The Screengrab : graham chapman

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE GODFATHER (1972)

Perhaps you've heard of it? The epic (and epically popular) metaphorical study of how the American dream was corrupted begins with the words "I believe in America" and then spends six hours and fifteen minutes (counting Part II) making it clear just what that belief entails. Sweet dreams, Papa.

IDIOCRACY (2006)

After skewering the soul-deadening effect of modern cubicle culture in 1999’s Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge created a comedic future dystopia (mirroring that of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons”) where idiots have inherited the Earth (because all you overeducated hipsters out there either didn’t spawn or tried to prevent unsustainable overpopulation by limiting yourselves to one or two kids while the irresponsible, short-sighted and just plain dumb were breeding like rabbits). Idiocracy featured eminently bankable heartthrob Luke Wilson (as well as plenty of good ol’ lowest-common-denominator fart jokes) and received largely positive reviews...yet, mysteriously, the film was withheld from critics and vanished without a trace, receiving virtually zero publicity from its distributor (20th Century Fox) during its shockingly miniscule 125-screen theatrical run, whereupon the film was dumped unceremoniously onto DVD. So what happened? Well, I’ve never heard an official explanation, but I suspect the Suits either didn’t get Judge’s film or its depiction of our nation’s ever-lowering standards of taste, intelligence and acceptable civilized behavior hit a little too close to home, given the media’s complicity in the closing of the American mind. In Judge’s film (set in 2505, but clearly, even shockingly evocative of the trashiest parts of our modern-day landscape), nothing matters but sex and money, nobody is responsible for their own behavior, everything (including the population’s disposable clothing) is branded with corporate logos and anyone who dares to appear smart, competent, cultured, self-aware or sensitive (y’know, elite) is branded a “fag” and viewed with hostility and suspicion, even if (like Wilson’s time-traveling 20th century everyman) they’re trying to prevent global catastrophe. Judge somehow got product placement from real companies (whose representatives apparently never read the script: one scene, for instance, features an H&R Block that offers tax returns with “happy endings”), and biting the hands of his corporate masters so viciously may be the real reason the Suits buried the film, although (like Office Space) Idiocracy has managed to attract a small cult following (which this entry will hopefully increase), bringing some overdue attention to an unfairly neglected satiric gem of smart dumb comedy.

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969)

Terry Southern was the foremost satirist of American culture of his generation, and The Magic Christian is a jab at American money-lust unrivalled by anything this side of William Gaddis' JR. And while director Joseph McGrath (abetted by two Monty Python's Flying Circus alums, Graham Chapman and John Cleese) transplanted the action to his native England when he adapted the book for the big screen, transforming billionaire prankster Guy Grand from an old line Northeasterner to (im)proper British banker along the way, there was still no mistaking what country the author had in mind when he penned the tale of a man whose sole purpose in life was to prove that everyone has their price. A few of the scenes play nicely into the new but not exactly improved British sensibility of the film, but most of the bizarre schemes Grand comes up with to test the limits of his countrymen's greed – from a ludicrously overpriced luxury car roughly the size of a city block to a championship boxing match calculated to enrage by having the fighters kiss at a vital moment – could only resonate the way they do in America. The change of scenery does give the movie a bit of a schizophrenic feel (as does the addition of a rather purposeless Ringo Starr as Grand's son), but really, if someone tells you he's made a satire of a cash-hungry nation full of venal hacks who will sell out their every principle for money, you know what country he's talking about even if everyone in the movie talks like Alastair Cooke.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

Suppose an alien, a blank slate with no preconceptions about our country, found himself in America. To him it is neither the land of opportunity nor the Great Satan, so with no frame of reference or historical context, what elements of our culture make the greatest impression upon him? Rampant consumerism? Unchecked capitalism? The duplicity of governments and corporations? That's one way of looking at Nicolas Roeg's trippy sci-fi flick (adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis), but like much of Roeg's '70s output, The Man Who Fell to Earth resists easy interpretation. David Bowie, already the man who sold the world, takes on the title role, one Thomas Jerome Newton. A visitor from another planet suffering from extreme drought, Newton has come to our world on a rescue mission. Using alien technology, he secures a number of patents (including one for ultra-futuristic self-developing film) and amasses a fortune, with which he plans to finance a return trip home (presumably with plenty of water, although like everything else, this is never really explained). But Newton loses focus, corrupted by wealth, drink, television and the only people he trusts. By the time he falls into the clutches of a government agency that has discovered his true nature, he has flamed out, never to return to the stars. Roeg keeps us as disoriented as his protagonist with his slippery acid trip visuals and elastic interpretation of time and space, but there's no mistaking the intent behind such images as Bowie stirring his gin with the barrel of a six-shooter, and it ain't God Bless America.

POINT OF ORDER (1964)

Emile de Antonio, the early, smarter, non-self-promoting version of Michael Moore, didn't pretend to be an investigative journalist. In his first film, which is about the Army-McCarthy hearings, he didn't even make any pretense to topicality: Point of Order was released ten years after the hearings themselves, and seven years after Joseph McCarthy's death. De Antonio's eye was on the big picture. He had the insight that, by boiling the 187 televised hours of hearing down to a tight 97 minutes of political vaudeville -- Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welch's greatest hits -- and doing without voice-over narration or any other kind of explanatory devices, he could skirt charges of bias by seeming to let the HUAC all-stars hang themselves by their own words and actions. At the same time, by selecting just the right material and emphasizing the ridiculous to such a degree that the movie was immediately praised as a work of nonfiction satire, he seriously affected how the Red-hunters in Congress would be seen for generations. De Antonio would use the same political scrapbook technique in such later films as the Vietnam War doc In the Year of the Pig and the Nixon biography Millhouse: A White Comedy, movies that attracted less mainstream attention in part because their targets hadn't been off the front pages for a decade at the time they were released.

Click here for Part One and Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

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