACKED: Where to begin? A coherent vision, a decent script, a solid creative interpretation of the source material, a consistent point of view, and most of all, a cast worthy of the material. Screenwriter Josh Friedman had worked on the script for years, but it's still a mess, and clearly not to his strengths, which lie mostly in sci-fi genre work. It had originally been optioned to David Fincher, who, given De Palma's clear boredom and frustration with the project, may have been a much better choice to tackle the project. And the cast is pretty much an absolute disaster: Josh Hartnett completely lacks either charisma or weight, Scarlett Johansson is in way over her head, Aaron Eckhart is a non-entity, Hilary Swank looks like she should be in a completely different movie, and Mia Kirshner isn't even remotely up to the task of playing the title role, especially given that it's much expanded from the novel.

DID IT SUCCEED?: No way. Brian De Palma is already one of the most divisive directors around, with legions of haters for every dozen fans he's picked up over the years, but even his staunchest defenders — I'm one — couldn't get behind The Black Dahlia. The critical consensus on the release of the long-awaited film was that it was a megaton bomb, and for once, the accepted wisdom is pretty much right on the money. A good movie could have been made from James Ellroy's novel, but this sure as hell isn't it. The novel is a formative effort from Ellroy, and while L.A. Confidential is still superior to the movie, so too is The Black Dahlia for entirely different reasons. With White Jazz slated to hit the big screen next year directed by Joe Carnahan — who most recently brought us the abysmal Smokin' Aces — Ellroy's luck with film adaptations of his work will likely continue circling the drain.