The Screengrab : happy days

In Other Blogs Goes to Hawaii

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule previews the summer movie schedule. “But even with the proof, in Star Trek, that my expectations could be so fundamentally off-base, it’s still hard for me to get excited, as Entertainment Weekly insists I should, about this summer’s big-ass slate of films. I thumbed through that 'Summer Movie Preview' issue with 'all the buzz on over 80 new films' and was bored stiff by the time I turned the page into the month of July. Really, am I supposed to care that Stephen Sommers, perpetrator of Van Helsing, has a new action blockbuster based on a toy I was bored with in 1967? Am I supposed to get all squirmy with excitement at seeing shots of a sweaty Megan Fox intercut with heavy-metal images from Michael Bay’s new movie about toys I was at least 15 years too old for when they were first popular? And despite my fondness for McG and the first Charlie’s Angels feature (about as zesty and giddily exciting as any pre-fab confection could be), that new Terminator movie just looks so goddamn glum and desperate, and overly familiar.”

GreenCine Daily’s DVD of the Week is Wise Blood. “Otherworldly in its characterizations (did I forget to mention the naïve, hyperactive 18-year-old obsessed with both a shrunken mummy and some guy in a bear suit?) but too sad or realistically perverse—even during a violent act late in the film—to be written off as a grotesque carnival, Wise Blood is not the tale of redemption or maybe accidental martyrdom that the final scenes superficially symbolize. It's about the powerlessness of existence, which is both as terrifying and absurd as that sounds.”

Beyond the Multiplex argues the importance of the original Star Trek. “For me, Star Trek and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites -- one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic -- were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early '70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or Happy Days, had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson ponders whether one bad shot can ruin a movie. “I'm not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby's Being There takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way. But how can just one bad decision -- maybe on screen for just a second or two -- deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that's sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there's nothing to keep it aloft any longer.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, Spoutblog offers 10 Lost Theories Inspired by the Movies. Back to the Future Part III, anyone? “When that bright flash of light ended the episode, the Losties trapped in 1977 were returned to the present time. Or, that’s what a number of the show’s fans are predicting today. But if anyone’s been paying close attention, they’ll know that Lost has taken some cues from the Back to the Future franchise this season. So, logically, by looking at that trilogy, we know that Lost must have its denouement in the 1800s, just as the BTTF series does with Part III.”

Yesterday's Hits: The Karate Kid (1984, John G. Avildsen)

Paul Clark — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Karate Kid a hit?: The Karate Kid is nothing if not a formula movie, and a number of ingredients were combined to make the film resound with audiences. To begin with, there’s the always dependable “underdog” element, which director John G. Avildsen previously mined with his Oscar-winning film Rocky. Then, of course, there was a sport that the hero had to learn in order to succeed- karate, of course, to capitalize on the burgeoning martial-arts craze. Finally, it was also a high-school movie- one which found new kid Daniel (Ralph Macchio), recently moved to California from New Jersey, forced to learn karate to fight off the bullies. With these three elements, it hardly mattered to audiences that the film was almost completely predictable.

Like its hero, The Karate Kid was an underdog, with few studio executives expecting it to make much money. What they didn’t count on was the word-of-mouth and repeat business that followed its release. Much of the buzz was fueled by the film’s most popular character, the elderly maintenance man Mr. Miyagi who trains the film’s hero Daniel (Ralph Macchio) in martial arts. As played by longtime character actor Noriyuki “Pat” Morita- recognizable to viewers from his recurring role as Happy Days’ Arnold- Mr. Miyagi’s cranky inscrutability and unorthodox training methods make him feel like a flesh-and-blood version of Yoda. With its comfortable formula and Morita’s scene-stealing (and Oscar-nominated) performance, Karate Kid became the surprise hit of 1984, and beloved Miyagi-isms like “wax on, wax off” quickly entered the pop culture lexicon.

What happened?: As is so often the case, Hollywood just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Flush with the film’s unexpected box-office success, Columbia Pictures promptly green-lit a second Karate Kid adventure, one which took Daniel and Mr. Miyagi to the mentor’s childhood home on Okinawa. But while the second film actually managed to outgross the first, the well had run dry with the third installment, a pale retread of the original movie, which wasn’t that original to begin with. Then, after biding five more years, Columbia decided the public needed yet another Karate Kid, but without Macchio involved the main character became a girl, played by future two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank. Add to this a short-lived Saturday morning Karate Kid series, and you get the idea- the public just got Karate Kid-ed out.

Does The Karate Kid still work?: Not really. Now that the film’s heyday has passed, Karate Kid looks hokier than ever. The formulas that made the movie a hit have been played out, and the film itself isn’t good enough to transcend them. It doesn’t help that the film (which runs a bloated 127 minutes) has a lot of slow patches, which are largely found in the scenes that don’t involve Mr. Miyagi. Daniel’s relationship with “Ali-with-an-I” (future Oscar-nominee-turned-fertility-nurse Elisabeth Shue) starts promisingly, but quickly turns to a clichéd movie romance with a touch of a rich girl/poor boy dynamic, and the screenplay can’t be bothered to find a new wrinkle. No less formulaic is the pack of eeeeeeeeevil martial artists from the Cobra Kai dojo, where all of the best students are blonde preppies and the classes are run like a cross between boot camp and a meeting of the Hitler Youth. It should goes without saying that Daniel is a dark-haired, brown-eyed Italian-American boy.

Then there’s Avildsen’s direction, which is clumsy and hamfisted. In the eight years since Rocky, he apparently forgot how to shoot action, since the fight scenes here generally move too quickly to tell most of what’s happening. Meanwhile, Avildsen intersperses plenty of sunsets, along with a number of cheesy montages, all of which are underscored with the most obvious music choices (I call it “The Tao of Steve Syndrome”). A beach party is set to The Flirts and Jan & Dean’s “(Bop Bop) On the Beach”, a song called a song called “Young Hearts” underscores Macchio and Shue’s first date, and the final tournament is accompanied by Joe Esposito’s deathless dumb-as-dust (and sadly memorable) power ballad “You’re the Best.” All of these factors and more make Rocky look like the model of subtlety and restraint by comparison.

Yet when Mr. Miyagi is onscreen, the movie still works pretty well. Sure, the wise Asian mentor is an age-old stereotype, but Morita makes the character a lot of fun. Supposedly, the great Toshiro Mifune tested for the role, but while his intense presence would have overwhelmed the story, Morita is just stern enough, while leavening the character with a gentle wit that makes him pretty irresistible. It’s been a good twenty years since I last saw The Karate Kid, and I was taken aback by how much of the film didn’t involve Mr. Miyagi. I think it says something about the movie that I’d forgotten most of the movie but remembered almost all of Mr. Miyagi’s scenes, wouldn’t you say?

Summerfest '08: "Corvette Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Regular Screengrab readers know that I am not one to go for cheap nostalgia. I don't view the world through rose-colored glasses, and I usuallly think that any line of reasoning that ends with 'things where better when I was a kid' come not from any real aesthetic position, but from an unwillingness to admit that one has gotten older and that the culture has moved along since we were teenagers. I'm especially not nostalgic about the 1970s; I spent most of that decade being pretty easy to please. If it came with a cape or a mask, and I could enjoy it while eating a bowl of Apple Jacks, it was okay with me. However, every once in a while, there's a piece of cultural driftwood that floats past that grips me with a strange sense of longing for the good old days, and today's Summerfest 2008 entry is one of them. Maybe I'm just becoming a softie because this is the penultimate installment of Summerfest '08 -- a feature in which I profile a movie with the word "summer" in the title that you can use to kill an hour and a half while you're waiting for your car to get detailed -- or maybe there's something deeper at work. It's hard to say: the big draws of this week's movie, Corvette Summer, are vintage cars and Mark Hammill, and I'm neither a gearhead nor a Star Wars fan. Maybe it's just my longtime crush on Annie Potts. But whatever the case, we're going to plunge head-first, for the second-to-the-last installment of Summerfest 2008, into a movie which represented the very last moment Mark Hamill was given any on-screen presence in anything but a Star Wars movie, and the very last moment Danny Bonaduce was even remotely taken seriously.

Summer's ending, as all things must. But with only two more Summerfest screenings to go, we're going to see it out with a bang! Join me for a look at 1978's Corvette Summer!

THE ACTION: It's 1978, and like every high school kid in 1978, Kenneth W. Dantley Jr. is obsessed with two things: hot girls and fast cars. Being an out-of-it chunkhead, he can't do much about obtaining the former, but in pursuit of the latter, he takes a shop class, and as his final project, instead of building a bird feeder or an ashtray, he comes up wih a custom-designed 1973 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. Unfortunately, Kenny is in the habit of befriending ill-meaning douchebags like the weaselly Kootz, under whose care the tricked-out 'Vette is stolen. Kenny, anxious to get back the car which got him his first-ever A grade, heads off on an epic trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; along the way, he runs into mobsters, lowlifes, ne'er-do-wells, and Vanessa, who describes herself as a "prostitute-in-training" headed to Vegas to hit the major leagues of whoring. We're apparently meant to find this flattering. Once he actually arrives in Sin City, he falls in with a bunch of other head-in-the-clouds gearheads and the tone of the movie shifts and becomes less an outrageous teen comedy and more a deadly-dull weekend with the kind of fanatic auto enthusiasts that you find at car shows embarrassing their wives. It's a testament to the quality of the movie that the star who's lasted the longest is the car itself, which is still shown at classic auto shows all over the country.

THE PLAYERS: Aside form the Corvette, the big star of Corvette Summer is meant to be Mark Hamill. Coming off the huge success of Star Wars, producers were jumping all over him, offering him all sorts of heartthrob roles under the assumption that he was going to be Hollywood's next bankable young star. Our condolences to everyone who didn't know how that was going to end up. Ironically enough given that he was playing a kid totally obsessed with tricked-out sports cars, Hamill's career -- and life -- were almost brought to an end a few months before filming this movie, when he was involved in a serious and nearly fatal car accident. Hammill recovered quickly enough to put Corvette Summer in the can, and he sported the scars in the two Star Wars sequels, so he physically recovered, but his career never did. Elsewhere, the slimy goofball Kootz is played by a post-Partridge Danny Bonaduce, not yet in his transsexual prostitute/celebrity boxing phase, but well into his not-having-a-career phase. The biggest find of the movie -- or so it seemed at the time -- was the young, vivacious, and beautiful Annie Potts, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for best new find, and only five years later would be playing a semi-matronly role in Ghostbusters.

SUMMER FUN: The movie starts out with Hamill still toiling away in shop class, so it definitely makes you earn your summer fun as you have to put up with a good half of its runtime being set in his somewhat dreary southern California high school. As the movie progresses, though, it hits you with the good times one after another, as Hastar wars; ghostbusters; Hamill gets (and loses) his dream 'Vette, runs into a hooker with a heart of gold, takes a road trip to Las Vegas, and gets menaced by a chainsaw-wielding organized crime syndicate thug. You know, all that fun stuff that happened to everyone in high school.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Not surprisingly for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, Hawaiian shirts abound, on big fat party animals and elsewhere. Everyone from shop teachers to parents rock the tropical look, and when the action shifts to Vegas and arriviste Mob thugs and classic car enthusiasts enter the picture, we actually begin to approach the tipping point where we hope that someone in a Brooks Brothers suit wanders on screen just for balance. Even Luke Skywalker himself, who wears a pseudo-Fonzie blue-jeans-and-white-tee combo for much of the movie, once or twice rocks this sort of goofy off-teal Hawaiian number that makes us mistake him for Ralph Malph. I wish he'd hung onto it for Return of the Jedi.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, bikinis are very few and far between. We get a few shots of them in generic SoCal beach scenes, and there's also a few walk-ons by spangled showgirl two-pieces during the film's Vegas scenes, but for the most part, bikinis are nowhere to be found. However, Corvette Summer does feature a number of shots of a 25-year-old Annie Potts in a SCUBA wetsuit, which, for my entertainment dollar, is almost as good. Unless you're a total gearhead who likes watching 'Vette porn, Corvette Summer mostly serves as a cautionary tale of what could have been with the pretty young actors, but there are worse ways to spend a Wednesday afternoon in August.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

Mentors don't always do well in Oliver Stone movies. The hero of the autobiographical Platoon had two of them, but one of them got killed and the hero wound up having to shoot the other. The fast-talking uber-capitalist Gekko is luckier; he has a smart wardrobe to construct around his power suspenders, an Academy Award, and a famous speech that will get replayed on the nightly news every time there's a market downturn or somebody who's worth more than the national revenue of Venezuela gets nabbed for insider trading. Actually, Gekko's weak link is agreeing to share his wisdom with the obnoxious little mouth-breather played by Charlie Sheen, the scowling kid from the wrong side of the tracks with the chip on his shoulder. Unable to work out his issues, Sheen screws his sensei over and then adds injury to, well, injury by setting him up and selling him out to the feds. Back when Wall Street was in theaters, it was possible to feel sorry for Gordon at the end, but since then it's become possible to get some perspective on these things. Today, after his stay at some Club Fed, he probably has his own reality TV show. Charlie Sheen can watch it when he gets home from his job scrubbing public toilets.

Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), THE KARATE KID (1984)

I feel confident that Pat Morita's martial-arts-instructing janitor richly deserves his place here, even though I'm actually pretty sure that I never did see The Karate Kid. (Hell, I might be less sure if I had seen it.) Consider that this is a guy who, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance here, managed to pull off a comeback almost a decade after he'd ill-advisedly abandoned the cast of Happy Days for a starring role in the sitcom Mr. T and Tina. (Can you tell me what ever became of Tina?) And he must be really good in this, because a lot of people lined up to see the movie, and they must have had their eyes glued to him, because I did see The Outsiders, and the one thing I remember from that is that looking at Ralph Macchio will make your eyeballs bleed. True, most of his biggest later roles would be in Karate Kid sequels, and while I'm not sure that I ever saw any of them either, I'm sure that they gave him the chance to really explore the possibilities of the character, plus he got to meet Hilary Swank. Clearly he was a fellow anyone would be well advised to seek out for advice, except on the subject of which Gus Van Sant movie to appear in. Wax on, wax off, motherfucker!

W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), BARTON FINK (1991)

Lured to Hollywood with the promise of easy money and big-screen glory, Barton Fink (John Turturro) quickly reaches an impasse in his writing. So with nowhere else to turn, his producer suggests that he find an established writer to mentor him. For his troubles, he gets W.P. Mayhew. Mayhew, played by a pre-Frasier John Mahoney, is a literary legend clearly modeled after William Faulkner, one who has toiled on countless screenplays for the studio in all possible genres. Tellingly, Barton first discovers Mayhew while puking out his liquid lunch in the men's room of the studio commissary. But Barton is so starstruck that he pursues him anyway, despite Mayhew's reputation as a washed-up souse. Unfortunately for the would-be student, the master whose guidance he seeks is too busy drinking and ranting at his secretary/live-in lover(Judy Davis) to give him much help with his writing, and indeed, it's Davis who's been doing most of the writing lately anyway. Yet while Mayhew isn't the mentor Fink bargained for, he's nonetheless valuable to Fink, providing him an objective lesson in what can happen to even truly great writers when they've been swallowed up by Hollywood. The lessons he teaches aren't pretty, but Barton isn't likely to forget them.

Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004)

The schlubby regulars at Average Joe's gymnasium are facing difficult times. With their beloved gym struggling financially and facing takeover from a more sophisticated fitness center, they have to raise a boatload of money to keep from going under. So they do what any bunch of scrappy underdogs would do in a similar situation- they enter a nationwide dodgeball tournament, even though they're not especially athletic and can't compete with more experienced dodgeballers. What's a ragtag band of self-labeled Average Joes to do? Find a coach, that's what. Or more precisely, let a coach find them. But not just any coach, mind you. None other than Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn) a fifties-era dodgeball legend who's now confined to a wheelchair. With a mixture of abuse and tough love, Patches whips the Joes into shape using exercises such as one founded on the theory, "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." Faster than you can say "Eye of the Tiger," the Average Joes are national contenders. Of course, their ascent has less to do with Patches' coaching style than it does to the demands of the plot- to say nothing of divine intervention from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris- but Torn is so irascibly funny in the role that it seems wrong not to include him. After all, how can you not love a guy who gets a line like, "is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway, because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Cole (J. T. Walsh), THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Midway through its narrative, Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's seamiest pulp classic pulls the brakes on itself to fill in Myra's (Annette Bening) back story, to show that she learned the intricacies of the con-artist's game at the feet of the old pro Cole--played by J. T. Walsh, an actor with a blandly sturdy facade that, more often than not (Breakdown, Sling Blade, Nixon, The Last Seduction), served as the mask of a mean, sick puppy. Here, he's onscreen just long enough to show the highs of his profession (pulling off a sweet scam and celebrating after) and the lows (he goes nuts). Maybe the filmmakers wanted to get him on and off fast so that he didn't turn to the audience and make a bonus pitch for the United Way.

--Paul Clark; Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2.