The Screengrab : cary grant

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS MICHAEL IN THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Following an especially painful round of orthodonture during my junior year of high school, my father brought me to The Big Chill to cheer me up, and I immediately fell in love with the movie, which celebrated the type of close-knit friendship that had sustained me through the many dateless nights of my adolescence. On the verge of young adulthood and the dissolution of those (mostly platonic) hometown relationships, I was also drawn to the film’s evocation of the big, chilly world I’d be facing after graduation, far from kith and kin, and started imagining myself as a cool, mordant loner not unlike William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet, Nick (except without the war injury impotence) -- the type of guy likely to attract weirdly sexy free spirits like Meg Tilly’s Chloe in droves once I got to college. Yet, in truth (as my friends were always happy to remind me), I was never really the Nick in our little group, but rather the Michael: i.e., Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy, needy motormouth, the guy with the painfully obvious motives and the total lack of game with the ladies -- but then again, at least he wound up with most of the best lines (and a pair of functioning testicles)! (AO)

STEVE MARTIN AS NAVIN JOHNSON IN THE JERK (1979)

The title is a misnomer. Navin Johnson isn't really a jerk. Jerks screw you over just for the pleasure. Jerks have intent. Jerks drive Hummers, talk during movies, and buy Carlos Mencia DVDs. Navin is more of a well-meaning idiot, which is the type of role that Steve Martin does best. He heads out to make his way in the world, but chance makes him rich before chance takes it away. Don't try to read too much into it. The search for larger meanings is admirable and all, but sometimes the gunman just hates cans. (HC)

JACQUE TATI AS M. HULOT IN MON ONCLE (1958)

The French had a way with fools. Like Boudu in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Jacques Tati's Hulot is less an idiot than an anarchic force of nature sweeping through the modern world and blowing away all of the little lies people tell themselves to maintain a sense of order. In the sequence above, the movie visits Hulot in the bustling corner of Paris where he lives. Ignore the Italian subtitles. You don't need to know the exact words to know what is being said. Hulot's sister lives with her family in a sterile ultramodernist nightmare, presumably in a far more affluent area of Paris. Consider the awful gurgling fountain:

It's no wonder that Hulot's nephew idolizes his goofy, absent-minded, and absolutely free uncle. Unlike Boudu, Hulot is making an effort to get along in the modern world, but it's clear that everything about it leaves him befuddled and bemused. And one of the best roles of the fool is to show his or her audience why their world is confusing and ridiculous. (HC)

CARY GRANT AS WALTER BURNS IN HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

The Cockney hustler that was inside the handsome gent called Cary Grant never made his presence more strongly felt than in this version of the great American theatrical comedy, His Girl Friday, in which Grant played the ultimate comic monster, the self-centered, bulldozing newspaper editor Walter Burns -- a role that gave him the chance to break the land speed dialogue record while demonstrating his ability to make it seem charming that he was pushing everybody around and giving the thumbs-up to the occasional felony. Burns is a man who'll do anything to get what he wants, and he could be played as a man the audience loves to hate; letting Grant run with the role turns the character into the amoral, ruthless son of a bitch that audience members suddenly realize they wish they could be. The performance may be the closest that a mortal man of woman born has come to approximating the movies' ultimate embodiment of the can-do spirit, Bugs Bunny. (PN)

W.C. FIELDS IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

If you look up "curmudgeon" in the dictionary, you may not see a picture of W.C. Fields’ glowering mug staring back at you, but you probably should. Fields made a career out of playing slight variations on his signature persona -- a guy whose disdain for women, children, animals, and other races and ethnicities was merely a subset of his overall drunken misanthropy. If Fields’ movies consisted only of him belittling those around him, they wouldn’t be funny. Thankfully, Fields realized that there was no better butt of his jokes than himself, both because it made the other characters feel less like victims of his barbs, and because getting picked on by others further fueled his misanthropy. Look at the way the henpecked Harold Bissonette rails against his wife when he’s alone only to clam up whenever she’s around. What’s more, nobody could deliver a joke quite like Fields -- beginning in his trademark nasal whine, he would often passive-aggressively swallow the end of the line, as if the people to whom it was addressed were suddenly unworthy of hearing it. And Fields was peerless when it came to the non sequitur, never more so than in his classic two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer, perhaps the purest distillation of his genius. Hard to say what makes it so brilliant- is it the sight of Fields in mittens and mukluks playing the dulcimer and singing, or such quintessential Fields lines as "My Uncle Ichabod said, when speakin’ of the city, ‘it ain’t no place for a woman, gal, but pretty men go thar’." And if the repeated "it ain’t a fit night out for man or beast" gag doesn’t make you laugh, well, there’s just no hope for you. (PC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Set Your DVR! December 29, 2008 - January 5, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ugh. The post-Xmas blues are coming on strong. Hell, let's drink to baby new year 2009 and get it over with! Here's the DVR-worthy scoop for the coming week. Times are Central/Eastern and overnight movies go with the previous day.

Monday, December 29:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is all wacky postmodernism, while The Sweet Hereafter is quite the opposite. The Player is somewhere in-between, but a lot funnier.

1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.
3:05/4:05 am: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.

Tuesday, December 30:

The penultimate day of 2008 is all about the past and the future! Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil is a topsy-turvy Civil War film, while Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not just the greatest Western, but the greatest film that this country has ever produced. CQ is about a lost young screenwriter in swinging Europe during the 60s making a Barbarella-like retro-future flick. Soylent Green is, uh, people. Heaven's Gate is an amazing, dull something.

4:30/5:30 pm: Ride With the Devil on AMC.
7/8 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
7:30/8:30 pm: CQ on IFC.
9/10 pm: Soylent Green on TCM.
1/2 am: Heaven’s Gate on TCM.

Wednesday, December 31:

It's the last day of the year, spend the sober part of it with America's (fictionalized) history. Stagecoach, the film that Orson Welles studied to learn how to direct movies, is surprisingly claustrophobic, given that it was shot in Monument Valley, and one of the most influential films ever made. And of course you've seen the two Sergio Leone movies before, but there's never a bad reason to watch one of the Man With No Name films.

5/6 am: Stagecoach on TCM.
9/10 am: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on AMC.
1/2 pm: A Fistful of Dollars on AMC.

Thursday, January 1:

If you find yourself up early (or late), The Coen Brother's gangster film Miller's Crossing is the best movie they've made. TCM has a Cary Grant film festival running during the day, with the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and It Happened One Night (there's others, too, but these are the best). In prime time, TCM is running the original King Kong, which is an awe-inspiring movie. And Reservoir Dogs is, of course, the movie that launched Madonna's career.

8:15/9:15 am: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
10/11 am: Bringing Up Baby on TCM.
2:30/3:30 pm: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
3:15/4:15 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM.
5/6 pm: It Happened One Night on TCM.
7/8 pm: King Kong (1933) on TCM.
9:15/10:15 pm: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.
2:35/3:35 am: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.

Friday, January 2:

While IFC has the weirdness of Blue Velvet, TCM is running a Randolph Scott film festival. The first two were directed by Budd Boetticher and are great, sometimes dark, versions of the classic Western style. I don't know anything about The Cariboo Trail. Western Union was directed by Fritz Lang. Excuse me, I mean Fritz "Kick Ass" Lang.

6:25/7:25 pm: Blue Velvet on IFC.
7/8 pm: The Tall T on TCM.
8:30/9:30 pm: Ride Lonesome on TCM.
10/11 pm: The Cariboo Trail on TCM.
11:30 pm/12:30 am: Western Union on TCM.
2:15/3:15 am: Blue Velvet on IFC.

Saturday, January 3:

Saturday doesn't have much. The 47 Ronin is the first part of an epic samurai tale. I'm guessing the second half will run the following Saturday. And Modern Times is the classic Chaplin film.

7/8 am: The 47 Ronin, Part I on IFC.
7/8 pm: Modern Times on TCM.

Sunday, January 4:

Burden of Dreams is the documentary about the ambitious dreamer Werner Herzog slowly going insane while trying to film Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an ambitious dreamer who slowly goes insane. Harlan County, USA is a documentary about a mining strike in Kentucky in the 70s. After watching this movie, you may join the IWW. And Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's 2008 film about skateboarders and murder. It's in the vein of his Death Trilogy rather than his more conventional style, and it's topping many Best Of 2008 lists.

7/8 am: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
8:45/9:45 am Harlan County, USA on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
5:30/6:30 pm: Paranoid Park on IFC.

Monday, January 5:

Back to the grindstone again! In this case, the grindstone will be played by Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental film Solaris and Michael Winterbottom's trippy history of Tony Wilson and the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.

1:35/2:35 pm: Solaris on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC.

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

Yesterday's Hits: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947, Irving Reis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

During the 1930s, there was no bigger star in Hollywood than Shirley Temple. So beloved was little Shirley by both moviegoers and other actors that allegedly she was given an honorary Academy Award for fear that she would defeat older, more experienced performers if she was nominated for a competitive Oscar. However, growing up can be awkward for child stars, and Temple, popular though she was, was no exception. By the early 1940s, she had been largely relegated to supporting “kid-sister” roles in films like 1944’s Since You Went Away.

In 1947, she decided to make a last-ditch effort to parlay her youthful popularity into an adult career, and what better way to do so than to share the screen with some of the era’s biggest stars? So producer David O. Selznick, to whom she was under contract, gave Temple permission to make a film at RKO Pictures opposite Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. The result was 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and it became one of the most popular films of the year. As usual, Grant and Loy were big audience draws, but it was Temple’s presence that put it over the top, as moviegoers were eager to see if the former dimpled moppet could still outshine the grown-up stars around her.

As it turns out, she couldn’t, in large part because she hadn’t really learned any new acting tricks since her childhood days. While as a child she could sing and dance, what really endeared her to audiences was her charm and charisma, and flashing a dimpled smile at the camera could smooth over any juvenile overacting she might have done. As Temple’s mother memorably told her curly-topped little moneymaker before every take, “sparkle, Shirley- sparkle!” But as an adult, she would have to work harder to win over audiences, and her talent just wasn’t up to the task. All too often, she falls back on her stock child-acting tricks- smiling, pouting, posing for the camera- and opposite ace comedians like Grant and Loy she was way out of her depth.

Not helping matters was the screenplay, written by none other than future best-selling author Sidney Sheldon. The most obvious flaw in the screenplay is Sheldon’s unfortunate tendency to have all of his characters speak in arch, convoluted dialogue. It’s hard enough to believe anyone would say, “these are merely the vestments I don as a concession to our outworn education anachronism,” let alone a seventeen-year-old girl, school newspaper editor or not. But an even bigger issue is that it’s hard to buy the events of the story. The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer is no more convoluted than your average screwball comedy, but the best of those films always kept their stories emotionally grounded with their characters. But here, practically every major character is plotting something or other, and once the movie’s happy ending becomes obvious, there’s little else to do but wait for the schemes to play themselves so that Grant and Loy can (SPOILER!) end up together in the end.

But if there’s a bright spot in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, it’s that great movie stars like Grant and Loy could give perfectly fine performances even with second-rate material. Grant is, of course, a treasure, and he takes the kind of role that he could play in his sleep- the ladies’ man- and finds new wrinkles for the character, even while the film does him few favors (who thought those ridiculous “white knight” bits were a good idea?). But for my money, Loy is even better. Loy is essentially the straight man in the story, and she pulls it off by giving her character (Temple’s older sister and guardian) a stern warmth that would have been tricky in the hands of a lesser actress. There’s a reason why both Grant and Loy enjoyed successful movie careers for years to come while Temple had more or less retired by 1950- for grown-up actors, it takes more than cuteness to survive in Hollywood.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

5. PAUL NEWMAN (1925-2008)

As the man who inspired this list, it's entirely fitting that Mr. Newman wound up in our Top 5...and we recently posted 10 good reasons why (in addition to the official Screengrab obituary by Phil Nugent) so, uh...moving on to number 4...

CARY GRANT (1904-1986)

In his single funniest movie, His Girl Friday, Grant responds to a threat by crowing, "The last man to say that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his throat." The line is an in-joke meant for mass consumption, since it was fairly common knowledge that Grant's real name was Archie Leach. But Grant really did cut "Archie Leach's" throat; the product of a Dickensian childhood -- as a rich, internationally famous movie star, he was unexpectedly reunited with his mother, who he had believed was long dead -- he created a romantic image of perfection and lived in it on screen and off. What makes the image so supremely, universally attractive is that it is perfect in its imperfection: unlike the countless male models and juveniles who tried their best to never put a foot wrong, Grant was a trained acrobat and natural farceur who had the solid instincts to know that the best way to win the audience's heart was to send his strapping, handsome frame falling all over itself in slapstick pratfalls, as if none of his physical assets were enough to keep him from being rendered powerless by what the sight of a female co-star was doing to his center of gravity. By the time the cycle of screwball romances that made him a star was gearing up, Grant was not juvenile, and he was never a shrinking violet: he was a brash scene-stealer who enjoyed getting a verbal rhythm going with the other people in a scene. Since he and his romantic partners couldn't actually get it on in the movies of their day, they exchanged wisecracks as a metaphor for foreplay; in this context, the moment when he gets Irene Dunne to reluctantly laugh when he's collapsing in on himself at a society recital is one of the sexiest stand-ins for an orgasm in movie history. Grant had other sides to his talent: his buddy-buddy-buddy act with Victor MacLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. helped to make Gunga Din one of the most joyous action comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, and he gave an honorable, committed performance in Clifford Odets' None but the Lonely Heart, a box-office failure and labor of love. But in more than sixty years, nobody has come close to displacing him as the most iconic romantic comedian in movies; the best anyone can do is to say, as they say of George Clooney now, that he's the closest we're likely to get these days to Cary Grant.

3. JACK NICHOLSON (1937 - )

Yes, his talent long ago calcified into an all-too-familiar repertoire of raised eyebrows and half-hearted devilish grins, but the case could be made that Jack Nicholson was the American leading man for nearly two decades, ranging roughly from 1970's Five Easy Pieces to 1989's Batman. (And yes, technically Michael Keaton was the leading man in Batman, but it was Jack who raked in a record $50 million thanks to all those lucrative Joker products.) Easy Rider made him an "overnight success" after spending the bulk of the '60s on Roger Corman's work farm, but Five Easy Pieces established Nicholson as the anti-hero for America's counterculture hangover – quick to anger, with little use for authority, but magnetic and funny nonetheless. He got on a hot streak that encompassed some of the most revered films of the era, from The Last Detail to Chinatown to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Soon he was an Academy Awards fixture, as both attendant (always in the front row, all shades and wolfish grin) and recipient (12 nominations, including wins for Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets), and then he was a caricature, albeit one still capable of firing up the jets on occasion (A Few Good Men, a few scenes in The Departed). Through it all, he's always been Jack – one name, four letters, and just about everyone on earth knows who you mean.

2. MARLON BRANDO (1924-2004)

There’s little that can be said about Brando that hasn’t been said before, and better besides. After all, he’s obviously a genius, with a style that revolutionized movie acting. But although much is made of how well he plays brutish characters onscreen, what helped Brando transcend the trap of playing “tough guys” was the tenderness with which he approached them. Look no further than the famous scene in On the Waterfront where he’s chatting with Eva Marie Saint and he suddenly starts to fiddle with her glove. There’s a gentle, almost feminine quality to this blue-collar palooka, one that manifests itself in his bashful-boy approach to the girl on whom he’s got a crush. Granted, in his later years, Brando became essentially a monologist, noodling in the corner while everyone else tried to make a movie around his whims. But when he was actually in a collaborative mood, no movie star engaged so completely with those around him. In his last great role in 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, Brando took what was essentially a two-character drama and shot it full of electric intensity, locking on to costar Maria Schneider so completely that we begin to see him anew through her eyes -- middle-aged and hulking, but undeniably erotic.

1. HUMPHREY BOGART (1899-1957)

So, what makes a classic leading man? If it’s staying power, then Bogie’s got it: he was a star for decades during his own lifetime, then enjoyed a posthumous resurgence of popularity during the 1960s, and remains a household name today, his timeless mug even now adorning the wall of a dorm room near you. Though some may argue his range was limited (despite two Oscar nominations and a win for The African Queen), it’s hard to imagine the history of modern cinema without his influential wised-up, world-weary, cynical/romantic tough-guy persona and his indelible performances in all-time classics like The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, etc., etc., etc. He was a box office badass, and despite a famously hangdog physiognomy that could charitably be described as “unconventional,” he somehow managed to seduce the insanely hot 19-year-old Lauren Bacall (or was it the other way around?) during production of To Have and Have Not and hold onto her for thirteen years until his death by cancer in 1957. And despite the 26 year age difference between them, Bacall was certainly no giggly schoolgirl...Bogart was just that cool, I guess. Cooler than Nicholson, cooler than Clooney...and certainly cooler than Sinatra, who many still believe was the original head of the Rat Pack, when in fact it was Bogie who was and remains the indisputable king of the ultimate fraternity of cinematic cool.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Yesterday's Hits: Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson)

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing Hollywood is sorely lacking nowadays, it’s larger-than-life figures. Nowadays, most moviegoers want their industry types to be down to earth, but in the classical era of Hollywood, it was a different story. Tinseltown was ruled by grandiose, even vulgar men who flaunted their wealth, made bold statements and engaged in dangerous behavior just to fuel their taste for adventure. Today’s peekaboo paparazzi photos and pregnancy gossip pale in comparison to the stories of Errol Flynn’s legendary parties and John Huston deciding to make a movie in Africa with the notion of shooting an elephant while he was there.

Michael Todd was one of these men. Todd began his career in Hollywood by running a construction company that specialized in soundproofing studio stages, but after he was bankrupted by the Depression, his colorful life really began. He began producing stage shows, often of ill repute. He romanced Gypsy Rose Lee, star of one of his productions. He married Joan Blondell, after his first wife died under suspicious circumstances. He gambled and spent money like a decadent prince, causing Blondell to divorce him and leading to his second bankruptcy. He staged a nudie musical written by the future king of Thailand. And if that’s not enough drama for one lifetime, he later married Liz Taylor. Todd also had a hand in the development of the three-screen Cinerama process before pioneering a technological breakthrough of his own, the Todd-AO process, which Todd envisioned as being “Cinerama coming from one hole.” And the crown jewel of Todd-AO was 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days.

What made Around the World in 80 Days a hit?: In addition to its wide screen and greater clarity (Todd-AO cameras shot at 30 frames per second instead of the usual 24), Todd-AO also employed the widest-angle lens of the era, approximately 150 degrees. These factors made the format ideal for filming grand epics and panoramic vistas. The first Todd-AO release was 1955’s Oklahoma!, but the maximum potential of the format was realized the following year with Around the World in 80 Days. A long in-development project that had yet to come to fruition, Todd used his newly-regained resources- much of which had been earned by his stake in 1952’s This Is Cinerama- to film his adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel on location all around the world, showing off what Todd-AO was truly capable of doing.

For such an ambitious production, it was only fitting that Todd would fill it to the brim with international stars, all the better to draw in moviegoing audiences worldwide. After pairing up-and-coming Hollywood leading man David Niven with popular Mexican entertainer Cantinflas (as Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, respectively), Todd then surrounded them with a galaxy of stars in cameo roles. It seemed like wherever the travelers went, another handful of familiar faces would drop in to greet them, with bit roles for the likes of Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Charles Coburn, Peter Lorre, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, and Edward R. Murrow as the narrator of the film’s introduction. The combination of globetrotting adventure and big stars worked like gangbusters, with the Around the World in 80 Days pulling in $23.1 million dollars- the second-highest gross of 1956 behind The Ten Commandments- and taking home five Oscars including Best Picture.

What happened?: Jules Verne’s novel, written in 1872, was meant to inspire a sense of wonder in its readers. But as is often the case with gee-whiz science fiction, much of the wonder evaporated once the fantasy became reality. By 1956, humanity had long since “conquered the air,” and the notion of circumnavigating the globe in four score days didn’t hold too much magic. So while Around the World in 80 Days offered audiences the irresistible combination of big stars and widescreen vistas, the story was little more than an excuse for a series of misadventures involving Phileas and/or Passepartout rather than the wondrous futuristic spectacle Verne had intended.

In addition, while Michael Anderson was credited as the director, this was without a doubt Mike Todd’s film, something that was discovered early on by the film’s original director, John Farrow. But Todd wouldn’t be around much longer to enjoy his success. In 1958, while flying his unfortunately-monikered plane “The Lucky Liz,” Todd suffered a fatal crash. This negated the possibility of any more ambitious Todd-produced epics, as well as beginning the slow decline of the Todd-AO process, which continued in a more conventional 24fps format through the sixties before dying out altogether.

Does Around the World in 80 Days still work?: Not really. If the film was charming in 1956, it’s merely quaint today. For one thing, the much-ballyhooed international shoot comes across mostly as hype nowadays. To modern audiences’ more sophisticated eyes, the seams in the production really show, as when the film cuts from a sweeping foreign vista to a shot of the stars gazing at it in wonder. Much of the action that actually involves the actors looks like it was filmed on soundstages. This isn’t categorically a problem, but when a movie’s primary selling point is that it was filmed on locations around the world, it feels like something of a cheat when the international shots appear to be second-unit work.

In addition, the principal actors in the film are consistently underwhelming. Watching his work as Phileas Fogg, it’s clear why David Niven never became a superstar- not only does he lack the necessary star presence, but his screen persona isn’t very interesting. Phileas Fogg is clearly meant to be an upper-class eccentric- independently wealthy, time-obsessed yet impulsive. Yet with Niven in the role, we have to take the movie’s word for it as regards his eccentricity, since all he brings to the table is a vague air of urbane sophistication. Perhaps a leading man who was more adept at comedy- Cary Grant, perhaps, or Alec Guinness- could have made the role enjoyable, but with Niven it just sort of sits there.

Similarly, despite his celebrity status south of the border, Cantinflas wasn’t cut out for stardom stateside. He looks fairly uncomfortable acting in English, and his physical schtick isn’t very funny, although Anderson and Todd’s insistence on extreme long shots doesn’t help any. Shirley MacLaine, in one of her first films, is sorely miscast as the Indian maiden Aouda, in keeping with classic Hollywood’s highly uncool tradition of “browning-up” white actors for ethnic parts. And while Around the World in 80 Days popularized the practice of “cameo” roles, they’re almost always distracting. Is that brief flash of recognition that comes over audience members when the piano player turns out to be Frank Sinatra really worth the tedious setup? I would argue that it’s not.

In the end, Around the World in 80 Days hardly seems to warrant the “epic” label that many ascribe to it. Far from justifying the largesse of the production, the film feels like an amusing trifle with some picturesque scenes interspersed in order to make the film feel like an event. With comedy that isn’t especially funny and lead actors who get outshone by both the scenery and the stars in the bit roles, Around the World in 80 Days amounts to little more than a widescreen travelogue- diverting in spots with some pleasant company, but not very interesting cinematically, and not really worth revisiting.

Trailer Review: Eagle Eye (Full Trailer)

Paul Clark — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Who would have expected that one of the most intriguing-looking big-budget thrillers of this year would star Shia LaBeouf and be directed by the clown who made Taking Lives? Eagle Eye doesn’t look particularly fresh- basically it’s a twist on Hitchcock’s “innocent man wrongly accused” rejiggered for our tech-happy age. Yet there’s something delicious about how paranoid this looks, with shadowy organizations setting up innocent people as possible criminals as part of… what? A sick game? Or something more sinister? Of course, LaBeouf is a far cry from the old-Hollywood classiness of Hitchcockian leads like Cary Grant, but there’s something ratty-looking about him here that not only makes him more relatable for today’s audiences, but also makes his survival less certain. It’s entirely possible that this movie will be all premise, no execution, but the premise is good enough that for now, I’m on board.

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab celebrated the 10 Sexiest Girl Geeks in Cinema...and now, in tribute to the return of that dreamy Professor Henry Jones, Jr. (in the hotly anticipated Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), we present our equal opportunity list of ten hot nerdy guys.

As with the previous list, most of these so-called nerds, geeks, dorks and maxi-zoom dweebies are played by actors who, in real life, are pretty easy on the eyes. But their characters, at least, are misfits and loners, undervalued diamonds in the rough just waiting to be discovered by some lucky, sharp-eyed lady (or gentleman).

Why lucky? Because as Robert Carradine’s Louis Skolnick says in Revenge of the Nerds (and as we at The Screengrab know oh so well), “Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex.”

10. William Hurt as Professor Eddie Jessup in Altered States

Back in the 1980s, William Hurt was the poster child for brainy-sexy-cool, thanks to his breakthrough role in Ken Russell’s nerd-tastic acid trip Altered States. Hurt stars as Professor Eddie Jessup, a Harvard scientist who is so totally obsessed with his research into universal consciousness that he’d rather “experiment” on himself than have sex with his hot primatologist wife...and what’s geekier than that?

9. Alan Tudyk as Wash in Serenity

Not being a lady or a gay gentleman, I was a little unsure of the actual “hotness” of some of the geeks on this list, and when I ran my original #9 (Jeff Goldblum as doomed scientist Seth Brundle in The Fly) by my wife, she shrugged, “Yeah...uh...I guess.” And while no less an authority than Geena Davis apparently found Brundlefly plenty damn sexy, I nevertheless decided instead to dedicate this space to the late, lamented pilot of the good ship Serenity, who my friend Julia informs me is quite the nerd hottie. Sweet, technology-obsessed and a little bit dorky, poor Wash is gone but evidently not forgotten.

8. Cary Grant as David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby

In last week’s girl geek list, I noted that Scarlett Johansson playing a geek in Ghost World was about as believable as Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist, and I freely admit it seems hypocritical to list this uber-suave icon of urbane manliness in a top ten list of cinematic nerds...yet Grant’s stuffy paleontologist is the ancestor to any number of sweetly sexy absent-minded professor characters too obsessed with their studies to recognize their biological needs or the effect of their powerful chemistry on the world around them. Speaking of which...

7. Ryan O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up Doc?

I deferred again to my wife here in the #7 spot after she violently rejected my original pick: Jon Cryer as Phil “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink, about whom I said: “Sure, Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh ultimately chose Andrew McCarthy’s limp noodle preppie, but in the same way all my guy geek friends preferred the pre-makeover Allison in The Breakfast Club, just about every alterna-girl I know would have picked Jon Cryer’s sometimes annoying but always stylish and devoted Duckie in a heartbeat.” To which my wife, an alterna-girl in her own right, shot back, “No. He’s not a hot nerd. He’s just a dork.” So, instead, I’ve substituted Ryan O’Neal’s befuddled, wife-approved musicologist as my #7 pick, in part to beef up the 1970s content of this list, and in part because any character who spends the majority of his time obsessed with igneous rock formations yet still manages to attract offbeat beauties like Madeline Kahn’s Eunice Burns and 1970s-sex-kitten-era-Barbara Streisand’s Judy Maxwell is clearly a nerd to be reckoned with.

6. Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts in American Beauty (by Paul Clark)

When we first came up with the idea for this list, we went back and forth about the idea of including Ricky Fitts. Sure, he's an outcast at school, but does that make him a true geek? Ricky certainly doesn’t fit the mold on the surface -- no horn-rims, not especially studious, and so on. But, to quote American Beauty's tagline, "look closer." With his ever-present camera and intense gaze, he has the bearing of someone who's spent his life on the outside looking in, the way all geeks feel during their high-school years. Listen to his famous monologue about the plastic bag -- there's an analytical mind at work here that distinguishes him from his more socially-adept, less self-aware peers. Being a loner has given him plenty of time to step back from life and think about the world around him in a way most people his age don't have time for. It's also given him a serene acceptance of his life that proves irresistible to his troubled next-door neighbor Angela (Thora Birch). When she's not sneaking him up to her bedroom to have sex, he's everything a good boyfriend should be -- sensitive, empathetic, a good listener, the whole shebang. So Ricky doesn't look the part, but so what? In many ways, he's the real deal in a way those Urkel wannabes aren't, and a kind of ideal for young women who find themselves frustrated with the limited possibilities of dating popular jocks. -- Paul Clark

Click here for part 2.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Forgotten Films: "Just Tell Me What You Want" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In his the most recent film of his incredibly long, checkered, impressive career, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (out on DVD next week), director Sidney Lumet played to his strengths: his rapport with his actors, and his ability to tap into an energy that can be exciting even when it turns scabrous. Lumet turned those qualities on his own show-business-industry set in his 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want, which came out early in 1980, got appalled reviews, and vanished from sight. Like much of Lumet's work, the movie is uneven and feels patched-together in places, but the very qualities that seemed to gross out critics at the time are part of what makes it such a bold, distinctive entertainment, a romantic comedy without illusions. It's cynical without being judgemental, which is so unusual that some reviewers may have had trouble believing what they were seeing. (Lumet got great reviews for some of his duller '80s films that were eager to point fingers at their characters' moral defects.)

Its hero, and its target, is Max Herschel, a self-made corporate head (played by the stand-up comic Alan King) who sees everything, including his love life, as a succession of deals to be made. Max is married (to a drug-addled, bejewelled WASP goddess played by Dina Merrill), but he's been juggling a long-term affair with a TV producer (Ali MacGraw), and when she leaves him for a playwright (Peter Weller) who represents artistic purity and uncommercial values, Max freaks. What makes his decision to wage war on his ex-girlfriend, by wrecking her career while offering her writer-lover the chance to corrupt himself by adapting his own work to the movies, weirdly charming is that, like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, he's trying to win her back by bringing her to her senses. He's right to think that she really belongs in the executive suite with him instead of blowing on her fingers in a cold hovel playing muse to some proud literary loser. And Alan King, in his only starring movie role, makes Max a hard man to dislike. (The large, lively cast also includes Myrna Loy, smooth as silk in her final screen role as Max's secretary.) Just Tell Me What You Want may have been a few years ahead of its time; a year after its release, Ronald Reagan was president, manipulative rich bastards were on their way to being redefined as glamorous "Masters of the Universe", and in People magazine and on TV series such as Dynasty, Americans were cheering on pushy, multimillionaire hustlers without a fraction of Max's charm. It might be the tragedy of Donald Trump's life that he had to settle for playing himself instead of staying home and letting Alan King do it for him.

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

George Clooney Leans In, and Other Insights

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In a long profile in The New Yorker, Ian Parker calls George Clooney a "Hollywood emperor" and "America’s national flirt," whose "stardom has had an air of earlier, pre-therapeutic times." Parker notes that, while Clooney is often described as the closest thing we have these days to Cary Grant in his prime, "the comparison falters at the level of physical movement. In one’s memory of Grant, he leans back a little. Clooney leans forward. Clooney’s masculinity is ambitious: he is a pickup artist, a flicker of locker-room towels...he is the fellow at the end of the bar, who, on a scale running from James Stewart to Jack Nicholson, has found an enviable midpoint of courteous roguishness." In some of the movies he's made lately that have been closest to his heart, Clooney has also insisted on letting his characters remain alone, in a way that's almost unthinkable for Grant. In both Syriana and Michael Clayton, his love interests wound up on the cutting room floor, a decision that Clooney was all for. Speaking of Michael Clayton, he told Parker, “If he’s loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn’t as awful.”

Clooney comes across as a guy who, having achieved major stardom after many years in the trenches, is intensely aware of his place in the Hollywood pecking order but treats it as a joke, as part of his campaign to be seen as a regular guy. During the buildup to this year's Academy Awards season, he appeared at a Newsweek-sponsored panel discussion where, on behalf of his entire profession, he made an elaborate show of fealty to Daniel Day-Lewis, and here he recounts an evening in the company of other big-time actors, including Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem, where “we got hammered and we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem.” And though Clooney takes his politics seriously, a few years ago "he seemed to read politics through the prism of his own expertise in handling public perception. He would often mention an unnamed magazine that, before the Iraq war, had his photograph on its cover with the word 'traitor' running 'across my chest.'” Parker was surprised to learn that the slandering rag in question was "the National Examiner, a second-rung supermarket tabloid; its “Traitors!” cover, in late February, 2003, did have a picture of Clooney, along with five other stars, as well as a competing story about the death of Kathie Lee Gifford’s dog. Although it isn’t for anyone but Clooney to say how insulting he found this, it does seem an obscure, even camp, place to find an insult."

These days, Clooney's primary public, non-movie focus is on Darfur, the subject of a speech he recently delivered at the United Nations. Afterwards, "He answered questions, and then moved to a suite of offices on the thirty-second floor, where he gave a dozen separate television interviews, speaking in a very low voice, without taking a break. Clooney’s publicist and a few others borrowed an office, marked 'Situation Room,' until the news that rebel forces were poised to topple the government of Chad caused the U.N. to ask for the room back, and the publicist moved into the corridor." Meanwhile, his professional focus may be drifting to what he'll be doing, perhaps behind the camera, when, as they say in Scorseseland, he ain't pretty no more. (I guess you have to worry about something.) The article is of course timed to coincide with the release of Leatherheads, the third movie he's directed (and the first that he's directed and taken the starring role in), a movie with a period setting a throwback slapstick-romantic-comedy feel that may be Clooney's way of addressing the Cary Grant thing head-on, but on his own macho turf. It's been judged a disappointment, and this has actually occasioned news stories, which may have been in the pipeline since the movie's release date was shoved back from last fall. But Clooney might take some comfort in knowing that there are other famous movie actors who turn out bombs all the time without anybody thinking that it's news.

Sex Talk with Brian De Palma

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

It’s sex month at Premiere.com, and what better way to kick it off than an interview with the director of Redacted and Mission to Mars? OK, we can think of a few better ways too, but even De Palma detractors must admit the man has committed a steamy scene or two to celluloid in his day. “Who can forget his homage to Hitchcock in Dressed to Kill (1980) when the camera pans shortly after the film's opening credits onto Angie Dickenson's crotch as she lustfully masturbates in the steaming shower seconds before she's grabbed from behind by a shadowy male figure?” asks Karl Rozemeyer. And while I think we’re all aware that wasn’t actually Angie Dickenson’s body in the shower scene, the larger point still stands: memorable nudity enlivens even the silliest movie. And the silliest movie I can think of is De Palma’s Body Double.

The man himself doesn’t seem to be particularly comfortable discussing the subject. Favorite sex scene in a movie? “That's a good question. I think sex scenes are extremely difficult to do. I don't think I have ever really done a straightforward love scene. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo.” Please, everyone, try to keep your pants on.

“So much of shooting sex scenes in movies you a see are naked people sort of humping each other on a bed, shot in the most unflattering way just because they happen to be naked and mimicking making love. They don't really dramatize their particular sexual attraction to each other. And it's very difficult. You have to find a way, a visual way to approach scenes like that… I am trying to think of movies with really good... there must be some classics that spring to mind.”

Clearly De Palma requires further prodding on the issue, if you’ll pardon the terminology. “Maybe Blowup or Last Tango in Paris?” Rozemeyer offers. “Blowup? Yeah, yeah. Incredibly sexy. Who was it? Veruschka [von Lehndorff]? Incredibly stunning and beautiful.” Ah, now he’s coming around. But De Palma is finally forced to concede the whole love-sex-relationship thing just isn’t his style. “What draws me to make movies is more the visual design and that is why very emotional stories between two characters — loving, complicated, dramatic — is just something my particular aesthetic is not drawn to.” Fair enough…and with visual design like this, who can really complain?

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Cary Grant Doesn't Vent

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz uses the excuse of sort-of-almost-as-an-afterthought reviewing what sounds like a pretty lame book (Richard Torregrossa’s Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style) to compose a love poem to the star of His Girl Friday and North by Northwest. The impoverished Cockney Archie Leach took the name "Cary Grant" when he signed to a Hollywood contract in his late twenties, but it wasn't until he was past thirty, with twenty pictures under his belt, that he became Cary Grant. The by-now standard gospel tells of how Grant, working with his frequent co-star Katherine Hepburn and the director George Cukor for the first time, in Sylvia Scarlett, suddenly "he felt the ground under his feet" (in Cukor's words) and how he then put it to use in his first really sophisticated, screwball romantic comedy, The Awful Truth. Scwartz writes that "seemingly from nowhere the Cary Grant persona gloriously appeared, fully formed. All at once there was the detached, distracted wit; the knowing charm; the arch self-mockery; the bemused awareness of his audience, with whom he was sharing a joke (a quality that made him simultaneously cool and warm); the perfectly timed stylized comedic movements—the cocked head, the double takes. And, not least, the good-natured ease combined with a genius for pitiless teasing ... Moreover, he suddenly created a new hybrid, combining qualities that hadn’t before mixed in the movies. He was oddly unplaceable: C. L. R. James, the brainy Trinidadian Marxist theorist and cricket writer, noticed at the time that Grant appeared both American and quintessentially English; at once subtle and rollicking, he seemed to James to anticipate nothing less than 'a new social type.' ”

For decades, Grant, whose name always seems to come up first in conversations about people who never won an Oscar (along with that of Hitchcock, who called Grant the only actor he'd ever loved), was everybody's ideal movie star without being taken very seriously as an actor. Schwartz gives much of the credit for his finally getting his critical due in the mid-1970s to two idiosyncratic, brilliant writers on film: David Thomson, who hailed him as "the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema” in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, and Pauline Kael, who fleshed that appraisal out in a legendary New Yorker profile, "The Man from Dream City." As for the book under review: "Torregrossa stumbles when it comes to one big thing. He devotes four pages to explicating what’s wrong with ventless jackets, how Grant came to eschew them, why double vents look best (they don’t), and the ways Grant modified his vents. He then holds up that perfectly tailored slim-line suit Grant wore during his cross-country travails in North by Northwest as an example of the star’s preference for customized vents. Torregrossa is talking here about the most famous suit in pictures. Todd McEwen wrote a smart and stylish Granta essay on it (North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit”). GQ has declared it nothing less than the best suit in film history. It’s ventless." Speaking as a man who, on his best days, can just barely figure out which Nike goes on the left foot, I am appalled.