The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 28-July 4, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hey gang, we're taking the day off to roast some weenies and blow a few bottle rockets off the roof of Screengrab headquarters. But that's no reason you can't celebrate your independence by catching up on the week in Screengrab!

Do your patriotic duty and check out America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right with U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

Celebrate your Independence Day with, er, Independence Day. Either that or cheer on our national pastime with The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.

Here's an All-American Gal for ya! OK, a South African All-American Gal, but still: Charlize Theron Is a Sexual Creature.

If you have the day off, why not catch up with Wall-E? We investigated director Andrew Stanton's Retro-Futurism and pondered whether Wall-E and Silent Running were Separated at Birth.

When I'm grilling my burgers, I like to crank up the Superfly soundtrack, especially if it's a Long Hot Summer.

No celebration of what makes America great would be complete without The Joker, The Smokers and The Midnight Tokers. (At least, we assume they were toking something to conceive a sequel to 300.)

You know who wasn't American? Derek Jarman. However, Don S. Davis was.

And finally, we hope you all are taking a much-deserved Requiem for a Day Off.

Don S. Davis, 1942--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:52:00 GMT

The character actor Don S. Davis has died at 65 of a heart attack. Born in Aurora, Missouri, Davis spent served three terms of active duty in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of Captain, before pursuing a degree in theater and spending a decade working as a teacher at the University of British Columbia. He was forty when he began to get work acting in film and television. Squat, burly and bald, he was a natural for authoritarian figures and played many a dad, judge, doctor, prison guard, and befuddled bystander in such movies as Stakeout, A League of Their Own, Hero, and Con Air. But it was his role in Twin Peaks that earned him a permanent place in pop culture history and made him a cult character god. As Major Briggs, father to barking malcontent Bobby Briggs, he first came across as the dad of fifties nightmares, a stuffy, repressive hardass who seemed to have been born in a military uniform. But as with so much in David Lynch's world, Major Briggs's blandly domineering surface turned out to be camouflage, and in a key scene with his troubled son, the Major revealed a warmer, soulful side that nicely set off his can-do attitude and mysterious inside knowledge of the UFO phenomenon. he would go on to reprise the role in Lynch's movie Fire Walk with Me, but the real impact of Twin Peaks on his career was that his association with it seemed to make him a prize catch among casting directors working on TV shows that aspired to hipness, such as Profit, where he could be seen in the pilot episode as the local sheriff shaking his head in wonder at the sorry upbringing of the sociopathic title character. Certainly his background playing Major Briggs seemed to inform his two other best-known roles: Major General George Hammond on the cable TV series Stargate SGI, which ran for ten years starting in 1997, and Captain William Scully, father to FBI agent Dana Scully, in the great The X-Files episode "Beyond the Sea." His big scene there, sitting in a chair and speaking inaudibly to the daughter who hasn't yet received the news that he's just died, is the best David Lynch sequence in TV history that wasn't directed by David Lynch.

The Screengrab : don s. davis

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 28-July 4, 2008

Don S. Davis, 1942--2008