The Screengrab : back to the future

Michael J. Fox's Missing Years

Phil Nugent — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

"It has been so long since Michael J Fox was a movie star", Emma Brockes notes in the Guardian, "that he's not sure his youngest children even know that's what he was, nor what he does for a living now." Fox and Tracy Pollan, his wife wife of twenty-one years, have four kids: nineteen-year-old Sam; twin fourteen-year-old girls, Aquinnah and Schuyler, and eight-year-old Esme, is eight. "I don't know that they've ever seen Back To The Future all the way through. Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career. I go down to my office every day and they say, 'Dad's going to work.'" Fox was first diagnosed with Parkinson's seventeen years ago, a year after he "woke up one morning in 1990 and noticed his little finger shaking," which he took for "a side effect of a hangover." At the time, Fox was already in a strange place mentally, trying to navigate a career path from Back to the Future's 24-year-old teen idol to success in more mature, or at least grown-up, roles. In his new book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures Of An Incurable Optimist, Fox recalls that period of his life as one spent in "the bubble", with fear as the dominant emotion. He was away from home a lot, and when he was at home, he drank at lot. The Parkinson's diagnosis did nothing to wean him off the bottle. "The alarm call came a year later, when he woke up on the sofa one morning, stinking of booze, with his baby son crawling on him and half a can of beer on the floor next to him. When he opened one eye to see his wife looking down at him, she didn't seem angry or disgusted, but, worse, indifferent."

Fox says that his first reaction to being diagnosed with Parkinson's was, "Hide." He was told that "if he was lucky he could keep acting for another decade", and that's about what happened: in 1996, Fox played his last starring, on-screen role in a movie in Peter Jackson's underrated The Frighteners and then jumped back to TV for the stability that a weekly series offered in Spin City. (He had practically auditioned for the sitcom role a year earlier with his supporting role in The American President.) He left the show in 2000, two years after going public with his condition. Of this milestone, he writes in the book, "I had been Mike the actor, then Mike the actor with PD. Now was I just Mike with PD."Since then he's done some voice work and short stints on Boston Public, Scrubs, and most recently, Rescue Me. Of that last gig, he says, "It felt good. I played a paraplegic, which is insane. It was nice to revisit [acting] again. But at the same time I didn't feel like, 'Aw, I'm home!' It was like visiting a place where you know the currency and the language, but you've moved on."

In his previous book, Lucky Man, Fox wrote about coming to terms with his ailment; in the new one, he describes his public evolution into a public advocate for stem-cell research at a time when the political powers that be didn't want to hear it. He cut a campaign commercial for a friendly candidate and wound up helping the country gauge the general level of Rush Limbaugh's loathsomeness. But after having a troubled reaction to seeing "a younger, healthier me" on TV one night, he managed to make a happier connection with Muhammad Ali, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1984. "Fox rang Ali's wife, Lonnie, to ask about this particular thing, the horror of being confronted with the way you once were. 'I was thinking, What does he think when he sees himself on television as he was as Cassius Clay? Ducking and weaving and joking and spouting poetry. Does he feel sadness? A sense of loss?' Lonnie said, 'He loves it. He loves to see himself. He can't get enough of it.' 'And I got that,' says Fox. 'Because it's still him. Parkinson's doesn't take away anything of his identity.'"

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

He only has 90 minutes before he has to catch that plane, and boom!, the love of his life shows up. Last time they met, they had only one night together. Now that they're older, time is even more precious, and they are even more uncertain how to proceed. The last time, the story could look away, passing time through ellipses, but this time, everything has to unfold in real time. Because love doesn't care about your schedule, and it comes and goes as it pleases. In 1995, when Before Sunrise came out, I was 23 and I didn't know how to appreciate the tender little moments life has to offer. I didn't know how hard it is to make a connection with someone, and I let friends and potential loves slip out of my grasp. In short, I understood the characters in Before Sunrise. I could see a little of myself in Jesse, and let this be the only time I admit kinship with Ethan Hawke. I never gave up anything as precious as Jesse and Celine (and, Julie Delpy, how many people my age are in love with you?) in Before Sunrise, but I could easily see how something like that could happen. When its sequel came out in 2004, I was 32, happily married, and I had learned a little more about how the world worked. And Before Sunset just tore my heart out, heedless. How do you deal with the person who makes you remember the person you were, let alone the torrent of old emotions and regrets? The structure of the movie insists that neither has time to dwell on regrets and anger, but they have to address it. Their connection isn't the superficial kind. Richard Linklater has had his ups and downs as a filmmaker, but he's never been finer than he was with this movie. Some people may like their car chases, but the pursuit of the most dangerous game draws more blood and quickens the breath like nothing else. (HC)

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Back to the Future (yes, that's part one, you fools, what kind of philistine do you take me for?) has plenty of scenes that still make me cringe and/or hold my breath like they did when I first saw them back when I was a wee one. In that department, the Johnny B. Goode scene is rivaled only by the end scene, which is literally a race against time. Young Marty McFly needs to be sent back to the future using 1950s technology and natural sources of electricity. The kid's literally starting to disappear, for crying out loud — that with almost seducing his own mother, and other murky psychological goop. Sure, the 1950s may have looked good to your average Reagan-voting suburbanite, but it was not just fun and games. There was segregation, and more importantly, no rock 'n' roll for white people. Imagine getting stuck back there forever. The horror! So back in 1954, Doc does his best to remedy the disorder he set about thirty years later, dangling from the town hall clock while Marty does his best in the DeLorean. Now if the franchise had only ended there. (SCS)

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Maybe I'm just partial to The Graduate. Could be. But there is something delicious about the penultimate part of the movie, where Dustin Hoffman's Ben is skidding around dusty California roads in his little red Alfa Romeo, desperately trying to find the chapel where Elaine is going to be wed to her hunky purebred husband. Part of what makes this so great is that it breaks two (or perhaps three) of the cardinal rules of cinematic races against time: first, there is a feeling of horrible slowness to Ben's car ride and search for the chapel. This is less fast and furious and more like one of those dreams where you need to run and run fast, but somehow it's all in slow motion no matter how much you power on. Second, Ben loses his race against time; he gets to the church too late...second-and-a-half being too late doesn't matter. (SCS)

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)

Fritz Lang's masterpiece of German Expressionism is part horror film, part crime syndicate saga, part procedural, and all about the force of obsession. The last third is given over to a race against the clock, as veil upon veil slips away to reveal Mabuse's ambitious plan, the unlimited reign of crime. The trailer above is in German, but it conveys just how stunningly creepy and exciting the movie is: the superimposition of images, the whispering voice, the car chase, the real sense of danger pervading every scene. Joseph Goebbels, no fool, saw it as a condemnation of Nazism and banned it from Germany under the Third Reich. It's up for debate whether Lang was intentionally condemning Nazis, but even if Lang wasn't sure what his message was, one cannot doubt his skill as a filmmaker. The visual power of the film, the unsettling use of sound, the wheels-within-wheels of the plot: all reach across the gap of time and still hold sway over modern viewers. Even as one easily discounts the psychology of the film, its coherent view of a world spiralling out of control cannot be denied. (HC)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Flashback, 1987: Crispin Glover, Kicking Against the Prick

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

As our heroic Oscar show live-bloggers pointed out, the Academy Awards broadcast did clear up one pressing question: more than a week after Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre, bearded appearance on the David Letterman show, it's still open season on the actor turned rapper. This is kind of s shame, if only because James Wolcott seems to have been proven right in his speculation that all the slack-jawed fascination Phoenix inspired in his few minutes on Dave's couch has come at the price of a lack of serious attention and box office for the movie he was ostensibly promoting, Two Lovers, his latest collaboration with writer-director James Gray. Still unanswered, though, is the question of whether Phoenix is genuinely flaking out publicly (or worse), or if, as has been suggested, he's engaged in some Andy Kaufman-style prank or long-term Borat-type project. Though for some of us watching, the appearance summoned up not thoughts of either Sacha Baron Cohen or Latka's creator but Crispin Glover. If that's the role model that Phoenix meant to invoke, he's a rare bird indeed.

Glover's turn in the spotlight came in the summer of 1987, when he was supposed to be promoting Tim Hunter's River's Edge, the tragic-teen melodrama in which he had his biggest movie role to date. (Up to that time, he was best known for having played Michael J. Fox's father in Back to the Future.) Glover's freakish, hand-waving performance in River's Edge garnered mixed reviews at best, and it helped create a climate in which the still relatively little-known actor was widely perceived as something of an oddball. Even so, his Letterman appearance exceeded even the most baroque expectations. Acting as if he were about to keel over from anthrax, Glover boogied out onstage in thrift-shop clothing, platform shoes, and a fright wig, and began to frantically stammer about how the jackals in the media were writing about him as if he were some kind of weirdo. Apparently incited to demonstrate what a normal fellow he was by some girls in the audience who called out, "Nice shoes!", Glover made a muscle, invited his host to arm wrestle, then leaped up to demonstrate his ability to kick as high as the seated Letterman's head. He did in fact, kick very close to Letterman's head, which seemed to be the cue Dave was looking for to announce that their revels now were ended.

In those pre-Internet days, word of what had gone down spread rapidly across college campuses, in some cases with VCR-recorded evidence that was disseminated with what we used to call "tape trees." (And I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.) Word was slow to get out that Glover was playing a character, Rubin, who would eventually be the focus of a barely seen feature film, 1991's Rubin and Ed, co-starring Howard Hessman and directed by Trent Harris (The Beaver Trilogy). This explanation fails to explain how Glover thought anyone not privy to this information could have been expected to watch him unravel with anything other than open-mouthed bewilderment, or why he thought that the notoriously crankly control freak Letterman would be delighted to watch him melt down on his time and feel the draft from his oversized clodhoppers tickle the side of his face.

Coupled with his work in River's Edge, the Letterman show appearance cemented the direction of Glover's acting career, which is to say that it officially redefined him as an unvarying token of sheer weirdness. (His subsequent failure to appear in the sequel to Back to the Future, which he followed up by suing the filmmakers for violating his "image" by having the actor who replaced him made up to resemble him, also earned him the reputation of a weirdo who was hard to deal with.) By the time of his cameo in Wild at Heart, Glover was seen as the sort of person David Lynch shoehorns into a movie if he's afraid that it might not be strange enough. Although Glover's few opportunities to play a relatively normal person, in mostly small roles in such films as John Boorman's Where the Heart Is and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? have shown him to be a capable actor with a surprisingly sweet screen presence, his biggest roles and ripest paydays have been for flaunting his geek-show side in such films as Charlie's Angels, Bartleby, and Willard. (More recently, he reunited with the director of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, to incarnate the title role in Beowulf.) A well-established young actor with a string of successes to his credit, Phoenix will not be so easily pigeonholed. At this point, most people would be relieved to hear that he's having a laugh, even if he did throw a labor of love movie under the bus in the procession, and after a shave, the industry would welcome him back with welcome if wary arms. But is he kidding? It's a dubious sort of joke that serves to turn you into a punchline for Ben Stiller's use. Stay tuned.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Morning Deal Report: Feeling a Little McClammy

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You may not have heard of Wayne McClammy, but if you’ve been anywhere near YouTube in the past six months, you’ve probably seen his work. He’s the guy behind the Jimmy Kimmel video “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” and its inevitable follow-up, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck.” Now he’s got a movie deal, which is making me rethink my plan to shelve my proposed short, “I’m Blowing Ernest Borgnine.” In any case, McClammy will co-write and direct Le Car, which the Hollywood Reporter says “is designed to unspool as a ‘found film’ made in the 1980s about a group of CIA agents who try to foil a plot by an evil car aiming to detonate an H-bomb at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.” Oh please, not that old story again.

Time travel is all the rage in Hollywood. Just the other day we told you about Spike Lee’s The Time Traveler, and now Variety reports that James Mangold (Walk the Line) is on board to direct The Archive, scripted by Proof playwright David Auburn. More time-bending comedy, albeit in the Groundhog Day mode, comes from Universal, which has picked up Repeat After Me. Per the Hollywood Reporter, it “revolves around a couple who realize that they are reliving their disastrous wedding day again and again and start to question getting married in the first place.”

Can Back to the Future IV be far behind? Or ahead? Whatever?

Blowtorch, Not Biff Tannen, Responsible For Back to the Future Disaster

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

According to the Associated Press, there was no disgruntled security guard involved in the Universal Studios fire this time around. Instead, the culprit responsible for the destruction of the back lot’s iconic Back to the Future clock tower set (as well as a King Kong tram tour exhibit and thousands of archived videos) was...bad luck. And possibly bad water pressure.

Workers at the studio had apparently been using a blowtorch (or blowtorches) to apply shingles to the roof of a movie set building façade, after which they waited around for an hour (per standard operating procedure) to make sure that nothing, y'know, caught fire and, uh...hold on, let me read that again...they were applying shingles to fake buildings with blowtorches? As opposed to...oh, I dunno...nails?

Hey, look, I’m no contractor...and I put together my parents’ garage door opener with a flamethrower, so what the heck do I know?

But, just so I’m clear on this: standard operating procedure is to apply shingles with a blowtorch, then stand around in the middle of the night for an hour to make sure the whole place doesn’t burn down? Sounds a little obtuse if you ask me...kinda like those poor bastards in March of the Penguins waddling 100 miles from the nearest source of food to mate, then standing in the middle of a blizzard balancing eggs on their flippers like contestants in some weird sadistic Japanese game show instead of just...y’know...mating near the food.

Anyway, the upshot is Universal had copies of all the videos that were destroyed, and the studio's devastated backlot New York streetscape, previously destroyed in the 1990 blaze and rebuilt, will now be rebuilt again (presumably with more garish, overpriced Trump slums, souvenir shops and Applebees).

Los Angeles County Fire Chief Michael Freeman said low water pressure hindered efforts to battle the flames, but the blaze was nevertheless contained well enough that Universal was able to reopen its theme park on Monday, and “tourists on the park's tram ride applauded firefighters as they drove past.” (Awwww!)

Yes...firemen RULE! (And, fortunately, none were seriously injured in the blaze.) Now, c'mon, kids...who's up for Backdraft?

Related Stories:

Universal Studios Fire Destroys Back To The Future Set; MTV Movie Awards Tragically Unaffected

Universal Studios Fire Destroys Back To The Future Set; MTV Movie Awards Tragically Unaffected

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I was living in Los Angeles in 1990 when a disgruntled security guard set fire to Universal Studios, causing $25 million dollars in damage and choking much of the San Fernando Valley in smoke.

History repeated itself on Sunday with another disastrous blaze on the famous back lot, only this time the destruction included a Gen-X touchstone: the Hill Valley clock tower set from the Back to the Future trilogy, where Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) tried to catch lightning in a flux capacitor in the first movie and raced around on a futuristic hover-skateboard in the sequel. The supercool animatronic King Kong that “attacked” passengers during the Universal tram ride was also destroyed.

Aside from Kong, nobody was injured in the conflagration, the cause of which is still under investigation.

The MTV Movie Awards were broadcast live from the adjacent Gibson (formerly Universal) Amphitheater less than 24 hours after the fire broke out (sometime around 4:30 A.M. Sunday morning). Fire footage and the full list of fake awards show winners are included after the jump:

2008 MTV MOVIE AWARDS

Best Movie

Transformers

Best Male Performance

Will Smith - I Am Legend

Best Female Performance

Ellen Page - Juno

Breakthrough Performance

Zac Efron - Hairspray

Best Comedic Performance

Johnny Depp - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Best Kiss

Briana Evigan & Robert Hoffman - Step Up 2 the Streets

Best Villain

Johnny Depp - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Best Fight

Sean Faris vs. Cam Gigandet - Never Back Down

Best Summer Movie So Far

Iron Man

Japandering: The Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

We’ve known for a long time that famous American movie stars who would never deign to sully themselves doing television commercials at home have no such compunctions about doing them abroad, most often in Japan. This phenomenon was immortalized in Lost in Translation, of course, but the tasteful Suntory ad that Bill Murray’s character struggles to complete is not necessarily representative of the antics our most respected and treasured movie icons will get up to when they don’t think we’re watching. Nowadays, of course, thanks to YouTube and the invaluable resource Japander, we’re always watching! Let’s assume these five stars haven’t been humiliated enough and put them through the wringer one more time.

NICOLAS CAGE for FEVER PACHINKO

It’s not always easy to tell what these Japanese commercials are advertising, and here is a case in point. At first I thought Cage was selling gum, then possibly a car. While this may be the actor’s best performance in years, those of us unfamiliar with pachinko gaming devices may be a little unclear on the message.

BRUCE WILLIS for ENEOS

Once again I had to do a little research to determine exactly what product or service Willis is shilling here. As far as I can tell, it’s motor oil. I should have been able to figure that out, what with the yellow paint and the Elvis impersonator and the backpack raygun thingy and…what was I talking about?

MICHAEL J. FOX for SOME SORT OF BEVERAGE

Honestly, I can’t tell if Fox is selling beer or canned coffee or some sort of energy drink here. Whatever it is, it makes you do crazy things, like trim hedges into animal shapes! Note Fox’s reprisal of the distressed yelp noise that made him famous in the Back to the Future movies. That’s branding, folks.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER for DIRECT TV

It’s hard to pick just one of Arnie’s ads – he seems to be the king of Japandering. I chose this one because of the multiple roles he plays. It gives us a moment to reflect on what was lost when he went into politics.

BEN STILLER for KIRIN

Are we sure this isn’t an outtake from Zoolander or something? No? How embarrassing.

Awesome Casting Announcement of the Week: Mos Def Plays Chuck Berry

John Constantine — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:04:00 GMT

Hey, Mos, it’s your cousin! Your cousin, Marvin Def. You know that new part you’ve been looking for? Well dig this!

While you might expect Marvin to point his fav relative Mos Def in the direction of Michael J Fox doing something appreciably sweet and rad, that’s not the case here. However, Mos Def will indeed be playing the role of legendary rocker Chuck Berry in Cadillac. About the rocking lives of Leonard Chess and the many culture-changing artists he released through Cadillac Records in the 1950s, Cadillac has got great casting across the board. Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters and Beyonce Knowles as Etta James are as inspired as Chuck Berry Mos Def. The flick is written and directed by Darnell Martin, a regular TV director but almost unknown on the big screen.

Thanks to AICN for the spot!

Crispin Glover: Modern-Day Vaudevillian

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Guardian investigates the age-old question, “Is Crispin Glover really a big ol’ weirdo, or what?” On the one hand, you have his recent appearance as Grendel in the big-budget CGI epic Beowulf, which might lead you to believe Glover is settling into the role of eccentric character actor in mainstream Hollywood fare. How strange could a guy be if he’s appeared in both Back to the Future and Charlie’s Angels?

On the other hand, you have Glover’s latest directorial effort, It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, “a psychosexual drama written by and starring Steven C Stewart, who died soon after the film was completed. Stewart, a cerebral palsy sufferer, plays a man suffering from murderous satyriasis, and can be seen in some truly graphic scenes in the film with a number of women, which seems at odds with Glover's description of the screenplay as ‘beautiful and naïve’.” It’s a follow-up to 2005’s What Is It?, which Guardian writer Andrea Hubert describes as, well, “virtually indescribable without at least mentioning a cast comprised entirely of Down's syndrome actors, swastika imagery, blackface minstrels, naked women in monkey masks, with race hate musician Johnny Rebel warbling in the background as snails die gruesome deaths by salt and razor blades.”

It may come as a shock to learn that studios aren’t lining up to finance such projects – at least not directly. There is a method to Glover’s madness: “I get to fund and promote my films off the back of theirs.” Give him credit for putting his money where his mouth is; a lot of actors claim their mainstream work is merely a means of sustaining their commitment to art (coughNicolasCagecough), but Glover is actually using his corporate paychecks for subversive purposes. “What Is It? is a reaction to corporate restraints in the film market whereby anything that can make an audience member unhappy will be excised. And by unhappy, I mean truly uncomfortable, so they're looking at a film and asking, 'Is this right? Is it wrong? Should I be here? Should they have done this? What is it?' Why has taboo been corporately excised from our view? At every step along the conveyor belt of the corporately funded film, someone will say, 'You really wouldn't want to say that.' And what ends up happening is that nothing is said.”

As to the question at the beginning of this post…well, for those of us who caught this infamous Letterman appearance the first time around, it’s never really been in doubt:

In Other Blogs: Good Friday Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

You may or may not have the day off, but rest assured, In Other Blogs never rests.

Cinematical commemorates the release of Drillbit Taylor with the Big-Screen Bullies You Love to Hate. Our personal favorite, O’Bannion from Dazed and Confused, comes in third, with top honors going to Marty McFly’s nemesis from the Back to the Future series. “The ultimate jerk, Biff Tannen is everything you'd ever want in an on-screen bully all wrapped up into one tall, dumb-looking knucklehead.”

Beyond the Multiplex offers up some Cannes gossip. The official selections won’t be announced for a couple of weeks, but Andrew O’Hehir isn’t buying rumors that the Coens’ Burn After Reading or the latest Indiana Jones movie will be opening the festival. “I wish I felt the same skepticism about the rumor recently floated by Hollywood Reporter blogger Steven Zeitchik to the effect that Michael Patrick King's likely-to-be-misbegotten Sex and the City: The Movie may wind up as opening-night fare at the Palais des Festivals. Unfortunately, it all fits: modest star power, wide international appeal and a certain vapid pretense at sophistication and cultural significance.”

Scanners takes a look at Las Vegas, as seen in the movies. “Like Disney World, it's hard to imagine anybody actually living there. For most, it represents a transitory state, impossible to sustain. Few care to wonder what happens to all that money, all that lust, any more than they wonder how much of that water from pools and fountains simply evaporates into the desert air. Win or lose, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

A couple of weeks back we gave praise to the mysteriously eloquent blog title Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. With baseball season just a few days away, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio offers a sort of explanation disguised as a fantasia of attending a ballgame with the Fistful of Dollars director. “He looks at me like I’m crazy. The old man has come to see, in this accelerated afternoon, a microcosm of the world on the field, in its orderly procedures and open-ended framework, a game that takes as long as it takes to play out to the end, sometimes nine innings, sometimes more. Does not the infield fly rule negate some of the possibility of unpredictability in a game that otherwise thrives on it, a game where any number of things can happen in any given moment, despite its apparently rigorous structure? If Tuco can shoot intruders with a gun half-submerged in a filthy bathtub, then why cannot a shortstop pretend to bobble a ball and lure a runner into a trap?”

Finally, Slashfilm presents a gallery of film geek graffiti.

12 Angry Men, 3 Little Pigs, and One Horny Polyp

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The Library of Congress has announced its annual list of new additions to the National Film Registry.. Every year since 1989, the Registry has named 25 films--everything from Casablanca to the Zapruder home movie of President Kennedy's assassination--to be permanently preserved owing to their being deemed to possess cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Among the inclusions this time: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grand Hotel, Days of Heaven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 12 Angry Men, In a Lonely Place, Wuthering Heights, Bullitt the Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs, the Robert Benchley comic short The Sex Life of the Polyp, the Oscar-winning Sinatra-does-tolerance short The House I Live In, and Dances with Wolves. (We have no idea whether that last one is supposed to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, but maybe somebody at the Registry just doesn't think that Native Americans have suffered enough.) The most recent of the new additions to the Registry, which now tops out at a total of 525 titles, are the Kevin Costner thing and Back to the Future (1985), which has the enduring distinction of being the only time-travel teen comedy ever directly referenced by name in a presidential State of the Union address. (Ah, the eighties!) For the record, the newest movie listed in the Registry overall is still 1996's Fargo, the subject of a recent "Face/Off" column at this site by the Corsican brothers of on-line film writing, Leonard Pierce and myself. The Registry declined comment on rumors that plans are underway to commemorate this event by constructing a life-size bronze statue in front of the building showing a couple of geeks having a shovel fight.

Portrait of the Artist as a McFly

Peter Smith — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I went to the Magno screening room in midtown Manhattan to catch a screening of Crispin Glover's new picture It Is Fine! Everything is Fine. Excitement abounded. I'd failed to catch any of the screenings of Glover's What Is It? when it premiered late last year and was still feeling pangs of regret. I'd developed an acute obsession with the man after finding his website in 2005. Yes, it's common knowledge that George McFly is a big weirdo, but I didn't really appreciate just how weird at the time. The trailer for What Is It? scared the shit out of me. The notion of a mad character actor creating humor through Dadaist films starring a cast of spastics was as entrancing as it was revolting. You see, I thought he was being ironic. It's not my fault though. "Clowny Clown Clown" leaves an impression.

So I was excited to finally see one of the man's movies in full, excited to be shocked, excited to see just how weird it could get. I arrived a touch on the early side, and there was no one at the theater aside from a confused woman in her late sixties, waiting to see a picture called The Unknown Woman, and a couple of disgruntled projectionists, type of dudes who you see with cigarettes dangling from their mouths even when they aren't smoking. Fearing small talk with the elderly and suffering from a coffee-filled bladder, I asked the projectionists where the gentleman's room was and went off to kill some time. Then, refreshed, I headed back out to the waiting room, prepared to talk about the weather or feign being busy. I also considered faking a cell-phone call. That's when I almost tripped on Crispin Glover. He was unpacking the reels for It Is Fine and handing them off to the projectionists. I knew it was a possibility that he'd be there. What Is It? was only screened by Glover himself on tour. But here he was sans publicists, handlers, anyone. Just Glover sporting a Prince Valiant bob and a black suit. I rushed to the benches and the relative safety of the old woman but the projectionists called out and let her know that The Unknown Woman was just about to start, and I was alone. Glover walked down the hall and sat down to my right.

Fuck.

"Are you here to see the film?" That tremor in his voice isn't put on. Guy sounds like that.

"Yeah. Yes. I'm excited. Looking forward to it."

"Excellent. Good. Good. It's an excellent film."

He pulled out a laptop and I wondered if he was suffering from the same chat phobia I'd been feeling a few minutes ago. But for the next twenty minutes this back and forth went on. We talked about how What Is It? was received critically, and about aberrant sexuality in widely released movies. It was plain that this quiet man was very serious about his work, and this was more unsettling than had he been a jabbering psychotic. It meant he wasn't being ironic. Finally the publicist arrived along with a handful of other people and things got underway.

Glover opened with a truncated version of "The Big Slideshow", a surrealist spoken-word piece accompanied by slides of pages and art torn from old books that he'd mangled and scrawled over. He apologized for not having a spotlight, but the flickering screen he stood in front of gave a better effect. It was like sitting in a David Lynch scene. As Glover yelled, ranted about zoos and slaves and mollusks while pointing at broken images in the dark room, it was settled. He was definitely not being ironic. By the time It Is Fine! (which you can read about here) had finished, I was exhausted. My brain felt overheated, like I'd tried to think about too many things at once and it had made me stupid.

The afternoon had turned out weird in the end, but not in the way I'd expected, and the only thing that was shocking was the earnestness in the work and the artist who was presenting it. I learned a couple of lessons. The first is that going to the bathroom is not an effective way of killing time to avoid awkward situations. It only leads to things getting stranger on you. The second is that it isn't wise to assume that every piece of media is aloof and the people making them are at a distance smirking. Irony may be an abused commodity these days, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Sometimes the artist is going to pop up in your face, make you look at something, and ask you how it feels.

— John Constantine

[I had my own memorable chat with Glover last year, available here for the curious. — ed.]