The Screengrab : escape from new york

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

ALIENS (1986) & GALAXY QUEST (1999)

Life will be more stressful in the future, partly because of the ravenous extraterrestrials and tyrannical galactic tyrants we’ll encounter, but mostly because the ticking clocks in our race-against-time adventures will be replaced by soothing female voices announcing our impending doom every few seconds. That’s the case in Aliens anyway, a movie Roger Ebert called “so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?” How’s this for suspense: not only does Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley find herself trapped in a space colony infested with slimy, ravenous xenomorphs (and the equally slimy Paul Reiser), but following a mishap with a nuclear reactor, the whole joint winds up on the verge of self-destruction! And then the evil Alien Queen grabs Newt (Carrie Henn), the sweet little orphan girl Ripley’s been trying to save for most of the movie!! And then, just when Ripley and Newt finally escape to the roof of the burning, exploding complex, they discover their ride is gone!!! And then it turns out the Alien Queen knows how to use elevators!!!! And she’s got David Fincher with her!!!!! And that damn soothing female voice won’t stop reminding everyone how close they are to death!!!!!! Aiiiieeeeee!!!!!!!!! Later, in the smartly high-concept Galaxy Quest, Weaver once again winds up in a desperate space race against time, trapped with co-star Tim Allen in a real-life starship designed by a much friendlier bunch of aliens to mimic the specs of their old TV starship...including the standard issue self-destruct gizmo that always counts down to zero in the most suspenseful possible way. (AO)

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

At first, time doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in the visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Harrison Ford’s Deckard has to hunt down the escaped replicants, true, but they don’t seem to have a particular goal in mind, and for a while, his search for them is discursive, even leisurely. But it soon becomes clear that even if he’s not racing against time, the replicants are – their leader, Roy Batty, beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, knows that his kind is programmed with a finite lifespan, and that any moment could be his last. The brutish Leon taunts Deckard with this information in their confrontation, but in the end, Roy turns it into a tragedy. His death is the only thing that saves Deckard’s life, but by that time, it’s clear that something truly unique and precious is being lost, and the sensation is not one of relief, but of profound grief and regret. Fading from existence, Roy half-sneers, half-laments that he has seen things that Deckard cannot even begin to imagine; but because he is both more and less than human, it will all be lost at that moment the clock makes its final tick. (LP)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Lean, mean and exhilarating, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York confirmed that the Halloween auteur was capable of delivering more than just horror. In a nightmarish future 1997, New York City has been transformed into a massive, walled-off maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One crashes on the island and the president is taken hostage one day before an all-important nuclear summit, badass criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited for a daring rescue mission. Plissken is given a 24-hour deadline that’s made more pressing by the fact that he’s been injected with micro-explosives that’ll blow if he fails his task in the allotted time-frame, a set-up that Carpenter mines for as much rousing action as possible. From a fight with an enormous bruiser, to a cab ride over a bridge covered in mines, iconic anti-hero Plissken’s efforts to save the commander-in-chief from the clutches of Isaac Hayes’ baddie – an undertaking that involves enlisting help from Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau – remains a thrilling, kick-ass sci-fi saga, and a testament to Carpenter’s still-underappreciated directorial greatness. (NS)

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

There are endless thrillers and caper flicks that depend on split-second timing for the bad guys’ nefarious plan to succeed, but the genius of Joseph Sargent’s tight little ‘70s thriller is that it places the action on a New York subway train, a milieu in which people already get terribly bent out of shape if there’s any deviation from the strict timetable. Populated by a cast of old-school character actors (including Walter Matthau Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller) who virtually define the word “craggy”, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three features a quartet of criminals – presciently given colors as code names, twenty years before Reservoir Dogs – who must ensure perfect timing and clever planning to overcome the fact that they’re committing their caper on a form of transportation that can’t possibly deviate from its course. A big-budget remake is being released later this year, but its flashy cast and jillion-dollar price tag almost guarantee it won’t have any of the grubby charm or jangling energy of the original. (LP)

Only a few precious seconds remaining to Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

LazyVision: Week Ending Feb. 14th

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We know that fans of the Screengrab want the dish on what's happening now in Hollywood (hence the Weekend Box Office Report) and what's yet to come (hence the Morning Deal Report). We know you want to be aware of what's coming to home video, hence DVD Digest. And we know that sometimes, you just want to park yourselves in front of the tube to catch a good flick, hence Set Your DVRs!.

We also know that some of you are deeply, deeply lazy individuals. And, beyond that, you're cheap, and you can't figure out anything more technologically complicated than a light switch. (We say this in the most loving way possible, for we count ourselves in your number.) You want to be able to turn on the TV -- not the computer -- and watch a good movie, anytime you want, without having to program anything -- for free. After all, wasn't that the promise of the new modern era? Wasn't that the allure of the digital age -- any movie you want, any time you want, no waiting, no fees?

Well, assuming you have digital cable, Video On Demand was made for lazy gasbags like you. Most of the stuff shown on VOD is either pay-per-view or, to put it mildly, dire, but occasionally, a gem will pop up on the "Free Movies" feature as a reward for infinitely patient cheapskates like yours truly. So, once a week, we'll bring you a handful of not-completely terrible movies you can watch whenever you want, for zero dollars and change. (Check your local provider for channel details.)

- FEARnet this week is featuring Night of the Creeps as one of its free movies on demand. This underrated 1986 camp-horror classic from cult director Fred Dekker is a real winner -- it never takes its zombies-from-out-space-plot too seriously, and plays around with the conventions of the genre years before the Scream franchise got the idea. The characters are all named after cult directors (Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, etc.), and best of all, it's held together by a swell performance from beloved tough-guy character actor Tom Atkins.

- The Sundance Channel's on-demand service is offering a look at John Huston's The Dead, gratis. The final film Huston ever made, it's also one of his finest and most personal; adapted from a very fine James Joyce short story, it features some astonishing performances (including by his daughter, Anjelica) in a story involving a woman's memories of her long-dead first love, and how it stirs emotions in her husband during an Epiphany gathering. Best of all, The Dead isn't currently available in a U.S. DVD release, so this opportunity is even more special.

- Turner Classic Movies also has an on-demand service, and free this week is the classic 1948 noir flick Naked City. Somewhere between solid post-war noir, hardboiled police procedural, and ripe pre-war crime drama, Naked City is a tightly wound look at every step of a brutal murder investigation in New York. Directed by legendary noir specialist Jules Dassin, Naked City features a terrific villain in Ted DeCorsia, a gritty semi-documentary filming style, and an absolutely gripping extended chase scene through the city. It was later made into a popular TV crime show in the 1950s .

- FEARnet's on-demand service coughs up another great free offering this week in Escape from New York. Made during the period when a new John Carpenter movie was cause for excitment, this cult classic takes place in a near-future dystopia where New York City is a maximum-security prison. When President Donald Pleasance's plane crashes there with the nuclear football on board, it's up to Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, one of the all-time great screen bad-asses, to bail him out. Russell gamely waltzes with a swell cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton -- and good ol' Tom Atkins.

- Finally, TNT's on-demand service this week offers the chance to see John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood. The 1991 film set off a wave of west coast gangsta dramas, but Boyz was the first and is still one of the best, as Singleton (whose filmmaking skills are raw and exciting here) takes a look at a group of childhood friends who struggle in different ways against the rough life of gang-ridden south central Los Angeles. Larry Fishburne's performance is a standout, and this was one of the first movies in which evidence was presented that Ice Cube was a good actor -- evidence which has been sorely lacking in recent years.

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Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

CHICAGO (2002)

Hot chicks behind bars? Check. A large, in-charge corrupt female warden? Check. Mean girl sparring between the new fish and the reigning cell block queen? Check. Nude lesbian shower orgies and bloody riot scenes? Sorry...Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the toe-tappingly cynical 1975 Kander/Webb/Fosse musical adaptation of crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play about celebrity criminals ain’t that kind of Women-In-Prison film. Helping to restore America’s faith in the potential entertainment value of movie musicals a year after Baz Luhrmann did his level best to destroy the genre with the Excedrin-headache known as Moulin Rouge, Chicago served up catchy tunes and light satire grounded by (relatively) gritty scenes of the “real-world” Murderess Row underpinning the fantasized production numbers. For all the literal and figurative song-and-dance surrounding the press and public’s fascination with lethal jazz babies Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie (Reneé Zellweger), there’s also the other side of the coin: the grim fate of a Hungarian inmate who, unlike her media-savvy cellmates, is probably innocent but gets the noose rather than justice because she can’t speak English and doesn’t know how to game the system for her own benefit. But that’s about as serious as things get: those who prefer more harrowing musical depictions of doomed immigrant ladies destroyed by American xenophobia are welcome to seek out Dancer In The Dark, the entertainment equivalent of a swift hard kick in the crotch you’re not entirely sure you deserved. The rest of Chicago, meanwhile, is a feel-good romp about getting away with murder featuring Zeta-Jones at the top of her game, an unusually tolerable performances by Zellweger (in a role Divine would have really knocked out of the park) and a surprisingly unembarrassing performance by Richard Gere (although as fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak correctly noted at the time, Christopher Walken in the razzle-dazzle role would have been godhead).

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Look, we’re not going lie to you: a lot of what’s awesome about John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is Snake Plissken. Kurt Russell’s one-eyed bank-robber antihero is badass enough to have earned the guy a generation of goodwill despite a subsequent decade filled with Captain Rons and Tango & Cashes. A lot more of what’s awesome about it is the dynamite supporting cast, which includes Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton, a tasty Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance as a Fightin’ President, Screengrab fave/That Guy! emeritus Tom Atkins, and Isaac Hayes in a role so tough he almost out-bad-dudes Snake Plissken. But leaving all that aside, Escape from New York twists conventions all over the place: the bad boy reprobate is trying to break into prison, not get out of it, and New York, rather than being the destination everyone’s trying to reach and the place people only leave because they’re about to hit 40 and they can’t stand living with a roommate in Crown Heights anymore, is a maximum security prison where futuristic America dumps its biggest scumbags. (Insert predictable ‘Oh, the wacky world of science fiction, where New York is filled with criminal scum! Ha ha!’ joke here). Much as he did in Escape from Precinct 13, Carpenter takes genre conventions and flips them on their ears, with highly entertaining results.

STALAG 17 (1953)

Billy Wilder’s films are so essential and influential and beloved that it’s hard to pull back and talk about how weird and unsettling and even unpleasant they are. But they are indeed weird, unsettling, and often unpleasant. For one thing, there’s so much fakery that it’s up for grabs what Wilder was trying to elicit from his audience. In Billy Wilder’s eyes, life is about deception. Many -- if not most -- of his main characters are phonies. The cynics are all romantics. The romantics are all cynics. Sometimes they’re deluding themselves, sometimes the rest of the world. His movies also lather on a thick corn hash. That’s not too unusual for a Hollywood director of his era. John Ford and Howard Hawks were both certainly guilty of overcooking the corn. In Wilder’s movies, sometimes the corn is funny and sometimes it seems pointless. It’s all part of the artifice of his movies, the occasionally clumsy sleight-of-hand that he works with to try to distract you from the horror and mess his characters are making of their lives with all their deception. This artifice is occasionally too much for Wilder’s movies, and a few stories that should work (like Ace In The Hole, for instance, or The Apartment) try to hang too much suffering on a premise too phony and characters too empty. However, Stalag 17 goes the other way. It's a good Wilder movie. It did, however, open the door for Hogan’s Heroes, a bad tv show (don’t try to justify your nostalgia to me; it may be iconic but that doesn’t mean it’s good). It also laid the groundwork for the Roberto Benigni atrocity Life Is Beautiful, and a handful of other movies leaping to your mind about the goofy fun time people had in Nazi prison camps. Not that movies about Nazi prisons have to be grim, but c’mon, those flicks have no goddamn perspective. Anyway, the comic relief is far too broad for the movie, the story is pitched somewhere between too cynical and too maudlin, the characters are a little slow on the uptake, and damn if I know how it all works, but Stalag 17 somehow makes sense.

A MAN ESCAPED (1957)

The title suggests a conclusion foregone, but Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is unconcerned with the conclusion. What’s important is the suffocating tight focus on Lt. Fontaine, our captured protagonist, his wide eyes full of twitchy wildness like cornered game, as he goes about the nuts-and-bolts of dismantling the prison about him. The movie opens with a close-up on his hand, testing a car door lever. In a minute, he will leap from the car and be immediately recaptured. But for the first couple of minutes, Bresson’s camera watches him as he holds his breath, waiting for just the right moment. Some men may give up when caught, but this one was built for escape. You will learn soon enough that he is a member of the French Resistance who is headed for detainment in a Nazi jail. He tells his story mostly in short, clipped voiceovers, as few people speak to him or give him a reason to speak during his confinement. But speech is unimportant. His mind is constantly at work planning his escape. Bresson’s taut and economical film lays bare the mechanics of a prison break, provided, of course, that the prison is built and staffed exactly like the one in the movie.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994)

The only prison in Roman Polanski’s film of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden is in the past. Sigourney Weaver plays Paulina, a former political prisoner scarred by her rape and torture while imprisoned. Her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) owes her everything. One night -- the only night in this movie, really -- his car breaks down and he catches a ride from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), who leaves and later returns when he realizes that he accidentally kept Gerardo’s spare tire. The two men have a drink. Meanwhile, Paulina has apparently flipped. She steals Miranda’s car and destroys it, then returns home and begins to torture the man, claiming he did terrible things to her in the past. Her husband is understandably confused. Miranda seemed okay to him. And he knows that Paulina never saw her tormenter while in prison. How can she be sure? Three characters, one night, and a lifetime of human suffering.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs

Isaac Hayes, 1942--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Isaac Hayes has died, at 65, at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. Hayes first came to prominence through his work at Memphis's legendary Stax studios, where, still in his early twenties, he became a keyboard player with the house band, worked as part of the production team, and developed a fruitful songwriting partnership with David Porter. The Porter-Hayes credit appeared on some two hundred compositions, including a raft of hits by the magnificent duo Sam and Dave, including "Soul Man", "I Thank You", "You Don't Know Like I Know", "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby", and "Hold On, I'm Comin'", whose title phrase is said to have been born when the hard-working Hayes was importuning Porter to return from the men's room. No ego as endearingly supersized as Hayes's could have been completely satisfied with working behind the scenes, and in 1967 he released his first solo album, the jazz-flavored Presenting Isaac Hayes. That was followed in 1969 by the unexpected blockbuster success of Hot Buttered Soul, which established Hayes's gruff bass voice, his habit of interjecting spoken-word interludes into his songs, his flamboyantly extended performances of such numbers as "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", and, through its cover art, the iconic impact of his big bald head and taste for gold necklaces. The album made him Stax's biggest star at a precarious time in the label's history.

Hayes would first branch out into movies with his soundtrack for the black-private eye movie Shaft in 1971. The jarringly funky "Theme from Shaft" became a significant radio hit, and would earn Hayes (who had an on-screen cameo as a bartender) an Academy Award for Best Original Song, thus making him the first African-American to be given an Oscar for a non-acting contribution to a movie. (Shaft would also earn Hayes Grammy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Original Motion Picture Score.) When Stax staged a one-day concert in Los Angeles, featuring all its biggest acts, to commemorate the anniversary of the Watts riots, the resulting performance documentary, Wattstax (1973), featured Hayes in the concert-closing role of conquering hero, taking the stage in bare chest and chains. (He proceeded to perform "Theme from Shaft" and "Soulsville", but because MGM owned the rights to those songs and refused to give them up for the soundtrack, Hayes wound up recording another song, "Rollin' Down a Mountain", just so that there'd be something the movie could show after his grand entrance. The original footage was finally restored a few years ago when a buffed-up version of Wattstax was shown on the PBS series P.O.V. and released to DVD.)

By 1975, Stax was reduced ro filing for bankruptcy, but by then Hayes seemed more interested in his movie career anyway. He co-starred with Fred Williamson in the self-explanatory Tough Guys (1974) and then played the title role in Truck Turner. He had a recurring guest role as the ex-con Gandy Finch on The Rockford Files and ruled a post-apocalyptic Big Apple in John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981). But through the 1980s and early '90s, most of the steam had escaped from his career. Salvation came in the unlikely form of the role of Chef on South Park, which didn't just give him a semi-regular paycheck and establish him as a beloved talisman of the 1970s; it gave him his most conspicuous music success in decades when the novelty song "Chocolate Salty Balls" (which he performed on the show and which was included in Chef Aid: The South Park Album) went to number one on the UK charts. After ten years, Hayes and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker went their separate ways over a nasty dispute over Hayes's reported indignation over the show's satirical treatment of Scientology. In the meantime, Hayes also put out some fresh music while appearing onscreen in Flipper, Illtown, Six Ways to Sunday, Blues Brothers 2000, Reindeer Games, Hustle & Flow, while lending his voice to Dr. Dolittle 2 and, of course South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. In 2002, he and other soul legends were paid tribute in the documentary Only the Strong Survive, and that same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A cause of death has not yet been determined.

It’s 2008. Where Is Our Moonbase?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Here at Screengrab headquarters, our snack of choice is Dippin’ Dots, the ice cream of the future. Not only do we enjoy the taste of Rocky Road flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, but we’re also fascinated with the philosophical implications of the futuristic dessert. After all, Dippin’ Dots booths have been taking up their sad little corner of the mall since the ’80s. Are they still the ice cream of the future? If so, how far into the future? Isn’t it possible that the future has come and gone, and Dippin’ Dots are now the ice cream of the past? Or are they simply the ice cream of one possible alternate future that now seems unlikely to ever arrive?

Yes, we’re quite the intellectual giants, but it took the folks over at Best Week Ever to apply our rigorous level of questioning to the realm of scientific fiction in motion pictures. Their list of 10 Futuristic Movies That Are Already Dated takes on such cinematic Dippin’ Dots as Strange Days, Demolition Man and Escape From New York. A few of the offerings err on the side of being overly optimistic; you could sort of understand how the makers of 1953’s Project Moonbase figured we’d have lunar outposts by 1970, but the writers of 1994’s Timecop were probably a little ambitious in anticipating time-traveling lawmen within the decade.

And then there’s The Apple, a 1980 musical written and directed by crap merchant Menahem Golan, which postulates the following in 1994: “Record label that holds sway over the government; devices to measure the impact that songs will have on peoples’ hearts; disco resurgence.” And it looks something like this:

Separated at Birth: "Cloverfield" and "Miracle Mile"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The apocalyptic monster movie Cloverfield, with its Camcorder-eye view of Manhattan being flattened by an aggrieved, bellowing beastie from the sea, was already well defined in the public mind as "Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project" long before it opened. It used to be that this kind of mixed-marriage pitch was a staple of Hollywood satire, an easy laugh at the industry's blatant embrace of unoriginality. By now, after a few decades of Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Weekly teaching lay people to think of movies in terms of grosses and big weekend openings, even ticket buyers are conditioned to think of a movie's resemblance to other movies as some kind of come-on. J. J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot company produced Cloverfield (and who is probably the creator most strongly associated with it, even though he neither wrote nor directed it), has also taken credit, in a roundabout way, for the most striking image featured in its trailer, that of the head of the Statue of Liberty being used as a bowling ball, by saying that he'd always felt gypped that there was no such image in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, even though that movie's poster showed the Statue's head lying discarded in the street. But there's another movie that in its structure bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield: Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and released to nothing better than mildly cultish appreciation back in 1989. The fact that a moviemaking team that takes so much pride in its influences has not — to my knowledge, anyway — done much to advertise their debt to De Jarnatt's film may indicate that the similarities are coincidental, or it may just prove that nobody wants to brag about building their hit on the bones of an underappreciated, semi-forgotten (and better) picture.

[Please Note: Spoilers to Follow. You have been warned]

CLOVERFIELD: The movie opens with the information that Beth (played by a very pretty young woman) and Rob (played by an even prettier young man) have fallen in love, but due to some miscommunication for which they both may be to blame, they quarrel and split acrimoniously on the evening of Rob's big going-away party. At that ill-timed moment, the apocalypse shows up, in the form of a giant, rampaging monster, and Rob tears through the increasingly chaotic metropolis that is Manhattan in a state of nocturnal panic, to be with the woman he loves. Thanks to his gallant heroism, which is depicted in something close to real time, they manage to reconnect, but an attempt to flee by government helicopter fails. The movie concludes with Beth and Rob dying in the rubble of Central Park, but their end is at least a small triumph of the heart: they have the chance to die together with the words "I love you" on their lips. Immortalized in the home-video footage collected and preserved by the government, they will live on in memory as a testament to the tender emotions of those lost in the monster's attack.

MIRACLE MILE: The movie opens with the information that Harry (played by Anthony Edwards in engaging, likable-geek mode) and Julie (played by Mare Winningham as a lovable geekette) have fallen in love, but Harry is reluctant to tell Julie that he loves her because he has commitment problems. He resolves to take the plunge when he and Julie are set to meet one night, but due to some miscommunication for which a power outage and malfunctioning alarm clock are to blame, he fails to show up. Wandering the nocturnal city alone, Harry learns that the apocalypse is coming in on the next train, in the form of a nuclear attack. Harry tears through the increasingly chaotic metropolis that is Los Angeles in a state of panic, to be with the woman he loves. Thanks to his gallant heroism, which is depicted in something close to real time, they manage to reconnect, but an attempt to flee by government helicopter fails. The movie concludes with Harry and Julie dying in the mire of the La Brea Tar Pits, but their end is at least a small triumph of the heart: they have the chance to die together with the words "I love you" on their lips. Like the dinosaurs, they will join the fossil record, living on in memory as a testament to man's folly.

It goes without saying that the feel and texture of the two movies could hardly be more different, though there are traces in Cloverfield of a yearning to express something close to the romantic sweetness of Miracle Mile; it's outside the movie's range, partly because it would get in the way of the spectacle, partly because the characters lack the individual spark of the people in Miracle Mile. (On the other hand, they also lack the unpolished averageness of the people in The Blair Witch Project, a quality that made it easier to believe that movie might really be a record of something that had happened. If you think that the people onscreen count for more than your taste in gimmickry, Cloverfield is actually more like Godzilla meets Make Me a Supermodel.) It might be nice if some of the attention being paid to Cloverfield could be siphoned off in Miracle Mile's direction, assuming that the clock hasn't already completely run out on Cloverfield's fifteen minutes. Miracle Mile was in some ways its writer-director's real feature debut; the script was named one of the ten best unproduced screenplays by American Film magazine in 1983, the same year that De Jarnatt got his first screen credit for his work on the screenplay of Strange Brew, starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug Mackenzie. De Jarnatt had sold it to a studio that had no interest in letting him direct it; he was later able to buy it back, after working as a writer and director on the mid-1980s revival of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and writing and directing the straight-to-cable sci-fi romance Cherry 2000. Since then, he's done a lot of TV, and he had a hand in launching the offbeat horror series American Gothic and Kindred: The Embraced. But in the almost twenty years since Miracle Mile was completed, he hasn't made another movie.

The Top Ten Action Heroes Who Deserve A Comeback, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:00:00 GMT

5. Alan "Dutch" Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Predator

When it comes to sheer coolness, few action movies can top John McTiernan's Predator. The uncomplicated tale of a Special Forces unit being stalked by an alien trophy hunter has little time to waste on anything that doesn't involve an explosion. Though the Predators themselves have returned to the screen several times (most recently in this year's Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), Dutch Schaefer has yet to be granted a rematch with the beasts. The role of the wisecracking soldier who transforms into an instinct-driven animal is one of the roles that put Arnold Schwarzenegger on the map. The sooner his political career ends, the sooner Arnold can get back to doing what he does best — punching extraterrestrials in the face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoRHcyf3lv0

4. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), Escape from New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York is set in a bleak near-future in which Manhattan is a prison colony. The film is a bare-bones affair with little budget for flashy set-pieces, which may be why the film's fans feel so much affection for megacool antihero Snake Plissken. In 1980, Kurt Russell was best known for Disney's The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, and his portrayal of the grim Plissken changed the trajectory of his entire career. The 1995 remaquel Escape From LA is oft-mocked, but it's both more showy and more fun. Its conclusion follows the nihilism of the bad-guy action hero to its furthest extreme: Plissken single-handedly destroys civilization and plunges the world back to the Stone Age. It's a great setup for further adventures in an even wilder setting, and with Russell riding a wave of newfound respect after Grindhouse, the time is ripe for Plissken to return.

3. William Bonney/Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez), Young Guns

Jack Torrance and Hannibal Lecter are certainly great screen maniacs, but for my money, one of the greatest psychopaths in film history is Emilio Estevez's Billy the Kid. In this flashy revisionist western, Billy turns a gang of would-be heroes into a group of coldblooded killers. He takes obvious glee in bloodshed, often toying with his victims before pulling the trigger. His stated reason for killing his first victim: "He was hackin' on me." The framing sequence of Young Guns 2 reveals that Billy survived well into the twentieth century, so there's plenty of room for continuing adventures.

2. Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal), Under Siege

For a brief period in the early '90s, Steven Seagal was the king of the action flick. In 1992, following a string of generically-titled bloodbaths, he made the best film of his career: Under Siege. Much of the film's charm comes from its over-the-top villains, portrayed by Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones, whose scheme to hijack a soon-to-be-decommissioned battleship comes straight from the Bond villain playbook. But the film's real strength is Steven Seagal's ebullient performance as Casey Ryback, a demoted Navy SEAL serving out his term as a cook — "a lowly, lowly cook." Ryback is calm about the hijacked ship; he only gets really angry when Busey insults his cooking. Seagal's films never stopped being fun, but he's never had another character anywhere near as entertaining as Ryback.

1. Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), Dirty Harry

With Dirty Harry, Don Siegel created the standard by which action films would be judged for decades to come. The film's story of a copy whose hunt for a serial killer is hampered by red tape and the Bill of Rights led to four sequels and a legion of imitators. Subsequent action heroes owe a lot to Harry, from Kurt Russell and Steven Seagal's gruff whispers to Axel Foley and Popeye Doyle's refusal to play by the rules. In the years since The Dead Pool, the fifth and final Dirty Harry film, Clint Eastwood has gained a reputation for both sophistication and simplicity, both as an actor and a director. A return to the character of Callahan would almost certainly become a meditation of the nature of violence and the lingering ghosts of past carnage. But it would also be fucking awesome. There are rumors that Eastwood has retired from acting, but for the sake of action films past, present, and future, Dirty Harry deserves a swansong.

Read PART 1.

Morning Deal Report: Behind My Camel

Peter Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Spider-Man 4 lumbers gradually into production. Sony says this will include a mere two villains, instead of their originally planned 846. Whatever.

Gerard Butler has fled the Escape From New York remake, just after news that Brett Ratner had split for the outer boroughs himself.

The underused Gillian Anderson will star in The Smell of Apples, a drama set in '70s South Africa. Nice to see her again.

That George Romero just really likes zombies, apparently; Diary of the Dead's not even out yet and he's already planning a sequel.

Speaking as the "Andy Summers" in a Police cover band, I'm delighted to hear that the real Andy Summers' autobiography is becoming a documentary. That it's from the director of Tupac: Resurrection is a little less encouraging, but we'll see.

— Peter Smith

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains opens this week, and while it isn't really about Carter the President so much as about Carter the Ex-President, it got us thinking about the Oval Office and the movies. Depicting Presidents is always a dicey proposition on film. In contemporary films, there are fewer ways to take your audience out of a movie than to show the President of the United States and have it not be the actual current President of the United States (another reason why Crimson Tide, with its CNN-generated Bill Clinton cameo, is so awesome). In films set in the future, it's hard to show the President and have it not feel like a ham-handed attempt at instant dystopianism. (Funny how those silly people in the future rarely elect somebody halfway decent to the office.) Our list this week focuses on Great Fictional Movie Presidents. But you'll notice that we've included two sorta-not-fictional Honorable Mentions. You may also notice that we've avoided some movie Presidents (coughMichaelDouglascough) who irritate the hell out of us.

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Of all the roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, none leaves an impression quite like President Merkin Muffley. (The dual vagina references in the name are as sure a sign as any that anarchic comic author Terry Southern was behind the screenplay.) Allegedly based on fussy Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Muffley's role as the sole voice of reason and practicality in a film full of powerful madmen anchors the entire movie — and, on occasion, such as in the legendary and hilarious telephone conversation with the Soviet premier (much of which, like a good deal of Sellers' dialogue, was originally improvised by the actor himself), provides some of Dr. Strangelove's funniest moments. Muffley wasn't always meant to be the film's unflappable straight man; Southern originally wrote him as an extremely loopy collection of tics and affectations, including a severe head cold and an obvious and stereotypical homosexual demeanor; the former was so effective that it basically prevented anyone from playing off of him, and the latter, in rehearsal, was felt by both actor and director, to be too broad. Instead, Sellers played Muffley as almost preternaturally bland, which made his occasional forays into hysteria all the more effective.

Walter Huston as President Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)

This 1933 picture, which opened during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, was directed by Gregory La Cava, but the real driving force behind the production was William Randolph Hearst, who intended it as a primer designed to show FDR how he ought to go about solving the country's problems. President Hammond is a compromise candidate, a cynical party hack who couldn't care less about his country's citizens or its future. But then he's injured in a car accident and slips into a coma, and when he comes out of it, he's a changed man, and he rolls up his sleeves and begins to do whatever it takes to make things right. His methods include firing his whole cabinet, threatening to declare martial law until Congress lets him do whatever he wants, and having all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed. His reign of righteous terror climaxes with a scene where he gathers all the ambassadors of the world's nations onto a yacht and treats them to a show of American military power that convinces them that they have no choice but to disarm and quickly fork over the money they owe the U.S. from the first World War. Having rendered the United States prosperous, crime-free and dominant, President Hammond contentedly drops dead; the movie leaves open the possibility that he's been dead since the car crash and that his body has been serving as an earthly conduit for the Lord. FDR wound up being a disappointment to Hearst, not taking much from the Hammond playbook, but some historians think that the movie may have actually prophesied the administration of a much later American president.

Donald Pleasance as The President of the United States, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

You know, sometimes you really feel sorry for Donald Pleasance. The poor guy survived the Blitz, fought in the Second World War, and went on to become President of the United States despite the constitutional hindrance of having been born in England. And what does it get him after forty years of struggle? Some mouthy stewardess blows up Air Force One and leaves him stranded in New York (which just happens to be a maximum security penitentiary, peopled with murderers, drug lords, and assorted human scum — nothing like it is in real life, of course), where he is continually menaced by the guy who sang "Grazing in the Grass." U.S. presidents in action movies tend to break down pretty cleanly into one of two categories — the Fightin' President, who punches people and shoots down alien warships, and the Frightened President, who cowers in a corner and waits for a real tough-guy he-man to come rescue him. For most of Escape from New York's run time, Pleasance's unnamed President is decidedly the latter, and we're clearly meant to feel some degree of sympathy towards him as he awaits rescue (like Nixon, he apparently has a secret plan to end the war). Still, it's hard not to come away feeling a bit of sympathy for the terrorists — after all, the guy did turn Manhattan into a prison. Won't somebody think of the restaurants?

Terry Crews as President Camacho, IDIOCRACY (2006)

Postponed for over a year before getting a blink-and-you-missed-it release last fall, Mike Judge's cult-classic-in-the-making imagined a future in which the morons have inherited the Earth. In a world where Starbucks sells both lattes and handjobs and crops are watered with Brawndo™ Energy Drinks, it only makes sense that the President of the United States would be a trash-talking, hard-partying ex-porn star and five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion. President Camacho, played with great comic relish by ex-NFL defensive lineman Terry Crews, is the kind of fearless leader who sports a tank top and American-flag warmup pants at Presidential functions, brandishes a machine gun during his State of the Union address, and rides a four-wheeler everywhere he goes, national security be damned. But his actual leadership skills are limited to making the country's smartest man his new Secretary of the Interior and tasking him to solve the nation's famine problem in one week, or else he'll get thrown into the ring during a nationally-televised monster truck rally. A few decades ago, it might have been tempting to read Judge's vision of the presidency 500 years from now as a dystopian satire conceived by a former high-school outcast sick of seeing the dumb jocks get all the glory. But nowadays, when having a significant speaking role in Predator is as accurate an indicator of electability as any previous public office, one can't help but wonder whether it'll even take five centuries to place us squarely in the political climate imagined by Idiocracy.

Charles During as President David Stevens, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977)

Charles Durning's President Stevens is a squat, foul-mouthed sign of the post-Nixonian times. On the one hand, it's doubtful a pre-Nixon president would have been allowed to drink and curse this much on-screen: Stevens has a "fuck" for every occasion. But he's also made directly responsible for the U.S.'s post-Vietnam fallout, blackmailed by Burt Lancaster into promising to reveal — on national TV! — our cynical, soldier-killing true reasons for entering the war. Impressively naive, Stevens is forced to condemn the administrations preceding him: he retains Nixon's profanity but none of his attitude.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov