The Screengrab : get smart

DVD Digest for December 9, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a number of interesting possible Christmas gifts for the DVD lover in your life, no matter what his or her taste might be.

DVD of the Week: There are probably about half a dozen DVDs coming out today that I’d be happy to receive for Christmas. But if, say, some unnamed benefactor with deep pockets was to give me any of this week’s new releases (hint hint), the one I would want most would be the Murnau, Borzage and Fox DVD Collection (Fox). Spotlighting two of Fox’s most celebrated silent filmmakers- F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage- the set collects a dozen of their great American silents, from Murnau’s City Girl and Sunrise to Borzage’s 7th Heaven and Street Angel. But while the films alone would justify the purchase, the set is also filled with extras that should prove to be catnip for silent film junkies, including a feature-length documentary about the filmmakers, several commentary tracks, and the alternate European cut of Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise. Perhaps most exciting is the inclusion of material related to Murnau’s famous lost film 4 Devils, including the screenplay, a stills gallery, and a documentary about the film. All in all, it’s the perfect Christmas gift for the movie nerd in your life, not least if that movie nerd is me.

Of course, if you’re on a budget, that movie nerd would probably be happy with a number of this week’s other releases. Also worth mentioning on the classics front is the release of two of the most inventive films of the 1990s, Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep (Zeitgeist) and Lars Von Trier’s Europa (Criterion), released in the U.S. as Zentropa. Also of note are a pair of double-feature DVDs from Warner, one containing Chamber of Horrors and The Brides of Fu Manchu, the other pairing The Shuttered Room and It!

If the DVD nut in your life is more of a TV watcher, you could do a hell of a lot worse than HBO’s massive box sets of The Wire: The Complete Series (HBO) and Deadwood: The Complete Series (HBO). Or if he’s more into brain-teasing fantasy, give Lost Season 4 (Disney, also Blu-Ray) a spin. And the classic TV nut should go for Get Smart: The Complete Series (Universal).

If you’re looking for some discs to go with the snazzy new Blu-Ray player you’re getting Christmas morning, this week brings the comedy triple feature of Dodgeball (Fox), The Mask (Warner), and Super Troopers (Fox).

Finally, this week’s new releases on DVD include something for the kids (Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! [Fox, also Blu-Ray]), something for the ladies (Sex and the City: The Movie Ultimate Collector’s Edition [Warner]), and something for the documentary fans (James Marsh’s stunning Man on Wire [Magnolia]). Oh, and there’s a little something called The Dark Knight (Warner, also Blu-Ray) coming out this week. I figure it’ll sell at least a few copies, but don’t quote me on that.

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for November 4, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week is a big one for classic TV on DVD, plus an old-school sci-fi franchise gets the Blu-Ray treatment.

DVD of the Week: My pick this week is only applicable if you have a Blu-Ray DVD player, which exempts a number of Screengrab readers including myself. However, if you have a Blu-Ray player, nothing this week can touch the release of Planet of the Apes: 40 Year Evolution Blu-Ray Collection (Fox). Of course, even fans of the series acknowledge that the Planet of the Apes films are widely uneven. Yet unlike most franchise box sets which pile the lion’s share of extras on the classic films and leave little for the others, Fox has lavished plenty of care on all of the Apes films, regardless of quality. The biggest news for fans is the newly-restored cut of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which went largely unseen since the 1972 studio test screenings. According to Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak, the new version of Conquest is much more darker and violent than the version that was eventually released in theatres. The set also contains a number of new extras, including new making-of featurettes for each of the sequels, a documentary on the evolution from Pierre Boulle’s original novel to the screen, and isolated score tracks for each of the sequels. In other words, everything that one could possibly need to satisfy even the most ravenous Planet of the Apes fan, although for the rest of all the movies are also sold separately.

For us non-Blu-Ray types, the big news this week is the release of the Fraggle Rock Complete Series Collection (Lionsgate), which collects all 96 episodes of Jim Henson’s classic HBO series in a massive 20-disc box set. In addition, the collection includes an exclusive new Fraggle Rock short directed by Cory Edwards, who will direct the upcoming Fraggle Rock feature film, which I hadn’t heard about until today. Other notable TV on DVD releases include: Batman: The Complete Animated Series (Warner), Futurama: Bender’s Game (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Little House on the Prairie: The Complete Television Series (Lionsgate), and Reaper Season 1 (Lionsgate).

The highest-profile recent release coming to DVD today is the big-screen update of the classic series Get Smart (Warner, also Blu-Ray). This week also brings the indie trifecta of Brad Anderson’s Transsiberian (First Look, also Blu-Ray), Luke Wilson in Henry Poole Is Here (Anchor Bay), and Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth in When Did You Last See Your Father? (Sony). And for the kids, there’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Special Edition (Fox) and Shrek the Halls (Paramount).

The annual onslaught of holiday DVDs continues this year with the A Christmas Story Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), although for my money nothing beats watching this over and over on TNT. Also of note this week is the re-pressing of two John Cassavetes classics, A Woman Under the Influence (Criterion) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Criterion). Finally, there’s the Waterworld Extended Edition (Universal), in case that’s your kind of thing.

Finally, this week’s non-ape Blu-Ray only releases include Monster’s Ball (Lionsgate) and Universal Soldier (Lionsgate). And honestly, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more unlikely pairing. Satantango and Rush Hour? Pretty Woman and Irreversible? I’ll have to think about this one…

Morning Deal Report: Another “300”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Wall-E walloped the competition at the box office over the weekend, taking in an estimated $62.5 million. That’s good for the second best June opening ever, right behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In second place, Angelina Jolie racked up $51.1 million for Wanted, which no one at this desk was expecting. Get Smart hung in there at third place with $20 million, but The Love Guru plummeted 61%, taking in only $5.4 million. Looks like Mike Myers needs a new mantra.

Proving Hollywood will never let a little thing like all of the characters dying get in the way of cashing in on a popular movie, Legendary Pictures has announced that a sequel to 300 is in the works. According to Variety, Frank Miller is penning both the graphic novel and the screenplay, “although at this point it's not clear whether it will be a prequel or spinoff. Most of the characters, including Gerard Butler's King Leonidas, died in the original, making a follow-up tricky…Spinoffs of bloody actioners can prove challenging, especially when the main characters kick the bucket the first time out.” The sequel story seems obvious to us: Leonidas and his troops dining in Hell, as promised.

Per the Hollywood Reporter, the roller derby comedy Whip It! is ready to…er…roll. Drew Barrymore will make her directorial debut and also star alongside Ellen Page. Also appearing will be Marcia Gay Harden as “an overbearing ex-beauty queen who would rather see her daughter, Bliss (Page), in pageants than skates,” Kristen Wiig as “Bliss' rowdy mentor, Malice in Wonderland,” and Juliette Lewis as “Dinah Might, the star of Austin's top team.” Don’t they know the ultimate Austin roller derby story has already been told in the documentary Hell on Wheels? Send them to Spank Alley!

Related:
Frank Miller: CGI Lacks Spirit, So "Spirit" Will Lack CGI

Morning Deal Report: Requiem for a Class Clown

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Get Smart was in CONTROL (see what I did there?) of the weekend box office, taking in an estimated $39.2 million. The new and improved Hulk is performing an awful lot like the Hulk Who Will Not Be Mentioned, tumbling to third place with $21.6 million, a 61% dropoff. And what may be the worst-reviewed movie of the year, The Love Guru, opened in fourth with just $14 million. Unfortunately, this probably means we’ll see another Austin Powers movie sooner than later.

“DreamWorks has pre-emptively bought the original comedy pitch Home Schooled from screenwriters Mike Arnold and Chris Poole,” says the Hollywood Reporter. It’s “the story of a 30-year-old man who was home schooled and is now heading off to college.” No word yet on which man-child comedy star will fill the role.

Variety reports that Rogue Pictures picked up an adaptation of the Jennifer Egan novel The Keep, a “thriller that revolves around a mysterious prisoner who seduces a local woman with his tale of a supernatural secret that can transform her life.” Who is this woman who’s picking up guys at the prison? She sounds like she could use a supernatural secret that can transform her life.

And of course, we’re flying the Screengrab flag at half mast today for George Carlin, who has died at the age of 71.

Summer of ’78: “The Cheap Detective”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Cheap Detective

Release Date: June 23, 1978

Cast: Peter Falk, Madeline Kahn, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Dom DeLuise

The Buzz: If you loved Murder by Death, perhaps you’ll tolerate The Cheap Detective.

Keywords: Sequel, Second Part, Detective

The Plot: Apparently The Cheap Detective doesn’t have much of a following, seeing as it only has three IMDb keywords and two of them are wrong. This is not actually a sequel to Murder by Death, in which Peter Falk played the Sam Spade-ish detective Sam Diamond. Here Falk plays the Sam Spade-ish detective Lou Peckinpaugh. See – totally different thing. It is true that both films were written by Neil Simon in his wacky mode (as opposed to his more popular treacly mode), and Detective is clearly intended to capitalize on the success of the earlier movie. A mash-up spoof of both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, it’s set in San Francisco on the eve of World War II. Peckinpaugh is a private eye whose partner has been murdered, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders. Since Peckinpaugh had been carrying on an affair with his partner’s wife Georgia (Marsha Mason), he’s immediately a suspect. Georgia is only the first in a string of unlikely femmes fatale who get Peckinpaugh in and out of trouble through the course of the movie. There’s also Eileen Brennan as sultry saloon singer Betty DeBoop, Louise Fletcher as the stand-in for Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa from Casablanca, and Madeline Kahn as the ludicrously evasive Mrs. Montenegro. Somewhere in the convoluted tangle of events, Peckinpaugh also gets involved with John Houseman and Dom DeLuise as a Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre pair looking for a dozen valuable diamond eggs.

The Test of Time: Compared to the typical zany comedy of today, The Cheap Detective is far less crude – but that’s not the same as saying it’s more sophisticated. What passed for a shocking sight gag in 1978 – like Kahn accidentally flushing her husband’s ashes down the toilet – wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the age of the execrable The Love Guru, in which grown men do battle with urine-soaked mops. Simon is taking his own shot at his Your Show of Shows colleague Mel Brooks’s brand of lowbrow parody, but seems unwilling to really get down and dirty. He and director Robert Moore assembled a month’s worth of Hollywood Squares stars for the supporting cast, including Abe Vigoda, Vic Tayback, Paul Williams, Scatman Crothers, David Ogden Stiers and James Coco, but to no avail. The Cheap Detective settles for cheap laughs, from a Chinese character named “Won Fat Ching” to groaners like “Oh, Georgia, I had you on my mind.” Falk does his best Bogart impression, which sounds a lot like Columbo.

Quotable Quote: “I wasn't talking to you, Schnell, I was telling him to go faster.”

2008 Equivalent: A spoofy spy story that really did originate with Mel Brooks, Get Smart.

Previously on Summer of '78: Jaws 2

Lower the Cone of Silence: “Get Smart” Gadgets Revisited

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Like anyone else who grew up watching Get Smart reruns, my first question when it was announced that a Get Smart movie was going to be made was: “Isn’t Don Adams dead?” The second question was: “What are they going to do about the shoe phone?”

The shoe phone was a crucial gadget in Maxwell Smart’s arsenal back in the 1960s, but I have to admit, it’s looking a little dated now. As a child, I never imagined I would one day have my own shoe phone, let alone a phone I could slip into my pocket, allowing angry creditors to find me any time of the day or night. But as the AP notes, “Today, almost everyone has a pocket-sized version that also takes photos, shoots video, sends e-mail and surfs the Internet. About the only thing it doesn't do is protect your feet.”

A new version of Get Smart requires a new generation of spy gadgetry. In the Steve Carell movie, the gadgets “are just as goofy as they were in the original TV series, but because technology has caught up with the writers' imaginations, there's a big difference: many of the movie's doo-dads actually exist…The film shows a tiny iPod alongside spy-worthy stuff such as a two-way tooth radio and a digital "spy fly" -- all of which are available now.”

So now CONTROL presumably has an account with Sharper Image, but what of the bulletproof pajamas and vibrating paint from the good ol’ days? Well, fortunately there’s always an obsessive somewhere on the web to meet our needs, and the good folks at WouldYouBelieve.com have compiled a comprehensive list of old school Maxwell Smart gadgetry. The cheese sandwich phone! The French bread triangulation device! The Snead Synthetic Onion! Why, if we’d had access to the Omega Deltoid Solatron Mark 2, this whole Iraq mess might never have happened.

Related:
Video of the Day: Gettin' Stupid with Get Smart

Stamping Out Goodness

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Over the years, Terence Stamp has transformed from Angry Young Man of British Cinema to Living Symbol of Swinging Sixties London to Occasional Blockbuster Filler Material Paycheck-Casher to Grand Old Man of the Silver Screen. But one thing has remained constant: he's a hell of a fun interview.

The Collider managed to track him down at the premiere of the Get Smart big-screen adaptation, and, in discussing everything from working with Tom Cruise to working on Yes Man with Jim Carrey to his classic role as General Zod in Superman II, he's as engaging as ever. In discussing the problem-plagued Valkyrie, Cruise's WWII epic, Stamp plays it pretty close to the vest, just before launching into a rather odd story about being invited to a Tom Cruise rave.

Our favorite anecdote, though, is the one where Stamp more or less takes direct responsibility for the moral decline of Western civilization since 1980: "I hadn't worked in about 10 years when I got the Superman offer, and I was very nervous because it was apparent that they just wanted, like, an ugly. And I had the feeling that they were going to just like me ugly, and dress me ugly, and give me ugly stuff to say. And I had a friend at the time -- he was a baron, a Dutch baron, he was called Frederick von Pallandt and he was a very wise guy. He was a bit older than me. And I said, 'I'm having doubts about this.' And he said, 'You shouldn't really have doubts about it, because for loads of kids, Superman movies will be the first movie they ever go to see. And by the time they grow up, there'll be more people who want to be more people who want to be Zod than Superman. So you really shouldn't worry about it. You should just be as ugly and as horrible as you can be.' And it kind of came to pass, you know."

Video of the Day: Gettin' Stupid with "Get Smart"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:45:00 GMT

With Steve Carrell's big-screen remake of the classic small-screen comedy Get Smart only a few weeks away, this might be a good time to look back at the original series. After all, it was the cool, clipped professionalism of Don Adams that made the original show such a success.

Er, well, maybe not. Luckily, the show reached the pinnacle of its popularity right around the same time that interest in bloopers peaked, so we're left with this. They're the bonus materials of the pre-DVD era!

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

READ PART II

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "War, Inc."

Phil Nugent — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

John Cusack gets his smug on in War, Inc., a satiricial action comedy with a touch every bit as light and precise as its sledgehammer title. Cusack, who co-produced the movie with Grace Loh for his New Crime Productions, and splits the screenplay credit between himself, novelist Mark Leyner, and Bulworth scripter and Huffington Post blogger Jeremy Pikser, plays a hit man who is hired by Tamerlane, a Halliburton-like corporaton that is staffing America's first war that has been fully outsourced to the private sector. The movie intends an attack on how big business profits from, and may even influence, American foreign policy, but its ideas about how that's reshaping the world seem to have only gotten as far as slapping company logos on the sides of tanks and in smoking urban war zones, a device that mainly results in some really questionable product placement deals. (The Get Smart-style entrance to the lair of the American intelligence officers is through a Popeyes chicken joint, arguably the most prominent space that franchise has been awarded in a major Hollywood production since the Adam Sandler vehicle Little Nicky established that the denizens of Hell thought quite highly of their product.) The movie hits its targets only once in a great while, particularly when it goes after the gullibility and culpability of the media. There's a choice sequence about an imbedded group of reporters who get a taste of what it's like in a war-ravaged country by being treated to a Sensurround-style simulated ride through rough terrain. (They cheer with excitement, just like Geraldo every time he sees his name in the paper spelled right.)

War, Inc. positions itself as a sort-of-sequel to the 1997 New Crime Production Grosse Pointe Blank; it doesn't continue that movie's story or revive its characters, but it does reunite some if its key personnel while aiming for something similar in tone and approach. Cusack's emotionally confused master assassin with a streak of white in his dark hair is Martin Blank with ten years on him in all but name; Joan Cusack is once again his personal assistant (but this time, infuriatingly, is subjected to unflattering lighting and funhouse lenses and camera angles), and Dan Aykroyd turns up to do his Dick Cheney impression as the self-satisfied master of the universe dealing Cusack his orders. (They are joined by Marisa Tomei, who, as usual, pumps an incredible amount of sexiness and vitality into her corner of the vaccuum, and Ben Kingsley, who attempts what I think is meant to be a Texas accent, though it could just as easily have labeled his character as an Australian, a Venusian, or just a raving nut.) This is actually a clever approach--just as it was when the cast of A Fish Called Wanda did it in Fierce Creatures, a movie that didn't work either--but it mainly serves to highlight how opportunistic the difference between the two pictures feels. Grosse Pointe Blank, which came riding in on the last fumes of the Pulp Fiction bandwagon, treated murder as a hip slapstick joke. War, Inc. has the same kind of what-me-worry approach to violent chaos and the same admiring attitude towards its hero's murderous prowess, but it expects to be taken as being on a deeper, more meaningful level of smirking cynicism because Cusack has sunk to working for Republican CEOs. (In both films, Cusack is paired with a heroine--Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank, Marisa Tomei here--who expresses horror at his violent side until she needs rescuing.) War, Inc. is set to go straight to DVD after a non-victory lap of the festivals and a token New York/Los Angeles theatrical release, and Cusack and company are welcome to console themselves with the thought that their movie was punished for the sharpness of its bite. But its "satire" is the kind of thing that The Daily Show regularly makes fun of.

Lightning Strikes for Big Red Cheese?

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Lost in the recent hype about superhero movies — largely because it, like Justice League and a handful of other projects, was nearly derailed by the ongoing writer's strike — was the projected Captain Marvel project slated to be directed by Peter Segal.

The project (which would feature the Fawcett/DC character Captain Marvel — sometimes known as "Shazam" — and not the cosmic Marvel Comics character of the same name) has a decent amount of potential; the character is one of the few family-friendly superheroes in modern comics, and the movie might have the sort of crossover kid appeal that's rarely seen in costumed crimefighter movies these days. Segal's record as a director is pretty spotty, but whether or not the movie will actually happen — and Segal, based on a recent interview with SciFi Wire, seems to think that it will despite long delays to production — may depend on the box office success of his next big feature, the Get Smart adaptation.

However, all is not rosy; even if the movie makes it to the big screen, it's newly been sidled with an absolutely terrible new title. Gone is the short, punchy Shazam!, replaced by the clumsy, hokey, awkward Billy Batson and the Legend of Shazam, a title guaranteed to appeal to no one and the most hamhanded repackaging since The Destroyer became Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

Trailer Review: Get Smart

Paul Clark — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

When I first heard that Steve Carell was going to be stepping into Don Adams' telephone-shoes for a new Get Smart movie, I actually had some hope that it might turn out to be good. If nothing else, you've got to admit that Carell is very well-suited to the role. But nothing I've seen since then has been a cause for optimism- the movie looks chintzy and half-assed, and the espionage-themed comedy feels about a half-step above Spy Hard, and we all know how well that turned out. That said, Carell still looks pretty good in the role, and his delivery of Smart's signature line, "missed it by thaaaat much," got a laugh out of me. If only there were others to be found in this trailer, I might feel better about it.

Coming Soon: "Citizen Kane 2" Starring Bronson Pinchot

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Universal would prefer that you not call its forthcoming American Pie: Beta House a direct-to-video release. The preferred corporate euphemism is now "DVD Premiere." And as Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, studios have reconceived the direct-to-DVD release as an important, pre-planned moneymaking part of the operation. The key element here is the proper way to continue to exploit a well-established brand name to which you own the rights. A few years ago, if you got the numbers back on the fifth Police Academy movie and found that the profits had dropped off considerably from the first installments but that the damn thing was still making money, you had a clear choice: you could decide that, as George Clooney said after the release of Ocean's Thirteen, "This tree has been sapped," and spend the rest of your life having nightmares about the money that Police Academy 6 might have made, or you could suck it up, green-light yet another sequel, and bring shame and dishonor upon your family. Direct-to-DVD releases tied to a familiar title are a neat compromise solution. They don't cost as much to make or market, partly because they usually don't feature the same level of star power as the theatrical releases from which they sprang, but they still appeal to fans who have developed a Pavlovian reaction to seeing certain titles. At the same time, the films are often marketed a little more aggressively than you might expect, and the studios will try to maintain some kind of superficial linkage to the real movies. For instance, as Barnes explains, "the American Pie DVD spinoffs all feature Eugene Levy as a father figure — even though the character’s son stopped appearing after the series ended its run in theaters." This is crucial to what Craig Kornblau, Universal's President of Home Entertainment, insists on calling "the integrity of the franchise." (Barnes adds dryly, "Mr. Levy declined to be interviewed.")

This summer, Warners will embark on a little experiment in synergy when they release Get Smart, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway, and with Masi Oka of Heroes and Nate Torrence in small supporting roles, to theaters, and at the same time release Get Smarter: Bruce and Lloyd and Out of Control, starring Masi Oka and Nate Torrence, and with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway nowhere in sight, to DVD. Then there was Daddy Day Camp, a sort of sequel to the Eddie Murphy comedy Daddy Day Care, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. Built to go straight to DVD, the film so impressed its studio masters that they upgraded it to theatrical release, a decision that proved a bad one for the box office, the reputations of those involved, and the planet as a whole. In general, those passing judgement on the quality of these films risk being deluded because it's only natural to go in with expectations set way below the bottom of the bar. Those not pitched at children tend to be overstuffed with gore and/or full-frontal nudity, in an attempt to make some kind of virtue out of the films' not being submitted to the MPAA ratings board. As for the more family-friendly, fanciful ones, such as the "DVD Premiere" sequels to Dr. Dolittle and Garfield...well, as Barnes delicately puts it: "Special effects in these films, while improving as a result of cheaper digital technology, often require a little more imagination from viewers."