The Screengrab : gong li

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)

One should resist the temptation to guess that Gish's name is better-remembered than most of the actresses who did their most noteworthy work during the silent era because she was such a favorite of D. W. Griffith, a director who has received (and deserved) so much of the credit for the development of the movies as an art form. In her performances for Griffith -- the titles include Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, and, of course, The Birth of a Nation -- she embodied fragile, beautiful girlhood, and had to carry out all the cliches of Victorian melodrama that make so many dramatic silent movies look ridiculous today. Yet she did it with an unearthly technique that poeticized the material and made her eternally threatened characters seem not so much frail and dainty but rather not of this world; it's as if they'd become their own ghosts without taking the customary step of first abandoning their bodies. She also made two great silents with director Victor Sjostrom, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind; the latter was a box-office failure that led to the cancellation of her MGM contract. Although she was never to enjoy anywhere near the same degree of success in talkies, she had a few notable roles spread far apart over the course of her remarkably long life and career, the most impressive being the stern, Christian spinster who holds her own against the devil, in the form of Robert Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter. Her last film appearance was in 1987's The Whales of August. She reacted to news that people were appalled she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it by saying that she really didn't mind not being put in the position of losing to Cher.

19. JODIE FOSTER (1962 - )

I’m pretty sure there’s only one actress on this list I’ve had a crush on since first grade, a crush even more doomed than my usual movie star fantasies (if all the rumors about Foster’s famously off-limits private life are true). Starting with her appearance as Becky Thatcher in the 1973 screen version of Tom Sawyer (though her career actually started at seven with a 1969 cameo on The Doris Day Show), Foster always seemed like the smart, cute, preternaturally mature older girl next door who clued you in to the grown-up world and made you feel cooler just for knowing her. Then one day, as cool, older girls tend to do, Foster leapfrogged straight from child’s play to adulthood with her amazing Oscar-nominated role as the not-as-smart-as-she-thinks-she-is jailbait streetwalker in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), inspiring the insane, obsessive infatuation of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, Jr. Most child and teen stars fade away with far less provocation, but after putting the Hinckley incident behind her with a stint at Yale and transitional roles in a string of box office disappointments (including the cult classic, Foxes), Foster’s adult career finally caught fire with a pair of Best Actress Oscars for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Since then, Foster’s had the clout to largely follow the whims of her own smarty-pants muse, like a real-life version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s aging prodigy in The Royal Tennenbaums, flitting from brainy mainstream fare like her driven SETI researcher in Contact (1997) and offbeat fandangos like Nell (1994) to interesting supporting roles, most notably her fantastically amoral fixer in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Thanks to her evident mental toughness (and probably the collective unconscious memory of her signature role as the serial killer- slaying Clarice Starling), Foster has also become an unlikely action star in movies like Panic Room and The Brave One...and while some of her paycheck jobs (like the terrible, terrible Flightplan) are miles beneath her, they can also be seen as forgivable means to her directorial ends, financing humble passion projects like Flora Plum and Little Man Tate. Given the range and breadth of her career, the usual rules and restrictions of female stardom in Hollywood just never seem to apply to Foster, and hopefully they never will: smart people rule!!!

18. GONG LI (1965 - )

First off, just look at that face. Gong Li was blessed with a timeless beauty, coupled with a regal movie-star bearing. However, the road to big-screen immortality is littered with the nipped and tucked bodies of gorgeous women. Luckily for Gong, then, that she got her start as an actress during China’s fabled Fifth Generation of filmmakers, an era that had little use for empty glamour. As the muse of leading Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and longtime lover Zhang Yimou, Gong quickly began to specialize in playing women who were systematically ground down by the oppressive forces of Chinese patriarchy. In movies like Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and Farewell My Concubine, Gong suited the filmmaking style perfectly, her soulfulness grounding the often-tragic stories while her beauty complemented the eye-popping imagery. Yet there was more to her than suffering and anguish, as evidenced by her tenacious turn in The Story of Qiu Ju and the bitchy moll she portrayed in Shanghai Triad. Around the turn of the millennium, Gong’s roles became increasingly ornamental for a time -- honestly, there’s no compelling reason to see Zhou Yu’s Train other than to stare at her -- but in recent years she’s finally begun working outside of her native land on a regular basis. And although her Hollywood roles have been inconsistent at best -- thumbs up for Miami Vice, thumbs down for Memoirs of a Geisha and (ugh) Young Hannibal -- she gave one her best performances yet in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. As the female equivalent of Tony Leung’s seedy writer Mr. Chow, Gong excels at the kind of morally compromised character that can only be played convincingly by an actress who’s grown into the role. It’s a tantalizing hint of the treasures that should be in store for us as Gong approaches middle age, and frankly, we can’t wait.

17. SHELLEY DUVALL (1949 - )

She’s gawky and weird, with stringy hair and an awkward way about her. And she’s mesmerizing. And beautiful. And one of the most amazing actresses of her generation. It took an eye like Robert Altman’s to see the gorgeous leading lady behind her not-so-Hollywood looks. She’s at her best in Altman’s Thieves Like Us, where a love scene transforms her from a funny-looking teenager into a Modigliani beauty. But she’s great in all of the Altman films she made, even Popeye. She popped up in Annie Hall, Time Bandits, and Underneath, but the general public probably knows her best as Wendy from The Shining. Let’s look at that list of directors again: Altman, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick, and Stephen Soderbergh. And yet, what has she done worth watching since 1995? In fact, she’s been mostly MIA since 1980. What gives?

16. MARLENE DIETRICH (1901-1992)

Josef von Sternberg brought her from Germany to the US and made her the ur-femme fatale before WWII. Later she became Hollywood’s go-to girl when they needed a faded flower of decadent old-world Europe. The Nazis tried to lure her back to Germany, but she hated Nazis. And she loved Orson Welles. After she broke with von Sternberg, she made some okay westerns (and one with Fritz Lang that sounds extraordinary, but has not been released on DVD), a second-tier Hitchcock film, a couple of Billy Wilder movies, and Touch Of Evil, one of the greatest movies ever made. She was some kind of a woman. What does it matter what you say about people?

Click Here for Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

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

Morning Deal Report: Step Up for Scorsese Pic

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Mark Ruffalo has joined Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Dennis Lehane adaptation Shutter Island.

John Cusack may star in Weinstein Co.'s period drama Shanghai. Gong Li is already attached. Sort of a departure for him.

Remember the Tom Swift books? Neither do I, but if you do have fond memories of the series, prepare for them to be trampled.

— Peter Smith