The Screengrab : charlton heston

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

REPO MAN (1984)

Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

Love him or hate him -- and there are plenty of cinephiles in both camps -- it’s hard to deny that nobody could end a movie quite like Michelangelo Antonioni. With plenty of wonderful conclusions in his work, it was hard to confine ourselves to just one Antonioni film (or even two, as we ended up doing), but ultimately we couldn’t possibly overlook the finale of this, his most critically-savaged work. Taken as a whole, Zabriskie Point is a scattershot vision of late-sixties America -- sometimes visionary, sometimes ponderous, often both. But even if you aren’t a fan of the movie, the ending packs a wallop. Sure, it’s somewhat obvious what Antonioni’s up to here, blowing up a gaudy “modern” house that has intruded on the natural majesty of the desert, even showing the explosion from multiple angles for extra emphasis. But it’s how he does it that turns the scene from sledgehammer symbolism to transcendent cinema (besides, this is relatively subtle compared to Antonioni’s other proposed ending, which involved an airplane writing “Fuck You, America” across the sky). As Antonioni shifts the film into some of the slowest slow-motion the cinema has ever seen in order to capture the explosions in exhaustive detail, he manages to exact his cinematic revenge on consumer culture -- watch as he blows up a television, a refrigerator, even a loaf of Wonder Bread -- while simultaneously transforming the destruction into something beautiful, with an assist from a modified version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” For lack of a better phrase, it’s pure cinema. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the notion that even a director as art-damaged as Antonioni knows sometimes his hardened audiences just want to watch stuff blow up real good. (PC)

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) & BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Sorry to ruin it for you, but the planet of the apes? It was Earth all along! Charlton Heston sure feels silly now. But not as silly as he’ll feel when he finds himself the prisoner of underground mutants in the sequel. Now he’s really had enough, and it’s hard to blame him for overreacting. I’ve told this story before, but one more time before they turn out the lights: Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen." (SVD)

WEEKEND (1967)

By the end of the ‘60s, it was clear to everyone that Jean-Luc Godard was through fucking around. He was using cinema less as a means of communication and more as a weapon, but how deadly serious he was about deploying that weapon didn’t become clear until the final scenes of his dizzying film Weekend. The circumstances are brutal enough; the bourgeois couple we’ve followed throughout the film, cheated of their inheritance, resort to murder and end up in cahoots with a pack of radical revolutionaries with a taste for human flesh. But throughout Weekend, Godard was operating on a higher level: it’s full of meta-reference, and the director makes no bones about his characters being tuned into their own artificiality at every juncture. He planned it not as a mere statement, but as a command: this art form, he said, is dead; leave the theatre not to discuss it, but to seize and tear down. It was a powerful message, and a prescient one a year before Paris exploded into a nearly miraculous revolution. But even in that atmosphere, only Godard would have had the balls to give Weekend its famous ending: a simple title card reading “END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD.” (LP)

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY (1966)

Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Leone's, aren't concerned with Western realism, but the myth of the West, which they blow up like Greco-Roman gods. This might be the most iconic and expressionist movie ending outside of, y'know, German Expressionism. The clip above starts after Tuco and Blondie find the graveyard, with the camera spinning through the graves as Tuco races through the rows, looking for the right name. Then Blondie forces him to dig. Angel Eyes appears and there's the first double-cross: the grave Tuco is digging up has bones rather than money in it. The Mexican standoff. The second and third double-cross: Tuco's gun is empty and Blondie didn't write anything on the rock. Tuco digs at the right grave, but as soon as he strikes the gold, there's the fourth double-cross: Blondie has hung a noose over his head while he was working. The camera stays with Tuco as Blondie rides away, and we all watch him disappear, thinking, "wait, that one is The Good?" But he returns and frees Tuco, calling back to an earlier scene of camaraderie between them. It sounds like a story from The Odyssey even as I describe it here. If there had been such a thing as a Mexican standoff when Homer was writing, I'm certain that Odysseus would have found himself at one point of the triangle, one step ahead of the others. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part Two: Live Blogging TCM's Easter Sunday Line-Up--"The Green Pastures", "Salome", "Solomon and Sheba", "Ben-Hur"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

6:30 AM: The 1936 The Green Pastures is a musical adaptation of several Bible stories, based on a Broadway show that Marc Connelly adapted from Roark Bradford's book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun; it features an all-African American cast, led by Rex Ingram as "De Lawd." I know what you're thinking, but it's actually a terrific movie, so I don't have a lot to say about it. Except that it's interesting to compare its staging of the journey out of Egypt and, especially, the Golden Calf period to the way DeMille handled them in The Ten Commandments. For one thing, in Pastures, the decadence that breaks out while De Lawd is otherwise occupied actually looks like something that a rational adult might be tempted to join in on. DeMille's looks like interpretive dance night at Burning Man, and DeMille's voice on the soundtrack explaining how awful it all is doesn't help. (For one thing, he starts out by complaining that the people started expressing their sinful nature by putting on gaudy clothes, and then he starts complaining that they began to take off their gaudy clothes. You just can't win with some people.)

8:15 A.M.: Watching the 1953 Salome soon after seeing The Ten Commandments, one of the first things you're likely to notice is that a lot of the same people tend to turn up over and over in these kinds of pictures. Clearly, if you ran a studio and discovered which actors looked more plausible than not wearing a bedsheet, you didn't want to take too many chances. Here, Cedric Hardwicke is the Roman emperor Tiberius, who fans of I, Claudius will remember as having been quite the dirty fucker, and who plants a mine by giving Pontius Pilate (Basil Sidney) a government job, and Judith Anderson is Queen Herodius, who is always giving King Herod a hard time for his reluctance to have the trash-talking prophet John the Baptist (Alan Badel). Herod is played by Charles Laughton, twenty years after first grabbing Hollywood's attention as Nero in C. B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross; in that movie, he played a powerful monster who enjoyed his work, but here he's troubled and bent out of shape because he doesn't know how to handle this John the Baptist business. Herod is plagued by father issues: he is the son of the earlier King Herod, who, in a similar situation many years earlier, ordered the murder of all male children in the city of Bethlehem, a move that was judged by most observers of the day as a gross over-reaction. Laughton's Herod, who remembers his father's piteous and agonized screams, especially when he read Maureen Dowd's latest column, is plagued by the thought that he might err in the same way his father did, and also by the suspicion that his father always thought his brother Jeb was really the smart one.

Where does Salome enter into this, you ask? It's a good question, and one that seems to have been judged by the screenwriters as not entirely within their powers to answer. Salome is played by Rita Hayworth, which sounds like a good deal at first. But Hayworth, whose production company was responsible for the movie, seems to have been going through one of those periods of a yearning for respect that sometimes befall screen goddesses, sometimes at the oddest of times. In some scenes, Hayworth tries to act seriously by slipping into a bogus British accent, so she'll fit in with her illustrious co-stars (and with her less illustrious ones, chiefly Stewart Granger as a Roman soldier she has the hots for); in others, she tries to convey heavy emotion by breathing so hard between her lines that it's as if she were trying to invent the obscene phone call centuries before some invents the telephone. In the version of this story that we all know and love, Salome dirty dances for the king in order to persuade him to have the Baptist executed for her pleasure. In this one. Rita's Salome takes to the dance floor in a gilded blue robe and modified kaiser helmet in hopes of steaming up Herod's glasses so badly that the old boy can be persuaded to spare the Baptist, but her ploy backfires: seeing her husband watching the evening's entertainment with his tongue in his lap, Herodius leans over and whispers that if he'll have the Baptist beheaded by the time Rita executes her last shimmy shake, she'll put in a good word for him with Rita about what a terrific personality he has. Things wrap up quickly and badly. Rita's reaction to the sight of John's head on a salver makes Herod realize that he'll be sleeping on the couch, and as the people outside bang on the gates, Stewart Granger lectures the royal couple: "Live! Live in torture. May the blood of the man you've murdered rise in your throats to choke you." All that remains is a quick twist ending: Herod and his queen feared John the Baptist as a threat to their power because they thought he might be the messiah, but a final shot of Rita and Stewart Granger standing in a crowd listening to some guy deliver the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that it is in fact this guy who is the real Keyser Soze. The movie ends with the words "This is the beginning" appearing on screen.

10:00 AM: King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba (1959) has many points of distinction. For one thing, it stands as a lasting reminder that the birth of the state of Israel once seemed like something that Hollywood could stand to cash in on. The story involves a power struggle for the throne of Israeli between the sons of David, Solomon (Yul Brynner) and Adonijah, played by my man George Sanders, with the Queen of Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) plotting with the Egyptians to destroy the Jewish state. As part of the production design, the Israelis' shields, home furnishings, and maybe their underwear are emblazoned with the Star of David. I'm pretty sure this is anachronistic, but it's not like I was there or have a piece of the copyright action, so what the hey. Perhaps harder to account for is what will strike many people as the central stroke of miscasting that has George Sanders playing the Sonny Corleone role of the fiery-tempered, violent brother while Yul Brynner handles the Michael role as the bookish Solomon who, somebody reminds us every three minutes, is a legend in his own time for being just as wise as shit. (There is no third brother to serve as the Fredo figure, and he is missed.) This is also one of those very special movies in which Yul has hair, perhaps because Solomon's precious brains need all the protection they can get. (Brynner was a late addition to the cast, stepping in for Tyrone Power after Power keeled over from a fatal heart attack as a consequence of doing a fight scene with George Sanders, which, for those of you who don't know, tells you just how bad George Sanders was.)

The movie, which is a long sumbitch, is padded out with some of Solomon's greatest hits scenes, such as the time he pulled the old let's-cut-the-kid-in-two-and-give-each-of-youse-half gag. This is to keep you alerted to the fact that he is, once again, wise. It might have been a nice touch if he could have indicated the depths of wisdom in some simpler fashion, such as dressing sensibly, but that ship had sailed by the time that the costume designer persuaded Yul Brynner to swan about in what looks like a Confederate army leisure suit with a big-ass Star of David medallion that looks like what Bob Guccione might break out for the high holidays. (Brynner's beard and toupee also serve to heighten a previously unsuspected resemblance to Hector Elizaondo.) He may be wise, but he's mortal, and certain things cut off the flow of blood to his brain just as fast as they do with the rest of us, so Sheba Lollobrigida goes to work on him, bewitching him with her ultry-sultry wiles, until God can't take it anymore and starts caving roofs in just to distract Solomon's attention away from his new friend's exposed midsection. After a big battle, Solomon kills George Sanders accidentally on purpose, and then carries Sheba's bruised and broken body into the temple so that God can demonstrate his own unquestioned superiority to Sam the Eagle when it comes to resurrections: he not only restores her to full health but scrubs her face and throws in some Botox. It would be easy to say that King Vidor has done better work, since most of us have. What's a little embarrassing is that one of the occasions when he did better work was Duel in the Sun.

12:30 PM: And now, it's time for the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room of Easter television: Ben-Hur, the 1959 Oscar-festooned super-epic that arguably announced the end of the era of the '50s religious epic, a genre that did not surpass itself so much as max out all its credit cards in this one last wallow. I'll confess right now that I have never fully understood this movie's qualfications as a religious epic. To my eyes, it's a "prestige" (i.e., bloated) version of a Roman sword-and-sandal action movie with brief but strategically placed cameos by a pair of feet and a hand or two that, we are to understand, are connected to the great unseeable presence that is Him. But you go trying to argue with fifty years of conventional wisdom and see where it gets you.

The plot is basically one of those Horatio Alger success stories, as contemporary culture critics understand the Alger books as tributes to the knack for picking out the right rich, powerful man to brown nose. Having had his life destroyed when he doesn't have sense enough to cross the street rather than run into his old school chum Messala--played by Stephen Boyd, an actor so habitually over-intense that I like to imagine he didn't die so much as supernova--our hero, Mr. Hur (Charlton Heston), climbs back to society's upper rungs while showing an unerring instinct for who to save from drowning when pirates attack the ship where he's manning the oars as a galley slave and whose reins to hold during the big chariot race. At the end of that race, you do get to hear the greatest line anybody ever wrote for somebody to say to Charlton Heston, when Pontius Pilate--played by Frank Thring this time--crowns him the winner and says, "Permit us to worship you."

About the only thing else I can think of to say about the movie is that, if you watch it after you've been gorging on films like Salome and Solomon and Sheba, it's impossible not to respect, even with one eye at half-mast and half your brain switched to autopilot, just what a tremendous professional job the director William Wyler did. You might think that someone gainfully employed by a major studio and entrusted with the job of bringing a big epic in on schedule would be able, at a bare minimum of competence, to direct the extras in a crowd scene so that they looked like human beings with some independent life, and to make the sets look as if somebody had lived in them for more than five minutes and as if they were still going to be standing five minutes after the director yelled "Cut!" But whether or not this stuff was worth doing at all, to see if done completely badly is to give you a fresh appreciation for how hard Wyler has to have worked to get it done half-right.

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part One: Live Blogging "The Ten Commandments"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:43:00 GMT

7:00 P.M., Saturday:: It's Easter Eve, which means it's time to kick things off with ABC's umpteenth broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille's career-capping whopper of a religious epic, The Ten Commandments (1956). Back when this was a good, God-fearing nation and it was easier to think of members of this movie's cast who were still alive, it was customary for ABC to run this movie on Sunday, as the cherry on top of the Easter festivities. But now it's been relegated to Saturday evenings, which nowadays are known as the night when the commercial networks don't even bother trying. Back in the days when ABC ran The Ten Commandments in prime time on the theory that someone would watch it, the network would have confronted the issue of the movie's exceptional length by spreading it out over two nights or letting it play past eleven o'clock, forcing local affiliates to try to keep their late-night news anchors up past their bedtimes. Now, eager to just get the august programming tradition the hell over with, ABC starts the movie an hour before prime time, daring moms across the land to call their kids in from soccer practice lest they miss Moses's thrilling origin story.

As it happens, Moses (Charlton Heston) has a pretty bang-up back story. Turned loose as an infant to float down the Nile by his humble Hebrew mother (Martha Scott), Mose is claimed by the barren and widowed princess Bithiah (Nina Foch), who raises him to be the Egyptian Howard Roarke. The mature Moses, working with thousands of slaves and the combined budget of all three Lord of the Rings films at his command, erects giant, phallic obelisks and dramatically throws back curtains to reveal expensive-looking matte paintings, all of which he has done in the name of the old Pharaoh (Cedric Hardwicke), who is suitably impressed. When he's not supervising feats of construction so dazzling that Erich von Daniken will someday make a pretty penny assuring people that they must have been completed using extraterrestrial technology, Moses swaggers about the city followed by a bunch of dudes whose only mission in life is to throw back their heads and guffaw whenever he gets off a good one, usually at the expense of Vincent Price, whose performance here really puts the "super" in "supercilious." (I had a bunch of guys like this following me around during my last two years in high school. Since Vincent Price has already graduated, I used to keep them entertained them by bouncing zingers off the forehead of Jeff Faggard, who I had no role in naming. Poor Jeff later died while standing on his roof adjusting his TV antennae during an electrical storm.)

Moses's chief rival for Cedric Hardwicke's job is Rameses (Yul Brynner), whose only reaction to seeing this eagle-profiled pretender to the throne rise through the ranks is to pout, glare, and seethe, though that has to have been pretty much what DeMille had in mind when he cast the role, since pouting, glaring, and seething would have remained Yul Brynner's default approach to whatever role he was playing even if he'd been cast as Willy Wonka. As if Rameses needed another reason to drop Moses from his Christmas card list, it turns out that the first prize in the "I Want to Be Pharoah" sweepstakes is the hand of the fair Nefretiri, played by Anne Baxter in a dark-bangs-and-bangles ensemble that brings a welcome touch of Bettie Page to the proceedings even before Moses, his Hebrew parentage having come to light, is brought before Pharaoh modeling the latest in jangly bondage gear. Nefretiri makes no pretense of not having a favorite horse in the running for her favors. "You will rule Egypt," she tells Moses, "and I will be your footstool!" "A man stupid enough to use you for a footstool would not be capable of ruling Egypt," Moses replies, showing that he is so pure-hearted a good Jewish boy that her kinkier suggestions are lost on him. When a slave (Judith Anderson) hints that she knows the Terrible Secret about Moses's past, Nefretiri tells her, "Old frog, be careful what you croak about Moses," then solves the problem by throwing Anderson's sandals off the balcony while Anderson is still wearing them.

Of course, the truth has to come out, and it isn't long before Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) has traded the crucial information to Rameses in exchange for a wheelbarrow full of money, Vincent Price's house, and Debra Paget, who looks at him beseechingly and says, "If you fear God, let me go!"--I line that I've heard myself often enough to recognize it as an unfailing sign that the first date isn't going well. Moses is stripped of his royal rank and key to the Playboy Club and sent alone into the desert, where he is cleansed and prepared to do God's work with an ordeal signified by having Heston make with the clenched-jaw grimness while a lucky stagehand sprinkles sand in front of the wind machine pointed in his direction. Finally, he meets a bevy of cuties in brightly colored clothes who seem to rehearsing for a production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It turns out that they are the daughters of Jethro, sheik of Medium, sophisticated international playboy and double-naught spy. When a bunch of Malchites, who seem to be what they had in the days before motorcycle gangs, show up to steal the girls' water and tease their sheep, Moses leaps out of the bushes, brandishing his staff, and demonstrates the Old Testament practice known by religious scholars as kicking ass and taking names. The next thing you know, the girls, having deemed him seriously worthy of their giggly attentions, are competing for the honor of using their precious water to wash his feet. De Mille's research for this picture must have convinced him that the footstool-fetish thing among women crossed all ethnic and class lines in those days.

Jethro welcomes Moses into his home with open arms and offers him the choice of his seven daughters, even though it's not much of a contest, considering that six of the daughters function as a sort of Hebrew chorus to the hottest daughter, played by a pre-Lily Munster Yvonne De Carlo, here completely living up to Jamie Lee Curtis's recent description of her as the Angelina Jolie of her day, minus the proficiency with light firearms. "I shall dwell in this land," Moses announces, doing his best to make it sound as if he has a whole shitload of better options. How comes the part of the story that I could never fully make sense of in Sunday school, when Moses kicks back and lets his hair and beard grow out and turn gray, starts a family, and adopts John Derek, while the Jews are looking at their watches and wondering when they're going to be led out of bondage. I remember thinking, as a kid, that if I were in charge of the spittoon at Pharaoh's place, I'd be kind of eager for Moses to get on with it, but he's determined to wait until he gets the right sign he's waiting for from God. I'll give DeMille and his casting director this: it's a lot easier to understand Moses's measured approach to tackling his mission when he's spending the time leading up to it kicking back with Yvonne De Carlo. Ultimately, however, Moses is invited to a sit-down discussion of the slavery issue with a burning bush, which has the same motivational effect as that letter from the student loan people that first raises the subject of wage garnishment.

Moses goes unto Rameses the Pharaoh, who expresses his disdain for God's messenger by greeting him shirtless while wearing his Zippy the Pinhead hat. Moses, with his special effects wizard John Carradine at his side, tries to impress upon Pharaoh the power of God by throwing his staff upon the floor, where it turns into a cobra. But then Pharaoh orders his own CGI guys to throw their staffs onto the floor, and they turn into cobras too. But Nefreteri announces that Moses's snake was so bad that he ate the other two snakes. I don't know if DeMille decided to not actually show this because he didn't have the technology, but for whatever reason, he has my gratitude. Now comes the part of the story that everybody always looks forward to, the series of anti-miracles when God turns the Nile to cherry Kool-Aid and gets all Magnolia on lower Egypt with the rubber frogs. DeMille, whose faith in the narrative power of female perfidy was forged in the furnaces of a thousand silent movies, makes it clear that what's really keeping the men from reaching a sensible truce is the manipulative scheming of Nefretiri, who's been forced to marry and have a son with a man she can't stand and now sees her old flame roll back into town, not to reclaim her, but just to start some shit about freeing his "people." Whenever Rameses is clearly beginning to think that holding onto his slave labor force just isn't worth it, she gets a bad case of the slinkies and starts taunting him in her Mae West voice.

In the end, she overreaches, because she doesn't expect God to sink low enough to play the death-of-the-firstborn-son card. When Pharaoh sees his own weird little slaphead kid laid out on his deathbed, he orders that Moses be brought to him via "my fastest chariot", adding, "He's my only son," indicating that he'd be willing to write off the loss if he had a couple of replacements cooling in the fridge. When Moses arrives, he finds a defeated man waiting for him, slumped in a chair while the cries of grieving parents are heard rising in the streets outside. Rameses makes a little summing-up speech, telling Moses that he fucked up his relationship with his father, fucked up his chance to be happy with his queen, and has now killed his son; he can't take anymore, and because of that, "I set you free." "It is not by your word or by my hand that we are free," Moses says. "The power of God has freed us." Rameses urges him to shut up and tells him to "take your people, your cattle, your god and your pestilence, take whatever spoils of Egypt you will, but go;" all he asks in return is that they be sure and take Edward G. Robinson with them. While Rameses slumps further in his throne and Nefretiri enters with her dead son in her arms, Moses, looking up to the heavens, intones, "Oh, Lord God, with a strong hand, you lead us out of bitter bondage," and slowly, slowly, slowly exits, talking all the while. At this point, I think we can all agree that Moses, in his moment of triumph, is just being a titanic dick.

As he shuffles off towards the land of milk and honey, Nefretiri hands Rameses their son, uttering the line, "He's dead", in a way that strongly implies that she's been fortifying herself with the cooking sherry, and Rameses deposits the boy's corpse before a huge statue of Sam the Eagle, and promises the most noble Muppet of them all anything if he will restore his son to life. A cut to the morning after establishes that this has worked out about as well as the time I promised God that I would grow up to be a preacher if he would keep them from canceling Holmes and Yoyo. Goaded once more by the missus, Rameses leads his men on a high speed chase after the departing Hebrews and gets to watch as his entire army is decimated in the celebrated sequence depicting the parting and un-parting of the Red Sea. Having established himself as the slowest learner in the history of religious epics, he returns home to sit beside his queen, while the screen turns red to suggest that whatever remaining time this marriage has to run will be an unrelentingly bitter series of "I told you so"s and "Moses would have known how to get a better estimate from the plumber" moments.

Moses leads his people into the desert and disappears into the mountains for forty days, a stretch of time so long that most of the people assume he is dead. They have no way of knowing that God is composing the guidelines for good behavior referred to in the title, reeling them off the top of his head and inscribing them in stone, using the time-consuming dictation-by-fireball method instead of just inventing the laptop. Only when God is finished does he think to mention to Moses that the people he left down there in the valley have gone batshit and are worshiping a golden calf under Edward G. Robinson's direction. When Moses sees this sorry display with his own eyes, he hurls the tablets at the calf, which turns out to be toxic and highly flammable. As punishment, the people are forced to wander in the desert for forty years, at the end of which time Moses slips into a white wig and ascends to Heaven. Which is nice for him, but I always feel that, without wishing this movie were any longer, the period of wandering in the desert for forty years might stand some fleshing out. There could be a sitcom in there somewhere.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I claimed the period from New Year's to Oscar Night was the most wonderful time of the year for movie geeks, what with all the Best-Of Lists and awards season festivities...but for movie AND music geeks (not to mention the small but powerful barbecue geek lobby), there is no better place or time than mid-March in sunny Austin, when the South-By-Southwest Festival unleashes 1,800 bands from around the world on the capital of Texas, along with several zillion filmmakers, wannabes, hucksters, tourists, web designers, Industry sleazeballs and bloggers (including yours truly, my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce and, heck, maybe half the Nerve.com staff for all I know...see you at the Yard Dog, guys)!

Thus, in celebration of SXSW’s yearly combo of films & fretboards, your pals here at the Screengrab are launching a two-week tribute to OUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC!

Andrew Osborne’s Favorites:

IMAGINE (1988)

As far as I can remember, the first pop song I ever knew by heart was “Yellow Submarine” -- well, the chorus, anyway, which my brother and me would sing endlessly to the delight (and eventually, I’m sure, to the ear-piercing annoyance of) my parents on numerous long car trips throughout the early ‘70s. So I guess that would make the Beatles my first favorite band...and brilliant, heroic, sarcastic, acerbic, mean, funny, shit-stirring, peace-loving John was always my favorite Beatle (even if he didn’t lend his voice to his cartoon incarnation in the film version of Submarine...a deeply disillusioning trivia fact I’ve been trying to erase from my brain through strategic drinking ever since I learned it). My hipster college roommate cried conspicuously on the fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death (and possibly every year since), whereas I save my tears over the Smart One’s tragically premature and sinfully meaningless demise for periodic viewings of Andrew Solt’s warts-and-all (but ultimately loving) tribute, Imagine (allegedly released in part to counteract the warts-and-nothing-else Lennon biography published by icky toad Albert Goldman the same year). Narrated by Lennon himself, the film chronicles the life and times (and music and feuds and love affairs and political activism) of its subject while evoking the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s far more effectively than a certain reverse-aging button enthusiast I could mention...I only wish Solt's documentary had a better ending.

BIG TIME (1988)

I may have started off loving the Beatles, but after that my tastes wandered from the pop and rock aisles to the musical theater section. Thankfully, my cooler friends were kind enough to broaden my horizons just in time for adolescence with an endless series of mix-tapes, bringing me up to speed on punk, New Wave and, eventually, the one-man genre known as Tom Waits. As it happened, I became a fan smack dab in the midst of Waits' Island years, when he was recording the game-changing trilogy of albums (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs & Frank’s Wild Years) considered by many to be the high-water mark of the singer/songwriter/Conundrummer’s more or less consistently brilliant career...and so I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to catch the Boston stop of the tour captured (or, more specifically, reimagined) in Chris Blum’s barking, bantering concert film Big Time, which depicts Waits both onstage and wandering the periphery as Frank, the mysterious, muttering song character who infamously doused his house in gasoline and torched it, then got on the Hollywood Freeway headed North (and some time later, apparently, wound up working as an usher in a creepy old vaudeville house). Unfortunately, I had to leave that long-ago Boston concert halfway through to get to a stupid play rehearsal (...stupid! ...stupid! ...stupid!), little knowing I wouldn’t get to see Waits in the flesh again for 20+ years (and counting): in the ‘90s, I kept leaving cities just before Waits’ tour arrived in them, and here in the oughts, his infrequent tour stops always seem to be far, far away. So until I finally manage to track the man down again, Big Time will have to do.

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984)

The first time Talking Heads entered my consciousness was on the soundtrack of Risky Business, growling the dirty stomp of “Swamp” over scenes of teen sex in Tom Cruise’s suburban bordello. Shortly thereafter but around the same period, I put a face to the distinctive voice...specifically David Byrne’s weird moony face projected on the side of a house and the dotted white line of a highway in the wicked pissa video for “Burning Down The House” (back when videos were wicked pissa and MTV wasn’t a 24/7 suck-fest). Then, a year later, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense finally gave me a full dose of Talking Heads (thus hooking me on the band for a lot longer than the band stayed hooked on each other). I never got a chance to see David, Tina, Chris & Jerry play live -- not all at the same time, anyway -- but dancing in the aisles with dozens of fellow Head-heads during the classic concert film’s theatrical run was the next best thing...kinda like Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience without the special glasses and shitty music. Indeed, Demme makes his subjects pop off the screen without 3D technology, pyrotechnics or any of the usual rock-doc clichés: all he needed was a lamp, a big suit, a good shot list and one of the best rock bands of all time.

WOODSTOCK (1970)

In the 1971 film The Omega Man, not-quite-last-man-alive Charlton Heston spends his lonely days in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles watching Michael Wadleigh’s super-size documentary of the mother of all concerts again and again...and, frankly, if I wind up being the sole survivor when the world ends in 2012, I’d be pretty psyched to find Woodstock in the projector of my local movie house. For one thing, it’s 184 minutes long (or roughly one hour for each of the three days of peace and music it chronicles)...and the special director’s cut released in 1994 contains an additional 40 minutes of still yet more peace, music and damn, dirty hippies. But what makes Woodstock perfect for repeat viewings is how much Wadleigh and his editors (including Martin Scorsese and BFF Thelma Schoonmaker) pack into the running time, using split-screen sensory overload to capture every conceivable angle of the epochal event, from the iconic onstage performances by Jimi, Joan, Joe, Country Joe, Richie, Arlo and the surprisingly awesome Sha Na Na (among many, many others) to the brown acid, Porta-Potty maintenance and holy-shit meltdowns of the poor bastards trying to keep the whole event from spiraling into the sort of madness and catastrophe captured by the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin in 1970’s other notable concert documentary, Gimme Shelter, the yang to Woodstock’s yin and definitely not the sort of movie likely to cheer you up in an empty theater surrounded by killer mutants.

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

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

In 1939 dollars, Gone With The Wind is still the highest-grossing picture of all time, and it's certainly epic and iconic, what with the burning of Atlanta and Vivien Leigh’s mother of all Oscar clip lines, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” (not to mention Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler not giving a damn and Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy not knowin’ nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies). But lawzy me, what a stupid movie. For one thing, Scarlett O’Hara is easily one of the most annoying characters in cinema history – hardly the sort of person you’d want to spend 222 minutes with (or 238 minutes with overture, entr’act and exit music...thanks, Wikipedia)! Gable’s a hoot, of course...but there are plenty of other, better Gable movies that don’t require the audience to giggle at date rape and cheer the Confederacy. Even setting aside the fact that, as a Yankee (and a heterosexual male), I may not exactly be the film’s target audience, there’s still the issue of the production’s relentless over-the-top Cheez Whiz melodrama. Sure, acting styles have changed over the years, but Of Mice & Men, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Stagecoach were all nominated the same year, so it’s not as if Leigh’s proto-drag queen scenery chewing only looks goofy from a modern perspective: I’m pretty sure the movie was stupid in 1939, too.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)

Widely cited as the worst movie ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, the circus-corn epic The Greatest Show On Earth may have benefited from the political tenor of the times. Its main competition was High Noon, a vastly superior film that nonetheless made AMPAS voters nervous because of its barely disguised anti-McCarthyite message and blacklisted screenwriter. Whatever the reason for its win, there’s no denying that The Greatest Show On Earth is a big load of elephant shit. Even if Cecil B. DeMille hadn’t made it a good 25 years past his own personal expiration date as a filmmaker, it was leagues out of his comfort zone: used to coaching actors in sweeping Biblical and historical epics, he didn’t take to the tawdry, small love triangle under the big top, and no wonder. The dialogue is pure hokum, and the performances range from overblown (Cornel Wilde as an acrobat) to comatose (Charlton Heston as the circus manager). The central romance has as much heat as a paper safely match, and every subplot – and there’s plenty of them in its bloated two and a half hours – is as predictable as it is uninteresting. Even the presence of Jimmy Stewart does nothing to salvage the movie, since his role, as a clown with a dark secret, is telegraphed from the first frame. There’s lots of phony reaction shots of local yokels gasping at the wondrous sights and sounds of the circus, but it’s often unclear what they’re watching; it sure ain’t this movie.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)

The fact that this musical trip to the deep freeze that is Julie Andrews' soul was the biggest box-office sensation of the mid-1960s and held onto the title of Number One Hit of All Time for seven years until it was dislodged by, of all things, The Godfather, just goes to prove that you never know. Critics like to imagine that movies tell us something about the times in which they were made, but when you consider what was going on in the world between 1965 and 1972, all you can surmise from this movie's success is that people must have been desperate to escape reality as thoroughly as they could without barricading themselves inside an isolation tank. If you look at the reviews it received at the time, you see that even polite mainstream critics saw it as a potential menace that would lay waste to the culture like some species of plague, but looking at it with forty years of hindsight, the funniest thing about the movie is that it seems to have come and gone without leaving any progeny. It did inspired the studios to plow millions upon millions of dollars into "family musicals" (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, etc.), all of which are now best remembered for providing an education in just how little return it is possible to get on a major investment. Subsequent attempts to squeeze another nickel out of Andrews' screen image proved largely unsuccessful. (The 1968 musical Star! -- her reunion with The Sound of Music director Robert Wise -- was one of the great financial disasters of the era.) The closest the movie has come to being positively re-evaluated came in the 1990s, when it attracted a cult that attended screenings in fancy dress and talked back to the screen, Rocky Horror-style. For the first time ever, Christopher Plummer's Dracula-like performance as Baron Von Trapp actually made sense.

ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)

Had anyone else been behind the cameras for Ordinary People, it would have come and gone with no great comment -- and perhaps even a modest amount of praise, for the quiet family drama isn’t terrible by any stretch -- but certainly without much hoopla, and definitely without a Best Picture nomination, let alone a win. But because Robert Redford was its director, and Hollywood has always been dismayingly overimpressed with actors who don’t completely embarrass themselves in the director’s chair, it ended up being praised far beyond its virtues. It’s hard to pick out any element about it that’s rotten; the performances are generally adept, the story is competent enough, and the direction is inoffensive. It’s a lot like a small literary novel that comes and goes without much comment. But just as there’s nothing much to damn it with, there’s also nothing much to recommend it. The Best Picture victory of the movie a lot of wise-asses immediately dubbed Ordinary Movie wouldn’t be such a sore thumb if it wasn’t for the competition it bested; not only did it triumph over Coal Miner’s Daughter, which covered much of the same ground only better, but it also beat out The Elephant Man and, shockingly, Raging Bull, both of which, unlike Redford’s directorial debut, went on to be numbered with the greatest films of the decade. Once it became clear what kind of filmmaker Redford really was, the Academy stopped embarrassing themselves by nominating him for big awards; if only they’d figured it out sooner.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

Of all the problems with our culture, what is the single most destructive and indefensible? Gosh, there's so many to choose from, but I'm gonna have to go with the enduringly popular notion that mental retardation and moral goodness are closely linked, to such a degree that one may not be fully possible without the other. Even in politics, the candidate who does the worst job of concealing the breadth of his intelligence is likely to be tagged as a know-it-all elitist and silver-tongued devil, and the one least ashamed of coming across as a dumbass is touted as being a tribune of the people who has the moral certitude that comes from being too dumb to know internal conflict. Forrest Gump isn't a movie about a hero who makes the right choices but the story of someone who does the right thing because he's such a dope that he doesn't know he has any other options. (Forrest's smarter friends, his lifelong love Jenny and his commanding officer in Vietnam, go down self-destructive paths that Forrest is too good to even know are there.) I think that a movie like this must have a special sick appeal in Hollywood, which is full of cynical, morally compromised people who find such nonsense comforting because it can be taken as a reassuring message to slimeballs everywhere: only the stupid can be truly good, so if you're not as good as you might like, it's not your fault: you just had the mixed fortune of being smart. The director, Robert Zemeckis, knows a lot about cynicism and moral compromise; he used to satirize it in movies like his great 1980 comedy Used Cars, and he found out that satire doesn't pay the bills. But even he may have been surprised to discover just how profitable sentimentalizing stupidity can be. Compared to this thing, Pulp Fiction, which it beat out for Best Picture, is as innocent as a newly born kitten on Christmas morning.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Charlton Heston: Gentleman, Shakespearean, Attempted Loser

Phil Nugent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Whatever you thought of his politics (which over the course of his career covered a lot of self-contradictory ground) or his movies (ditto), few deaths this past year left a bigger crater in movie history than Charlton Heston's As Anthony Giardina writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, "Heston was an actor about whom what we say, now and forever, is likely to be determined by the huge, looming bookends of his career. Barely out of his 20s, he put on a beard, dyed his hair gray and descended Mount Sinai carrying the tablets in The Ten Commandments (1956). Some 40 years later, Heston carried a different set of tablets for the N.R.A., extolling its members’ rights with a passion that edged close to zealotry. Lost somewhere in all of this was the subtler, more reflective man who emerged in the 1960s when Heston, after the back-to-back successes of Ben Hur and El Cid, made a series of smaller films critical of the traditional male ethos, an ethos he himself had pretty much come to embody. 'Our time is oriented to the loser,' Heston wrote in his diaries in 1965, and though he had, up to that time, almost invariably played winners, he seemed to know in his actor’s bones that the true riches were to be found playing the sorts of antiheroes then dominating the movies." Heston had a special affection for his role in the 1968 Western Will Penny, in which he played a middle-aged, illiterate cowboy facing the end of his way of life with nothing to look forward to but the closing of the frontier and Donald Pleasance as the head of the local welcome wagon. Heston's performance in that movie is very fine, but there was something wasted when Heston, with his American eagle profile and embodiment of the can-do spirit, played a real loser, a mere mortal. That's why his most fruitful exploration of that terrain was probably in the title role of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 cavalry Western and Vietnam allegory, Major Dundee. Giardina describes Dundee, whose rash and remorseless decision to track down a renegade Apache and his followers smacks of both honorable duty and an ambitious, frustrated man's grab for glory, as "a kind of Donald Rumsfeld of the Civil War, but a Rumsfeld suffering an identity crisis." Peckinpah clearly pushed Heston hard to deliver the performance he wanted, and it makes sense that, in the heat of the battle to get the picture made, Heston offered to fork over his entire salary to the studio in exchange for them backing off from their decision to fire the director. (To his eternal astonishment, they took him up on it.) But it also makes sense that he never worked with Peckinpah again, though it's tantalizing to imagine him as Peckinpah's Pat Garrett.

Another, closer and more personal glimpse of Heston comes from Nicholas A. Salerno, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, who has written a brief remembrance of how he came to make Heston's acquaintance through a shared passion for Shakespeare. In the 1970s, the prof screened for his students the Joseph Manckiewicz movie version of Julius Caesar, with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, David Bradley's film of a student production made in 1950 with Heston in the role, and a 1970 film, directed by Stuart Burge, in which Heston reprised the role of Marc Antony. "In both those films, a near-nude Heston was shown running the race on the Feast of the Lupercal. A hunk when he ran for Bradley, the somewhat overweight Heston running for Burge was not necessarily a pleasant sight." But Salerno managed to pull it together enough to ask Heston for permission to show his class a 16-mm. film of the 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, which Heston directed and starred in. ("This time around," he assures us, "Heston's more mature body was better suited to Shakespeare's mature Antony than it had been to the younger Antony in the Burge film.") Heston "did me one better. He called me with a generous offer: He would send his personal 35-millimeter print and come with it for a question-and-answer session with my class -- if I could find a way to screen the print. Enter Dan Harkins, the owner then of a few local movie theaters, now the emperor of a chain of theaters crossing state boundaries. He had been a student in the first film class I taught. All it took was a phone call: Harkins offered me his Valley Art Theatre in Tempe free of charge. The print came by courier a few days before Heston's scheduled arrival. My students packed the theater. But would Heston really turn up? On Nov. 1, 1973, I was pacing in front of the Valley Art, waiting, I suppose, for Moses to drive up in a stretch limo, when I spotted Heston walking down Mill Avenue. He'd had his driver let him off a few blocks away, so he could get a feel for Tempe." It would be the first of a number of run-ins that Salerno would have with a man he found to be "a lover and thoughtful interpreter" of Shakespeare as well as "gentlemanly, generous with his time, willing -- nay, eager -- to talk with my students." Heston would invite Salerno to see his 1975 production of Macbeth with Vanessa Redgrave and sometimes ask his opinion of scripts. He also attended a one-man show Heston gave where he showed clips from his movies and took questions from the audience, an evening where the "most moving moment was his emotional retelling of Eddie Robinson's death scene in Soylent Green; both actors knew that Robinson was dying in real life and that they were immortalizing their last Earthly goodbyes on film." Salerno adds that "By the time all the NRA stuff made the news, we had gone our separate ways," and he mentions that in all his conversations with Heston, he managed to avoid the subject of politics. You learn this stuff on the road to tenure.

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCOTT VON DOVIAK'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

If your weaknesses include pre-Star Wars sci-fi of the '70s and monkey movies, it really doesn't get any better than the Planet of the Apes series. I would classify the first Apes movie as a genuine classic, no guilt required. The same can't be said about the first sequel – at least, not by me and certainly not with a straight face. For one thing, star Charlton Heston only agreed to a few days of shooting, so he disappears a few minutes into the movie and is essentially replaced by James Franciscus as a newly arrived astronaut from the past. Franciscus appears to have been cast for his resemblance to Heston…that is, until late in the movie when you actually see both actors in the same shot and realize what a freakish-looking human being Charlton Heston really was. His performance may not be fondly remembered, but Franciscus did give us an immortal reading of the line, "My God! It's a city of…apes!" Beneath also offers Barney Miller's James "Inspector Luger" Gregory as a gorilla and Victor Buono as the leader of a race of underground mutants who worship an atomic bomb. Best of all, it has the most abruptly nihilistic ending of all time, as Charlton Heston attempts to put an end to the series by blowing up the planet. Fortunately for us Ape-heads, it didn't work.

O.C. AND STIGGS (1985)

This one is close to indefensible. I know Robert Altman loved all his children equally, but pundits like myself are supposed to be more discerning. Rationally, I know O.C. and Stiggs ranks with bottom tier Altman like Kansas City, HEALTH and the odious Pret-a-Porter, but for some ineffable reason I love it anyway. Goodness knows the leads (Daniel Jenkins as O.C., Neill Barry as Stiggs) are a uniquely uncharismatic pair – at times downright repellent, in fact. The plot is nonexistent even by Altman standards – two teenagers bum around suburban Arizona, torment their hated neighbor and conspire to bring King Sunny Ade to town for a concert. Yet there's something about the lazy summer vibe and tacky-tiki setting that sucks me in, something fundamentally amusing about applying the Altman filter to the John Hughes template, and even something geekily satisfying about the way Altman weaves in references to other movies, whether his own (the continuing campaign of Hal Philip Walker from Nashville) or others (Dennis Hopper reprising his Apocalypse Now role). If the filmography of Robert Altman is a vast palace of wonders, O.C. and Stiggs is the pink flamingo on the lawn. He wouldn't have it any other way.

POINT BREAK (1991)

I know the release date is 1991, but I like to think of Point Break as the last movie of the '80s. It's goofy and way over the top, but it doesn't get bogged down in CGI and fireballs and seizure-iffic editing – it's pre-Michael Bay action filmmaking at its most testosterone-poisoned, so naturally it could only have been directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The role of quarterback-turned-FBI agent Johnny Utah (Johnny Utah! Genius! The perfect genetic splicing of Johnny Unitas and Joe Montana!) fit Keanu Reeves like the wetsuit he often wears in the movie; if you were going to pick one agent to infiltrate a gang of surfers who rob banks while wearing Reagan and Nixon masks, it would be him. Of course, he needs a crazy partner with a fondness for meatball subs, which is where Gary Busey enters the picture. And he needs a worthy adversary to brah-mance, a golden god Zen master of surfing and bank robbery and all that is extreme in life – and who better for that role than the star of that cheesiest of all '80s action-fests, Road House? Point Break is basically a two-hour dick-measuring contest, which Reeves wins by jumping out of a plane without a parachute and using his sheer dudeness to fall faster than Patrick Swayze.

THE FAST & THE FURIOUS (2001)

Let me be clear: I speak only of the first of the fasts and the furiouses, not the 2 stinky 2 believe sequels. The 2001 original is a supercharged street racing thriller straight out of the old Roger Corman playbook. Ideally, it should be viewed not in an air-conditioned cineplex with stadium seating and THX sound, but at a hot, sticky drive-in with a case of cold beer on hand. The opening half hour offers up a bare-knuckle brawl, a drag race down a deserted city street, a high-speed police chase, a surprise attack by an Asian motorcycle gang, and finally a little down time at a house party where two gorgeous young women lock lips. It was at this point, I well recall, that someone in the audience behind me jumped up out of his seat and yelled "I love this movie!" to uproarious laughter and applause. It's that kind of picture. Sure, the lead is limp noodle Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez is at maximum glare-and-pout annoyance, but for once Vin Diesel is the right man in the right place. His name alone qualifies him as an astute casting decision, but his sleek chrome dome and rumbling voice seal the deal.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Scott Von Doviak

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We recently asked YOU what Top Tens you’d like to see here on The Screengrab and, among the many fine suggestions, “Other Matt” proposed the Top Ten Ignominious Exits (i.e., “...films of an actor that are less than glorious and not [fitting] the last time we see them on celluloid”)... a list we’ll actually tackle NEXT week, since THIS week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s final completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we've decided to examine the other side of the Two-Face coin: actors and directors who managed to fade to black with a fitting and/or memorable cinematic swan song.

Robert Altman's A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006)

When this project was first announced, it was a real head-scratcher for many: the sensibilities of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor would seem to blend together about as well as bourbon and buttermilk. While no one in their right mind would ever equate A Prairie Home Companion with one of Altman's masterpieces, the result is a genial slice of faux-Americana that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The wisp of a plot concerns the closing of the theater that has served as the long-time home of Keillor's homespun radio program, spurring the cast and crew to put on one last show for the folks at home. The specter of death hovers over the proceedings, but Companion is never morbid – how could it be when said specter is embodied by sweet-tempered Virginia Madsen? The backstage shenanigans and onstage farewells lend Companion the highly appropriate aura of a curtain call for a great American master – the icing on one of our culture's richest cakes.

John Wayne in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

After winning his Academy Award for the 1969 Western True Grit, a movie that gave him the chance to make fun of his anachronistic image and his physical decline yet still emerge heroic, John Wayne didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He spent most of the 1970s alternately starring in stale cowboy flicks (Rio Lobo, The Cowboys, Chisum) that tried to deny that he, or the movies, had changed, and embarrassing himself in imitations of the new bullying cop movies that had displaced the Western (McQ, Brannigan), like some combination of Clint Eastwood and a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a bad rug. He rallied, though, for his last film, in which he played a character specially tooled to provide a send-off for Wayne's screen image. He's J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter who rides in from the plains to take a room in a small town and wait to die of cancer. The movie itself is sentimental and uneven, but Wayne, fitter-looking than in True Grit and dandified with a moustache, performs with more dignity and grace than he'd demonstrated onscreen in years. He must have suspected that this would be his last chance to tone up the tail end of his filmography, and he didn't let himself down. Although Wayne would live another three years, The Shootist was his last film, and 1977 would be the first year in which he didn't appear in a movie since his film debut in 1926.

Edward G. Robinson in SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Soylent Green is a cheesy camp landmark of a dystopian sci-fi picture, but it has greatness in it, in the form of Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the ancient researcher who is partner and roommate to Charlton Heston' tough-cop hero. As someone old enough to remember the planet before overpopulation, global warming, and the depletion of its natural resources turned it into a sweltering hellscape, Robinson's character is an emissary from another world, and so was Robinson, who began his career in movies before talkies and became a star in 1931 when he landed the title role in Little Caesar. He and Heston have an old-married-couple rapport that gives the movie its bit of heart; theirs is the only human relationship we see, maybe the last one left in a world that turns people into scavengers and victims. (Heston and Robinson had almost played together in the first of Heston's future shock films, Planet of the Apes, but after playing Dr. Zaius in a test scene, Robinson concluded that he wasn't hale enough to endure wearing the ape makeup for long stretches of time.) To its credit, Soylent Green gives him a beauty of a send-off, gazing wistfully at old nature footage while waiting for his lethal shot to kick in at a euthanasia clinic; it renders the famous "Soylent Green is made from people!" finale an anticlimax. Robinson died in January, 1973, four months before his last picture was released.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE (1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a masterpiece by any yardstick, a beautiful, uncompromising meditation on the encroaching apocalypse and one man’s attempts to stop it in order to protect his family. Yet if one considers that Tarkovsky was suffering from lung cancer -- the disease that eventually claimed his life -- while making the film, it takes on a poignant new layer of significance. Once, in an interview, Tarkovsky stated “the only condition of fighting for the right to create is faith in your own vocation, readiness to serve, and refusal to compromise.” Having built up one of the most acclaimed bodies of work of any filmmaker of his generation, Tarkovsky might have been forgiven for retiring from filmmaking and living out the rest of his days in peace. But Tarkovsky, scarcely 53 years old at the time, wasn’t about to pass away without making one more offering to the gods of cinema. So when the film’s hero (played by Erland Josephson) lays down his life to spare those he loves, it’s impossible not to think of the filmmaker himself, making one final effort to better the art form he loved so passionately and uncompromisingly. Fittingly, The Sacrifice was one of Tarkovsky’s most celebrated films, not only as a tribute to a major work by a master filmmaker, but also as the final film from an artist who had, as always, raged against the dying of the light.

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

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

In(dy) Other Blogs

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Because the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been so criminally overlooked by the mainstream media, it’s been up to the blogosphere to pick up the slack. As Paul Clark tipped you in his revisitation of the Temple of Doom, Cerebral Mastication is the hub of Indy blogdom, so a tip of the well-worn fedora to Ali Arikan for the centralized linkage.

The House Next Door offers a three-fer, looking back at all three previous Indiana Jones movies. Matt Zoller Seitz emerges from semi-retirement to offer his own thoughts on Temple of Doom, which he says “has the series' simplest plot, most annoying love interest, most casually racist and imperialist attitudes and most grotesque imagery (Doom and its summer-of-'84 blockbuster cousin, the Spielberg-produced Gremlins, sparked the creation of a new MPAA rating, PG-13). At the same time, though, it's the most viscerally intense entry in the series and the most wide-ranging in its moods, spotlighting the imaginations of Spielberg and his co-producer, George Lucas, at their most freewheeling. It's a blast from the id—like Close Encounters, 1941, E.T. and A.I, a rare instance of the director appearing to construct images and situations for his own private reasons, rather than keeping his eyes and ears attuned for signs of viewer discontent.”

At Edward Copeland on Film, David Gaffen has narrowed his focus to a single scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark – the one “where Indiana Jones, realizing that the Ark of the Covenant is to be placed on a plane and flown out of Egypt, sets out to sabotage the plane.” Gaffen proceeds shot-by-shot to dissect the workings of a signature action sequence. “The escalation here is deliberate – slowly ratchet up the tension within a scene that is already filled with active movement, derivative of Hitchcock in its cleverness even if Spielberg still names the 1950s serials as his original inspiration. The elements added in are small, careful ones – a shot of the wing grazing a nearby fuel truck, which spills gasoline. Just as the large German was introduced as a potential opponent this is presented as a problem, the proverbial gun in Act I that has to be fired in Act II.”

At Cinema Styles, Jonathan Lapper is trying to get excited about this whole thing. “A lot can change in 27 years. That's how long it's been since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark and it's been nearly two decades since the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Look at it this way: Two of the biggest adventure hits of 1954 were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Naked Jungle. Now imagine Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston making sequels to those movies in 1981, 27 years later. By 1981 the movie landscape was decidedly different than it was in 1954 and 2008 is decidedly different than 1981. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't sense the excitement about a new Indiana Jones film like I did in the eighties. When the other two sequels were released they, like the Star Wars sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, were the summer movies to see. Now Indiana Jones is practically lost in the shuffle.”

Cinematical has a week’s worth of Indy stuff on offer. They’ve got us covered for List-o-Mania this week with Seven Indiana Jones Knock-Offs. Number one is Tomb Raider: “It's like all the initial three Indiana Jones films wrapped up in one, with added sex appeal in casting Angelina Jolie in the Harrison Ford role. Yet Jolie as Croft is too serious to be the female counterpart to Ford's Indy. Also, while the Indiana Jones films deal with some level of magically religious fantasy, they're at least grounded by ‘real’ or familiar artifacts such as the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. And they tend to remain just realistic enough to avoid things like giant six-armed statues that come to life.”

Remember those kids who made the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders back in the 80s? Well, they’ve hit the big time – sort of. According to Underwire, “On May 14, eight days before the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, now-grown filmmakers Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb will showcase their movie at the landmark Mann's Chinese Theater. But the guys who made it won't see a dime. ‘Due to copyright issues, revenue from the screenings of our film must go to a nonprofit organization,’ said Strompolos…While Adaptation can't be screened for profit, the DIY back story has turned into a moneymaker for Strompolos, Zala and Lamb. Big-shot movie producer Scott Rudin (There Will Be Blood) purchased rights to their real-life filmmaking adventures and hired Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) to write the script for Paramount Pictures.”

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews of Cinema (Part II)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

JOHN GOODMAN AS WALTER SOBCHAK IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, so technically, this one is a bit of a cheat. Not only was Walter Sobchak portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish John Goodman, but the character isn’t even technically of the People; as the Dude points out, he’s a Polish Catholic who converted when he married a Jewish woman. Still, that doesn’t stop him from maintaining his Jewish identity to the point of outright hostility; he won’t roll on Shabbos, and claims that he’s “as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevye”. Nor does it stop him, in a movie not exactly known for its macho tough guys, from being the toughest guy on screen: whether it’s pulling a .45 on a burned-out hippie for going over the line while bowling, hatching a scheme to take out an entire gang of phony kidnappers, or biting the ear off of a German nihilist, the proprietor of Sobchak Security displays a toughness that borders on the psychotic. And if he sometimes flags a bit, backing off from an outraged neighbor whose car he’s just totaled, he makes up for it later by brusquely yanking a paraplegic out of his wheelchair to see if he’s faking. (Turns out he isn’t, but hey, he had to check, right?) As an aside, Walter may be the toughest Jew in the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ouvre, but he’s hardly the only one; their films are crammed full of hard-assed Hebrews. There’s tough-as-nails furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheinz) in Raising Arizona; steely mob moll Verna Birnbaum in Miller’s Crossing, who has plenty more guts than her conniving brother Bernie; monstrous movie producer/force of nature Jack Lipnick (played by longtime tough Jew Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink; scheming business tycoon Sidney Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy; and inscrutable post-modernist shyster Freddie Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Sure, only one of those characters was actually played by a Jewish actor, but the Coen Brothers clearly have a soft spot for tough Jews, and Walter may be the best, but he won’t be the last.

HANK GREENBERG IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG (1998)

No other baseball player could ever match the impact of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, or go through the hell he did to achieve it. But as the 1998 documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg makes clear, the major leagues were no picnic for the first Jewish slugger either. When Greenberg got his start in the Texas League, a teammate was puzzled by his appearance; he'd been told that all Jews had horns. Things didn't improve when he made it to the show in the 1930s. Between Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, Detroit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Chants of "kike" and "sheeny" rang out through the stands and opposing dugouts. But through it all, Greenberg was a one-man wrecking crew. He was twice voted the American League MVP and he led the Detroit Tigers to back-to-back World Series in 1934 and 1935, despite refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the pennant drive. (He did play on Rosh Hashanah, though – his rabbi found a loophole in the Talmud.) The Hebrew Hammerin' Hank was the first prominent Jew known for physical prowess and an inspiration to kids like Walter Matthau ("I was just delighted to know there was someone like Hank Greenberg around, and I didn't have to wind up as a presser, a cutter or a salesman in the garment center") and Alan Dershowitz ("He defied every stereotype – he defied Hitler's stereotype!"). He's in the baseball Hall of Fame – and now he's in our Hall of Tough Jews.

MICHAEL LERNER AS ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN IN EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

How tough was Arnold Rothstein, the only man to successfully fix the World Series? So tough that Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews, calls him “the Moses of organized crime”. Though the man many refer to as the most successful Jewish gangster in American history met an ugly end, getting his gut shot after he bowed out of what he claimed was a crooked poker game, he made quite a name for himself along the way: starting out as a masterful oddsmaker and proposition bettor, he rose to such prominence that Lucky Luciano credits him as having taught the Italian mobsters of the day how to act and dress, and Frank Costello claims he was the first to truly recognize the vast amounts of money to be made off of prohibition. He became fodder for no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim on him; Damon Runyon picked up the gauntlet, writing Arnold into many of his stories under a variety of names. Along the way, he also became a legendary pool shark (providing inspiration for the marathon game in The Hustler) and made a nearly unprecedented mark on modern organized crime – so much so that another tough Jew, The Godfather Part II’s Hyman Roth, cites him as an inspiration. Oh, yeah – and he fixed the 1919 World Series and got away with it scot-free. Although the names of many a White Sox great was dragged down into ignominious disgrace (including two, Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, who were likely innocent of any wrongdoing), Rothstein, the architect of the fix and the man who made more money off of it than anyone else, was completely exonerated by an impressionable jury. In Eight Men Out, Rothstein is expertly played by Michael Lerner, no stranger to playing tough Jews (see the entry on Walter Sobchak, above); his icy, unflappable confidence and contempt is perfectly realized in a scene where, discussing with his fixer the likelihood that the best players in baseball will take a dive, says “I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. ‘Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say. ‘Sit down, maybe you'll learn something.’ Well, I learned something all right. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands.”

LEE STRASBERG AS HYMAN ROTH IN THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

By the time we meet him Hyman Roth is an old man in ill health, yet we'd never think to call him frail. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharp and his lust for wealth and power undiminished. The Godfather saga's fictionalized version of Meyer Lansky was one of the few screen roles taken on by Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, and easily the greatest. In a few short scenes, with a handful of well-chosen gestures – the dismissive passing of a gold telephone, the raising of a plate of cake – Strasberg gives us a man in full. We may never have seen him in the full bloom of youth, but we can guess how terrifying he must have been from his "Moe Green" speech to Michael Corleone, one of the all-time great movie monologues. His gaze steady and full of fire, his breath hitching in fierce, staccato snorts, Roth lays it on the line: This is the business we've chosen.

ADAM GOLDBERG AS MELLISH IN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) AND THE HEBREW HAMMER IN THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)

In comedic roles from Dazed & Confused to Entourage, Adam Goldberg frequently comes across as a younger, hairier Woody Allen with his fast-talking, hyper-cerebral neurotic characters. But, even in his lighter moments, there’s always a sense of intensity and simmering anger underpinning his performances, leading my fellow Screengrabber Phil Nugent to suggest his work in 2 Days In Paris for this list (“What can I say? The guy scares me!”). But instead, I’ve chosen two of his more overtly tough screen personas, in films where his characters literally bring the pain. As the Jewish soldier Private Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg’s character is a smart, regular guy hardened by combat and his own, very personal stake in the war. Even when his tough façade finally cracks (in one of the most harrowing, visceral depictions of impending death I’ve ever seen), Mellish, despite his fear, remains determined and clear-headed to the end. As the titular superhero in The Hebrew Hammer, meanwhile, Goldberg tweaks the popular notion that Jews are more brainy than brawny in what writer/director Jonathan Kesselman dubbed the first “Jewsploitation” movie. As Mordechai Jefferson Carver, Goldberg wears the wide-brimmed hat of a Hasidim like a pimp crossed with Clint Eastwood as he fights to save Hanukah from the clutches of Santa’s murderous, power-mad son, Damian. Non-P.C. hilarity and Jewish stereotypes repurposed as standard Hollywood action clichés ensue. Shabbat Shalom, muthahfuckers!

CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

It’s one of the crowning ironies in the history of religious cinema that Charlton Heston, a man who tended to project about the same spiritual qualities as a forcefully hurled brick, portrayed not only the author of the Pentateuch, but also the Pope. It’s even more ironic that Moses, perhaps the toughest Jew in history, was given his most memorable screen portrayal by a man so WASPy his first name was “Charlton”. The Bible tells us that Moses was a willful but often reticent man, a man so unsure of himself, so terrified to lead, that he asked his brother Aaron to do his public speaking; in Cecil B. DeMille’s last huge Bible epic, Heston’s Moses couldn’t be farther from that portrayal. Moses, in the hands of Chuck amok, is a primal force of nature, as intimidating as God himself; when he struts down from the Mount after having received the Decalogue, he looks less like a man awed by coming face-to-face with the creator of the universe than he does Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. His jaw jutting even beneath his pasted-on beard and his iron chest swelling outside of his robes, Heston’s Moses looks like he’s received special dispensation from Jehovah to start kicking ass and taking names, and he can’t wait to get started. When Moses sneers “Hear His word, Ramses, and obey,” he isn’t imploring, he’s demanding – let my people go, he seems to say, or I’ll take these stone tablets and flatten you right across the choppers with them. It’s no wonder this portrayal resonated with Chosen People and Gentiles alike; the goyim got to claim the actor as their own, and the Jews got to see their main man transformed from thoughtful liberationist rebbe to one-man Pharoah-stomping machine. Heston would go on to play Judah Ben-Hur, who was almost as tough a Jew as Moses, but The Ten Commandments still remains the pinnacle of big-screen Hebrew bad-assery.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Roger and Out; A. O. Scott Applauds Ebert's Return to Writing

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A. O. Scott of The New York Times pays tribute to Roger Ebert, who recently announced that he won't be returning to TV--persistent illness having robbed him of the ability to speak since 2006--but that he will be returning to his regular written column. (Ebert's farewell to Richard Widmark and Charlton Heston appeared on his website last week.) Of course, Ebert had made his mark as a film writer (and as the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) long before he first teamed up with fellow Chicago reviewer Gene Siskel on Sneak Previews, the local public television show that made the two of them the most recognizable film critics in the country when it went national in 1978. That show made Ebert a TV star (and, in the process, probably did more to persuade publishers to bring out collections of his reviews than his Pulitzer ever did), as well as inspiring a wave of copycat shows and dueling on-camera critics, including such lesser tackheads as Michael Medved. It also made Ebert a target, and not just for Homer Simpson, who was once seen watching the show and guffawing, "I love watching the bald guy argue with the fat tub of lard!" Some began to think of Ebert as an overexposed grump who had thumbs for brains.

Scott isn't having it. He considers Ebert "one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment," and while his praise is scaled in proportion to some of the other film critics who may have appeared to leave a bigger mark on literature and film scholarship, he turns the relative modesty of Ebert's shadow into cause for respect. Ebert's "writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer. His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off." As he sees it, Ebert's extension of his work into television, "far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character," whereas the Internet and the blogging revolution may have resulted in "a glut: an endless, sometimes bracing, sometimes vexing barrage of deep polemic, passionate analysis and fierce contention reflecting nearly every possible permutation of taste and sensibility." While I myself am hard-pressed to think of down side at all to writing about movies on-line (got my check today, boss!), Scott's views make for an interesting and well-argued counterbalance to the recent spate of pieces wondering if film criticism will make it through the night one more time.

(As Scott freely notes, he writes as a personal friend of Roger Ebert's. This is nice to hear, since back when Scott got the job with the Times back in 2000, Ebert complained that the hiring showed a cheap disrespect for the profession of film criticism, because Scott was then known mainly for writing about literature, which Ebert deemed poor preparation for making sense of Keanu Reeves. Scott is too classy to bring that up after all these years. Fortunately, I'm not classy enough to not bring up shit.)

Korey Coleman Salutes Charlton Heston's Big-Head Ass

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In the last couple of days, we've seen a lot of memorial tributes to Charlton Heston (starting with our own Paul Clark's fine obituary for the Screengrab), but so far, our favorite may be this short animated personal essay by Korey Coleman of Spill.com, which deftly balances its appreciation of Heston's accomplishments as a movie star with the most honest, sanest reaction yet expressed to his impassionaed public espousal of his late-life politics: "Even if you didn't agree with him, you were like...damn!" It's convincingly loving and funny as hell, too. I imagine Heston grimly nodding in approval.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

Watch the Lost John Ford Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In Searching for John Ford: A Life, biographer Joseph McBride described the director’s final film as “the most dismaying entry in the Ford filmography, a film that paints such a simplistic and often historically inaccurate view of America’s most controversial war that even the USIA [United States Information Agency] found it embarrassing.” Now you can see it for yourself.

Ford did not actually direct Vietnam! Vietnam!, but he served as executive producer on the 1971 production commissioned by the US government’s propaganda arm. McBride writes: “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this little known episode of Ford’s life is that privately he had a highly skeptical view of the Vietnam War. After making two trips to Vietnam in the winter of 1968 and the spring of 1969, Ford wrote to his high school classmate Alnah Johnston, ‘What’s the war all about? Damned if I know. I haven’t the slightest idea what we’re doing there.’”

Eric Spiegelman was curious enough to seek out the barely released film. “Ford’s last documentary remained locked away in a vault for the next 27 years, when a change in the law allowed the National Archives to make it available to the public. I learned about the existence of Vietnam! Vietnam! three years ago. Curiosity led me to pull the ancient reels from the National Archives and have them digitized. Years of neglect badly damaged the audio portion of the first half of the film, and my cousin painstakingly restored the soundtrack to the best of his ability.”

You can watch the complete film at Spiegelman’s site Bus Your Own Tray. I’ve only managed to get five minutes into it, as Charlton Heston’s seemingly random narration (“The Beatles! Pope John! Dope! Black power!”) keeps lulling me to sleep, but die-hard Ford completists may fare better.

Trailer: "10 Things I Hate About Commandments"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Easter is coming this weekend, and you know what that means: the whole family piled in front of the TV to enjoy the holiday perennial starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, and an awesome big golden calf. Yeah, you've seen it before, but hey: you gotta love the classics.

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Neil Marshall's new sci-fi action thriller Doomsday, starring the very hard-to-mind-looking-at Rhona Mitra, opens tomorrow. It is but the latest in a long and hallowed tradition of using the controlled, expensive technology of motion pictures to imagine how things will look as our planet, spinning out of control with its resources depleted, chews through its last nerve and prepares to breathe its last. We don't know for sure how the world will really end of course, but one thing's for sure; if the last person who's there to see it has seen the right movies, he's certain to spend his last minutes experiencing a powerful sensation of deja vu.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

This is actually the second of the three films directed by George Miller and starring Mel Gibson as Mad Max — hence its title outside the United States, Mad Max 2 — but even though it's the one in the middle, it's the one that gets the apocalyptic element just about right. Things are pretty crazy in the original Mad Max, but society hasn't completely flatlined yet. And in Beyond Thunderdome, known to serious film scholars as "the one with Tina Turner", damned if the people don't seem to be having too good a time. (It makes the end of the world look like something that Vince McMahon is staging for a Pay-Per-View.) The Road Warrior gets a real doomsday vibe going by boiling the cutting-edge action movie, circa 1980, down to its essentials: loud motor vehicles, lots of space in which to drive them at high speeds, and plenty of attitude exhibited by people with punk haircuts and Dirty Harry jawlines. It is a hard world where men are men, except for the ones who are more like warthogs who've been hitting the Nautilus machines, and the screenwriter, if he knows what's good for him, isn't getting paid by the spoken word. George Miller has since proven himself to be a director whose talent is varied and many-sided, but he may have had trouble fully shaking this vision off: in his most recent film, Happy Feet, he managed to slip an end-of-days vibe into a story of dancing penguins.

GLEN AND RANDA (1971)

The end of the world as brought to you by hippies. Shaggy-haired Glen (Steve Curry) and Randa (Shelley Plimpton, Martha's mother) are a young couple who have never known civilization; among the last surviving human inhabitants of a world devastated by nuclear war, they have no memory of a pre-apocalyptic world and no knowledge of what has been lost outside of the images Glen sees in some comic books he's scavenged. Childlike and close to nonverbal, they spend their days frisking naked in the grass and among the trees, much as they would if they were rich California trust fund kids before the apocalypse and their parents were out of town for the weekend. They don't even seem to have the instinctive ability to figure out about sex and procreation on their own; after Randa is impregnated by a half-mad old man (Garry Goodrow), Glen, who has led them out on a search to find the wonders he has beheld in his Wonder Woman comic, turns pouty and takes to kicking her in her growing tummy. In the end, Randa dies in childbirth, and Glen sets out to sea in a tiny boat, taking the newborn baby along in case he needs a snack. Glen and Randa had trouble getting released at all, perhaps in part because of its stars' reluctance to put some clothes on, and like some other films by the director Jim McBride, seems to have subsequently vanished from the face of the earth.

BLACK MOON (1975)

The end of the world as brought to you by arty French hippies. Actually, this film was directed by the great Louis Malle, but he was clearly trying to access the counterculture zeitgeist and getting in touch with his inner goofball. Cathryn Harrison, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Rex Harrison, is wandering through what's left of the world; she is first seen posing as a man, because, maybe because the women heard about what happened to poor Randa, relations between the sexes have degenerated into a shooting war. She ends up taking refuge in a huge house occupied by Therese Giehse (German), Alexandra Stewart (French Canadian), and Joe Dallesandro (the jury's still out). None of the people talk much, maybe because, given the language barriers, they'd have trouble understanding each other if they did. The cast also includes a rat and a unicorn (which appears to have a glandular condition), both of which do talk; there are also flowers that, when stepped on, whine about it. Shot by Sven Nykvist, Black Moon looks great, thus confirming any suspicions you may have had that the human race will still be able to take pretty pictures even after we've used up our last collective brain cell.

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Charlton Heston's astronaut character Taylor was already a rather nihilistic fellow in the original Planet of the Apes, but in the first sequel of the series he proves he's not just all talk. First he vanishes for about an hour, shortly after the discovery of the Statue of Liberty that ended the first movie, leaving the main action to a mini-Heston, James Franciscus. (Franciscus's meaningful contributions to the series are few, but we'll always have his incredulous reading of the line "My God — it's a city of apes!") Late in the movie, Franciscus discovers that Taylor is being held captive by a band of underground mutants who worship a doomsday bomb that will, if detonated, destroy the entire planet. The gorilla army descends on the mutant lair and all hell breaks loose, in the course of which poor Franciscus takes a bullet to the head. Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen."

LAST NIGHT (1999)

Most movies about apocalypse tie themselves in knots to imagine the unimaginable. They spend millions of dollars on effects and art direction to stage elaborate scenarios of how the world will end, as the filmmakers work out of the question of why. Standing in contrast to films of this kind is Don McKellar's Last Night, a movie with a strictly ground-level approach to an impending apocalypse. In McKellar's world, the end is imminent, and the characters are powerless to stop it, so rather than focusing on the extremes of human behavior, the film attempts to deal more realistically with how characters would spend their final hours on Earth. The tone is set early on when a woman (Sandra Oh) stops at an abandoned grocery store for a bottle of wine, sees two on the shelf, and instead of simply taking both and leaving she carefully chooses one and politely leaves the other for someone else to take. This small gesture says it all — there is looting and rioting in Last Night, but in the face of the unspeakable many people would prefer to end their lives by maintaining all the order and dignity they can. Consider the gas company executive (played by David Cronenberg) who calls all of the company's customers to assure them that the power will stay on until the end. Other people take the end of the world as an opportunity to fulfill their lifelong wishes, from the aspiring pianist who finally gets a gig a hour before the world is scheduled to end to the man who uses it as an excuse to sleep with one of his former teachers. Last Night lacks the visceral thrills of most films about apocalypse, but instead it focuses on the very different reactions people would inevitably have with the end of the world only hours, minutes, even seconds away.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

The Tree Of Libertas Is Watered By The Blood Of Idiots

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As longtime readers will know, I am a dirty stinking liberal. I complain about the depiction of Arab terrorists in movies about Arab terrorists. I make fun of right-wing cultural pest/William F. Buckley son-in-law Brent Bozell on a regular basis for his alleged resemblance to Ghostbusters bureaucrat/asshole Walter Peck. I infiltrate conservative polticial conferences in order to take pills and mock bogus documentaries featuring Ben Stein. I think one of the most irritating things about the modern-day Democratic Party is that they pretend to care about stuff like violence in video games and smut in movies. I would rather watch Ben-Hur ten times in a row than spend five minutes hearing Charlton Heston gas on about gun control, and I'm a gun owner who hates Ben-Hur.

But let it never be said that I don't play fair. I believe in a level playing field, and I've decided that it's about time, given all the posts I've made here linking to bastions of communism like the Guardian and the New York Times, that I give some props to my favorite right-wing movie blog: LIBERTAS!

Founded as the internet component of Jason Apuzzo's Libertas Film Festival, a tiny annual symposium of conservative cinema, the Libertas blog has grown from a mere forum for right-wingers to complain that their values aren't honored by those crooked pornographers in Hollywood to a wonderful full-service site featuring movie news, reviews and writing from the perspective of angry cranks! (As an aside, Libertas and their ideological counterparts love to point to the poor commercial performance of anti-war documentaries as evidence that America isn't interested in such subversive flapdoodle. So where does that leave their claim that no one ever makes movies from a right-wing perspective?)

If you visit Libertas this very day, you'll see an exciting array of crazy cooterness: a review of Definitely, Maybe that condemns its "distasteful display of Hollywood values"; a review of Diary of the Dead that laments George Romero's "increasingly strident politics"; an article which condemns the mainstream media for failing to report Bob Geldof's recent praise of President Bush (although a quick Google News search reveals that it was covered by such non-radical papers as the International Herald-Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Investor's Business Daily); a review which calls the new Harold and Kumar sequel "unfunny and mean-spirited" even though the reviewer has not seen the film; and a pre-emptive condemnation of Iron Man for possibly containing anti-war sentiments. Now that's good film blogging! Enjoy, folks!

Forgotten Films: "The Designated Mourner" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike Nichols really doesn't direct movies that often, so maybe it's not so surprising that whenever he does unwrap a new film, such as Charlie Wilson's War, the critical response tends to run from polite to rapturous, the occasion treated in the media as a serious cultural event. (Even Regarding Henry inspired thoughtful meditative pieces exploring the question: what heavy object might have fallen on Mike's head?) But for some of us, the real puzzler is, why doesn't Nichols act more? He made his name doing revue sketches with his old partner Elaine May. Elaine May doesn't act much, either, but she seems to be a far less social creature to begin with, and between her appearances in Enter Laughing and Luv in the 1960s and her most recent on-screen role, in Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks in 2000, she has done enough — turning up with some kind of almost-every-ten-years regularity — to keep the movie world aware that she has a corporeal form. Nichols, on the other hand, has in the course of his career taken exactly one on-screen acting role in a feature film. It was a doozy, though — the title role, which is one-third of the cast, of David Hare's 1997 film version of Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner.

Having chosen to be exclusive, Nichols also went out of his way to make his big starring debut in a project guaranteed to be seen by as few people as possible. In terms of potential mass-audience appeal, The Designated Mourner is not an ingratiating work in either its form or its content. It's a theater piece written for three actors, who never interact; they deliver their accounts of how the world fell apart in long monologues delivered straight to the camera. David de Keyser plays Howard, a distinguished literary figure and political thinker; Miranda Richardson is his daughter, Judy; and Nichols plays Jack, her husband, an English professor. The main action that the characters describe is the collapse of their country (America? Maybe.) into a thugocracy, a fascistic police state that uses the threat of a revolution by a communist guerrilla movement said to be taking root. The government sees Howard and the world he represents as the enemy — the "elitists" — and members of that world, friends of the central triumverate, have begun disappearing and being jailed and executed. Though Howard and Judy rail, in their elegant, cultured way, against the government repression, they're just as likely to be targeted by the lower-class guerrillas, who don't like elitists either. The joker in the deck is Jack, who is assumed by the members of Howard and Judy's circle to be in staunch sympathetic agreement with them about everything, including Howard's magisterial saintliness. In fact, he confesses to the audience, he has never felt entirely comfortable around Howard and resents the standards that Howard and Judy, just by their own conduct, have always seemed to be demanding that he live up to. When the changing tide of the country forces him to adjust to a less cultural exalted way of life — by basically wiping out "highbrow" culture through a climate of fear and the systematic extermination of its more dedicated adherents — Jack has to admit that he finds himself happier, under less pressure. He takes on the identity of the "designated mourner" for that culture because there's no one else left — he is the last person, he says, who can understand a poem by John Donne — but whatever remorse he may feel over the loss of Judy, he wouldn't really have things back the way they were.

How are we supposed to feel about Jack's confession? Elitism and John Donne aren't cool subjects to be defending these days, and the Howard that we see is indeed both an admirable man of principle and more than a bit of a stick. At the same time, Jack, whose plea for the unambitious, unoffending pursuit of basic, self-interested modest enjoyment of one's time on earth, is a monster, even if he sometimes sounds not so different from Wallace Shawn himself, in My Dinner with Andre, saying that he'd rather sit at home reading Charlton Heston's diaries and sipping a cup of cold coffee than head out to reinvent theater in a Bavarian forest. (in live performances of the play, Shawn has often played Jack.) It's a disturbing, ambiguous role, and Nichols seems to embody it down to his flesh tones. (Jack keeps his soft-looking, pale, doughy hands in view, as if he enjoyed reminding you that for all his whining, he's never done an honest day's labor in his life.) As a text and as a piece of staging, The Designated Mourner has none of the show biz pizzazz that made Nichols phenomenally successful directing in both movies and the theater, but something in this weird little play must have spoken to him very deeply: both he and Hare are credited among the film's producers, and if it remains his only extended piece of screen acting, it'll serve an important function in determining the way he's remembered after he's gone. Future biographers looking for clues about what it was like to be in the room when Mike Nichols was there will turn to it, and see the director of The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? talking about how liberating it felt to place a book in the bathtub and shit on it.

I Am Legend Too

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

I Am Legend broke all box office records for December, taking in over $77 million over the weekend. For those of you who are too busy finishing up your Christmas shopping to wait in lines that stretch around the block, we present an alternative that can be enjoyed on your own schedule in the comfort of your home: The Omega Man. Based on the same 1954 Richard Matheson novel as the Will Smith blockbuster, this 1971 sci-fi extravaganza stars Charlton Heston as plague survivor Robert Neville. Seemingly the last human resident of Los Angeles, Neville fills his days with one-sided chess games and repeated screenings of Woodstock. At night, however, albino mutants emerge from the underground, wielding torches and firing arrows at our hero. But as the trailer narrator intones, “the last man on earth always carries an automatic weapon. Of course he does – and you can have it when you pry it from his cold, dead hands. The special effects may not be as impressive as in the current version, but can anything in I Am Legend match the paranoid intensity of this “ringing phones” sequence? We think not.

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So everybody’s all a-twitter about the new Clooney flick Michael Clayton and how realistic and original it is. "Realistic" is a relative term, sure, but we’d like to note humbly that Clayton fits into a long line of movies about characters crusading against Evil Movie Corporations, some real, many fictional. The fact is, the Faceless Corporation is one of cinema’s easiest targets — cooking the books, offing all detractors, bribing officials, and usually killing its consumers. But maybe it’s about time we paid tribute to these parasitic, conglomerated baddies. They may not sneer like Lee Marvin, and they may not cackle like Gert Frobe, but without them, the annals of movie villainy would be a far more impoverished place. So here they are, The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History.

The Soylent Corporation, SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Charlton Heston went through some shit in the late 1960s and 1970s. He had to deal with earthquakes, runaway airplanes, post-apocalyptic albinos, and a planet full of damned dirty apes. He didn't always make it to the end of the movie in one piece, but give or take a hissy fit in front of the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, he usually managed to hang onto his stoic composure. The one time he cracked and had to be carried offstage screaming and frothing at the mouth, it came from a good look at the inner workings of the Soylent Corporation. In 2022, the teeming refuge of an overpopulated and underresourced planet depend on SoyCorp for their meager diet: synthetic crackers and buns that go by the names Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the ever-popular Soylent Green, which is said to be made from plankton and which has a tangy zest with just a hint of Edward G. Robinson. For the benefit of extremely slow viewers, the terrible secret of Soylent Green is spelled out in Chuck's exit line, which has entered the camp lexicon and is beloved even, or maybe especially, by those who've never seen the movie.

The Parallax Corporation, THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)

In Taxi Driver, arguably the greatest of all the seventies assassination movies, Travis Bickle, like Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer before him, plans to kill one target and then shifts to another when things don't work out. What Travis lacks is a stabilizing figure to help him stay focused and channel his energies — just what the Parallax Corporation offers to the maladjusted social reject searching for the right career path. In this paranoid fantasy, both the "lone gunmen" accused of picking off the potential saviors of our nation, and the real assassins for whose crimes those patsies are framed, are the carefully sculpted products of a company that arranges the hits and shapes the way they're perceived by a gullible public. They're so good at it that reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), the movie's hero, whom we expect to expose the conspiracy, instead winds up as the latest patsy. In the movie's most memorable sequence, Beatty and the audience are subjected to a lengthy film montage that's a regular part of the Parallax training process, a scene apparently based on the not-implausible notion that watching short student films could turn someone homicidal.

The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, ALIEN Saga

Most of our readership will surely have two thoughts when reading the above byline, the first being, "wait, Alien AGAIN???" and the second being, "Wait, the Company has a name?" Well, yes, they do, although we’d understand if you hadn’t noticed it. In Ridley Scott’s original film, Weyland-Yutani ran the show, but their presence in the film was almost subliminal — on computer monitors, on a beer bottle, and so forth. But as the series continued, their logo became more visible, especially in Aliens, where it appeared at several points emblazoned on the walls of the mostly-deserted colony where the film is set. But the Company’s ubiquity pales in comparison to its insidious presence in the Alien universe. From the time it tricked the Nostromo into embarking on an alternate, crew-expendable mission resulting in the death of all but one crew member, Weyland-Yutani consistently sent people into the path of the Alien, all in the name of bringing back a specimen for weapons research. Ash’s sentiments about the Alien — "a perfect organism. . . unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality" — could just as easily be applied to Weyland-Yutani. But as the saying goes, there’s always a bigger fish. In a scene deleted from Alien: Resurrection, it was announced that Weyland-Yutani had somewhere along the line been bought out by Wal-Mart. Not even a money-grubbing intergalactic juggernaut stood a chance against the Sam Walton empire.

Pacific Gas and Electric, ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

If you want a generic corporate name, "Pacific Gas and Electric" will do. And if you want a particularly evil-sounding chemical name, what’s better than hexavalent chromium? It’s got HEX in it and it sounds shiny. . . like the Terminator. And then if you really wanna rile people up, have the faceless corporation dump evil chemicals into something harmless and life-sustaining. . . like groundwater. Watch as PG & E (Profits! Greed! Eeeevil!) seems to snicker while the good townspeople get sicker and sicker from an act so innocent — simply drinking the water. If you made it up, they’d slap cliché (or Ibsen) on the script coverage. But if it happened to be a True Story with a 333 million dollar settlement at the end of a class-action lawsuit, then you’d have an Oscar-winning hit movie.

"The Company", SECONDS (1966)

John Frankenheimer's profoundly depressing horror movie deals with the machinations of a deep-pocketed organization that arranges for people unhappy with their lives — from the looks of things here, that would be everybody over the age of fourteen — to be "reborn" via plastic surgery and forged identities. Veteran character actor John Randolph plays the poor schlub who gets roped in and, because the Company uses entrapment and blackmail to make it "easier" for their clients to give up their old lives, is forced to become Rock Hudson. No one will be surprised to learn that this does not prove to be the automatic gateway to an exciting, more rewarding new existence. Unable to cope, Randolph/Rock finally demands that the Company give him a new new life, and soon discovers how they acquire the corpses they need to fake the deaths of new clients. The tough minded will say he brought it all on himself by not ducking out the nearest fire exit when he learned that the head of the Company was Will Geer, TV's Grandpa Walton. As any hardened moviegoer could have told him, anybody that folksy (see also "Brimley, Wilford" in The Firm) in a position of power has got to be up to no good.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield