The Screengrab : brittany murphy

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

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

JESSICA ALBA

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

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

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

HALLE BERRY

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

ORLANDO BLOOM

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

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

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

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

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

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

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

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

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

Summerfest '08: "Summer Catch"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

I knew when I started the Summerfest project, in which I review one movie each week with the word 'summer' in the title in hopes of giving faithful Screengrab readers something to do when it's too hot to wash your car, that there would be sacrifices. Since my only criterion for inclusion was the presence of the word 'summer' and Netflix availability, I knew that there would be a couple of movies that would be pretty lousy, especially given the sort of movies that come out in the summer. But I didn't realize until the 2001 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle Summer Catch arrived in the mail that I truly understood to what depths I was willing to sink in pursuit of the project. A lot of things should have warned me off: the uniformly negative reviews; the fact that I couldn't find anyone who remembered the movie being released, let alone actually seeing it; the dire circumstances predicted by the words "Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle". But I made a promise to you people, and I'm not one to break a promise, even one that involves a hundred minutes of Jessica Biel reading inspirational slogans from an insurance company calendar in voice-over narration. I'm not saying you should watch this movie; I'm not even saying you should go into a room where this movie once sat. I'm just saying:

Put on your cleats and spit on your hands, because we're about to slide face-first into Summer Catch.

THE ACTION: Freddie Prinze Jr., who looked like he might have a career at one point until he kept making movies like Summer Catch, plays a hotshot local playing in the prestigious Cape Cod baseball league. (Much as lame platitudes stand in for dialogue, and Jessica Biel in a bikini stands in for a plot, North Carolina stands in for Massachusetts in the film.) He's got a chance to make it to the big leagues as a pitcher, but first he must overcome a variety of challenges: his dad and his coach, who alternate between telling him that he's the greatest thing since Walter Johnson and telling him that he's the worst thing since Jaime Navarro; his rival, who is heavily tattooed and is an arrogant jerk (well, the rest of the players are arrogant jerks too, but they don't have a lot of tattoos or a demeanor that makes it seem like they're on their way to tie Polly Pureheart to a railroad track); and his complicated love life, which requires him to choose between Brittany Murphy, who does an interesting trick involving beer, and Jessica Biel, who does an interesting trick involving wearing a bikini.

THE PLAYERS: Directed by the guy responsible for Radio and written by the guy responsible for The Temp, Summer Catch clearly wants us to pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. Instead, all of our energies are meant to be devoted to the young hunks and beautiful babes on screen, but in the case of the lead actors, it's difficult, because Prinze has no personality and Biel has a bad personality. Some decent character actors, including Fred Ward and Brian Dennehy, are brought in to class things up a little bit, but both of them are both looking off camera a lot to get a high five sign from their accountants that the check cleared and don't really bring anything to their roles. As for the rest of the cast, this is a movie where guys named Marc, Christian, Corey, Wilmer and Gabriel play guys named Miles, Dale, Rand, Auggie, and Calvin, or something like that, and it's really hard to keep track of which one is which. They're all supposed to be wacky, though. I think.

SUMMER FUN: Although Summer Catch is built around the all-American summer sport of baseball, it's really about the all-American summer sport of attractive teenagers making out with each other. Oddly enough, though, it fails to satisfy on both counts: the baseball action is pretty tissue-thin and there's not enough at stake that you really give a shit whether any of these dufuses make it to the bigs or not, and, by the same token, the supporting characters are all so obnoxious that you begin to actively hope that none of them ever get laid, either. The class conflict angle is undersold and the romantic leads are terminally boring, so the script tries to distract us with the wild-and-crazy antics of Prinze's teammates. Unfortunately, the movie's idea of high-larious comic action is making one of the players an unrepentant chubby-chaser, leading to some highly dignified scenes of him seducing fat girls for comic effect. Oh and also there's the guy who keeps farting in an umpire's face.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately for all of us, this is a very different era than the 1980s, and no teenager is going to pay nine bucks to see James Van Der Beek or Freddie Prinze Jr. wearing a Hawaiian shirt. There was a time when they would have made one of the ballplayers a fat guy and let him wear a Hawaiian shirt, but in a movie like this, the only people who are exempt from being blindingly attractive are the fat girls that Marc Blucas uses as slumpbusters a la the ever-classy Mark Grace. It's slightly possible that Brian Dennehy's character, the irascible baseball coach, owns a Hawaiian shirt, but he hasn't worn it in several decades because he's been too busy crushing the dreams of impressionable teenagers.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: By this point, I think I may have already mentioned that Summer Catch features footage -- and rather extensive footage, at that -- of Jessica Biel crammed semi-successfully into a bikini. I'm not going to lie to you folks: if all you're looking for in a summer movie is Jessica Biel in a bikini (and I will by no means condemn you if that is in fact what you're looking for), then Summer Catch will give you what you want in spades. However, that will have to be all you're looking for, because it ain't going to give you anything else, unless you're a devotee of dumb voiceovers, half-baked inspirational speeches, and Freddie Prinze Jr. standing around looking awkward. And while both Biel and Murphy are fun to look at, their characters' first names are Tenley and Dede, which is just upsetting. My advice to you is to search the internet for the images of Ms. Biel in her two-piece (which are plentiful), download them, and look at them for one full minute. Then do this one hundred times, and you will have had a more enjoyable experience of watching Summer Catch than I did. See you next week, summer movie fans!