The Screengrab : ed begley

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.

Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 5

Paul Clark — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It seems that most high schoolers in the U.S. have to sit through a screening of Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men at least once in civics class. But with its totemic presence as the pre-eminent celebration of American jurisprudence, it's sometimes overlooked how terrific it is as a film. Reginald Rose's justly acclaimed screenplay has spawned hundreds of regional theatre productions and at least two remakes. But none has quite lived up to the original, which is a tribute to both the excellent ensemble- which includes Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Ed Begley- and Lumet's direction, which turns the jury room where nearly all the action takes place into a kind of pressure cooker as the day drags on. Congrats to all those who guessed it.

This week, we've got another multi-line quote for you. See if this rings a bell:

“I think I’m all right.”
“Maybe the next time, darling. Maybe the next time."

As always, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. For a list of rules, click right here. And remember, all guesses for this week's quiz are due in by next Wednesday at 11:59 PM Eastern. Good luck!

Take Five: Filmic Youth

Peter Smith — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Many years ago, a friend of mine coined the term "The Coppola Line". An artistic equivalent of baseball's Mendoza Line (the .200 batting average below which a hitter is considered detrimental to his team despite any defensive abilities he might possess), the Coppola Line was the point at which someone's bad work outweighed the value of his good work. If you made six good movies and five bad ones, you were above the Coppola Line; if you recorded three good albums and four bad ones, you were below it. It was named, of course, for Francis Ford Coppola, the man who best epitomized this dreadful ratio, who made some of the finest films in American cinema in the 1970s before cranking out dud after dud in the 1980s and 1990s. With his eagerly anticipated movie, Youth Without Youth — releasing this Friday — he hopes to become the first filmmaker named Coppola to rise back above the Coppola Line after sinking below it. The motion picture business, only slightly less a youth-centered industry than the music biz, has always been obsessed with youth, so if Youth Without Youth turns out to be another stinker, here are some 'youth movies' that will help make up for it.

ASSASSIN OF YOUTH (1937)

Lest you think that anti-drug hysteria is a relatively recent development in American culture, look back to this grade-Z production from the Depression, when apparently people didn't have anything to worry about other than the notion that smoking the devil weed might turn their children into murderous zombies. Starring a cast of no-names in roles so flat they can't even be called caricature, Assassin of Youth can still be enjoyed on an ironic level, preferably while stoned: it's the kind of raving, no-budget hackwork that makes Reefer Madness look like an even-handed documentary.

SPIRIT OF YOUTH (1938)

Widely considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, Joe "The Brown Bomber" Louis only appeared in one film, which should clue you in that he wasn't quite as gifted as an actor. Still, there're a few reasons to recommend this film, which was meant to be a loose parallel of his fighting career and was released during his second year as reigning heavyweight champion. Louis has no chops talking in front of the camera, but he's grace in motion when he gets the chance to fight, and the movie is one of the few where Mantan Moreland is given the opportunity to show some actual acting skills and not just behave as a comic stereotype. The DVD release of Spirit of Youth can be seen all over America, unlike the movie's theatrical release — it was not shown in many Southern theaters for fear that the audience would become enraged at the sight of a black fighter defeating white opponents.

NO REGRETS FOR MY YOUTH (1946)

An early film from Akira Kurosawa, this one is known as Waga seishun ni kuinashi at home, but in any language, it's a prime building block in what would become one of the greatest careers in cinema. The story of a college professor who is removed from his post for opposing the war against China, No Regrets for My Youth is one of the first Japanese films to speak out openly against the fascist regime that took power in the 1930s — and that's not the only taboo it breaks, as it deals, as openly as possible given the time and place of its making, with homosexuality. As if all that's not enough to tempt you to hunt down the DVD, it also features a character nicknamed "The Poisoned Strawberry".

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)

Hollywood generally didn't know how to handle Tennessee Williams. Much of the sexuality (especially homosexuality) in his plays had to be removed or toned down to placate the censors of the time, and unless handled just right, his florid dialogue, so powerful on stage, could come off as campy on screen. Writer/director Richard Brooks did a pretty decent job in this adaptation, abetted by a great cast that included a young, handsome Paul Newman as a zooted-out drifter, Geraldine Page (light-years removed from her later dowdy-matron roles) as a sex kitten, and Ed Begley and Rip Torn gnawing on the scenery as a powerful southern lawman and his jealous son.

YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963)

Seijun Suzuki's Yaju no seishun (usually translated as Youth of the Beast) is one of his finest slices of deranged yakuza action — and as such, it's one of the movies that helped get him blackballed from the industry for decades. Like most of his films, it's a demented ball of non-stop energy, filled with fantastic eye candy, crazily giddy performances (especially an all-time classic role from Jo Shishido as the relentless young gangster of the title), and stylistically sexualized violence. Recently released in a jam-packed Criterion Collection edition, Youth of the Beast is living proof of why the Japanese film industry couldn't figure out what do do with Suzuki for the longest time.

— Leonard Pierce