The Screengrab : hairspray

Michelle Pfeiffer, "Dangerous Liasons" Director Reteam for Colette's "Cheri"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Michelle Pfeiffer turned 50 last year, and though the years haven't been that bad on her, her screen image has definitely cooled a bit. Her last couple of movies went straight to DVD, and her few other screen performances since 2001 have been in supporting performances (White Oleander, Hairspray, Stardust). Now she's starring as an aging French courtesan in Cheri, directed by Stephen Frears and adapted from the Colette novel. The movie is having its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and Mick Brown's timely profile of Pfeiffer will do until somebody publishes her biography. The title character of Cheri is the son (Rupert Friend) of a colleague (Kathy Bates) who Pfeiffer's character, Léa de Lonval, agrees to educate in the ways of sex and love, with predictably bittersweet results. "Being in that stage of life wasn't something I really had to do a lot of research for,' Pfeiffer told Brown, "because I'm already there. Although in some ways it's a little bit harder to really understand and articulate to yourself, because you're right in the middle of it. Probably 10 years from now I'll be able to look at this phase of my life and be able to understand her journey more. But I think for a lot of women 50 is a very particular age. I'm not one that's ever really thought about birthdays, but this was a big one and I was not looking forward to it. But surprisingly it has left me feeling liberated in a strange kind of way. Sort of, the pressure's off."

For Pfeiffer, Cheri marks a return to the literary period-picture world of Dangerous Liasons and The Age of Innocence. Pfeiffer speculates that she fits into these movies about the social manners of an earlier time because "I'm good at disguising my feelings." Frears, who directed her twenty years ago in Liasons, says she was first on his list of actresses for the role, and "It's quite a short list… She is exactly the right age, and just by being beautiful herself, that struggle has been a large part of her. And she wears it very gracefully. She puts jeans and a cap on and she looks about 16. I remember saying to her when I met her, I think we're going to have trouble making you look old.' But she was just very good about it. She wasn't saying, 'Oh, go on, make me look younger,' like you might imagine Hollywood actresses do. She wasn't asking to conceal anything. The main problem was this great, great cameraman [Darius Khondji] who had been trained to make beautiful women look even more beautiful, and who was completely soppy – he kept saying, 'I can only make her look beautiful.' She was much more straightforward about it. I took my hat off to her."

As to her recent career slowdown, Pfeiffer claims to be okay with it ("Everyone slows down when they get to my age, but that's fine."), adding, "But there are fewer roles for all of us in the movie industry. They're making a fraction of the movies they used to make; and so many of them are either animation or these franchise films that you see more and more A-list actors doing. The middle-range financed film hardly exists any more." She lives outside Los Angeles, raises her kids, and checks in with her analyst. "I remember I had an acting coach, Milton Katselas, who I studied with when I was first starting out, and he would ask us, 'OK, how do you think this character would behave in this scene?' And you'd give your little explanation – 'Well, I think…' And then he'd say, 'OK, now how would you really behave in this scene?' And the first answer was almost always bullshit. But we don't even realise it."

Morning Deal Report: Sinbad Sails Again

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Hairspray director Adam Shankman has two new projects ready to roll, Variety reports. Bob the Musical “centers on a mild-mannered man who suddenly hears the ‘inner song’ of people's hearts after being struck on the head.” Shankman is also in negotiations to re-launch Sinbad (the sailor, not the Vegas comedian). “Story centers on Sinbad and his crew, who are marooned off the coast of China and embark on a quest to find the lamp of Aladdin.”

Shattered Glass and Breach writer-director Billy Ray will switch things up with an adaptation of a 1943 horror/fantasy novel. The Conjure Wife “centers on a New England college professor who discovers that his good fortune is the result of his wife's secret, magical interference. When he pressures her to stop, dark forces descend on the couple without her protection.” I think I had that professor.

Not a moment too soon, Barry Sonnenfeld will direct The How-To Guide for Saving the World. “Story's centered on an instruction manual for saving the world left behind by a secret group that protects the Earth from alien invaders but is wiped out,” Variety reports.

Related:
In Other Blogs: The Musical
John Phillip Law: 1937-2008

Morning Deal Report: Ang Lee Takes Woodstock

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Ang Lee’s next project is set to go before the cameras later this month. Lee’s longtime producing partner James Schamus has adapted the memoir Taking Woodstock by Elliot Tiber, “who played a role in helping the historic 1969 music fest unfold on his neighbor's farm.” Variety sez Demetri Martin of The Daily Show will play Tiber, “an aspiring interior designer in Greenwich Village obliged to run the family business, a Catskills motel. In summer 1969, he found himself at the center of a generation-defining experience when he volunteered the motel to be the home base for Woodstock concert organizers after his neighbor, Max Yasgur, made his farm available for the event.” Our advice to young Mr. Martin: avoid the brown acid.

Jackie Chan is set to star in an action-comedy that the Hollywood Reporter assure us is 100% Chris Tucker-free. The Spy Next Door “centers on a man (Chan) who is called to baby-sit his neighbor's children and winds up having to fight off secret agents after one of the kids inadvertently downloads a secret code.”

Remember when John Grisham adaptations were all the rage? I don’t recall what the last one was and I had no idea the legal thriller maestro had written something called Playing for Pizza, but that will be the next Grisham flick to reach the screen. The story “revolves around a veteran NFL quarterback who winds up on a semi-pro team in Italy after blowing his last chance to lead a team to the Super Bowl,” according to Variety. Director Adam Shankman (Hairspray) envisions a cross between North Dallas Forty and Jerry Maguire. Maybe we’ve finally found a landing spot for Brett Favre.

Related:
When Good Directors Go Bad: Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)
Jackie Chan, Zhang Ziyi Respond to Sichuan Province Earthquake

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

MALA NOCHE (1985)

"You drive like you fuck!" Walt (Tim Streeter) yells at Pepper (Ray Monge), the Mexican boy toy who has accepted Walt's offer of driving lessons, with the result that Walt's car is resting in a ditch. Walt is actually in love -- painfully, head over heels in love -- with the pretty boy Johnny (Doug Cooyeate), who doesn't mind putting up with his adulation so long as it gets him handouts, but has no intention of letting Walt touch him, so Walt, in a spirit of compromise that is familiar to inhabitants of the independent filmmaking scene, makes do with Johnny's friend, the scruffier Ray, and takes what satisfaction he can in being one degree of separation away from his obscure object of desire. This grungy erotic fever dream of a first feature by Gus Van Sant was made for $2500.00; hard to see for most of the years before it came out on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection last fall, it was one of the most exciting directorial debuts of the 1980s and announced Portland's placement on the indie film map.

ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES (1992)

When Hudson died of AIDS in 1985 while still trying to remain in the closet, a number of people felt that he had missed his last chance to make his stand against the homophobes. This hilarious illustrated lecture by the experimental filmmaker Mark Rappaport argues that Rock was trying to tell us something all along; you just had to know how to listen. Rock, represented by actor Eric Farr, walks us through a series of clips from Hudson's career, pointing up the suddenly obvious messages conveyed by his skittish relationships with Doris Day and his other virginal leading ladies, his verbal pas de deux with Tony Randall, the mysterious nudge-nudge wink-wink underworld inhabited by the remade men of Seconds, and the shift into horror movies as Rock's youthful beauty began to fade. Like certain films of Todd Haynes, the movie is a satirical commentary on certain strains of pop criticism and a cunning work of criticism itself.

SCORPIO RISING (1964) & UN CHANT D'AMOUR (1950)

Between the two of them, these two short films, made by directors (Kenneth Anger, who made Scorpio Rising five years after the best-selling success of his book Hollywood Babylon, and the legendary playwright, novelist and poet Jean Genet) famous in the literary world, established a whole visual language of gay eroticism, based on fetishistic totems of power on the one hand and a defiant romantic tenderness in the face of imprisonment and institutional mistreatment on the other, that other artists have fed off for generations since. And not just gay artists: Anger's cutting to rock music paved the way for everything from Scorsese to MTV, and Oliver Stone, a director not noted for his sensitivity to homosexuals (see JFK) did his own butch version of the shared-cigarette scene from Genet's film in Platoon, with Willem Dafoe putting a rifle to Charlie Sheen's pliant lips and giving him a little something-something.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)

In his later Far from Heaven (after honoring Genet in his 1991 Poison), Todd Haynes paid tribute to the 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the closeted gay subculture that many see being given a shout-out in those movies. In his salute to the glitter rock scene of the 1970s, Haynes sets out to recreate a very different era in pop culture, one that celebrated letting it all hang out -- and he also administers a bitch slap to those who would write off the music as an opportunistic sham. Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Haynes' David Bowie stand-in, may ultimately sell out to arena rock and heterosexuality, but the fire he lit in the hearts and minds of young adepts such as the rock writer played by Christian Bale continues to burn even as all the color and spark has bled out of the conventional show business world he's joined. Keep watching the skies!

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) & HAIRSPRAY (1988, 2007)

Back in 1972, when underground filmmaker John Waters had his starlet and muse, the 300-pound drag superstar Divine (neé Harris Glenn Milstead) eat dog shit as a glorified publicity stunt in the final moments of Pink Flamingos (a.k.a. the Citizen Kane of bad taste cinema), the wise-ass, openly gay, proto-punk director probably thought he was being pretty damn subversive in his blatant attempt to shock the bejesus out of the hopelessly square “straight” world he never had any particular interest in joining. Little did he know at the time that the most subversive act of pop culture would come sixteen years later, when he achieved crossover indie success with the (mostly) family friendly Hairspray, starring Ricki Lake as an indomitable plus-size, racially politicized Mashed Potato enthusiast and Divine as haggard Baltimore housewife Edna Turnblad. Tragically, Divine passed on to the great Hefty Hideway in the sky just as Hairspray made Waters and his Baltimore crew of “Hillbilly Rip-offs” shockingly respectable (and at least as famous as Pia Zadora)...but “the Filthiest Woman Alive” lived on (in a beautifully ironic twist Flamingos’ Babs Johnson would have adored) as a beloved family-friendly icon, first as the inspiration for the under-the-sea witch Ursula in The Little Mermaid and later in the gender-bender casting of Harvey Fierstein, Bruce Villanch (and, recently, George Wendt??!?!?) as Edna Turnblad in the smash hit Broadway musical version of Hairspray and (egad!) John Travolta in the super-smash hit re-movie-fied 2007 version of the musical that introduced Waters’ racially and sexually egalitarian Baltimore fantasia to the High School Musical crowd (thanks to that dreamy Zac Efron). Waters’ never bought into the peace & love banalities of the Flower Children he mocked so mercilessly in his earliest films, yet the musical Hairspray’s triumphant showstopper “You Can’t Stop The Beat” rivals “The Age of Aquarius” in its joyous, unabashedly hopeful vision of a world where literally everyone is welcome and accepted at the dance...even assholes like the vain, villainous Van Tussels (as long as they’re willing to chill out, play nice and, of course, shake those fanny muscles).

Click here for Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

Julia Roberts’ breakthrough film, Pretty Woman (about the magical romantic possibilities of being a whore) was a monster hit, if not exactly a high water mark in the history of feminism (be sure to look for it on our upcoming Girl Dis-Empowering Top Ten). Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, was the flipside of the equation: a realistically desperate woman who succeeds in spite of, rather than because of her prominent cleavage...and in this quasi-true story, the prize at the end of the fairy tale isn’t a rich millionaire, but a million dollars the single-mother-turned-investigative-paralegal earns for herself (as a bonus from Albert Finney's lawyer/mentor Ed Masry) through brains and tenacity during the course a battle royale with an evil...uh, utility company. And talk about empowering: Roberts went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, she and director Steven Soderbergh got to hang out with George Clooney and screenwriter Susannah Grant went on to write and direct...Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner and Kevin Smith. Which must have been nice for her.

ALIENS (1986)

There were kick-ass female action heroes before Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, of course. Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien comes to mind, for instance, as does Linda Hamilton in the original Terminator, Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on and so forth, all the way back to real life ass-kickers like Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But the Ripley of James Cameron’s Aliens really redefined the female action star for the modern age. For one thing, she’s the star of the movie, and she’s tough all the way through, taking command of a doomed rescue mission to an alien infested colony when the indecisive (male) space marine commander in charge of the mission literally falls down on the job, then later rescuing her man-sel in distress potential love interest, Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks. But Weaver’s heroine isn’t just a muscled, monosyllabic Rambo with tits: she’s a deeply human character who draws superhuman strength not from extra testosterone or the bite of a radioactive spider, but from the sweet maternal bond she forms with an orphaned girl in the midst of all the gunplay and explosions of the masculine world...at least, that is, until David Fincher went and fucked everything up in Alien 3...but I’ll save that rant until our Top Ten list of great movies with incredibly aggravating unnecessary sequels.

MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Mean Girls began with a book by Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes, about high school social hierarchies and how they shape the lives of those who pass before them. It is a serious journalistic-sociological study, which apparently came as a bit of a surprise to Tina Fey after she agreed to take on the job of adapting it into a movie. Fey, who appears in the movie as the math teacher Ms. Norbury, came up with a story about Cady (Lindsay Lohan), who moves to Chicago and enters her first American public school at 16 after being home-schooled in Africa by parents who emphasize the value of learning, and so has to endure the culture shock of discovering that "education" in the States is all about bureaucratic rules on one side and social anxiety and status on the other. Out of a mixture of anthropological fascination and a half-conscious but real desire to fit in, Cady "infiltrates" the top clique of pretty girls -- a process that involves her pretending to be dumber than she is in order to snare a boy she likes -- and begins to maneuver her way to the lead position by outbitching them in ways that suggest a Machiavellian Heather. The movie's official mouthpiece is Fey's Ms. Norbury, who ultimately gets Cady to embrace her better side by forcibly inducting her into the school's "Mathletes" team. She also has a strange but deeply felt scene where she hustles all the girls together in the gym and lectures them about why they behave the way they do and why it's not good, though the whole point of Cady's character would seem to be that it's possible to know all that and still find the seductive pull of the status sirens impossible to resist. A mere four years since its release, the most poignant thing about Mean Girls now may be that it serves as a reminder of a more innocent time when it was possible to cast Lindsay Lohan as a sensitive brainiac who, after a brief slumming phase, manages to get herself under control.

WAITING TO EXHALE (1995)

This episodic drama about the rocky-but-hopeful romantic lives of four black women in Phoenix (get it, Greek mythology buffs?) shocked the shit out of the industry by becoming one of the major sleeper hits of the '90s. It also surprised movie critics, who tended to notice that it kind of sucks. It's also arguable whether it merits inclusion in any discussion of movies with positive female role models: all of the members of its central quartet come across as a little brain-damaged, and not just because of how eager they are to define themselves as failures or successes depending on whether they've managed to land a man. (The director, Forest Whitaker, managed to wangle some money from HBO after the premiere of Sex and the City, claiming that the network had ripped him off, and it's true that the movie shares most of what's objectionable about the TV show.) But the public embrace of the movie, and the way it cowed professional opinion makers, marks some kind of landmark moment in empowering the audience, especially if you define empowerment as doing the hucksters' jobs for them. Viewers who loved the movie, especially black women, hit back at criticism of it so hard that newspapers and magazines actually started publishing editorials and what amounted to counter-reviews denouncing the people who had been so insensitive to the entertainment needs of those who wanted overplayed, demented soap operas geared to their own demographic group. The movie helped get a number of movies starring black women greenlit, but its real lasting influence can best be seen in the critical reaction to a movie like Dreamgirls, which inspired many mumbly, mealy-mouthed reviews by writers who clearly thought that it stank but also thought that it was going to be another phenomenon and were afraid of being seen as coming down too hard on the wrong side of it. For an example of what this looks like in practice, compare the Dreamgirls review that Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote when the movie was released , and her review of Hairspray, where she led off by revealing what she really thought of Dreamgirls -- six months later, when she thought no one was looking. Waiting to exhale can take many forms.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

It’s one thing to talk about how women are empowered by watching the adventures of a fictional female space marine, lady cop, or teenage devil-slayer. But it’s quite another to consider the triumph over sexism and oppression represented in the animated big-screen adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful, powerful graphic novel, Persepolis. Satrapi was born in Iran, not too long before the Islamic revolution against the corrupt and brutal Shah by the fundamentalist Ayatollahs. Her father was a respected civil engineer and her mother was an international journalist – living symbols of the new, modernized Iran that hoped to take its place among the elite nations. This aspiration was crushed with the Islamic revolution and the subsequent war with Iran, both of which Satrapi lived through as she and the women of her family (liberated all, three generations back) struggled to adjust to a new reality where they could be imprisoned for letting too much of their faces show in public. She managed to escape to Europe, but it was never home to her, and she eventually returned, hoping to balance her need to be in the country that was her true home with her need to be respected and taken seriously as a woman. Satrapi has always made it a point to illustrate the fact that there is more to Iran than the caricature of out-of-control religious fundamentalists, and in the scene where Satrapi, as a college art student, stands up to a panel of men who insist that her education take a back seat to their sexist dogma, it gives a stirring picture of a country that bristles at its every restriction.

Click here for Part One!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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

John Waters Smokes Crack

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

OK, so it was an accident. In a revealing new interview with New York magazine, the 61-year-old director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray makes it clear he’s not ready for a life of early bird specials and Matlock reruns. He’s ready to start shooting his 17th film Fruitcake, and Cry-Baby is about to follow Hairspray to the Broadway stage. He’s working on a book called Role Models, “a self-portrait where I write profiles of other people and how much I love them and how much they changed my life and influenced me—famous people, criminals, people you’ve never heard of.” But as Ariel Levy writes, “his interests have remained intact: art, sex, drugs, class, and transgression.”

Levy gets a tour of Waters’ home in Baltimore: “One of the first things you see upon entering is the electric chair Divine died in in Female Trouble…A framed pair of Patty Hearst’s glasses (‘She was wearing those when she got arrested!’) hangs on the wall in the bathroom downstairs, next to some photographs of couch cushions that somehow look a lot like a vagina. On top of the toilet there’s a bowl of fake brownies and cookies. In fact, there is fake food in every room. Fake sushi in the dining room, a leg of lamb in Waters’s office, rubber blueberry pie in his bedroom. In the guest room that doesn’t lead to the bomber’s room, there is a bookshelf on which Waters has organized the books by category, one subject per shelf: extreme weather, psychological disorders, Nazis, Catholicism, high society.”

Then there are some of the director’s favorite haunts, like a feminist sex store owned by one of his assistant directors. (Waters: “Well, let me see the vibrating cock rings.” Sales clerk: “I think we’re out.”) And that crack-smoking incident? “He was having a party at his house in Baltimore and someone passed him a pipe that he assumed was packed with pot, so he took a puff. ‘I thought, Am I addicted? Am I gonna rob my parents now? I had a horrible hangover, but I’d been drinking anyway. I was glad, actually, in a way. I would never now purposely try a new drug, I don’t think, but I’m secretly glad I know what it feels like.’”

All that and much more here.

Christopher Walken Wigs Out

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Every year, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals selects a man and a woman to publically humiliate in recognition of their years of selfless hard work devoted to enriching America's traditional role as the entertainment capital of our galaxy. A couple of weeks ago, it was Charlize Theron's turn to show what a good sport she is, and this past weekend, America's most beloved living song and dance man, Christopher Walken, hit the campus to show the enthusiastic youngsters how it's done. According to BBC News, the star of The Deer Hunter, King of New York, and The Country Bears "sang a tune from the musical Hairspray during the performance and took part in a sketch involving cow-bells, which parodied an earlier appearance of his on the US TV show Saturday Night Live. He said he was 'amazed and thrilled' to receive his prize, although he joked: 'I hope nobody's watching.'" Not much more to this one, really, but there was no way in hell we weren't going to find an excuse to post this photo.

Location, Location, Location: Baltimore

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Hooker on the corner, waiting on a train
Drunk lyin’ on the sidewalk, sleepin’ in the rain

That’s the picture Randy Newman painted in his 1977 song “Baltimore,” and it hasn’t gotten much better for Charm City since then – at least, not as far as its portrayal in the popular culture is concerned. Nowadays the city is best known as the setting of The Wire, this week’s season premiere of which was greeted with the customary round of “greatest TV show ever” reviews, as well as the usual grumbling from residents that the program tends not to portray their home as a nice place to visit, live or even think about.

To add insult to injury, the wasteland that is the January movie release schedule today serves up the execrable First Sunday, a Tyler Perry knockoff starring Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan as a couple of B-more bad boys who decide to rob a church stocked with dismaying stereotypes.

It’s not so much that Baltimore has never been treated right by the movies – it’s that it’s rarely been treated at all. If Barry Levinson and John Waters had gone into accounting or narcotics distribution, we might never have seen the city on the screen, but instead they have both used Baltimore as their respective canvases, to very different effect.

Levinson’s Baltimore is primarily nostalgic and gentle; there’s not a whole lot of slingin’ on the corners of Liberty Heights or Avalon. Instead, it’s “a little place where people gather to enjoy the banquet of life”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxjL0Ifd6gI

That’s a little more Chamber of Commerce friendly than The Wire, and although Levinson doesn’t shy away from the sticky issue of race relations in his hometown, it’s hard to imagine Marlo or Snoop finding much to identify with in this clip from Liberty Heights:

John Waters also took a nostalgic look at Baltimore’s racial divide in Hairspray, but that’s about the only point of comparison between the two directors’ depictions of the city. Not many things could scare the corner boys of The Wire, but here’s a sight that could do it:

So you can see why it’s been hard for the good citizens of Baltimore to hold onto their dignity when all the world thinks their city is nothing but a teeming cesspool of run-down row houses, drug dealers and oversized drag clowns with slabs of meat clenched between their thighs. But cheer up, Baltimore! Somebody loves you: