The Screengrab : gene roddenberry

Chris Pine Gets His Kirk On

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Here's how Geoff Boucher's profile of Chris Pine, the new James T. Kirk of J. J. Abrams's Star Trek movie, begins: "Wearing a trucker hat, battered blue jeans and an air of breezy confidence, Chris Pine walked through the Paramount Pictures studio lot like he owned the place but felt no particular need to show anyone the deed in his pocket." Seriously, aside from the sartorial details, if you were writing about anybody who was picking up the gauntlet from William Shatner, isn't that how you'd want to be able to describe him? Many a young (28 years old, to be precise) actor might be able to pull off that walk in his head, but in reality? (As if to provide a constant genetic reminder of how many couldn't, Pine is the son of the actor Robert Pine, best known for the disappointed looks he used to direct at Erik Estrada during roll call on CHiPs.) "Shatner will forever be James T. Kirk," says Pine. "There's something set in stone about that. That actually takes pressure off me. I'm going my own way. My name is not William Shatner."

Some of the actors in supporting roles, such as Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy and Simon Pegg as Scotty, have talked to interviewers about how much they enjoyed riffing on the mannerisms of their predecessors, playing with the traits that have so well served generations of nightclub impersonators and stand-up comics. Instead, as the man at the center, Pine saw it as his job to evoke Shatner in the role without imitating him. "There was no sense in trying to re-create what Shatner had done because it was so specific. He was unique, singular, it was his take. I did spice my performance with some of his straight-spined, almost ballet way of moving." (There will now be fifteen minutes of silence while we all try to adjust our conception of the term "balletic" so that it can apply to William Shatner.) If Pine's approach sounds very nuts and bolts, that goes with his having grown up in the business. "Whenever you're on set with people that have put in the years, pick their brains -- that's our apprenticeship, that's how the trade gets passed down, the stories, the lessons. I think with my family and my background, I have a sense of the history of the business, what has come before . . . going with my dad to his auditions I would listen to the actors talk and it was almost like workers in a steel town on lunch break talking about the line or union issues." Now he's kicking back in the captain's chair at a time when a new, turbocharged version of Gene Roddenberry's '60s chestnut may actually be timely. "There's a message in this almost utopian possibility and this team of people who must work together to overcome tremendous challenges."

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Scott's Take

DVD Digest for May 5, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the fifth and final Best Picture nominee from last year makes its DVD debut, and a whole lot of TV and Blu-Ray releases hit the market.

Recently, there was some uproar over the announcement that Criterion would be releasing David Fincher’s latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, on DVD and Blu-Ray. Frankly, the naysayers sort of had a point- while Button is Fincher’s first stab at Oscar glory, it’s hardly the best-regarded film of his career, and it looked like Criterion was grabbing a big-ticket title in order to make some money to find its more esoteric efforts (such as last month’s Jean Painlevé box). But it turns out that we all underestimated Criterion- while the movie itself might be nothing special, the new 2-disc DVD is, boasting nearly three hours’ worth of documentaries on the making of the film, from on-the-set footage of Fincher at work to exhaustive features on the movie’s technical marvels. Paramount will also be releasing a film-only version as well, but if you really want to own this, the Criterion set is the way to go, and besides, if enough people buy the Criterion Button, maybe they’ll be persuaded to release some other Finchers as well. I for one long for a snazzy new version of The Game, but that’s just me…

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week include the Bollywood hit Chandni Chowk to China (Warner) and Azazel Jacobs’ priceless indie Momma’s Man (Kino).

The only notable classics release that’s on my radar this week is Mike Newell’s 1992 arthouse hit Enchanted April (Disney).

The week’s TV on DVD include: Spader and The Shat in Boston Legal Season 5 (Fox); the Daniel Defoe reworking Crusoe: The Complete Series (Universal); Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: The Final Conflict Season 1 (Paramount); the Candace Bushnell-penned Lipstick Jungle Season 2 (Universal); and the since-cancelled drama October Road Season 2 (Disney).

Finally, this week’s selection of Blu-Ray only releases has plenty of fun to help lead movie watchers into summer. We’ve got comedy- Big (Fox), There’s Something About Mary (Fox), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Paramount). We’ve got love stories- It Could Happen to You (Sony) and Roxanne (Sony). We’ve even got a double dose of dancing Travolta, with Grease (Paramount) and Saturday Night Fever (Paramount). Or if none of these does it for you, there’s always Michael C. Hall as everyone’s favorite serial-killer-hunting serial killer in Dexter Season 2 (Paramount).

Harlan Ellison vs. Star Trek, Paramount, et al - Round XXVI

Peter Smith — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Screengrab contributor Faisal Qureshi reports on a brewing lawsuit. — ed.

I'm sure a lot of people have been enjoying the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek trailer with Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang rebooting the franchise after Paramount sucked it dry so many years ago. Now comes news that Harlan Ellison is suing Paramount for money he says they owe him for writing the classic 1967 Star Trek episode, "City on the Edge of Forever." For those unfamilar, the episode follows the adventures of Kirk and Spock as they travel to 1930s Earth, after a deranged McCoy inadvertently changes the past and prevents the the Federation from ever existing. To complicate matters, Kirk falls for social worker Edith Keeler (played quite well by Joan Collins), but Spock discovers that Keeler needs to die to restore the timeline.

Fans generally consider the episode to be the best of the series, but the production wasn't a pleasant experience for Ellison. His account of the whole mess also claimed that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had consistently lied to the public about the author's contribution. Yesterday evening, Ellison announced that he was going to sue Paramount. This is no idle threat given this is also the man who took successful legal action against James Cameron, ABC (for plagarism) and more recently, AOL. To quote from the scathing press release:

"To quote Gandhi: 'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.' ...And please make sure to remember, at the moment some studio mouthpiece calls me a mooch, and says I'm only pursuing this legal retribution to get into their 'deep pockets,' tell'm Ellison snarled back, 'F---in'-A damn skippy!' I'm no hypocrite. It ain't about the 'principle,' friend, its about the MONEY! Pay me! Am I doing this for other writers, for Mom (still dead), and apple pie? Hell no! I'm doing it for the thirty-five-year-long disrespect and the money!

"The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who 'have more important things to worry about,' who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely 'take' meetings, and shuffle papers — much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams — they refuse even to notice. . . until you jam a federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars. . . from OUR labors. . . just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters."

Even more importantly, Ellison is suing his own labour union, the WGA, for failing to take his complaints seriously. Given the last high-profile case involving Paramount's accounting practices was 1990's Art Buchwald vs. Paramount (the book about the case, Fatal Subtraction, also gave the WGA a kicking for their perceived lack of support), one wonders how far this case will go before Paramount or Harlan throws in the towel. Given his history within the court room, Ellison probably won't be the one to fold.

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part I

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

For a movie that’s made so many people laugh for over 30 years, the people who made Monty Python and the Holy Grail didn’t have a very good time. The first big-screen effort from arguably the greatest sketch comedy group of all time was plagued with problems: they were frequently denied access to filming locations they thought they’d secured; Graham Chapman, playing the part of King Arthur, was plagued with psychological and physical problems as a result of his recovery from alcoholism; the entire production was plagued with budgetary problems and probably wouldn’t even have been made if members of Pink Floyd (huge fans of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV show) hadn’t have stepped in and pumped money into the film; the troupe was working on an incredibly strict filming deadline and nerves were frayed to the breaking point trying to get the production in on time; and much of the filming was done in locations that left the cast and crew cold, wet, and miserable much of the time, when they weren’t almost dying from falling off of a cliff. And in the end, what did they have to show for it? Nothing more than the purest distillation possible of their absurdist, kitchen-sink comic sensibilities. Decades of abuse at the hands of geeks who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone still haven’t managed to sink Monty Python and the Holy Grail or its hard-earned reputation as one of the funniest movies ever made. And if filming it was fraught with peril, that just means that it had even more in common with the original TV show: Monty Python’s Flying Circus faced censorship battles, ratings problems, drug and alcohol abuse from a cast who were often at each other’s throats, a network that completely failed to understand the show and scheduled it in the most ham-handed way possible, and, of course, a miniscule budget and a ruthless production timeline. So it’s no surprise that Holy Grail so effectively captures the postmodern comic brilliance of Flying Circus; they’d all been there before.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

For all the hype that went into the release of the big-screen version of Our Favorite Family, you’d think something exceptionally earth-shaking was going to happen. But really, what was the big deal? It wasn’t the revival of a beloved but long-lost franchise; The Simpsons is still on the air and is likely to remain so until the apocalypse. It didn’t promise any major changes in continuity, since The Simpsons doesn’t have any. (They did kill off at least one supporting character, but it’s not like the entire future of the series hinged on the actions of Dr. Nick Riviera.) And with the exception of a hilarious “goddamn” from Marge and a brief glimpse at Bart’s hand-drawn doodle, it didn’t even take much advantage of the creative free space of a theatrical release. All it did was deliver, essentially, a triple-length episode of The Simpsons. But that’s pretty much what the show’s fans wanted, and the producers, writers and directors gave them an extremely high-quality triple-length episode for their money. The animation is terrific, and one of the few ways in which the filmmakers do take advantage of the big screen is in a gorgeous color palate and some cinematic storytelling that uses up every inch of the space allotted. The writing is top-notch, with tons of funny lines and despite a bit of a sag near the end, it’s one of the tightest comedies in recent memory; while the show’s latter seasons aren’t as dismal as some embittered fans would have you believe, measured against the product on TV, The Simpsons Movie is a lot funnier, more controlled, and better at what people value in the show. The gimmicky guest stars are (literally) disposed of early on, leaving Albert Brooks – a veteran of the series who’s provided some of its most memorable moments – to nearly steal the show from then on. Sure, it’s just a long episode of the show, but that’s good enough for me.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

The 1979 Star Trek--The Motion Picture was many years' worth of stops and starts in coming, and remains a very expensive project that no one involved with looks back on proudly. But despite its being regarded as a disappointment, it did make enough money that Paramount decided to burn off whatever good will remained among fans of the TV series by making a much less pricey sequel for the summer trade. It was actually the sequel that rejuvenated interest in the property and launched the long-running movie franchise. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who had previously demonstrated a flair for playing with other people's characters in his Sherlock Holmes novel and screenplay The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was brought in late and given a short window in which to prepare a shooting script, and managed to do it by cobbling together the best elements of the many already-discarded attempts by other writers—including the idea of a sequel to the old TV episode "Space Seed" with Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as the regal, megalomaniac villain Khan. He also had the masterstroke of supplying Leonard Nimoy with a gorgeous death scene as Mr. Spock, which was reportedly a key factor in persuading Nimoy to go back on his vow to never put his ears back on after the first movie. The results were greeted with rapturous gratitude by long-time fans and non-Trekkers alike despite attempts to sabotage the release by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, whose displeasure with something that someone wanted to do with his baby was almost infallible proof that it must be a step in the right direction.

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

Most "movies" spun off from still-current, ongoing TV series are just stretched-out TV episodes, sometimes with pricier special effects or guest stars. (The last straw may have been the over-hyped 1998 X-Files movie, which tarted up a subpar script from the series' "conspiracy" with a fireball explosion, a Martin Landau cameo, and the threat of the two leads kissing, then ended with a series-impacting plot twist designed to make those smart enough to have stayed at home feel left out when the fall TV season began.) The South Park movie, a genuine act of pop outrage with its mock-Disney-cartoon-musical score (written by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and composer Marc Shaiman, who later brought Hairspray to Broadway) and its Colorforms-meets-Photoshop images of Saddam Hussein and a weirdly sympathetic Satan getting it on, is the rare example of someone bringing their hot, pre-sold property to the big screen and seeing it as a reason to step up their game. At a time when movies are getting smaller and smaller and moving more and more to TV and computer screens and even cell phones, Parker and Stone felt an old-fashioned obligation to enlarge their vision for the theater version. What's more, their discovery of just how much they could do with their little freak hit informed and improved the subsequent seasons of the TV version, now on its twelfth season and going strong. In fact, it was with the movie that South Park made its real transition from giggly fad to one of the cornerstones of our civilization.

MIAMI VICE (2006)

The '80s TV show co-created by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich was very much a product of its time, so much so that Manhunter, the 1986 movie that Mann made while the show was still on the air, looks a lot more like the movie called Miami Vice that he made twenty years later. The movie doesn't have the high-contrast visual scheme or the pastel threads or the distracting celebrity cameos of the series; it does have the tropical setting and some character names in common with the series, but what it mainly has is the hopeless-romantic atmosphere and the coiled-spring bursts of action that the show reached for in its proudest moments, executed by a gifted director who had had a couple of decades to work on his moves. The movie, which required significant rewriting to satisfy the whims of one of its stars, Jamie Foxx, has been released in a "director's cut" DVD version, and neither it nor the theatrical release can be said to be free of lulls or to consistently make a world of sense. But when it's at its most intoxicating--especially when Gong Li points her sad headlights at the camera as the cinematographer Dion Beebe is adjusting the light on the horizon just so while God, looking over his shoulder, takes notes--it can get you higher than all the coke in Colombia.

- Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

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