The Screengrab : clueless

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SAVED! (2004)

In the Red and Blue State era, America often feels more like a pair of hostile side-by-side nations than a single group of United States, but this scrappy little indie by writer/director Brian Dannelly (and producer Michael Stipe...yes, THAT Michael Stipe!) does its part to bridge the divide by showing that maybe, just maybe, liberal elitists and conservative family values/assault weapon enthusiasts aren’t really so very different after all. Saved! tells the remarkably charming story of a bunch of very nice young people at a Christian fundamentalist high school trying to be as moral and decent as possible while grappling with questions of faith and the harsh realities of life. Naturally, many actual Christian fundamentalists hated it, but the cast (featuring undervalued charmers like Jena Malone and Patrick Fugit, a great comedic performance by Mandy Moore and a surprisingly likeable and sardonic turn by Macaulay Culkin) is the most likeable bunch of adolescents this side of Freaks and Geeks. The story is both highly respectful of religious belief and hilariously perceptive about the frequent disconnect between piety and common decency (not to mention the freshly topical disconnect between abstinence education and elevated teen pregnancy rates).

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

I know, I know: this is a back-to-school list, and Dazed and Confused is the quintessential "last day of school" movie. But you poor souls facing down a whole new year of classes, teachers, schoolbooks and locker stuffings need something to dream on, and there's no better light at the end of the tunnel than the Richard Linklater ensemble comedy that launched a thousand careers. One of the all-time great up-all-night party movies, Dazed is like a favorite rock album; it's stuffed with greatest hits and no matter how many times I've seen it, I'm always up for another viewing. Dazed captures the giddiness of those final hours dealing with teachers' dirty looks as well as the anxieties of those on the threshold, either of high school (and hazing by sadistic seniors) or adulthood ("The older you do get, the more rules they're gonna try to get you to follow.") And unlike most high school movies with their rigid caste systems, Linklater's film finds that rare relaxed groove where the stoners overlap with the jocks and the geeks co-exist with the cheerleaders. And then there's Matthew McConaughey's immortal Wooderson, the cautionary tale/stoner sage still trying to ride that endless summer as far as it will take him. I don't ever want to go back to high school…except when I'm watching Dazed and Confused.

BATTLE ROYALE (2000)

The idea behind Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale – one of the highest-grossing films in Japanese motion picture history, and a stunning achievement in blending artistic elements with balls-out action – is so simple that it would have been an instant winner at a high-concept Hollywood pitch meeting: it's basically Beverly Hills 90210 meets Death Race 2000. Luckily, the movie was based on a hugely successful (if incredibly controversial) novel, and the Toei studio needed no convincing to greenlight it. The participation of the legendary Beat Takeshi – not as director, but acting as one of the schoolteachers – cemented the deal. The premise of the movie is simple: in the near future, economic woes and overpopulation combine to leave Japan facing a crisis: teenagers can't get jobs and so are easily drawn to street crime and terrorism. To thin out their ranks, the government forces all high school classes to participate in an annual kill-or-be-killed tournament: each class is dropped on a remote island with a handful of weapons and orders to wipe out anyone who gets in their way. Some choose not to participate at all; some have friendships tested and torn apart; some try to game the system, and others take to the game – which becomes a national sensation as a televised blood sport – all too readily. The appeal of the movie isn't as simple as the terrific, and often incredibly bloody, action sequences: it's also in the surprising performances (including a near-silent turn by Masanobu Ando as Kiriyama, the demonic villain, and a pre-Kill Bill Chiaki Kuriyama in a juicy role), the relationships that develop between the kids (which range from operatic to heartbreakingly realistic), and the way that, despite the outlandish trappings, Fukasaku never lets you forget these are supposed to be real kids, behaving like kids would behave. It's that element of realism amongst all the sci-fi craziness that makes Battle Royale so memorable.

CLUELESS (1995) & MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Amy Heckerling, director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, returned to her prime territory a dozen years later with Clueless, which for all practical purposes remains that brief, special moment known as Alicia Silverstone's movie career. Here we have the ideal satirical vision of the sunny side of adolescent girl power: Silverstone's Cher may be too socially adept and fashion-conscious not to seem shallow, but she hasn't got a trace of Heather in her, and she's determined to use her skills to help others and do her part for a series of good causes, from helping the environment to greater awareness of global hunger to getting Wallace Shawn laid, all of which ought to be woven into the Democratic Party's national platform. (Okay, maybe not getting Wallace Shawn laid.) Flip to side B and you've got Mean Girls, where the Heather virus has so thoroughly contaminated high school life that Lindsay Lohan, the home-schooled offspring of zoologists who didn't bring her in from the African bush until she was sixteen, is forced to pretend to be both stupid and bitchy in order to get close enough to her genetic peers in the Chicago educational system to study their strange, exotic ways. These two movies also serve as a double feature illustrating Hollywood's seeming ability to turn any source material at all into a commercial teenpic: Clueless is the least official but not the least (emotionally) faithful of the string of Jane Austen adaptations that flooded theaters in the mid-'90s, and Mean Girls was adapted by Tina Fey from Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction sociological study Queen Bees and Wannabees.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Amy Heckerling: Fast Times in a Clueless Hollywood

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In a better movie world, filmmakers like Amy Heckering would constitute the backbone of the industry. Heckerling doesn't have a colossal artistic reputation or rack up Academy Award nominations. She's a mainstream, commercial director, and some of her hits, such as Look Who's Talking and its sequel and National Lampoon's European Vacation, are pure, unapologetic hackwork. But she's intelligent and talented, with a special, sensitive feeling for the comedy of adolescent romantic confusion, and at least twice, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, she's plowed those qualities into modest-seeming projects that have taken on the status of modern classics. But Clueless came out more than a dozen years ago, and since then, Heckerling has only managed to get one new movie into theaters, the sweet but underbaked Loser (2000). Heckerling has spent much of the time since then working on a comedy called I Could Never Be Your Woman. Heckerling wrote the script back in 1999, drawing on what she knows herself about the difficulties that women — especially women who aren't as young as they used to be — face in Hollywood. The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a fortysomething TV producer with career problems, single-mother problems, and a confusing, budding romance with a younger man — Paul Rudd, who got his big break playing Alicia Silverstone's love interest in Clueless. (For Woman, Heckerling cast the then-unknown young actress Saoirse Ronan as Pfeiffer's daughter; Ronan has since won an Oscar nomination for her work in Atonement.) After years of delays, the movie is finally being released on DVD on February 12. In a story in Entertainment Weekly (not available on-line), Missy Schwartz writes that the movie's path to direct DVD release comes only "after coming this close to a theatrical release more times than Heckerling can remember" and terms the situation "something of a sub-cultural curio. It's a modestly budgeted indie that, while far from perfect, never got the chance it deserved, hitting every speed bump and knocking over every traffic cone along the way."

Initially Heckerling was going to make the movie for Paramount, but the project never got off the ground there, something that Heckerling believes had at least something to do with "concern about doing a movie with an older female protagonist — not anybody's favorite demographic." Heckerling then secured financing from Philippe Martinez, a controversial figure who, in 2005, set up Bauer Martinez Entertainment, which he promised to turn into the biggest indie film studio in the U.S. Martinez did allow Heckerling to get the movie made, though not without some odd compromises: for financial reasons, she was obliged to shoot the film in London and try to pass it off as Los Angeles. And by the time the film was completed, Martinez had decided that, contrary to his original plans, his company wasn't up to distributing its own movies. A distribution deal with MGM fell through, and other interested parties backed off after discovering that the DVD and non-pay-TV rights had already been signed away to The Weinstein Company, a move that Heckerling likens to saying, "Here, but my baby. I've cut its legs off, but it's still cute." Is Heckerling at least happy that her baby will be available to be seen now? She doesn't seem unhappy. Well, she doesn't seem miserable about it. But, at fifty-three, she isn't even promising that she'll direct again. "I don't want to work for the hell of it," she says.

That Guy!: Dan Hedaya

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

You know, folks, it's really not my intention for this feature to just go through a list of everyone who's ever worked with the Coen Brothers or appeared in Buckaroo Banzai, but that's the way it seems to be shaking down. Some people just share my appreciation of freaky-looking middle-aged guys who behave eccentrically, I suppose. Anyway, Dan Hedaya's first movie role was in Myra Breckenridge, but don't hold that against him: not only did he go one to have a beloved television career, most prominently as the dull-witted Nick Tortelli on Cheers, but he's also appeared in nearly a hundred movies, usually as some variety of dolt or sleazebag. 1999 saw him combine the two, playing doltish sleazebag Richard M. Nixon in Dick and fulfilling a sort of physical destiny: with his weighty jowls, shifty eyes, and perpetual five-o'-clock shadow, he's a near spitting image of the Tricky One. Born to a family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Hedaya taught junior high school science for a number of years before his acting career took off; his shuffling demeanor and absent-minded craziness is certainly reminiscient of more than a few science teachers we can remember from our own school years. Outside of television, the role which Hedaya made the biggest impact was that of Alicia Silverstone's wealthy father in Clueless; he also stole the show in the overblown, overpriced movie version of The Addams Family as Gomez's crooked, shiftless attorney, Tully Alford. Recently, as he closes out his sixties, he's specialized in playing the fathers of characters as eccentric as he is: he was Amy Sedaris' dad in the big-screen adaptation of Strangers with Candy, the patriarch of the Butabi Brothers in the dismal SNL spin-off A Night at the the Roxbury, and the father of the obsessive-compulsive detective played by Tony Shalhoub in Monk. His recent appearance in the controversial TV series The Book of Daniel shows that he won't stop shuffling into strange roles anytime soon.

Where to see Dan Hedaya at his best:

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

In their motion picture debut, Joel and Ethan Coen were already showing their deft touch with character actors, casting Dan Hedaya as Julian Marty, the possessive, sleazy strip club owner who stands between John Getz and Frances McDormand. Hedaya gets a rare opportunity to show off his capacity to express rage during his final confontation with Getz, and goes on to become the most persistent murder victim since Paul Meurisse in Diabolique. But all told, it's just one of the earliest examples of his long line of questionable scumbags, a man so dodgy that even ethics-deprived private dick M. Emmet Walsh finds him "disgustin'".

JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

John Patrick Shanley was one of Hollywood's hottest properties, coming off of a big hit with Moonstruck, when he made this rather strange little number, a suicidal romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan looking as uncomfortable as ever. But Dan Hedaya almost single-handedly salvages the movie with a brief but mercilessly hilarious cameo near the start of the film as the hapless, hopeless Hanks' boss. He vanishes from the movie early on and never has much impact on the plot, but he gets some of the greatest comic dialogue of any film of the year: "I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you!"

MUHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

We have it on good authority that when David Lynch approached Dan Hedaya about appearing as enigmatic movie producer Vincenzo Castigliane in Mulholland Drive, he asked him: "Dan, we know you can do eccentric. We know you can do sleazy. We know you can even do creepy. But can you do completely bugshit insane?" (He can get the job, but can he do the job?) It turns out he can, and we were all rewarded with another small but scene-stealing performance in this perplexing surrealist masterpiece from a guy who knows good character actors almost as well as the Coens.

That Guy!: Wallace Shawn

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Squat", "toadlike" and "bespectacled" are not the first three adjectives you want on the list when you're building your movie star résumé. But That Guy! isn't about movie stars. It's about character actors, B-listers, stock-in-traders — and Wally Shawn is one of the best. Best imagined as the guy who gets parts for which Bob Balaban is simply too macho and charismatic, Shawn suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity when, playing Diane Keaton's ex in Manhattan (his movie debut), he was described as a "homunculus" by none other than Woody Allen, himself not entirely lacking in homuncular qualities. Still, the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn has managed to carve out a decent Hollywood career playing nebbishes, losers and schnooks — while simultaneously building an eminently respectable career in New York as an insightful, volatile playwright whose work is intelligent, fiercely political and often controversial. Harvard-educated and terrifically well-informed, Shawn has written opinion pieces for The Nation, interviewed Noam Chomsky, and produced a widely-read translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, all while appearing in Hollywood fare ranging from Clueless to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. His distinctively nasal, high-pitched voice has made him a natural for animation, and he's provided memorable voice-overs as Rex the dinosaur in the Toy Story franchise and Bob Parr's insufferable boss in The Incredibles. Only a few of Wallace Shawn's outstanding plays have made it to film; while a David Hare-directed version of The Designated Mourner (perhaps his finest work) was made in 1997, it was seen by precious few people, and his most popular script, Aunt Dan and Lemon, remains unfilmed. But as an actor, Shawn has endeared himself and his ungainly appearance to thousands of people who know nothing about his off-Broadway existence.

Where to see Wallace Shawn at his best:

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

The movie that put Wally Shawn on the map — and gave him his first and last leading-man role to date — was made at a time when he was still known only as the author of some well-reviewed plays in New York. Louis Malle's filmed adaptation of a number of actual conversations Shawn had with his friend Andre Gregory, who has been the director of a number of Shawn's plays, turned out to be a surprise hit, proving that there was a bigger audience than previously suspected whose idea of a good time was watching two overeducated Manhattanites argue about whether or not an electric blanket is morally defensible.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)

Wallace Shawn's best-known role is as the not-so-masterful criminal mastermind Vizzini in Rob Reiner's beloved adaptation of William Goldman's The Princess Bride. It is here that he gives new meaning, or lack thereof, to the word "inconceivable," and gets to play straight man to Andre the Giant in one of Hollywood's oddest comic pairings. (Shawn claims that he played the role of Vizzini perfectly straight, since he lacks a sense of humor. That claim in and of itself would seem to suggest otherwise.)

VANYA ON 42nd STREET (1994)

A meta-referential film that is both an adaptation of Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya and a movie about making that adaptation (and making the movie about making the adaptation), Vanya on 42nd Street is one of the most successful blends ever of film and theatre, thanks largely to its explosion of talent: aside from Wallace Shawn in the title role, it features great performances from Julianne Moore as Yelena and Brooke Smith as Sonya, a crackerjack script by David Mamet and tight, taut direction by Louis Malle, and a big-screen reunion of Shawn and Andre Gregory, again playing himself.

— Leonard Pierce