The Screengrab : cockfighter

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

4. BADLANDS (1973) & DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick's first two films are wondrous. I mean this in the sense that they contain wonders to behold and that they are themselves wonders. For one thing, they shouldn't work. Both movies are narrated by girls on the cusp of becoming young women, and both often suppress dialogue to emphasize through voiceover the inner lives of their narrators. Badlands recasts the story of serial killer Charles Starkweather into an insular fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story about murderous innocence. Days Of Heaven is like an Andrew Wyeth painting given life, and like that other famous artwork that springs to life, Pinnochio, it's a much darker story with breathtaking beauty and sudden horror. (HC)

5. GRAND ILLUSION (1937) & THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)

6. THE SEARCHERS (1956)

The Searchers is such a strange film, veering wildly between the unholy obsession, the blanket condemnation of racism, the anti-hero who might well be the hero, the cornpone humor, the score that screams of American exceptionalism even as the movie shows itself deeply ambivalent about America's past. This multifaceted approach is offputting at first, but utterly compelling over multiple viewings. John Ford and John Wayne made a hell of a lot of Westerns together, but this is the greatest. (HC)

7. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)

8. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) & THE LADY EVE (1941)

9. VERTIGO (1958) & LA JETEE (1962)

Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's finest film, an echo chamber of fetishistic obsession with an almost indescribably weird plot. La Jetee is Chris Marker's most accessible movie, a short film captured almost entirely in still shots with a voiceover explaining key plot points. The plot revolves around an obsessive remembrance of an event from the protagonist's youth. One of the major scenes echoes a scene in Vertigo. In his film Sans Soliel, which almost made this list, Marker explains how obsessed he became with Vertigo, wanting to copy it as a means of understanding and possessing it. The embedded video below contains all 26 minutes of La Jetee in its totality. (HC)

10. COCKFIGHTER (1974)

Monte Hellman made some heady no-budget movies in his heyday, but this one, in which Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence, is the headiest (sorry, Two-Lane Blacktop, but you're second in my heart). Let me be clear: cockfighting is one of the ugliest, most vulgar and inhumane sports known to man, and I find it reprehensible. Hellman looks at it without flinching and finds the beauty within. Oates is one of my favorite actors, and never is he better than here, a movie in which he has maybe five lines of dialogue, although he is in every scene. (HC)

11. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) & YOJIMBO (1961)

Both of these movies make art out of sheer pulp. By almost any standard, Touch Of Evil should be unbelievably bad, but it's astonishingly great, better, I dare say, than Citizen Kane. It's a police procedural where the killing and killer are completely irrelevant to the plot. It's a movie about a corrupt cop who is always right about his suspect even when he plants evidence (and unlike, say, 24, the film doesn't condone police corruption). It's a movie with an unhealthy amount of cheese and ham - Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop!, a biker gang all addled on weed who abduct Janet Leigh!, Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy fortune teller! Orson Welles in a fat suit (or should that be an even fatter suit?)! - that somehow turns it all into the finest cinematic cuisine. Yojimbo also starts with a pulp premise, in this case a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and finds a way to frame it all into a stunning battle royale. (HC)

12. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)

What the first thing an actor learns? The show must go on!

Here's several other movies that ought to be on this list, and would have been if I'd figured out a way to stretch the idea of Top Ten any further:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Week End (Godard, 1967)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Hayden Childs

Take 5: Character Actors Who Take The Lead

Hayden Childs — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Film critics often love character actors more than leading men or women. With good cause, too: as we saw with our Leading Men and Leading Ladies Top 25 lists, some of the people at the top of the ticket couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag. But they have charisma in spades, and that's what it takes for a leading actor to make the big bucks. Character actors, on the other hand, are the craftsmen of the profession, learning how to bring their own sense of self to many different roles. They have charisma, too, but it's a weird, flawed charisma. Character actors seem more like regular people, although they are usually the hardest-working actors in the trade. They often don't have the luxury of choosing their projects, and many seem happy to be earning a paycheck. But they don't just spin their wheels, no. They bring their game to even the paltriest of projects. For them, acting is about the love.

Often character actors gather around strong directors. John Ford had a company of them that appeared in various permutations in his films. So did Sam Peckinpah. David Milch brought together one of the greatest assortment of character actors in recent history for HBO's Deadwood (Brad Dourif, Ricky Jay, Powers Boothe, Molly Parker, Jason Jones, Brian Cox, Jim Beaver, and this list could just keep going) and returned to many of them for John From Cincinnati. But Judd Apatow's tv shows and films have done something exciting: they lift the weirdos who would normally be on the edge of the screen to the central spot. And Apatow is not the first person to think of this, just one of the more recent. The Coen Brothers have certainly played with the idea of leading actors, often pushing tried-and-true lead actors to their weirdest performances and othertimes asking honest-to-goodness character actors to take the central role of the film. Preston Sturges, a clear antecedent to both Apatow and the Coens, was a similar proponent of the charming weirdness of life, and his decision to hang a couple of his great movies on the nervous shoulders of Eddie Bracken is more than perversity.

Let's hope someone takes this to heart and makes a buddy movie starring Stephen Root, Ricky Jay, and Jon Polito. Sometimes filmmakers put a character actor in the lead role out of expedience or budget. Sometimes filmmakers want to let the world see just how special this actor on the periphery is. Whatever the reason, here's a list of five of the best character actors who have made classic movies when they ascended to the lead.

1. Warren Oates. With his droopy mouth and off-center face, Oates was the guy directors used to telegraph ROUGHNECK to the cheap seats. But Oates wasn't just any redneck peckerwood, but a powerhouse able to make the most stockish of stock characters bleed for you, and you for them. Consider his parts in the Peckinpah movies: the roughest Hammond brother in Ride The High Country, unwilling to bathe for his brother's wedding; the reddest of the Rebel soldiers in Major Dundee, who has a death scene that steals the whole damn movie away from Charlton Heston and Richard Harris; the skankier Gorch brother in The Wild Bunch, forever the butt of the joke. Phil Nugent just wrote a brilliant article about his all-too-small role in Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, to which I'll link in lieu of adding anything. Then he popped up in Malick's Badlands as Sissy Spacek's doomed father, unprepared for the amoral type of generational backlash. That was the year before Hellman and Peckinpah independently put Oates front-and-center for two movies, each one among their finest, both impossibly uncommercial and both utterly raw and honest about the nature of human struggle and strife: Cockfighter and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Hellman's Cockfighter, which Paul Clark recently reviewed here, is stunningly simple. Oates plays Frank Mansfield, a competitive cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence until he wins the cockfighting championship. The sport - as unsportsmanlike as it is - is appalling, and the movie doesn't try to hide that. But the characters are immersed in it. Most of them being products of farm life, they don't even notice the dubious morality. It's hard to value the life of a chicken when you've raised them. The vow of silence, explained in a flashback, means that Oates hardly speaks a word in the whole movie, despite being in every scene. But Oates carries the character through body language alone, and there's no doubt whatsoever about who Mansfield is and what he's about. I can hardly think of another actor who could come close to doing what he does here. Paul neglected to mention my favorite scene, the last in the movie, where Mansfield rips the head off of a chicken and presents it, plumage upwards like a flower, to his disgusted lady love. It's equal measures horror and beauty. You will never forget it.

Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia is another celebration of ugly beauty. It's unbelievable crude in parts, but it's the crudity of a master craftsman. Oates plays Bennie, a down-and-out pianist who takes a road trip through Mexico with his prostitute girlfriend to recover the head of her deceased ex-lover. A powerful man has put a bounty on the head, and Bennie sees the money as a way to turn his life around. He's very wrong. The movie follows him from debasement to debasement until there's nothing left, which is where he finds his last shred of dignity and humanity. I don't know if I can overemphasize the intensity of this movie, especially through the second half, but I will say that it's a completely rewarding and powerful experience, and no one other than Warren Oates could have played Bennie.

2. Forest Whitaker. Whitaker is a huge presence in the movies that he's in, but he's also always on the sidelines. He had almost no words in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. He smiled at Robin Williams a lot in Good Morning, Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Purple Heart. He played the lead in Bird, Clint Eastwood's stillborn ode to Charlie Parker, but let's not speak of that. Since Bird, he's made a lot of movies where he plays key supporting roles, often involving that "still waters run deep" face that he has perfected, where his smile is tempered by the pain in his eyes. However, Jim Jarmusch made him the lead again in Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, which was batshit crazy enough to assert that the hulking Whitaker could be a whisper-silent urban ninja taking down hardened mobsters. Jarmusch's movies never bat an eye at the battiest behavior, and many of his movies allow guys with a character-actor affinity (like Johnny Depp and Bill Murray) to pretend they haven't moved up to the major leagues as leading men. But Ghost Dog was special sort of pastiche, a movie where the Wu-Tang Clan met The Sopranos in a Shaw Brothers kung fu movie. Well, there's no real kung fu in Ghost Dog, just the apparent agreement of everyone involved that kung fu is awesome. And Forest Whitaker, playing the same damaged-but-noble guy he often plays, makes you believe that this tremendous bear of a man is capable of these amazing feats of stealth and cunning.

3. Richard Farnsworth. Farnsworth went from stuntman to character actor to The Grey Fox and The Straight Story, all in 62 years. That's a heck of a career arc! Although he started off doing stunt in Westerns in the 1930s, his acting career didn't take off until the 1970s. His IMDB page shows that he appeared mostly uncredited and unnamed in a number of great movies in the early 70s, but by the end of the decade, he'd been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Comes A Horseman. In 1982, he played the lead in the entertaining train robber throwback The Grey Fox. Seventeen years later, David Lynch cast him as the lead in his only G-rated movie (produced by Disney!), The Straight Story. Lynch is fascinated by the weirdness that crops in on everyday life, and The Straight Story was both deeply weird and as wholesome as apple pie. Farnsworth plays the same old-timer that he usually played, but his Alvin Straight was a man who knew how to look beyond his limitations. In the movie, he leaves his mentally-challenged daughter (played by Sissy Spacek, who might have been a character actor if she hadn't crossed over to leading lady so early in her career) to travel across the Midwest by lawnmower so that he can make up with a long-estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton, keeping the weirdness real). It's an amazing movie, and it was also his last film.

4. Takashi Shimura. Shimura, like Oates, has a great droopy face that carries the weight of the world. Perhaps he was a great star in Japan, but in almost all of the movies I've seen, he's the guy on the side. Toshiro Mifune usually plays a guy who either looks up to him or treats him like trash (if he even notices Shimura's character at all, that is), but in every case, Shimura's characters have been passed by time. His hangdog look is the crux of his lead role in Kurosawa's Ikiru, one of the finest films made by anyone in cinema's all-too-brief history. Ikiru (Japanese for "To Live") is about a bureaucrat who, upon discovering that he is dying, decides to leave a tiny little legacy after a lifetime of invisibility. It is also, by a large margin, the most tearjerking tearjerker ever made. Shimura is a master of conveying his character's every little emotion, often without saying a word, and one would need to have a heart of dust not to be moved by his final scene.

5. Klaus Kinski. Is Kinski a character actor or a leading man? I really don't know. I have not seen many of his pre-Herzog movies, but my impression is that he was too odd and spooky for leading man status. In For A Few Dollars More, he doesn't have much to do other than creep out everyone around him. I'd forgotten he was in Doctor Zhivago, which may say more about how long it's been since I watched it than his performance. None of his many, many spaghetti westerns seem to center on his character. But then Werner Herzog made put him front-and-center for Aguirre, Wrath of God, and thus loosed his insanity on the world, as ordained in the Book Of Revelations. Herzog and Kinski had a complicated relationship, to say the least. I'm fairly certain that Kinski had a complicated relationship with any and all other human beings and several inanimate objects, as well. As Burden of Dreams shows, Herzog was coming fairly close to completely losing his mind during the midpoint of their collaboration. Still, after being the Wrath of God, Kinski appeared as the lead in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu, then in Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. All are worth a viewing, but none matches the greatness of Aguirre, Wrath of God. Kinski appeared in a number of other movies around the same time, mostly European productions. He doesn't appear to have played the lead in any of them. Too weird, as I say. Too uncontrollable. One would have to be used to exploring human behavior at its breaking point to even attempt to deal with Kinski's mad energy.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 11-17, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Hey there, Screengrab readers. Joe the Plumber here. You don’t want to know the details, believe me, but there’s been an unusual toilet incident here at Screengrab headquarters and I’ve been called in to take care of the situation. It’s cool, I don’t mind helping these guys out because they pay cash under the table. No taxes! But they did ask if I wouldn’t mind handling the Highlight Reel while I’m here. I’ll admit, I don’t usually read the Screengrab – I’m more of a Modern Materialist guy – but they slipped me a few extra bucks, so what the hell. Here’s the best stuff I saw this week:

They did a decent job with the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight), although I personally would have included Raquel Welch. Always had a thing for her. And this list of the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Parts One and Two) is all right, but where’s For Your Eyes Only? That Sheena Easton had some pipes – and I know from pipes!

I don’t get out to the pictures much, so I probably won’t see W. and What Just Happened, but I am looking forward to that new Star Trek. Does anyone know if it has tribbles in it? I never saw Cockfighter, My Neighbor Totoro, Swept Away or Boiler Room – but I’ve seen my share of boiler rooms, let me tell you!

Aw, jeez, this toilet is bad news. What is that green stuff? Anyway, I gotta wrap this up, but if you’re interested in Tony Curtis’s book, Oliver Stone movies, the Saw amusement park ride or Jabba the portly Irish gent, go read about ‘em.

Oh, and this isn’t funny. These are tools, not weapons.

Reviews By Request: Cockfighter (1974, Monte Hellman)

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Since the poll format of selecting movies for future Reviews by Request columns worked so well last time, I’ve decided to keep it for the time being. See the bottom of this piece to pick a Halloween column from five horror favorites I’ve never seen. But before you do, enjoy this review of the movie that was chosen by popular vote two weeks ago- Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

I honestly have no excuse for not seeing Cockfighter before. After all, I’ve long been a fan of Warren Oates, who I believe to be one of the finest and most undervalued of all screen actors. And I’ve enjoyed a number of Monte Hellman’s films in the past, particularly The Shooting and Two Lane Blacktop, both of which also starred Oates. So why have I taken so long to see Cockfighter? It wasn’t the violence against animals, which I’ve been able to handle in numerous other films. Maybe I was just waiting for the right occasion to see it. So thanks to those of you who voted for it.

As those of you who haven’t seen it might guess from the title, Cockfighter tells the story of a man who raises gamecocks to fight for sport. The man’s name is Frank Mansfield and is played, of course, by Oates. Cockfighting isn’t a lucrative line of work, but Frank seems to be pretty good at it. He’s got a house, a farm, and a mobile home- that is, until he loses it by making a too-rich bet against a longtime rival, played by Harry Dean Stanton. It’s not the first time that Frank has let his greed get the best of him, and the film flashes back to a previous occasion when he lost his best rooster and his chance at the Cockfighter of the Year medal by running off his mouth. Since then, he’s maintained a vow of silence (though he’s prone to talking in his sleep). It’s Frank’s quest to make it to the top that serves as the film’s story.

Given its subject material and Deep South setting, it should go without saying that Cockfighter is a B-movie. But like all of Hellman’s best-known work, it’s a B-movie of the highest caliber, which is to say that it takes advantage of the possibilities of working quick and cheap. A more extravagantly-budgeted film on the subject would spare no expense to re-create the world of Southern cockfighting. But because all Hellman could afford was to film real cockfights, the world more or less created itself. The fans don’t feel like extras because they aren’t, and the blood from the fights is real. It’s this aspect of the film that troubles many viewers, who object to the non-simulated violence against the animals. But Hellman directs these scenes in a matter-of-fact style that avoids the cheap thrills that are often part and parcel with exploitation movies. Cockfighting is a way of life for these people in the movie, and for the most part they’re long past the point of being affected by the violence they see in the ring.

My only prior experience with cockfighting, either in real life or onscreen, came from Claire Denis’ No Fear, No Die. The difference between the two films is striking. In Denis’ film, cockfighting is an underworld activity, run by criminals and dominated by immigrants, with fights taking place in shady back rooms. By contrast, Frank’s world is out in the open- there are special cockfighting arenas, police officers are seen at the fights, and the final tournament is sponsored by a Senator. Everyone involved in the cockfighting world- be they trainers, sponsors, or fans who bet on the matches- accepts the way it is, which makes it all the more affecting when an outsider is invited in only to discover she can’t take it. A lesser film might take the side of Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy), who loves Frank before seeing the disgusting business he’s in. But the film is above all a character study of a man who has chosen a less-than-savory path, but is committed to riding it as far as it’ll take him.

For this reason, Oates’ presence is invaluable. Hellman fills the film with plenty of vivid character actors- Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Shull, Laurie Bird, a young Ed Begley Jr., the inimitable Millie Perkins- but Oates owns the film. Cockfighter was released the same year as another of Oates’ too-rare lead roles, in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, and the differences between the two performances illustrate Oates’ formidable acting talent. In his own way, Frank is just as desperate as Garcia’s Benny, but whereas Benny was a down-and-out loser, Frank sublimates his desperation into the pursuit of his goal and blocks out anything that’s unrelated to it. And Frank’s vow of silence allow Oates to demonstrate his gift for physical acting, which often leads to priceless bits of comedy (the film is sometimes very funny, something I’ve somehow neglected to mention before).

All the while, Oates never allows the character to become too charming or too heroic. Perhaps that was his greatest asset as an actor- his ability to keep his characters human-sized, with all the frailty and foolishness that implies. Rather than serving as larger-than-life vessels for audience wish fulfillment, Oates’ performances reflect the way we believe (or fear) that we ourselves would react to life’s biggest challenges. And while that’s not the stuff of top-flight movie stardom, it’s real grown-up acting of the highest order, and few did it better than Warren Oates.

So, what’ll it be? The Hammer release that introduced the world to Christopher Lee’s Dracula? A semi-forgotten Euro-zombie movie that’s allegedly ripe for cult resurgence? A late-period Jacques Tourneur fright favorite? A Criterion-anointed Japanese classic? Or will it be a Dario Argento giallo, a subgenre in which I’m woefully underversed? You decide!

Choose a movie for my next Reviews By Request column: | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to stump for your favorites in the comments section, or suggest possibilities for upcoming columns. See you in two weeks!

That Guy! Classic: Warren Oates

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As character actors go, they don't come much more iconic than Warren Mercer Oates. A tall Marine Corps vet from rural Kentucky's Muhlenberg County, Oates came west in the 1950s and, after working a number of menial jobs, started to get a string of acting jobs in western movies and televisions shows, thanks largely to his hunched six-foot frame, throwback looks, and thick rustic accent. But it was his acting chops that won him the attention of some of Hollywood's greatest directors; over the years, he worked with, among others, Norman Jewison, Monte Hellman, Stephen Spielberg, John Milius, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, and Philip Kaufman. But it was with Sam Peckinpah that Oates found his greatest success; the two shared a no-nonsense approach to filmmaking and a similiarly straightforward (and sometimes abrasive) personality. After first working together on Ride the High Country, Peckinpah and Oates worked together repeatedly over the years, and Peckinpah even gave Oates one of his few leading man roles in the controversial and underrated Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Extremely prolific during his 25 years in Hollywood, Warren Oates and his sneering, crooked smile became one of the few character actors as immediately recognizable as many lead actors of his day. Sadly for the many fans of this gifted actor and storyteller, he didn't live to enjoy his greatest success: he died unexpectedly of a heart attack just months after completing Stripes. His role as the straight-edge Sgt. Hulka won him legions of new fans and scored him more money than he'd made in any of his previous movies, but he would make only three more films, both of which were released after his death. Since then, a posthumous cult has grown up around Warren Oates, and it's hard not to read various bits of casting without imagining what he'd do with the role. Luckily, he left us with a lot of good work to chew on.

Where to see Warren Oates at his best:

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Outside of Stripes, Warren Oates' best-known, and most beloved, film role is that of the bandit Lyle Gorch in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Gorch combines Oates' two most common roles in western genre pictures — the craven and the brute — into an incredibly memorable, whore-chasing, washer-stealing character. Better still, Oates is paired in the barrier-busting revisionist western with Ben Johnson, another genre great, as his conniving brother Tector. An essential role in an essential film.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Monte Hellman was the director Warren Oates worked with most often outside of Sam Peckinpah (Oates claimed that he would work with either man at any time on any film for any reason). This bizarrely minimalist existential road picture was probably their finest collaboration, though Cockfighter has its partisans: Oates plays "G.T.O", an enigmatic, constantly self-inventing figure who becomes embroiled in a cross-country road race for the same reason men climb Everest: because it's there.

BADLANDS (1973)

Oates has only a minor role in Terrence Malick's stunning retelling of the story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but it's an undeniably effective one. Playing the father of Sissy Spacek's Holly Sargis, Oates' laconic performance contains unexpected depth, and his character, by acting as the barrier between the two callow young lovers, is the one who sets off their oddly casual, affectless killing spree. Proof that even in small parts, Oates could make a huge impact.

Video of the Day: It's Monte Hellman Time!

Peter Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Cult director Monte Hellman may be one of the few major influences on Quentin Tarantino whose films it's still somewhat difficult to see. While his major achievements, like Cockfighter and Two Lane Blacktop (one of the most famous scenes from which is above, followed by an interview with the director) have been released in swanky critic-baiting editions, some of his other films aren't even copyrighted and end up in those fifty-DVDs-for-ten-bucks anthologies you get at drugstores. Witness his first film, the freaky vampire schlocker Beast from Haunted Cave, or his revisionist western China 9, Liberty 37, neither of which are available in anything but the jumbo family pack edition. (The kung-fu movie he partially completed in between Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter is allegedly available as a two-pack, but we've never seen it, and even YouTube couldn't find us a clip. Where's Rolling Thunder when you need them?) — Leonard Pierce