The Screengrab : ed harris

That Gal! Amy Madigan

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Amy Madigan has been one of my favorite actresses for twenty-five years now. She's maintained her place in the rotation even though I've managed to see less and less of her as the years go by. A quick peek at IMDB confirms that she's never stopped working for very long, but it became clear pretty fast in the 1980s that she wasn't going to become a movie star, partly because she's never done "kittenish", and she's spent an awful lot of the past ten years working in movies that nobody saw and in TV shows about doctors that I didn't see. (I'm a hypochondriac. The last thing I need is to spend my down time learning about new symptoms.) Her last good role in a movie worthy of her time was in Gone Baby Gone, and it's probably not a coincidence that the picture also featured Ed Harris--her husband, who she met on the set of Places in the Heart and with whom she also co-starred in Louis Malle's Alamo Bay, Winter Passing, the TV film Riders of the Purple Sage, and Harris's own directorial debut, Pollack. One interesting aspect of her having been married to Harris for most of both their film careers may be that Madigan always has an easy reminder of how much easier it is for men to slide back and forth between a (relatively) great variety supporting and ensemble roles and character leads than it is for a woman.

Madigan has always had such strength and power onscreen that it must have cost her some roles--big roles that were being cast by people who find such power in a woman intimidating (and who extrapolate from that that folks in the audience will have trouble "relating" to her) and also small roles where the worry is that she'll stand out too much, as if it's supposed to be a bad thing when an actress is cursed with having such an effect on audiences that they can't take their eyes off her. This may be something that Madigan can't do much about, since she doesn't seem to be one of those performers who disappear into the woodwork when they're not acting. At the 2001 Academy Awards, when Elia Kazan tottered out to collect his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the camera picked her out, sitting in the audience, next to her husband, not clapping. I mean, she was not clapping up a goddamn storm, and glowering silently at the spectacle onstage. I remember the sight of her better than I remember most of the movies that were nominated that year. (I also remember looking at Harris and thinking, My God, son, if you know what's good for you, you'd better not clap!)

Where to see Amy Madigan at her best:

LOVE CHILD (1982):

This "true" story about a woman who entered prison at 19, had an affair with a guard, got pregnant, and fought for the right to hold onto her baby while in prison was directed by the infamous Larry Peerce, and in most respects, it's a like a Lifetime movie on hillbilly heroin. (Mackenzie Phillips failed to stage a comeback through her role as the prison's ducktailed head bull dyke.) But it was Madigan's first starring role, and those of us who saw it when it came out--on HBO, I mean, nobody saw this thing when it was in theaters--really knew we were seeing something. Madigan carries the movie to the movie on her back. She was in her early thirties but looked much younger, and uses her fireplug quality--the short frame seemingly on the verge of exploding from its own surplus of energy--very effectively to convey the David-and-Goliath side of the story, but without a trace of parthos; she's not a David you'd bet against. A year later, she got to give birth after a nuclear holocaust in the TV film The Day After, raising fears that she might be on the verge of being typecast as pregnant women carrying to term symbolic tokens of a second chance.

LOVE LETTERS (1983): This quiet, searching, imperfect yet emotionally rich film was written and directed by Amy Jones, and at the time it came out, it inspired some loose talk that it might be part of a new run of films looking at sex and love from a woman's perspective. (It wasn't, at least not from Amy Jones, whose subsequent films as writer and/or director amount to a steaming pile of junk, from Indecent Proposal and the Halle Berry vehicle The Rich Man's Wife to the Beethoven films. Earlier, she directed The Slumber Party Massacre from an original script by the novelist Rita Mae Browne. That one has a cult rep among people who want to believe that it must be intended as some kind of parody. People will always be kind...) The movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a single woman who, having found a cache of old letters written to her late mother by a man not her father, is compelled to jump into an affair with a married photographer (James Keach). Curtis is brilliant, and her scenes with Keach are fine, but it's the scenes she has with Madigan, playing her best friend, that set a new standard for capturing the distinctive rhythm of two intelligent women who care a lot about each other talking around the fact that one of them is doing something very, very stupid.

STREETS OF FIRE (1984)

Madigan has spent so much time playing rural and country women of good peasant stock that it's a real kick getting to see her as an urban action warrior. In Walter Hill's deranged "rock & roll fable", she plays McCoy, a two-fisted, pistol-packing super-mechanic with a tough-gal catch phrase: "Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna do it?" If Hill has employed her to hang around him when he was working on his scripts and bark that line out whenever his mind started to wander, he might have had more of a career since Ronald Reagan's first term. The movie stars Michael Pare, once a highly touted star of tomorrow who might as well have had "Where Are They Now?" scrawled across his birth certificate, as a pretty-boy bad-ass who's on a rescue mission to save his ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane) from the clutches of Willem Dafoe and his band of toughs. (They're so bad, they force the Blasters to perform for Jennifer Beals's body double in Flashdance.) When Pare and Madigan join forces, the movie seems to think that now she's his sidekick. It's so cute! Legend has it that Hill originally asked Madigan to read for the part of Pare's sister, and that after she'd done so, she pointed out to him that McCoy (who was originally written as a man) was the only part in the script worth a damn and, you know, what have done for me lately, Walter? Maybe if she's tried that line on her husband, she would have gotten to play Jackson Pollack.

CARNIVALE (2003--2005)

This HBO series would probably be finishing up its run right about now if the network had committed to the six-year plan that the producers intended. Instead, they cut it off after two seasons--and few who saw the second-season finale walked away thinking they had reason to complain, because the show seemed already to be doing a thorough job of swallowing its own tail. The show, about occult hocus-pocus set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, was a murky stab at an instant Twin Peaks-style cult hit, but it did provide you with a way to check in on Madigan week after week. She played the formidable sister of the scary preacher man played by Clancy "voice of Lex Luthor" Brown, and she always improved the show's focus, even when she couldn't even pretend that her character has a better idea than you did of what the hell was supposed to be going on.

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab's Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.

Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”

And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!

WALKER (1987)

And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.

WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)

Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)

There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

DVD Digest for January 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, Criterion and Eclipse’s salute to the late films of an Italian master takes the top spot, opposite a handful of notable classics and a bunch of recent junk.

DVD of the Week: Having finished yet another holiday season, most of Hollywood’s high-profile recent releases aren’t due on DVD for another few months yet. In other words, it’s the perfect opportunity for Criterion to roll out some of their most interesting work yet. Case in point is this week’s release of several of Roberto Rossellini’s historical films. The most noteworthy of the bunch is his film The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Criterion), which invests the “historical drama” genre with Rossellini’s trademark realism, turning the genre on its ear by refusing to succumb to its usual picturesque tendencies. In conjunction with this release, Criterion’s sister company has created the box set Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films- Renaissance and Enlightenment, which contains three more of Rossellini’s historical films, including The Age of the Medici, Cartesius, and Blaise Pascal, which our own Vadim Rizov praised here a few months ago. In the middle of an Oscar season dominated by biopics and period films, the Rossellini DVD should provide a reprieve from the usual bloated reverence.

The most notable recent release coming to DVD this week is the Ed Harris-directed oater Appaloosa (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Kevin Costner in Swing Vote (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Dane Cook and Kate Hudson in My Best Friend’s Girl (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Keifer Sutherland in Mirrors (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys (Lionsgate); the India-set drama Brick Lane (Sony); and the Evelyn Waugh adaptation Brideshead Revisited (Disney).

In the classics department, this week sees the release of Eagle Pennell’s seminal proto-indie The Whole Shootin’ Match (Koch Entertainment Distribution). Also this week are two more Paramount Centennial Collection DVDs both starring Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Funny Face.

Finally this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Reba Season 5 (Fox) and ’Til Death Complete Second Season (Sony).

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

GANDHI (1982)

After watching this 188-minute biographical epic (possibly the only first-run film I ever saw in a theater that featured an intermission), it was years before I was able to see Ben Kingsley without thinking of his most iconic role. Now, almost three decades later, I’m so familiar with Kingsley’s onscreen persona (thanks to films like Bugsy, Sexy Beast and The Wackness) that it’s amazing to look back on Gandhi and consider how deeply the British-Indian actor submerged himself into the role of this lawyer-turned-freedom fighter, spiritual leader and all-around Great Soul. Richard Attenborough’s production was an old school event, featuring 300,000 extras (a Guiness World Record!) and racking up eight Academy Awards (including the trifecta of Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director) for its depiction of the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, through his early days as an activist for Indian rights in South Africa and his leadership in the struggle for Indian independence from England to his ultimate martyrdom at the hands of a radical Hindu assassin. This kind of large canvas storytelling frequently collapses under the weight of pretension, slack pacing and scattered focus (see: Australia), but Attenborough pulled off this cinematic monument with a clear-eyed discipline worthy of his extraordinary subject.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933) & REMBRANDT (1936)

Here's why Charles Laughton was a movie star. (You could be excused for not always being clear on that.) With Henry VIII, a real warhorse of a classic early talkie, Laughton did as much as anyone to create the modern image of that much-married royal as a tantrummy spoiled child who did nothing but indulge his whims and send his clothes back to the tailor to be let out again, and he did it at such a generous comic pitch that he made the fellow seem lovable, even cuddly, like an Ewok with a weakness for having his ex-girlfriends beheaded. For a full taste of the big boy's range, it ought to be sampled alongside the much quieter Rembrandt, a surprisingly sensitive and engaging portrait of the Dutch master. For that cozy family feeling, both films feature charming appearances by the off-screen Mrs. Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, who was also the on-screen Bride of Frankenstein.

SWEET DREAMS (1985)

Patsy Cline died too young, but nobody can say that the movies haven't done all right by her. Beverly D'Angelo walked off with the second act of Coal Miner's Daughter as the pampered, saucy Patsy who taught poor little country girl Loretta Lynn how to be a star, and this full-length treatment, centering on the married-folks love story between Jessica Lange's Patsy and Ed Harris as Charlie Dick (one of those guys who was born to bathe in the light of a more exciting personality generous enough to decree him worthy), is like great country music in motion. For girl talk, Lange has Ann Wedgeworth, supporting actress extraordinaire, as her mama.

LUMUMBA (2001)

Raoul Peck's film stars Eriq Ebouaney, in one of the most towering unheralded great performances of the past decade, as Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba was driven from office and assassinated two months into his term; when the movie was made, some forty years after the events it documents, the region was still such a political powder keg that locations had to be scouted far afield, and even after the film was released to theaters, a former American government advisor who felt that he'd been accused of being implicated in Lumumba's death got HBO to bleep the mention of his name from the soundtrack before the movie was broadcast on cable TV.

LUST FOR LIFE (1956) & VINCENT & THEO (1990)

In his tragically short life, Vincent Van Gogh was underappreciated, starved, mistreated, thought mad, and forced to go without his share of love and satisfaction, but he did get two pretty good movies made about him, and one of them inspired the title of an Iggy Pop song that somehow found its way into the ad campaign of Carnival Cruise Lines, so I guess it evens out. Directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas, with James Donald as Brother Theo and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, Lust For Life is in the dramatic MGM style and played to the hilt; a huge success in its day, it is clearly enough a product of its time that it may be a bit underrated today, but it remains a very moving experience crafted by intelligent, talented people at the height of their game. The latter film, which stars Tim Roth as a Van Gogh so ferociously in love with life and so passionately aware of how much of it he's missing out on that he can seem open-hearted and embittered at the same moment, was directed by Robert Altman, and is very clearly the product of his sensibility alone. It is barely rated at all, because so few people have seen it.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part Three)

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

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Noon – 2 p.m. THE DARK HALF (1993)

I think we can all agree that writing has been very good to Stephen King, and it certainly seems to be something he enjoys doing for a living, given the fact that he still puts out approximately seventeen books a month. Yet a casual glance at the writer characters in his work reveals a certain, I dunno, ambiguity about the matter. There’s Jack Torrance, the frustrated novelist of The Shining, who tries to bludgeon his family to death. Paul Sheldon of Misery attempts to retire his most famous character and ends up the prisoner of an obsessed fan. And in George Romero’s adaptation of The Dark Half, we have Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont, an author of serious but poorly-selling literary fiction who achieves success with dark, violent novels published under the name George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to out Beaumont to the press, the author takes matters into his own hands, confessing his Stark-ness and staging a mock funeral for his alter ego. The matter seems resolved until George Stark comes to life and goes on a killing spree, for which Beaumont is the prime suspect. Romero’s film is one of the better received King adaptations, and Hutton does a respectable job in the dual role of weenie Thad and badass Stark (even if he can’t pronounce “Bangor” – it’s not “banger,” people!), but a more accurate title would have been Half-Baked. Romero doesn’t bother trying to wring much suspense out of whether Thad is actually doing Stark’s killing himself, and like much of King’s latter-day work, the whole thing degenerates into arbitrary hocus-pocus in lieu of a psychologically satisfying ending.

Odd (but not really that odd) fact: Michael Rooker plays Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn, who is played by Ed Harris in Needful Things. Ed Harris is married to Amy Madigan, who plays Thad Beaumont’s wife Liz in The Dark Half. This must mean SOMETHING.

2 p.m. – 4 p.m. THINNER (1996)

Of course Stephen King had his own George Stark, although as far as we known the pseudonym Richard Bachman never came to life and started murdering people. King published five novels under Bachman’s name before being outed as the real author shortly after the publication of Thinner. In King’s case, however, it’s not like he was doing something completely different as Bachman; Thinner, in particular, is vintage King. It’s also a prime example of a story that works on the page, but not so much on film. Whilst driving and simultaneously receiving a blowjob from his wife, fat mob lawyer Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) accidentally hits and kills an old gypsy woman. The gypsy’s even more ancient father puts a curse on Billy, who begins to lose weight at a rapid clip. This is great at first, especially since he can eat whatever he wants, but it soon becomes clear that the weight loss won’t end until there’s nothing left of him. With the help of a mobster client (Joe Mantegna), an emaciated Billy tries to get the gypsies to reverse the curse. Unfortunately, the fat suit technology is not sufficiently advanced to be anything other than a distraction; Mike Myers was more convincing as Fat Bastard. The “thinner” prosthetics are even worse, but I suppose it’s too much to ask for Burke to go on Christian Bale’s Machinist diet for a B-movie like this. There’s a nasty little twist ending (hint: it involves pie!), but again, it worked better on the page.

King’s cameo: He’s the pharmacist Mr. Bangor (not banger!)

4 p.m. – 6 p.m. THE NIGHT FLIER (1997)

One of the lesser known – perhaps even the least known – King adaptations, Night Flier is based on a short story from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. Miguel Ferrer is his usual acerbic self as sarcastic, ill-tempered tabloid Richard Dees, a reporter for the Weekly World News-esque Inside View. Dees and a rival cub reporter (Julie Entwisle) are investigating a series of murders at small airports. It seems “the Night Flier” swoops in at night in his black Cessna, emerges in a black-and-red Dracula cloak, and eviscerates the unlucky inhabitants. It’s a pretty flimsy premise for a feature-length film, and not much happens until the last fifteen minutes or so, when Dees finally catches up to the Night Flier in an airport full of slaughtered victims. There’s an eerie bathroom moment I’ve never seen before: a stream of blood emerging from an invisible wee-wee and splashing into a urinal. Hey, it creeped me out. As so often happens, however, the ultimate revelation of the baddie is a letdown – just another big critter carved out of latex.

King’s cameo: He doesn’t appear in person, but there’s a clever moment when the camera pans across a wall of framed Inside View covers, each of which takes its headline from a different King story.

The Final Chapter

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And now, the war films that didn't quite make our official Top 25...

HONORABLE MENTION

LAND AND FREEDOM (1995)

Land and Freedom is Ken Loach at his most unabashedly leftist and over-earnest, but by Jove it is enjoyable! It certainly helps that unlike many other Ken Loach films, Land and Freedom is not set among pale, pudgy and poorly nourished people in some post-industrial British shithole. Well, it may start and end there, but no mind, that isn't what you will remember. The story quickly whisks you off to the heady days of the Spanish Civil War. A young English Socialist goes to Spain to fight the good fight and finds himself chanting "¡No Pasarán!" among the Catalonian hills amid leftist in-fighting galore, and plenty of sexy comrades who believe in free love. As icing on the cake, Ian Hart plays our hero (you may remember him as a young John Lennon in Back Beat — if you swing that way. No one does sullen English working class desperation with quite the same verve.

HAMBURGER HILL (1987)

This movie, directed by the British John Irvin from a script by James Carabatsos, who served with the First Air Calvary Division in Vietnam, is the plainest and most direct of all the 'Nam movies. It introduces you to the guys in a U.S. Army battalion and then documents the ten days they spend trying to carry out their orders to take an occupied hill that affords them minimal cover from the fire raining down. Although Hill shows some of the soldiers complaining about how unappreciated their efforts are back home, the film has no real political statement to make and no larger messages about the nature of warfare aside from the obvious ones, principally that the war looks a lot different to the officers who are off somewhere deciding which orders to give than it does to the guys on the ground who are staring up at the building about to collapse on top of them, and dying for a decision that makes no sense to you sucks. A lot of Vietnam movies have been made with the stated aim of providing a requiem for the people lost in that war; of all of them, this one gets that job done with the least fuss and confusion.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951)

This was the first war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, a World War II infantryman who would later tell interviewers how proud he was when a military representative complained to him that his movies would have no value as recruiting tools. Like his follow-up film, Fixed Bayonets, it's a Korean War picture that serves as a showcase for Gene Barry, a big, brusque galoot with a beady-eyed, unshaven mug who Fuller judged to be the ideal actor to play a grunt. (Suggestions from one studio that they enlarge the budget and try to reel in John Wayne sent Fuller swooning in horror.) With its garage-sale props, pissed-off acting, and quick bursts of chaotic action, it perfectly represents the mixture of cartoon, off-Broadway theater, whirligig violence and real anger that struck Fuller as the appropriate response to war. Spielberg later paid homage to the movie in the second Indiana Jones picture by giving Indy's child sidekick the same name (Short Round) that Fuller gave to the Korean kid who attaches himself to his hero.

WAG THE DOG (1997)

If you think this comedy about a political spin specialist (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman, doing his patented Robert Evans impression) helping to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal by stirring up public support for an attack on Albania isn't really a war movie, what channel have you been watching? At the time of its release, just as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was breaking, the movie seemed prescient, but David Mamet's script borrowed its basic idea from a novel, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, in which the president was George H. W. Bush and the phony war was the 1991 attack on Iraq; the novel depicted real-life Republican slimeball Lee Atwater literally handing over the worked-out plans for the war and its likely effect on the president's approval rating on his death bed, along with the advice -- which the White House failed to heed -- that George not get overexcited and be sure to save the plan until closer to the 1992 election so that it would do him some good. Mamet and company may have cost the project some of its edge by making it about a fictional president and a fictional war, thus rendering it more "universal." On the plus side, they did give us the image of Willie Nelson, hard at work on his new novelty propaganda song, trying his damndest to think up a rhyme for "Albania."

UNDER FIRE (1982) & WELCOME TO SARAJEVO (1997)

These two movies are both about white English-speaking reporters trying to cover violent trouble spots in remote corners of the world while having to grapple with their ethics about playing nonjudgemental observers of the horrors going on in front of their noses. (Oliver Stone's Salvador is in a similar mold except that James Woods' Richard Boyle, who by most official professional standards has the loosest ethics of any reporter imaginable, is so sure he knows what's right and what's wrong that he isn't troubled about a thing.) In Under Fire, the setting is Nicaragua in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The hero, a photographer played by Nick Nolte, agrees to help the rebels keep up morale by faking a photo "proving" that their dead leader is still alive. The politics of the movie flew in the face of the Reagan administration's policy that the Sandinista government was unacceptable and needed to be taken down by proxy warriors. The movie was, accordingly, buried, but the director, Roger Spottiswoode, and the writer, Ron Shelton, manage to achieve a clear-eyed view of all the competing forces propping up the Somoza dictatorship or trying to bring it down, including a fun-loving psycho of a professional mercenary (Ed Harris), a mysteriously well-connected Frenchman played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Richard Masur as Somoza's mealy-mouthed American flack, who's trying to turn things around with media spin while Somoza's soldiers are shooting down people in the street. In Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, which is set during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovia (and which was shot on location there while the ruins were still smoking), Stephen Dillane plays a British journalist who weighs the pros and cons of adopting a little girl and smuggling her out of the country. Challenging and involving, the movie is also blessed by one of Woody Harrelson's most entertaining wild man turns as a well-respected establishment TV journalist whose off-camera behavior in the field is pure double-live gonzo.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Seven
Seven

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent

Reviews By Request: Knightriders (1981, George A. Romero)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Beginning this week, I’ve decided to make a change to my normal posting schedule, switching the posting dates of my big features. So from today onward, Reviews by Request and When Good Directors Go Bad will post on alternate Tuesdays, while Yesterday’s Hits will run every Friday.

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

In the opening scene of George A. Romero’s Knightriders, we see a blackbird flying through a forest at daybreak. The bird awakens a man, sleeping on the forest floor, next to a woman. We next see the man, stripped naked, in the river, flagellating himself with a stick. Then the man and woman don their clothes- the man, a suit of armor; the woman, a cloak and a crown. As they prepare to leave the woods, the camera finally reveals their trusty steed- a shiny new motorcycle, gleaming in the morning sun.

Make no mistake about it- Knightriders is a strange creature, from its premise on down. As the film continues, the man and woman soon join up with their companions, a traveling Renaissance Faire-esque troupe whose specialty is staging medieval tournaments using motorcycles instead of horses. It’s an odd juxtaposition and something of a bizarre spectacle around which to make a movie. But somehow, against all odds, Romero pulls it off.

From the beginning, Romero acknowledges the strangeness of pairing these two extremely dissimilar concepts. For most people, chivalry carries such associations as tradition, discipline, and a code of honor, while motorcyclists have a stigma of being hell-raisers and outlaws. Part of the reason the movie works is because it doesn’t so much try to reconcile the two ideas as let them play off each other.

On one side, there’s Morgan (Tom Savini), a mustached biker who joined the troupe to rider and fight, and started calling himself Morgan Le Fay until he was informed that the character was a woman. Morgan has set his sights on being the troupe’s King, until he gets another offer from a sleazeball agent to start his own show. Not for Morgan is the chivalric code, not when there’s money to be made and women to be bedded.

On the other side is Bill Davis (Ed Harris), the man we met in the forest at the beginning. Bill formed the troupe and became the King, and honestly believes that he’s carrying on the old ways. To him, the bikes are a necessary evil- they’re certainly not horses, but under the circumstances, they’ll do. But he’s not happy about it. When a young fan asks him to autograph a motorcycle magazine with his photograph inside, Bill refuses on principle. He treats the knight’s code of honor with deadly seriousness, and even when his actions seem foolish to others, he’s acting with the honor in mind.

In terms of the material, Knightriders would seem to be an odd choice for Romero, best known as director of horror movies like the Dead franchise, Martin, and The Crazies. But thematically, the films are more similar than they initially seem. Like all of his best-known work, Knightriders deals with the gulf between the lives of an insular, marginalized minority and the outside world.

The Dead films portray this idea at its most basic- a band of survivors barricading itself against outside threats. Here, the outsiders are those who aren’t part of the troupe- the “suckerheaded American driftwood” (Billy’s words) who come to see destruction and mayhem with no care for the meaning of it all. A pivotal tournament scene happens just as the troupe looks like it’s about to disband, but all the spectators care about is the motorcycles and the violence, even complaining when the musical accompaniment gets shut off.

But no less important to the story is the internal conflict of the group, between those who want to pander to the crowds and make big money, and those who want to stay true to the ideals upon which the group was founded. What’s sort of amazing is how successfully Romero integrates it into his story, instead of simply paying it lip service. As a filmmaker, the conflict between commerce and idealism no doubt held a great deal of interest for Romero, who must have had numerous temptations to make “safer” and more respectable films following the success of Dawn of the Dead.

I sometimes wonder if Romero doesn’t get his due as a filmmaker because he usually made movies in “disreputable” genres. Does the fact that action and horror movies are designed to provoke an emotional response first and foremost make the best ones unimaginable as art? Romero’s typically unobtrusive direction of Knightriders ranks among his best, effective in both its larger moments (the tournament scenes) and the smaller ones. One indelible moment in the film, almost incidental to the story, finds a middle-aged woman with a black eye standing alone in her kitchen just after her daughter has left with one of the troupe members. Romero’s camera watches her from a distance through a doorway, as she turns on the faucet just before she starts to cry. It’s a perfect little touch, one that tells us everything we need to know about her, and I’m glad Romero decided to keep it in the film.

Knightriders is divided into three main sections, centered around three tournaments. In the first two tournaments, the troupe is putting on a show for the paying audience, knocking each other off their bikes to get the spectators to whoop and cheer. But for the third, there’s no one watching but the rest of the troupe. The ideological conflict between Bill and Morgan has become real, and the battle could decide the fate of the group. True, no money will be made from this battle, but no matter- the participants finally have something to fight for.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Insane Cargo-Salvage Story From Wired to Become Movie

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Some of you may have read the totally batshit story from last month's issue of Wired, entitled "High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas," about a team of tough dudes who fly around the world trying to refloat sinking cargo ships using good ol' American ingenuity. If not, read the whole thing here. Seriously. You will not believe this story. It's like a Michael Bay movie with all the action and none of the stupid. It's got neat gadgets, expensive cars, a race against time, hardass wisecrackers of varying nationalities and skill sets, tragedy, comedy... my God, one of these guys has a scar from a fight with a wolf. The main thought you walk away with is, "This should be a movie," and now, according to Andrew Hetherington, the photographer whose photographs (see right) run with the story, it's been optioned to be one. I'm thinking Tommy Lee Jones from ten years ago as Rich Habib, but Ed Harris will do if 1998 Tommy Lee Jones isn't available. I just hope they don't add a love interest, or play up the part of the competing Dutch salvage team. Don't mess with success, guys.

Alex Cox: Revisiting "Walker"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The director Alex Cox drove his career off the rails a while back, and he's kind of self-congratulatory about it, and a lot of his movies, well, suck, but he did make Repo Man, and there's something likable about him. Like John Sayles, Cox sets an admirable example as an ornery, self-supporting filmmaker even if you'd rather not watch at least half of his movies (and can't locate copies of the other half), and he makes for a better interview. Dennis Lim talks him up on the subject of his "Waterloo moment", Walker, on the occasion of that badly received movie's debut on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. The film itself remains one of the strangest of all relics of the Reagan era. It was loosely inspired by the historical figure William Walker, a medical doctor, lawyer, newspaper editor and journalist, and soldier of fortune who, in 1853, briefly installed himself as president of part of Baja, California after he and a force of forty-five men "conquered" it from Mexico. After the Mexicans drove him off, Walker signed on with the rebel forces in Nicaragua, and in 1855 he took the capital of Grenada and installed himself as ruler of the country, first acting through a puppet leader and then having himself "elected" to the position of president. He was driven out of the country after a year and ultimately executed by firing squad while futzing about in Honduras.

When Cox encountered the story of Walker, he saw it as a chance to stage an action-adventure that would serve as an eerie parallel to the Reagan administration's then on-going proxy war to drive out the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He actually managed to persuade the Sandinistas to let him shoot the movie on location in their beseiged country, and perhaps more remarkably, he got Universal to pay for the thing. (He also made the spaghetti Western parody Straight to Hell, featuring Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and the Pogues, as a sort of warm-up, saying that he wanted to work on his action-filmmaking skills by staging a bunch of shoot-outs with his cast, which was largely made up of politically like-minded musicians who had the time on their hands because a planned tour of Nicaragua had just been scuttled.) Cox wanted a sort of Sergio Leone-Sam Peckinpah flavor for Walker, and to that end he hired Rudy Wurlitzer, who had written the script for Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid — though granted, when he first wrote it, he thought it was going to be for Monte Hellman — to whip up a screenplay. By the time that Cox, Wurlitzer, and a cast that included Strummer, Xander Berkeley, Rene Auberjonois, Alfonso Arau, Gerrit Graham, Miguel Sandoval, Sy Richardson, and Ed Harris as Walker, were shooting in Nicaragua, the Iran-Contra scandal had broken, Oliver North was a television star, and Nicaragua was bigger news in America than it had ever been. Lines such as Walker's ominous, taunting "You may think there will come a time when America will leave Nicaragua alone" would have had some special resonance. But when Walker opened in December of 1987, you could all but hear crickets chirping.

Twenty years ago, the conventional wisdom regarding the movie's commercial failure was that it was snide and self-congratulatory yet underbaked, unrealized, and disposable. Cox has other theories. As he sees it, he actually set out "to make a broadly popular film, which is why it's full of jokes and violence and beautiful women." He also clearly thinks that his sins were political, not aesthetic. Cox may have expected a bad reaction from conservatives, but he also thinks that lily-livered liberals such as Robert Redford were too soft and pious to appreciate his brand of audacity and the film's mix of gore and anachronistic sight gags (Walker appears on the cover of Time magazine and is choppered out of the collapsing country by an American helicopter) and random punk gestures (Marlee Matlin, whose role as Walker's deaf-mute fiancee was her first movie appearance after winning an Oscar for Children of a Lesser God, gets to sign "Go fuck a pig"). Weird thought this seems now, Walker was Cox's big one for an American study, and he says that "since 1988 I have not had one offer of work from any of the Hollywood studios. I've existed entirely independent of the studios. You make one political film, and that's it — blacklisted. But that's okay, it's a good film to be blacklisted for."

Take Five: Romero Alive!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

George Romero's Diary of the Dead opens this Friday, and it's the fifth in his legendary zombie film series. We thought about dedicating this week's Take Five to an overview of each installment, but not only could we not swing a screening of Diary (dammit!), but we figured, what better time to look at some of Romero's other films? Yes, it's true: the man who invented the modern conception of the zombie, who's responsible for one of the most durable and appealing of the Famous Monsters of Filmland, has actually made a couple of movies that do not feature the living dead! We're the first to admit that we're suckers for the low-budget, foul-mouthed, expatriate Pittsburgher, though, and while he seems to save his best stuff for the zombie pictures, that's not all there is to the man. True, he sticks with bloodshed and horror — we aren't expecting a Shakespeare adaptation or a minor-key family drama from him anytime soon — but at least a few of his non-zombie pictures are worth checking out for various reasons. So if you're in one of the many cities where Diary of the Dead won't open for a while, head to your local grindhouse video emporium or fire up your rent-by-mail queue and have a Romero-fest in which the dead don't walk: they just die.

THE CRAZIES (1973)

Romero's fourth film overall, and his best to immediately follow the original Night of the Living Dead, this is similar to his original zombie masterpiece in many ways: the Pittsburgh-area filming locations, the largely amateur cast and the ultra-low budget, and the dreadful atmosphere of paranoia and nameless fear. It concerns the government's attempt to control a bizarre outbreak of a strange virus that causes instant, violent insanity in all who contract it; but the government, as it often is, isn't telling all that it knows, and the faceless federal agents in stark white biochemical hazard suits quickly become as menacing as the maddened townsfolk. A fascinating, underseen movie that creates a terrific mood of terror and insanity, with some of Romero's pointed social commentary; he's currently working on a big-budget remake.

MARTIN (1977)

Perhaps George Romero's most underrated film is this suspenseful, character-driven horror film made just before the release of Dawn of the Dead (and financed by Romero's direction of a TV movie about O.J. Simpson called Juice on the Loose, which would only take on horrific dimensions much later on). Martin Madahas — played compellingly by the young unknown John Amplas — is a drifter of Eastern European descent who has come to believe that he's a vampire, and for everyone who's determined to talk him out of it before he wields the straight razors that compensate for his lack of fangs, there's someone else who's trying to convince him he's right. The ambiguity over Martin's true nature, and his own feelings towards the urges he can't deny, are what make this such an interesting movie. Definitely worthwhile.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

We've discussed this one before, in our Stephen King Take Five, but it's a longtime favorite of ours and one of the gems of Romero's catalogue — not to mention the only time he really seems to relax and have fun. It's his first truly big-budget picture, and while the effects and film quality are much improved, the most he gets out of the money he's given to play with is populating the cast of this campy good time with tons of appealing character actors, from Fritz Weaver and Ed Harris to Leslie Nielsen and E.G. Marshall to King himself and an uncredited Tom Atkins. This isn't high art by any means, but it perfectly captures the atmosphere of giddy vileness in the old EC Comics it emulates, and it's a highly enjoyable romp if, like King and Romero, you surrender completely to the pulp tone of the thing.

MONKEY SHINES (1988)

Monkeys share one thing in common with zombies: they are awesome. As single-word punchlines, only robots can rival them. But with Monkey Shines, a film about a homicidal helper chimpanzee, Romero manages to prove that monkeys are only as successful as the stars of horror movies if they are a hundred feet tall. Monkey Shines isn't nearly as bad as its reputation or its horrible name (it's hootily subtitled An Experiment in Fear); it has a compelling psychological angle, an interesting undertone of moral ambiguity, and a light touch with the social satire. Then again, it ain't all that good, either, and it's largely sunk by dud after dud in the supporting cast, from charmless Jason Beghe in the lead to completely baffled pros like Stanley Tucci and Janine Turner. Still, it's got a monkey, plus Stephen Root, so you'll laugh at least once.

BRUISER (2000)

We were quite excited when we heard about the impending release of Bruiser back around the turn of the century: not only was Romero back, but he appeared to be directing a movie that was more psychological thriller than gorefest. Unfortunately, despite tight direction and some swell performances (especially by Peter Stormare), the story of a repressed, simpering executive who explodes into rage and revenge gives the game away too soon and drifts aimlessly in its latter half into a fog of serial-killer cliches. This is a movie that could have benefited hugely from dwelling on the psychological state of its lead character and leaving open a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty about his actions, the way Martin did, but instead, it's a statement of the kind of potential Romero always has but doesn't always deliver on.

The Screengrab Super Bowl Highlight Reel

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Here it is, two days before Super Sunday, and we haven’t run a single Super Bowl-related item here at the Screengrab. Sure, you could flip back through the archives to this list of the All-Time Worst Athletes Turned Actors, which includes Super Bowl heroes Broadway Joe Namath and Howie Long, but it would be downright un-American if we let this most hallowed day pass with no new content. So to pump you up for the big game, here’s a selection of the most rousing inspirational football speeches ever to be found on YouTube on a Friday afternoon.

Any Given Sunday

Notice how Al Pacino, as Miami Sharks coach Tony D’Amato, begins with an almost Belichickian monotone before building to his trademark full-throated bellowing. That’s how you fire up the troops, folks.

Remember the Titans

You would expect Denzel Washington to have some memorable, impassioned words for his team, but all we can find is Will Patton. It’s not exactly “win one for the Gipper,” but bonus points for (almost) working the title of the movie into the pep talk.

Rudy

Frankly, we don’t see this one inspiring anyone to win a tiddlywinks match, let alone the big game, but maybe you have to hold back a little when there’s a priest in the room.

Radio

Ed Harris may have felt this was the low point of his career, but all he had to do was glance over at Cuba Gooding, Jr. to know it could be so much worse.

The Waterboy

In our moment of need, we don’t turn to Pacino or Patton or even Knute Rockne himself. No, when the inspiration is low and the Screengrab is crying out for just one more post, it’s the timeless words of Clint Howard that see us through.

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent