The Screengrab : glengarry glen ross

Robert Prosky, 1930-2008

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hollywood lost one of its most reliable stalwarts -- and the Screengrab lost one of its favorite character actor "That Guy!"s -- when Robert Prosky died Tuesday in a Washington, DC hospital from complications following heart surgery. He was 77 years old.

Probably best-known for his television work, especially as the dispatch sergeant who replaced Michael Conrad's Sgt. Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, Prosky -- born Robert Prozuczek in Philadelpia -- also had a lively screen career and appeared in nearly three dozen big-screen productions, from Michael Mann's Thief to Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking. Already in his fifties when he netted his first movie role, Prosky specialized in playing world-weary older men, from working-class fathers to judges. He had a light touch with character, and one of his most beloved film roles was as the Al-Lewis-like horror movie host Grandpa Fred in the cult hit Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

For all his work in film, though, Prosky was most closely identified with his work on stage, and it was the theater which he enjoyed the most. He appeared in over 200 stage productions, nearly half of them at the Arena Stage in his beloved hometown of Washington, D.C. Although he did a great deal of work elsewhere -- including, famously, originating the role of Shelly "The Machine" Levene in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross -- he worked most of his life to support and raise the profile of the theater in Washington.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAIR (1979)

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

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

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

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

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

ORDET (1955)

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

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

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

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

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

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

BOB’S COUNTRY BUNKER, THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

I’m not exactly sure where Bob’s Country Bunker is supposed to be. I lived in Chicago for 15 years, and there’s no place in the city even remotely that rowdy – not even on the South Side. The closest we got was the Hideout, and even they managed to keep the boisterous crowd placated without the aid of chicken wire. But if I’d ever managed to find Bob’s Country Bunker, I would have spent every night there, especially if it meant getting to see the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band play dubiously down-home versions of “Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man”. Bob’s Country Bunker may not have been the best place to play – their willingness to cut off the power of anyone without enough Hank Williams songs in their repertoire and their stingy no-comped-drinks-for-the-band policy can’t have made them many friends – but the mood was infectious, the waitstaff was brave even in the face of hundreds of pounds of flying broken glass, and the atmosphere was just perfect, all Nudie suits and unironic trucker hats. Plus, they had both kinds of music – country and western!

THE CHINK’S, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Another bar I never managed to track down in Chicago was the impolitically named Chink’s. (It had to be in Chicago, because everything David Mamet does takes place there, even when it’s explicitly stated that it doesn’t.) But maybe it’s for the best; it didn’t look like the most relaxing place in the world. Oh, sure, it was a quiet little dive with cheap tiki drinks, and the Chink made a mean egg roll, and the décor was decent enough – all mail-order-catalog Chinese and whorehouse-red light bulbs. It was the kind of people you met that would stress you out: let’s say you just go in for a nice cocktail to beat the murderous heat, as did Jonathan Pryce’s helpless James Lingk. The next thing you know, some desperate, flop-sweating real estate salesman, like Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma, has sat down next to you, given you some borderline terrifying spiel about how he sometimes takes a massive shit that feels like sleeping for twelve hours, and before he even finishes telling you it’s okay to fuck little girls, you’ve agreed to buy some overpriced condo in Arizona somewhere. Nope, a man can’t relax in a place like that...

...so instead, we’ll am-scray outta Big Windy and bar hop Back East to...

TONY’S PLACE, MEAN STREETS (1973)

Arriving for the night's festivities at the crimson-tinted neighborhood dive where he and all his buddies hang out, Robert De Niro makes a phenomenal entrance, with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing as he glides along the length of the bar in slow motion to meet the best friend (Harvey Keitel) whose face registers his approach as if it were a death sentence. Soon De Niro and Keitel are adjourning to the back room for a two-man improvisational jam session in which the English language gets slapped around a little, which barely prepares the viewer for the confrontations to come: between a punk on the make (Robert Carradine) and a target he corners in the men's room (David Carradine), between a returned military veteran (Harry Northrup) and his demons, and finally between De Niro's Johnny Boy and the affronted loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus), who has to deal with Johnny Boy's amused disbelief that Michael could have ever seriously imagined that he was ever going to get his loan repaid. The movie also features a visit to a rival joint, a pool haul where the guys get into the movie's famous brawl choreographed to "Please Mr. Postman," which feels like Our Gang hijinx compared to what goes on at the home front. It's about as good a vision as any movie's ever offered of a bunch of guys trying desperately to enjoy themselves in Hell...

...not unlike the Greenwich Village denizens of the next stop on our tour...

HARRY’S BAR, THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973)

Harry Hope's waterfront bar in The Iceman Cometh is the anti-Cheers, a place where all the regulars know each others' names, and have got each others' numbers, to boot. They're really regular, too; most of them haven't left the premises in ages, not even just to stick their heads out the door to confirm that the sky is still blue. These desperate lost souls are so hard up for some diversion that all they've got to look forward to is the semi-annual arrival of their favorite drunken traveling salesman, Hickey (played in the 1960 movie version by Jason Robards, in 1973 by Lee Marvin and later on stage by Kevin Spacey), in the hopes that maybe this time his dirty jokes will have funny endings. Woe to them, Hickey has just murdered his wife and is so impressed with himself for having finally taken an active approach to dealing with his problems that he wants to make all his washed-up friends shave, change their socks, and get back out into the world. Luckily, in his big monologue, Hickey reveals that he may have had less than pure motives for throttling the Missus and is hauled off by the cops, and Harry and company, relieved to discover that they've just been humoring a psycho, can return to their daily routine of talking about how they're going to turn their lives around the day after tomorrow, just as soon as they drain this keg. If the story were set in the present day, Hickey would be given his own daytime TV series and released into the custody of Oprah.

TREES LOUNGE, TREES LOUNGE (1996)

But don’t let all the big city neuroses and overpriced drinks get you down. Just a short stagger from Manhattan in neighboring Long Island, you’ll find a slightly less depressing breed of barfly whiling away the hours at Trees Lounge, the neighborhood haunt of Steve Buscemi’s hangdog hero Tommy Basilio in the beloved character actor’s writing/directing debut. This semi-autobiographical tale unspools in a parallel universe where Buscemi never got serious about the acting thing, but instead spent his entire life in the self-loathing stupor that defined his early twenties, driving an ice cream truck and bedding inappropriate women like Daniel Baldwin’s teenage daughter, Debbie (played by Chloë Sevigny in a wise-child performance we somehow forgot to mention in last week’s Jailbait Sweet 16). Yet, while sometimes grim, Buscemi’s gin-soaked world is never hopeless, thanks to healthy shots of gallows humor, a great soundtrack on the jukebox and a who’s-who of top-notch indie drinking companions like Debi Mazar, Mark Boone Junior, Rockets Redglare, Eszter Balint, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan and Samuel L. Jackson.

Who’s up for another round? The night is still young and Screengrab’s buying as the Pub Crawl continues through Boston, Europe and beyond in Part 3!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

That Guy!: Jonathan Pryce

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater. An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures. Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today. A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

Pryce (the son of a Welsh shopkeeper, and originally named Price; the reason for the name change is murky and doubtless irrelevant) still keeps extremely busy with stagework, and even his big-screen roles maintain elements of the theatrical: one of the few times he broke away from his normal roles as precise and deliberate, almost timid, characters is when he played Argentine strongman Juan Peron opposite Madonna in the 1996 big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. But despite the moneymaking blockbuster roles he takes, and the occasional foray into television work, he still wins his highest praise for independent or 'little movie' screen work, and in 1995, he received what he's described as one of the highest honors of his storied career, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes film festival for his sensitive, powerful and emotional portrayal of British novelist Lytton Strachey in director Christopher Hampton's little-seen Carrington. Recently, Pryce got the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and portray Sherlock Holmes on British television, but he's been taking less work recently to spend time with his family. He'll be appearing (as the president of the United States, no less!) in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, although his devotees are much more excited about next year's My Zinc Bed, where he'll be playing the lead in a new David Hare adaptation. Pryce just recently turned sixty, and with a few more choice roles (and, well, a few less G.I. Joes, he's still got a good chance at following in Olivier's footsteps as a Grand Old Man of British cinema.

Where to see Jonathan Pryce at his best:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

Though it wasn't the breakout role that would come his way two years later, Pryce's performance as the sinister Mr. Dark in this spotty but entertaining adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel is incredibly compelling. As the proprietor and ringleader of a curious and somewhat menacing circus that comes to visit a small town, Pryce strikes a perfect balance of sophistication and terror; throughout his entire time on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him, and he swills Bradbury's ripe dialogue around in his mouth like a fine wine, making the moments when he loses control all the more effective. A stunning performance from a nearly forgotten film.

BRAZIL (1985)

The movie that really thrust Jonathan Pryce into the public eye was his performance as the hapless and ultimately hopeless Sam Lowry, best described as Winston Smith with even more British repression. It would be the first of many collaborations between Pryce and Terry Gilliam, and while it made quite clear the reasons why he wasn't cut out to be a typical romantic lead, it was a brilliant piece of acting, aided and abetted by the clever and theatrical scripting of Tom Stoppard. Gilliam and Pryce would work together several more times, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to The Brothers Grimm, but it would never be this magical again.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

As the terrified and uncertain would-be real estate investor James Lingk, Jonathan Pryce not only gets the chance to act in one of the most powerhouse ensemble casts in recent memory (including getting to play the majority of his scenes off of Al Pacino at the very last moment in his career when he did any actual acting, as opposed to just yelling at things), but he also played the unusual role of the film's moral center, getting to act like a normal human being among these amoral Type-A monsters. Curiously enough, Pryce went on to play Shelley "The Machine" Levene -- portrayed here by Jack Lemmon -- in a London revival of the David Mamet play.

After Forty Years, the End of the New Line

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

The latest development marked the end to a long, strange trip to the top for a funky little company that had its first big successes in the early 1970s marketing John Waters's 1972 Pink Flamingos and the camp revival of the 1936 drug-hysteria picture Reefer Madness. New Line hit a new level of mainstream commercial success with the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which the company built into a powerhouse franchise. By the end of the eighties, New Line had one foot in the art house and one in exploitation/genre movies, a formula that it made work with a lively mix of films such as The Evil Dead, Sid and Nancy, The Hidden, House Party, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Player, Glengarry Glen Ross, Menace II Society, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Se7en, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Austin Powers, Friday, Blade, and Final Destination and the franchises that grew out of them. The studio's biggest gamble, and biggest success, was probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a high-stakes commitment that left the company CEOs looking brilliant--at least, until they proceeded to alienate the director Peter Jackson so badly that he become but one of a long line of litigants who filed lawsuits that grew out of controversy about the company's accounting practices and charges that they failed to honor various pledges and legal committments to everyone from bit players in the movies to the heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien. New Line had recently updated its corporate logo to celebrate its fortieth birthday last October 5.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SCARFACE (1983)

Here’s something funny about Oliver Stone: he seems to have a lot more fun when he’s writing movies than when he’s directing them. While the movies where he’s behind the camera have become self-important bores, the movies where he’s behind the typewriter are highly enjoyable, if completely demented. Conan the Barbarian may have been the purest distillation of his bloodthirstily goofy aesthetic, but it was the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface a year later where he really let his freak flag fly. A perfect example of a movie that’s compulsively watchable without actually being very good, Scarface also proves that the one thing more enjoyable than a movie with non-stop vulgarity is a movie with non-stop vulgarity in an incredibly over-the-top quasi-Cuban accent. (A chainsaw execution can’t hurt, either.) Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t an obscenity artist; he is but a humble craftsman, a busy businessman who relies on the word "fuck" because he hasn’t got the time to learn any other ones. For every cleverly crafted "Why don’t you try sticking your head up your ass? See if it fits," there’s a workmanlike get-over like "You know what? Fuck you! How about that?" How about that, indeed. It’s hard to know if Scarface would have been the deranged, hyperactive masterpiece that it is without Pacino’s constant Hispanic-causing-panic vulgarisms, but it surely wouldn’t have been as much fun. If you don’t believe us, try to imagine Paul Muni saying "This town is like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked." Now that’s comedy!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

David Mamet's ode to testosterone-soaked salesmen is a veritable symphony of profanity, with even legendary milquetoast Jack Lemmon attempting to wrap his mouth around words like "cocksucker." (Not to speak ill of the dead, but he's no Ian McShane.) Alec Baldwin is the soloist who takes home top honors, though his inspirational speech to the troops does not rely solely on foul language for its power. With his reptilian delivery, lines like "coffee is for closers" and "third prize is you're fired" sound nearly as venomous as the blunt rejoinder "Fuck you – that's my name!" Though he doesn't say it in so many words, Baldwin makes the point that the sales game is a dick-measuring contest and everybody but him is coming up short. Like all the best motivational speakers, he uses props. "It takes brass balls to sell real estate," he announces, brandishing a pair for effect. Don't try this in your own boardroom unless you have good lawyers.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

When the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes started to come out, what shocked a lot of people wasn't the president's amorality so much as the language with which he expressed it. His obscene ramblings suggested a potty-mouthed genie bubbling and rumbling and thrashing beneath the surface of his carefully fostered image as the last defender of Middle America, subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and Norman Rockwell illustrations. In Robert Altman's one-man show, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), sealed in the wood-paneled tranquility of his study like William Hurt set to de-evolve in his isolation tank in Altered States, runs through his whole life and political career in a spastic monologue punctuated by sputtered out "shit!"s and "fuck!"s. It all builds to the moment when Nixon, having considered blowing his brains out as penance for his sins, decides that this would give too much satisfaction to the real monsters, the ones who "elected me, not once, not twice, but all my goddamn life," and signs off with an endless, Tourette's-like chant of "Fuck em! Fuck 'em!!" As he bellows out the same two words, again and again, Altman frames his wild face in the screens of the TV monitors that line the room. The genie has been isolated.

POETIC JUSTICE (1993)

John Singleton's Poetic Justice actually played against Tupac's ever-growing reputation as an out-of-control thug and notorious player. His character Lucky is a postman who gets dissed in the very first scene and then has to endure a road trip with the same girl that made him the butt of the joke. This is every guy's worst nightmare – confined space with a girl who shot you down. Unless you're counting her role on Good Times or Rhythm Nation 1814, this was essentially Janet Jackson's film debut, and even though she may have told us she was nasty, most people still assumed, looking at that angelic face, that she was probably very nice. This scene is so memorable because all of that is blown to pieces as she trades fuck yous with Mr. Thug Life himself. Although the scene can certainly stand on its own in terms of pure firepower, you might want to brush up on the back story – outlined in our previous Top 10 Offscreen Feuds list – to help you understand the uncanny authenticity of the venom being spit here.

NIL BY MOUTH (1997)

When it comes to vulgar language in movies, there is quality, and then there is quantity. Whether or not Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, counts as a lodestone of quality obscenity, it is the all-time grand champion in terms of quantity. It’s actually a fine little film, and Oldman’s script about growing up in a dysfunctional working-class family in South London is quite compelling at times, but where it truly excels is in its non-stop barrage of obscenity. No less than the Guinness Book of World Records has certified it as the film containing the most iterations of "fuck": the word appears an astonishing 470 times, or almost four times a minute. It’s that sort of dedication that separates the pretenders from the true masters, and Oldman doesn’t stop there: he also favors us with the word "cunt" a whopping eighty-two times, or once every minute and a half. Most of the fucks and cunts issue from the lager-stained mouth of Ray Winstone, playing a character based on Oldman’s own father. (Oldman dedicates the film to his old man, which must have made him feel pretty good about himself.) Some films don’t even have as much punctuation as Nil By Mouth has "fuck"s; if its director grew up in an environment anything like the one portrayed here, it’s a wonder he can communicate at all. Other films may be more artful in their use of the f-word, and other films may save it for when it counts more instead of going for total sensory overload, but until someone manages to make a movie in which someone uses the word "fuck" in every frame, then Nil By Mouth will be the reigning king.

– Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Bryan Whitefield

Check out Part 1 here.