The Screengrab : harrison ford

Getting Darrined: When the Sequel Doesn’t Need You

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Out on the promotion trail for Fighting, Terrence Howard is still miffed about being replaced by Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2. “‘It was a very, very bad choice,’ fumed Howard, who played Iron Man's Army buddy Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes in the first film, to Parade magazine about Marvel Studios' decision to reboot the part with Don Cheadle in the role. ‘You don't make $800 million and then try and shake everyone down. That's not nice,’ he said to MTV News, exaggerating the film's worldwide box-office gross by a mere $200 million.”

As the L.A. Times reports, however, Howard is hardly the first actor to get the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” treatment when sequel time rolls around. Rachel Abramowitz has even come up with a name for it – getting Darrined, as in Dick Sargent replacing Dick York as Samantha’s husband on Bewitched. “Or perhaps being ‘Baldwinized’ is a better term, for Alec Baldwin, who starred as Jack Ryan in the movie of Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October but was replaced by the far more popular Harrison Ford for the next two installments.” (OK, but then what do we call it when Ben Affleck replaces Harrison Ford in the same series? Besides a terrible, terrible idea?)

One explanation for Darrenization is simple penny-pinching; in Howard’s case, he was actually the highest-paid actor in the original Iron Man and was asked to take a significant pay cut for the follow-up. Howard wasn’t having it, and “it didn't help that, as some critics pointed out, Howard struggled to hold his own against the razor-sharp comedic stylings of Robert Downey Jr., who played Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man.” Nobody seemed to miss Katie Holmes in The Dark Knight, in which she was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal, but then again, Batman himself has been recast so many times, there’s probably not much reason to expect a consistent love interest.

The all-time greatest bit of sequel recasting isn’t even mentioned in the Times article. Of course I’m referring to the third Smokey and the Bandit movie, which was originally titled Smokey IS the Bandit and was allegedly shot with Jackie Gleason playing both roles – his traditional part as Sheriff Buford T. Justice as well as the one vacated by Burt Reynolds when he declined to play the Bandit a third time. I say “allegedly” because no footage or stills of Gleason in Bandit drag have ever surfaced, but the story is oft repeated that this version was screened for test audiences (including by Leonard Maltin in his movie guide). In any case, the finished Smokey and the Bandit 3 sees Jerry Reed taking over the driver’s seat for Reynolds, who does provide a brief cameo as the Bandit. Either way, the movie was a flop. Some roles simply weren’t meant to be recast.

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Yesterday's Hits: Smokey and the Bandit

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

ALIENS (1986) & GALAXY QUEST (1999)

Life will be more stressful in the future, partly because of the ravenous extraterrestrials and tyrannical galactic tyrants we’ll encounter, but mostly because the ticking clocks in our race-against-time adventures will be replaced by soothing female voices announcing our impending doom every few seconds. That’s the case in Aliens anyway, a movie Roger Ebert called “so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?” How’s this for suspense: not only does Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley find herself trapped in a space colony infested with slimy, ravenous xenomorphs (and the equally slimy Paul Reiser), but following a mishap with a nuclear reactor, the whole joint winds up on the verge of self-destruction! And then the evil Alien Queen grabs Newt (Carrie Henn), the sweet little orphan girl Ripley’s been trying to save for most of the movie!! And then, just when Ripley and Newt finally escape to the roof of the burning, exploding complex, they discover their ride is gone!!! And then it turns out the Alien Queen knows how to use elevators!!!! And she’s got David Fincher with her!!!!! And that damn soothing female voice won’t stop reminding everyone how close they are to death!!!!!! Aiiiieeeeee!!!!!!!!! Later, in the smartly high-concept Galaxy Quest, Weaver once again winds up in a desperate space race against time, trapped with co-star Tim Allen in a real-life starship designed by a much friendlier bunch of aliens to mimic the specs of their old TV starship...including the standard issue self-destruct gizmo that always counts down to zero in the most suspenseful possible way. (AO)

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

At first, time doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in the visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Harrison Ford’s Deckard has to hunt down the escaped replicants, true, but they don’t seem to have a particular goal in mind, and for a while, his search for them is discursive, even leisurely. But it soon becomes clear that even if he’s not racing against time, the replicants are – their leader, Roy Batty, beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, knows that his kind is programmed with a finite lifespan, and that any moment could be his last. The brutish Leon taunts Deckard with this information in their confrontation, but in the end, Roy turns it into a tragedy. His death is the only thing that saves Deckard’s life, but by that time, it’s clear that something truly unique and precious is being lost, and the sensation is not one of relief, but of profound grief and regret. Fading from existence, Roy half-sneers, half-laments that he has seen things that Deckard cannot even begin to imagine; but because he is both more and less than human, it will all be lost at that moment the clock makes its final tick. (LP)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Lean, mean and exhilarating, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York confirmed that the Halloween auteur was capable of delivering more than just horror. In a nightmarish future 1997, New York City has been transformed into a massive, walled-off maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One crashes on the island and the president is taken hostage one day before an all-important nuclear summit, badass criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited for a daring rescue mission. Plissken is given a 24-hour deadline that’s made more pressing by the fact that he’s been injected with micro-explosives that’ll blow if he fails his task in the allotted time-frame, a set-up that Carpenter mines for as much rousing action as possible. From a fight with an enormous bruiser, to a cab ride over a bridge covered in mines, iconic anti-hero Plissken’s efforts to save the commander-in-chief from the clutches of Isaac Hayes’ baddie – an undertaking that involves enlisting help from Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau – remains a thrilling, kick-ass sci-fi saga, and a testament to Carpenter’s still-underappreciated directorial greatness. (NS)

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

There are endless thrillers and caper flicks that depend on split-second timing for the bad guys’ nefarious plan to succeed, but the genius of Joseph Sargent’s tight little ‘70s thriller is that it places the action on a New York subway train, a milieu in which people already get terribly bent out of shape if there’s any deviation from the strict timetable. Populated by a cast of old-school character actors (including Walter Matthau Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller) who virtually define the word “craggy”, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three features a quartet of criminals – presciently given colors as code names, twenty years before Reservoir Dogs – who must ensure perfect timing and clever planning to overcome the fact that they’re committing their caper on a form of transportation that can’t possibly deviate from its course. A big-budget remake is being released later this year, but its flashy cast and jillion-dollar price tag almost guarantee it won’t have any of the grubby charm or jangling energy of the original. (LP)

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

LUKE SKYWALKER & PRINCESS LEIA, STAR WARS IV-VI (1977-1983)

Getting his first look at Princess Leia in what was once the first and is now supposed to be the fourth Star Wars movie, Luke fairly moos, "She's beautiful!", thus revealing that he's an old-fashioned boy who likes his headphones big, round, and gnarly. Later, Leia will plant a quick smooch on him while he's in the process of saving their asses. This was back in those more innocent days when George Lucas, whatever he's said to the contrary since then, didn't know that he was going to be making a second movie, let alone that he had a whole complicated mythos to spin around it. By the time of The Empire Strikes Back, when Leia plants a hot one on Luke to make Han Solo jealous, it was clear that Leia had decided that her heart was with the bad boy who liked to hang out with Bigfoot, but just as clearly, Luke still thought he might be in the running. Certainly he didn't have the traditional manly response to his sister slipping him the tongue. You revisionist historians can dance around this all you like, but the fact is that for a couple of movies there, the all-ages audience for the Star Wars saga was treated to the sight of the Annakin sibs kind of hitting on each other. No wonder George Lucas opted to abandon his plans for a trilogy of films that would follow the action of Return of the Jedi, where the big reveal was made: he didn't have the heart to stage the most awkward holiday dinner scenes in movie history.

MAX SCHUMACHER & DIANA CHRISTENSEN, NETWORK (1976)

The May-December romance is always a tricky maneuver to pull off. This one stands out partly because it's totally bewildering; I've heard theories about how the moon landing was faked that make more sense than the plot turn that throws these two together. The movie sets them up as oppositional figures from the start: Faye Dunaway's "liberated" young woman Diana who, in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's cranky vision, stands for commercial exploitation and debasement, and the older man, Max, (William Holden) who, as the mouthpiece of traditional broadcast journalistic standards, represents the last stand against the corruption of the medium. When Max's old friend, the anchorman Howard Beale, has a breakdown and turns into a ranting crazy, Diana runs with it, turning the news into a showcase for the crazy man's diatribes in the name of entertainment; Max responds by accusing Diana of having "learned life from Bugs Bunny." Then, somewhere in the middle of all this, Max leaves his wife for her, they boink, and then they break up. And from the start of it all Diana's busy undermining Max's career, so it's not even as if she's using him as a stepping stone. Seriously, it's as if Eliot Ness and Al Capone just threw caution to the winds and got it on three-quarters of the way through The Untouchables. The closest thing to an explanation for this comes from Max's wife, played by Beatrice Straight, who parachutes into the movie just long enough to tell him that he's experiencing "his last roar of passion" before male menopause sets in. The Academy Award voters who gave Straight a Best Actress Oscar for this speech might almost have been reacting in self-defense.

BOBBY DUPEA & RAYETTE DIPESTO, FIVE EASY PIECES (1970)

This counterculture hit has its snobbish side, particularly in its scenes involving rich-boy classical pianist turned slumming hardhat Bobby's quote-unquote "romantic" life with "Rayette Dipesto", a name that the Minnie Pearl enthusiasts at the Grand Ole Opry would regard as a bit glaring in its white trashitude. Everything about Bobby's blue collar existence is there to signal that he's meant for better things, but there are real traces of affection and respect in his friendship with his co-worker (Billy Green Bush), whereas he treats his squeeze Rayette as if she were something he won at the company raffle when he was really hoping to come home with the waffle iron. Not that the movie doesn't agree with him that she's a nightmare: in scene after scene, he gets to smolder while she gets to whimper and whine. The question of what's wrong with him that he's chosen to keep company with such a horror never seems to get addressed. The ending, with him deserting her in the middle of nowhere, may be the act of a bastard, but it's definitely the best thing for him, for her, and for the audience.

DEBBY & VINCE STONE, THE BIG HEAT (1953)

In Fritz Lang's noir potboiler, Gloria Grahame is the platonic ideal of the smart moll, and as her gangster boyfriend, Lee Marvin, at his most bestial, is the last person in the world anyone should get smart with. By most conventional standards this is a horrendous pairing, but it's a classic if your thing happens to be mutally assured destruction. The evening that ends with him scarring her face with hot coffee even begins with him manhandling a different woman, which must be her version of foreplay. No longer able to count on her looks as her meal ticket, she throws in with the rogue cop (Glenn Ford) on the mob's tail and turns herself into a sacrificial victim by paying Marvin back and goading him to put her out of her misery. They were made for each other, dahling.

AL & VERA FROM DETOUR (1945)

Film noir has given us a lot of self-deluding males who become willing accomplices to deadly females, but there’s no bigger chump than Tom Neal’s Al and no bigger a shark than Ann Savage’s Vera in Detour. A zero-budget production shot more or less over a weekend by Edward G. Ulmer and a crew of Poverty Row nobodies, Detour is one of the most nihilistic – and yet thrilling – post-war noir films in existence. Al Roberts is a never-was nightclub piano player who travels west to hook up with a woman who clearly couldn’t be more glad to be shed of him. It’s not hard to tell why: Al is a sad sack’s sad sack, a self-pitying, pouty loser who blames his every misfortune – and he’s got plenty of ‘em – on the whole rest of the world. When a kindly drunk slips him a big enough tip to go to California and see his girl, he looks at it like someone’s shat a big old turd in his morning coffee. Along the way, after an uncanny turn of events, he runs into the appropriately named Ann Savage playing Vera, who “looks like she just got thrown off of the crummiest freight train in the world”. She’s a seething cauldron of rage, and as up to no good as a hurricane, but that doesn’t bother Al, who’s looking for a new set of gams to walk all over him. Vera sizes him up as a grade-A cut of chump in about a millisecond and spends the entire rest of this wonderful, horrible little film heaping abuse over him, to his barely registered protests. The pure inappropriateness of this abusive relationship is part of what makes it such a filthily energetic noir classic.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

HARVEY & JACK, MILK (2008)

Most every straight guy I know has tangled at some point with the Sexy Crazy Girl (y’know, the one that stole your wallet and set your bathroom on fire but looked so damn good in that little plaid miniskirt), and most straight girls have their horror stories about that Hot But Psycho Bad Boy all their friends warned them about, to no avail. From Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Leslie Mann in The 40 Year Old Virgin to Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and Mark Wahlberg in Fear, Sexy Crazy Girls and Hot But Psycho Bad Boys have been well-represented in mainstream cinema over the years. And while independent films (not to mention six seasons of The L Word) have provided numerous rainbow-flavored versions of the aforementioned archetypes, the gay characters depicted in most Hollywood films are usually too sexless and/or noble to fall into the sorts of messy romantic entanglements that pit brains and common sense against libido, heart and instinct. Gus Van Sant’s Milk, of course, was a recent and notable exception, dramatizing not only Harvey Milk’s heroic struggle for gay rights, but also the concrete realities of the complicated human relationships beneath all the abstract rhetoric. Like Hillary and Julia Goodridge, who recently got divorced after helping to pave the way for same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (yeah, MA!), Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is only human as he fights for human rights. Like any number of hard-working professionals before and since, he has trouble balancing his personal and professional life, and falls into a mid-life crisis affair with Diego Luna’s clingy, troubled good-time-guy Jack Lira. For those who haven’t seen the movie, let’s just say that, in the tradition of countless real world and cinematic Crazy Girl/Bad Boy relationships, it doesn’t end well.

BOBBY & HELEN, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971)

Not giving your characters last names to make them more universal is always generally kind of a cheap trick, but Joan Didion co-wrote this, so I suppose we should just let it go. The Panic In Needle Park outdid Requiem For A Dream by nearly 30 years through a really simple expedient: just show people shooting up in needle close-ups. You don't need the anal dildo or hallucinations then. Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) don't use at first; he just deals, and she stares adoringly. Then he starts "chipping," she sneaks some while he's sleeping to see what it's all about, and much OD'ing, jail time and bad decision-making ensue. They're a couple who accelerate each others' downward spirals; thanks to one of Pacino's early galvanizing performances (before the ham set in) and Winn's essentially passive, worshipful gaze, it works.

MIMI & OSCAR, BITTER MOON (1992)

Oscar, an older American expat writer meets Mimi, a hot young French girl on a bus in Paris. After the initial meet-cute hot romance ensues. Years later we meet Oscar again, a broken man, as he tells his story to an awkward young Brit (Hugh Grant) on a Mediterreanean cruise. Don't let the presence of Hugh Grant fool you. This is a Polanski flick. The gist is that a man hasn't truly loved a woman unless there were animal masks and water sports invoved and he treated her like shit. Conversly, a lady never really loved a man unless she let him dismantle her self-confidence brick by brick and then took her revenge by putting him in a wheel chair and flaunting her magnificently muscled lover in front of him. Sounds like fun, no?

GEORGE & SHERRY PEARY, THE KILLING (1956)

There may be no film genre richer in sordid, back-stabbing, and generally unrewarding relationships than that of film noir, and they never got nastier than when Marie Windsor, star of Cat Women of the Moon, was in the room. With her heavy lids, bottle-blonde Wilma Flintstone 'do, a nose that she seemed to be looking down at men from even when they were taller than her, and a voice that could make any line sound withering, Windsor was born to nag, and in Stanley Kubrick's classic caper movie, she's partnered with an actor who was such a natural sucker that he first made crime movie history getting sold out by Sidney Greenstreet. Loitering around their apartment, Windsor casually reduces her short hubby to asking why she married him --"You used to love me. You said you did, anyway." -- to which she responds that he hasn't exactly delivered on those promises he made about hitting it big and setting her up in style, adding that she doesn't mind the lack of money so long as she has "a big, strong intelligent brute like you" to be down with. Even Homer Simpson would have trouble missing the sarcasm. The final proof that this marriage cannot be saved comes when she finds out that her husband George is involved in a million dollar racetrack robbery scheme; rather than just wait for him to pull off the heist and show up at home to wave the dough in her face, she just can't resist getting her boy toy -- Vince Edwards, all muscles and smirk -- to oil his own gun and go try to rip off the robbers. Poor George finds out that his lovey-dove has set him up for the last time when he hears Edwards break into the room, look around for him, and ask, "Hey, where's the jerk?"

STEVE BOLANDER & LAURIE HENDERSON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)

When American Graffiti begins, the plan is for Steve and his buddy (and Laurie's sister) Curt to go off to the East Coast and attend college; this means that his relationship with Laurie will be going long-distance, but not to worry -- Steve has thought about that and proposes to Laurie that they strenghten their bond to each other by seeing other people. This goes down about as well as you could expect. Bad as this is, those of us who actually know people who saw the momentous event of their high school graduation as a cue to marry their first serious dating partner will recognize that the real sign of horror to come arrives when Steve and Laurie take to the dance floor, and she clings to him with such fierce tenacity that his bare back must look as if he'd gone a couple of rounds with Lon Chaney, Jr. She then forces him to recognize the depth of his "true feelings" for her -- defined here as his acquisitive male jealousy -- by flouncing off and landing in Harrison Ford's lap. Come dawn and they're so solidly committed to each other that Steve isn't going away to college anymore, which means that in a few years, he'll have someone handy to blame for the fact that he's stuck in a shitty job in the same podunk town he grew up in, and she can't look at him without thinking about the twenty minutes when she was Indiana Jones' girl.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Harrison Ford and Rachel McAdams Wake to “Morning Glory”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Harrison Ford will play a “grizzled old-school anchor in the Ted Koppel mold who quits in disgust with the gossip-heavy direction of the evening newscast” in Morning Glory, per The Hollywood Reporter. “He is then recruited by a hot up-and-coming producer (Rachel McAdams) to help revive a morning talk show, only to be paired with his rival.” J.J. Abrams is producing under his Bad Robot banner.

Gore Verbinski is developing a project based on a 2007 Wall Street Journal article “about the online fantasy role-playing world and its detrimental impact on the real lives of players,” Variety reports. “The article by Alexandra Alter focuses on a married man who spends as many as 20 hours a day on a computer, existing through an avatar who is a thriving, musclebound entrepreneur. In reality, he is a diabetic, chain-smoking 53-year-old.” Verbinski needs a title. How about Second Skin?

Cheech and Chong aren’t ready to put down the bong anytime soon. In addition to the live concert movie already announced, the duo will join forces for Cheech and Chong's Smokin' Animated Movie, based on their library of classic comedy routines. “"It's great to be doing a movie where Cheech and I never have to get out of bed or be on camera," Chong said.

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The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Star Wars Holiday Special"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:25:00 GMT

The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved. Notorious would be a better word. Infamous would be another. It also isn't a movie; it's a television special. What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix. In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it. Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years. Or unless you have Google video. Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release: George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special? It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke. It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it. It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good. It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it. Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

Written and produced during a brief period of time when it wasn't completely certain how humongously successful the Star Wars mythos would become, its creators decided to cash in by putting together something that combined the worst elements of the sci-fi classic with the utter dregs of 1970s variety shows. To get one thing out of the way, the Star Wars Holiday Special does contain the first appearance of Boba Fett, in a nifty little animated sequence by Canada's legendary studio Nelvana. Beyond that, though, it is 100% utterly horrible and awful from the first frame to the last. It's so bad, you don't even know how it ended up on TV even in the late '70s. The plot, such as it is, involves Chewbacca's quest to defy an Imperial barricade and get home to spend "Life Day' -- a sort of outer-space super-Christmas -- with his Wookie family. But the Special isn't so much a story with a plot as it is a bunch of completely disastrous moments strung together so incoherently that it makes you want to commit suicide. At times, you begin to suspect that the Star Wars Holiday Special is what the head of the Silver Shamrock Corporation should have gone with in Halloween III instead of those lame masks that turned kids' heads into bugs.

Picking out the worst moment of the Star Wars Holiday special is like picking out the worst moment of the Second World War: it's really just one unspeakable horror after another, only WWII ended sooner. Every time you think you've seen a scene that is as ungodly bad as it can possibly get, another scene that's even worse shows up, and then you look at your watch and you realize that there's still an hour and a half left to go before it's over. A mere listing of some of the most memorable scenes should be enough to scare off any sane human being: there's the scene where Chewbacca's wife, son and father -- Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy -- bellow at each other in Wookie-speak (which resembles a couple of dying walruses bellowing at each other) for something like fifteen minutes, with no subtitles. There's the scene where Art Carney walks around with his shirt open to the belly-button talking about how he loves to make a Wookie happy. There's the scene where the nauseating old freak Itchy watches Wookie porn, which involves Dihanne Carroll manning a futuristic phone sex line, and makes profoundly disturbing Wookie pleasure noises. There's the scene where an Imperial storm trooper watches a Jefferson Starship music video for no discernable reason. There's the scene where Mark Hammill shows up wearing more makeup than Joan Crawford (and looking considerably less butch, to boot). There's the musical number by a coked-out-of-her-gourd Carrie Fisher, which would be the worst musical number in television history if it weren't for the fact that it comes after an even worse musical number by Bea Arthur. (Yes, that's right, Bea Arthur is part of the Star Wars canon, and there's nothing you can do about it, fanboys.) There's not one, not two, but three comedic roles by Harvey Korman, one of which involves him playing an outer space version of Julia Child called Chef Gormaanda. There's the scene where Han Solo kills a guy just to break up the monotony. And more, more, so much more.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is mind-numbingly bad, but it has a special cachet because of its inexplicable attachment to one of the most popular film franchises of all time. Fans of utter kitsch will enjoy it on its own merits -- I mean, honestly, this thing reeks so bad it's simply amazing that no one breaks character and asks director Steve Binder just what the fuck he think's he's doing -- but for Star Wars fans, it's virtually a rite of passage: if you can watch this colossal stench-bomb, featuring almost all the original cast, and still call yourself a fan, no one can dare question your loyalty to the franchise ever again.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An uncontrollable 2 turtledoves crapping all over your kitchen. The only way this thing could possibly be any worse is if it had Jar Jar Binks and/or Hayden Christensen in it.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start). Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

LOST HORIZON (1973)

It’s a cliché to say that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia; the only way to make it interesting is to show us why. Lost Horizon, a 1973 remake of a 1937 classic, sets out to show us how even the best human intentions can make a Hell of Heaven, and it certainly succeeds, but not in the way it intends. Instead of illustrating its point by skillfully telling how a group of outsiders come to Shangri-La and spoil its utopian purity with their unchecked desires, it illustrates the concept of a dystopia by being a really, really shitty movie. It’s hard to know exactly what the worst thing about this stink-bomb of a musical is: is it the crappy songs, surely the worst things ever to have Burt Bacharach’s name attached? Is it the bad acting from bad actors, or the worse acting from good actors? Is it Charles Jarrott’s incompetent directing, Larry Kramer’s wildly stupid screenplay, or producer Ross Hunter’s ability to spend gobs of money on a movie that looks absolutely terrible? Yeah, those are all good candidates, but for our money, the worst part is the decision to make it a singing, dancing musical and then cast people in it – the corpselike Peter Finch, the ungulate Liv Ullman, the bombed-out-of-her-mind Sally Kellerman, and the completely lost George Kennedy – who have no apparent ability to dance or sing. Let’s not even get into Bobby Van. Long unavailable for home audiences, Lost Horizon is a so-bad-it’s-just-incredibly-bad classic that screams for a DVD release.

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Movies have shown us a near infinite number of futuristic dystopias, but few of them have seemed as plausible as the Los Angeles of 2019 in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece. Heavy enough is the basic plot, which is the stepping stone to all sorts of explorations on the nature of memory, the meaning of freedom, and what it is to be human: in the near future, big corporations provide humanity with perfect duplicates, android servants who do our dirty work so that we can have lives of luxury. What makes them not human, and what will happen if they decide that being human is just what they want, even if it means their own destruction? But beyond that, there are eerie convocations of class, race, and wealth that seem eerily relevant today: the future L.A. is populated with losers. Those with money and connections – save for the corporate masters who stay behind to manufacture the androids – have left earth for a cushy life in the outer space colonies, while the rabble remain behind. Scott’s masterful imagination of the futuristic city is stunningly evocative: an ethnic mélange, a collision of fashions and cultures, sex and violence around every corner, crooked cops and criminals alike speaking a curious language that is an amalgam of dozens of immigrant voices. The losers live by scrounging, while the winners sit in remote towers above them. The vision of a dystopic futuristic metropolis as imagined by Scott (and Philip K. Dick) was so compelling that Blade Runner later became a founding document of the cyberpunk movement.

SLACKER (1991)

Here's the thing about utopias: your ideal society may not look a whole hell of a lot like mine. Yours may resemble the Garden of Eden, perhaps with a chocolate river running through it, but mine probably looks a lot like Richard Linklater's no-budget 1991 debut Slacker. Here's a magical land full of interesting people, and you don't have to spend more than two minutes with any of them. It's a bohemian crazy quilt of coffee houses, bars, rock clubs and used book stores crammed with conspiracy literature, a laid-back enclave percolating with oddball creativity, where time has no meaning. When I first moved to Austin more than a dozen years ago, hardly a day went by that I didn't run into Ultimate Loser at the Continental Club or Been on the Moon Since the Fifties on the hike and bike trail, and it was almost – but not quite – as if I'd found myself living in the movie. (One of the characters nearly punched me in the eye for hitting on his girlfriend, which is a nice memory to have now, if not so much fun then.) Austin is still a cool place to live, all things considered, but it's changed so much since then that Slacker is almost a relic; you could make a drinking game out of spotting the locations that have since been supplanted by condos or Starbucks. Still, it's nice to know I can still visit that place any time I want just by cueing up the Slacker DVD.

V FOR VENDETTA (2005)

The fascist England of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, upon which the James McTeigue film was based, was a very British affair: tawdry, dirty, steeped in a very 1930s understanding of totalitarianism and suffused with an English sense of racial purity. The film did what such films always do – it took liberties. (Which is why Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his work.) Gone was a the filthy, hardscrabble Orwellian vision of a nearby dystopia, triggered by an unexplained nuclear exchange: in its place was a very modern authoritarian state, its parallels to Bush’s America as blaring and obvious as Moore’s references to Thatcher’s England were subtle and quiet. The great dictator is transformed from a hard, driven, religious man to a cartoonish supervillain appearing on giant screens as if he were a James Bond nemesis; his right-hand man is transformed from an advantage-taking careerist to a sneering Dick Cheney type; nuclear conflict becomes terrorism, blacks lose their status as the scapegoat of choice to Muslims; and, in a choice that painfully subverts the intent of the original, the state’s highest crime isn’t oppression, it’s deceit. In the absence of the fascist trappings, and the obvious references to modern society (completely with the recreation of state propaganda with talk-show blathering), the story loses much of its muscle. But the terrorist V remains a powerful symbol, and a memorable scene where police inspector Stephen Rea dispassionately explains, like a man who’s seen it happen a dozen times before, how state authority easily gets out of hand, is a compelling vision of the simple corruption of power.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We're used to seeing actors endorse political candidates, but not like this: in an interview with that distinguished cultural journal Parade, Daniel Craig sizes up the American candidates for president and decides which of them is best-suited to take his job. After asking Craig about which Hollywood "tough guy" he would most like to emulate (“The obvious choice for me would be Bogart. Not only because of that ease he had with his unique take on masculinity, but also—and this is much more important—because he got to sleep with Lauren Bacall.”), interviewer Kevin Sessums hits him with the big one: “Who do you think would be the better James Bond—Barack Obama or John McCain?” As Sessums reports, "Craig doesn’t hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because—if he’s true to his word—he’d be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond’s boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'”

In other election season movie news, Reuters is reporting that a majority of people who responded to a Moviephone.com poll voted Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One as their favorite movie president, coming in ahead of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. Trying to explain this, Moviefone's Scott Robson says, "It seems everybody is looking for a commander-in-chief who can come in and take command. Our readers voted with their hearts at a time when you have the economy going down the tubes, but in an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass." It will be remembered that presidents Ford and Freeman stood up to Gary Oldman in a Satanic goatee and a big fucking rock from space, respectively. Others who made it onto the top ten include Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!, and Jeff Bridges in The Contender, who, respectively and with varying results, stood up to alien attackers, more alien attackers, and Gary Oldman in an Antonin Scalia haircut. E. G. Marshall in Superman II finished out of the money entirely, proving that if you balance the budget but also kneel before invading Kryptonian supermen, one guess which act is the one that everyone remembers.

Jabba The Portly Irish Gent

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If you've ever read any of my posts on the Screengrab before, you may recall that I am a tremendous dork.

As such, I tend to get inordinately excited when I stumble across Star Wars-related ephemera on YouTube that most fans have probably known about for years.

Back in April, for instance, I discovered, much to my amazement, that George Lucas had actually filmed all those scenes I'd only ever heard about in the Star Wars novelization (and Marvel Comics adaptation) where Luke Skywalker hangs out with Biggs Darklighter and his other no-account pals in Anchorhead on Tatooine.

And now what to my wondering eyes should appear but the original footage of Han Solo confronting Jabba the Hut in the Millenium Falcon's Mos Eisley docking bay, way back when Jabba was played by big-boned Irish actor Declan Mulholland rather than the CGI slug that replaced him in the 1997 Special "Greedo Shoots First" Edition of the movie.

If the preceding paragraph is old news or complete gibberish to you, then by all means just scroll on by to one of the Screengrab's other fine blog offerings...but for any fellow geeks who've never had the pleasure of seeing Harrison Ford menaced by a furry Weeble, enjoy!

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

BURT REYNOLDS (1936 - )

It may be hard for you young whippersnappers to believe, but 30 years ago, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. He'd be the first to admit that his career management skills were never a match for his good ol' boy charisma and winking, bubblegum-popping likability – in fact, he's practically made a second career out of admitting it. His forgettable early career in television and B-movies (Navajo Joe, anyone?) isn't what convinced John Boorman to cast Reynolds in his breakthrough role in Deliverance; rather, it was his easy command of the Carson panel as a guest host of The Tonight Show that led to his star-making turn as Lewis Medlock. His Southern charm and Marlboro Man looks led to a series of redneck roles, from White Lightning to Smokey and the Bandit, which became the second-highest grossing movie of 1977, behind only Star Wars. Reynolds went to that well a few times too many, famously turning down Terms of Endearment to reteam with hick flickster Hal Needham for Stroker Ace. His career never came close to returning to the heights of Smokey, but he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Boogie Nights. True to form, he fired his agent after seeing the rough cut, fearing his career was ruined…and then when the movie instead revived his career, he squandered the comeback opportunity by going right back to making crap again.

STEVE McQUEEN (1930-1980)

Steve McQueen's best-known roles didn't require him to do much other than be Steve McQueen, but really, who cares? A lot of leading men coast by on personal charm; that's sorta what people like about them. And the thing that made Steve McQueen popular had nothing to do with his acting chops and everything to do with how fucking cool Steve McQueen was. He was so cool that just typing his name over and over again makes me feel cooler. So he made himself a star by stealing The Magnificent Seven from bigger-name actors, just by being cool. He convinced John Sturges to put a motorcycle chase into The Great Escape, because motorcycle chases were cool, and he was Steve McQueen, dammit. He effortlessly makes The Thomas Crown Affair a fun movie to watch. And Bullitt, man! There's nothing even approaching acting in that movie, but McQueen just kills. I think people were surprised when it turned out that McQueen could act after all. His roles in Junior Bonner and Papillon called on him to do something with all that legendary cool, and McQueen delivered in spades. He wasn't so great in The Getaway, and no one got out of The Towering Inferno without some stink. He made only a few more movies before his all-too-early death in 1980. But he left a legacy of untouchable cool backed by unsuspected competence that's unique among actors too fucking cool to break a sweat while making something as inconsequential as a movie.

HARRISON FORD (1942 - )

For a lesson in the importance of Leading Man star power, one need look no further than the disparity between the first Star Wars trilogy and the second. Sure, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith had shinier special effects, and Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and even Hayden Christensen have all been known to deliver fine acting performances (albeit in non-green screen environments)...but Ford managed to bring a recognizably human heart to his half of the trilogy despite the hokey dialogue and distracting special effects, and then he went on to prove his Leading Man status in all the Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan and other ‘80s and ‘90s tentpole action flicks that followed. For some, none of Ford’s films matter as much as the cult classic Blade Runner, and his female fan base may have a particular soft spot for Witness or Working Girl...but Ford’s inability to expand his range much beyond the action genre (despite interesting against-type anomalies like The Mosquito Coast, What Lies Beneath and “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck”) keeps him batting clean-up the Honorable Mention list rather than enshrined in our Top 25.

WILLIAM POWELL (1892-1984)

In the days when Americans still dreamed of embodying classy sophistication, before we all started hating elitists and shooting wolves from helicopters, Powell was as classy as you could get without actually turning English. Of all the homegrown American stars of his day, he may be the one who it's hardest to imagine doing time in a Western between trips to Manhattan. He was built to swill cocktails and trade wisecracks, but his eyelids, which he kept permanently at half-mast, signaled that he was dangerously close to becoming jaded. The only solution was for him to find the perfect woman and verbal sparring partner -- you didn't want him turning cold and becoming one of those rich rotters, but you also didn't want him coming after your girlfriend or sister. So when Powell met Myrna Loy for the first time on-screen, the nation must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. He had co-starred with other actresses, notably Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, and he also had a well-known off-screen connection to Jean Harlow before she died, but his partnership with Loy struck so many people as so ineffably perfect (like picking up the paper to see if your favorite wastrel buddy from college had been forced into rehab yet and discovering instead that he'd married the first duchess to be crowned Playmate of the Year) that they wound up doing fourteen pictures together, including six installments of the Thin Man series. (Their first co-starring gig, which was released the same year as The Thin Man, was Manhattan Melodrama, in which Powell, as a politically ambitious D.A., marries Loy after Clark Gable, who plays a gangster, has had his fun with her; at the end, Gable winds up happily going to the electric chair after whacking Powell's crooked rival, because he isn't about to stand by and see his beloved New York denied having such a handsome-looking couple make it to the Governor's mansion. Manhattan Melodrama now has its place in history as the movie that John Dillinger was watching just before G-men mowed him down as he was leaving the theater. I'll bet he had a good time.) After supporting Henry Fonda in the 1955 Mister Roberts, Powell retired and stayed that way, for almost thirty years, until his death at 91.

CHOW YUN-FAT (1955 - )

Chow was being called things like "the most photogenic man alive" and "the coolest actor in the world" when his movies were still available only to American movie fans who lived in cities with significant Chinatown districts. As it is, the pull of his image had a awful lot to do with the craze for Hong Kong movies that started among Western film geeks in the late 1980s and would lead to Hollywood trying to buy up most of the hottest Chinese directors. But John Woo, who made Chow a star with the 1986 A Better Tomorrow and then made him the sort of figure for whom words such as "star" seem inadequate with The Killer, Once a Thief, and Hard-Boiled, has yet to do anything as good in Hollywood as his early work, and while there are many factors that might help explain this, the failure of his American films to include footage of Chow's face is one that should not be underestimated. Chow himself has taken to focusing on the great dream of cracking the American market, haltingly and with some very strange results: his role in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie was scissored by officials in his home country who felt that the characterization was "in line with Hollywood’s old tradition of demonizing the Chinese." At 55, Chow could probably benefit from finding a new stage to sustain his career a while longer. If he does, some of us won't care if it means that he's doing his acting while speaking phonetically-learned Portuguese.

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI (1924-1996)

For most of his long career, and even now, years after his death, Mastroianni was probably the best-known internationally of all Italian movie stars, and indeed, he did seem to have the field pretty well covered. He achieved great popular success in comedies such as Big Deal on Madonna Street and Divorce, Italian Style, but he also happened to arrive in time to embody the tortured-artist/modern man figure that was so important to such directors as Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2), Antonioni (La Notte), and Visconti (The Stranger). Though he gave handsome bearing and weight to these iconic roles, he usually seemed happiest playing ordinary men cast into remarkable circumstances that throw their frailties and limitations into sharp relief. At the very end of his career, when he was in his seventies, he worked with such veteran avant-garde directors as Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death) and the ninety-ish Manoel de Oliveira (Voyage to the Beginning of the World), as if he were still hoping to learn from those odder and even older than himself. His experiences in English-language pictures -- John Boorman's Leo the Last, Robert Altman's Ready to Wear -- were few and far between and not particularly successful, but he did once send a shout-out to his American fans by appearing on an episode of Laugh-In and giving the camera his best soulful, romantic look while ripping off his toupee.

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Raiders of the Leaked Frank Darabont Screenplay

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Somewhere in the crush of publicity for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you might have heard that an early version of Indy 4 was scripted by that master of the Stephen King prison movie, Frank Darabont. Among the people who spoke highly of the Darabont script was…Frank Darabont, who made it clear while doing publicity for The Mist over a year ago that he wouldn’t be sending George Lucas any congratulatory bouquets. “I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn't like the script,” Darabont told MTV. “I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You have a fantastic script. I think you're insane, George.’ You can say things like that to George, and he doesn't even blink. He's one of the most stubborn men I know.” When asked if he’d like to share his version of Indy with the world, Darabont replied, “I would love it, but it's not my material to disseminate.”

Apparently, someone disseminated it, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Last week a PDF document purporting to be Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods by Frank Darabont surfaced online. Lawyers torpedoed it before we could get our hands on it, and although it’s probably still easy enough to track down, we’re slow readers anyway. So we thought we’d take a spin around the Indysphere and see if there’s any consensus about this alleged artifact.

The first thing that’s apparent: No LaBeouf. That’s right, the character of “Mutt” is entirely absent from City of the Gods. Again, per MTV: “No Mutt Williams; no Mac; a tougher, more Raiders-esque Marion; and a climax that not only gives Indy something to do (how in the world did David Koepp think to give Indy nothing?) but forces him to make a decision that rivals the end of Crusade (the cup or a father's love?), crystallizing the character and his history into one momentous singularity.” And here we thought One Momentous Singularity was the new James Bond movie.

According to the Feed, “the script is largely the same, storywise, focusing on the discovery of the crystal skull, as well as the lost city in Peru where the Gods were thought to live, only to discover that these "gods" were aliens with a culture advanced thousands of years beyond our own. Also, Marion Ravenwood is in the script…and, to my surprise, the ‘nuking the fridge’ sequence and the giant ants are there, as well. However, also in this script are Dr. Henry Jones, Sr. and Sallah, making awesome cameo appearances that really help cement the whole history of Indiana Jones, and tie the whole saga together.”

Of course, Darabont was not the only big name scribe to take a whack at Indy. Again we turn to MTV, where M. Night Shyamalan was queried about his involvement in shaping the story of the fourth installment. “I was just gathering information at that point from all the deities,” Shyamalan said, referring to Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, [Frank] Marshall, and George Lucas. “I haven’t seen the new one yet. I can’t wait… I understand there are a few things we all talked about that are there.” I’m going to be generous and assume Night came up with the quicksand.

Related:
Screengrab Rant: Indiana Jones in 2008
Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Hollywood Accountants

Morning Deal Report Returns

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Please, people, stop with the telegrams and picket lines and frivolous lawsuits already! We get it! You can’t live without the Screengrab’s daily roundup of the latest wheeling and dealing out of Hollywood. You need to know which superheroes, videogames and misguided horror remakes may or may not ever make it someday to a theater near you. Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear, and we’re pleased to present the return of the Morning Deal Report.

Speaking of videogames, the Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on Gears of War, to be directed by Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard) for the “reconfigured” New Line. “Set on the planet Sera, the game thrusts players into a battle for survival between humans and a race of creatures that surface from the bowels of the planet known as the Locust Horde. Players assume identities of soldiers on Delta Squad as they fight to save Sera's inhabitants.” The game’s designer, Cliff Bleszinski, says, “Disney made a great movie out of a theme park ride, and somebody is sooner or later going to make a great one out of a video game.” And by that logic, sooner or later someone will make a great movie out of stereo instructions.

Variety reports that Sam Raimi will helm the latest Dennis Lehane adaptation, this one of a book that hasn’t even been released yet. The Given Day, due in September, revisits Lehane’s Boston turf, this time in 1919 “with the city in turmoil as soldiers are returning home from WWI, having brought back an epidemic of Spanish influenza. Attempts to unionize the police department have set the stage for a historic strike and two cops take center stage.” The same report notes that Raimi is “also aligned to reinvent the Jack Ryan franchise at Paramount,” presumably without either Harrison Ford or fellow Lehane adapter Ben Affleck.

And some news that’s either out of Variety or one of my deepest, darkest nightmares: Kevin Spacey will star in Shrink as a psychiatrist to the stars whose clients include Robin Williams. Stock up on scenery, because there won’t be any left once these two are finished chewing it.

Taverns on the Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine example of the way lazy, excessive reliance on ridiculous CGI (and CGI monkeys) can ruin an otherwise passable movie. And there’s no finer argument for the good ol’ fashioned non-CGI pleasures of real world filmmaking than the Nepalese bar sequence in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. To recap: winsome badass Karen Allen (oh, Hollywood, HOW did you ever let her get away?) drinks a yak-herder under the table, then her flaky ex-boyfriend shows up while she’s all full o’ rotgut and she slaps him in the face and sends him on his way. And THEN, creepy Nazi torturer Toht (a.k.a. Mr. Melty-Face) shows up with a bunch of evil minions and things really get interesting. What follows is a master class in cinematic action, pacing, camera placement, stuntwork, pyrotechnics, performance and editing...all without a bluescreen (or hangover) in sight.

ON_LINE (2002)

Okay, so maybe I’m biased, given that I co-wrote this one (with director Jed Weintrob), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the scene in this under-the-radar internet sex comedy where neurotic shut-in John (Josh Hamilton) goes to an odious, overpriced Manhattan nightclub on a disastrous double-date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), the wild cybersex enthusiast he picked up on the internet, his oversexed roommate, Moe (Harold Perrineau, Jr.) and Moe’s pill-popping, manic-depressive girlfriend (Isabel Gillies). But don’t take my word for it: in a Salon review that (almost but not quite) made up for any number of really quite nasty reviews of the film, the extremely cultured and discerning Andrew O'Hehir summed up the appeal of the scene thusly: “John's nightclub internal monologue, as he watches Jordan dance and reflects on how hot she is, how shallow he is for thinking that and how little chance he has of actually getting in her pants in the off-line world, is probably the movie's high point.” Thanks, Mr. O’Hehir...I couldn’ t have said it better myself!

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Before that dastardly Hedley Lamar (played with nefarious gusto by the late Harvey Korman) decided to run the railroad through it, the hamlet of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had everything an Old West town needed: a church, a hoosegow for when Mongo came to town, and proximity to the Hollywood Hills. And, of course, it had its own saloon. But unlike most of the filthy, rowdy joints in the history of westerns, this particular saloon was always kept nice and clean, thanks to the stewardship of the unfortunately named Anal Johnson. All that came to an end, however, with the arrival of the Teutonic songbird Lili von Shtupp, played with Dietrichian élan by the Oscar-nominated Madeline Kahn. Lili’s world-weary act, sweet set of curves, and foul-mouthed stage patter (“Why don’t you get your friggin’ feet off the stage?”) brings every rough rider in the county, but it’s her love of that delicious schnitzengruben that leads Lamar to hire her to seduce and abandon Bart, the new sheriff in town. In one of the most memorable scenes ever set in an Old West saloon, Lili sighs out “I’m Tired” before being carried off, James Brown-style, by her backup dancers and deposited in the arms of Sheriff Bart – who, it turns out, has more schnitzengruben than she can handle.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

It’s a scene we’ve watch play out a million times in a million action movies: a nameless bar in the middle of nowhere is taken over by a generic group of bikers, who wreak havoc in the place until they push the wrong guy just a little bit too far. But William Peter Blatty’s disturbing cult hit The Ninth Configuration is no typical action movie, and the bar fight won’t play out in a typical way. The set-up to the scene is more complex than it seems: mentally disturbed former astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), disillusioned that sensitive psychiatrist Col. Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) has turned out to be a blood-soaked Marine Corps commando, escapes from an asylum and seeks refuge in liquor at the nameless biker bar. A combination of booze, despair and a smart mouth enrages the boss bikers (the unstable brute Stanley and the cunning, sadistic Richard, played by the gaunt, devil-faced Richard Lynch), who abuse Cutshaw until Kane arrives to rescue him. Kane, who has forsaken violence and taken up the mantle of the caring, well-meaning shrink in order to bury his own murderous past, attempts to come to a peaceful resolution, but finally he can take no more. The scene that follows is one of the most stunning bar fights every captured on film – although to call it a fight ignores what truly happens: Kane utterly annihilates the biker gang in a matter of seconds, killing a number of them. It’s an astonishing scene, and even more astonishing is the fact that it’s not even the climax of The Ninth Configuration.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

In an audio commentary track recorded for the French Connection DVD, Gene Hackman described Eddie Egan, the real-life model for Hackman's obsessed narc "Popeye" Doyle, as having been "flippant" to a degree that he'd never encountered before in a human being. It's easy to imagine the conversation among the patrons of the Harlem bar that Popeye raids after he's stormed in and out like a hurricane: "That fellow was certainly flippant, wasn't he? I'm a fervent supporter of our boys in blue, but speaking as an amateur observer of the law enforcement process, I can't help feeling that some of that flippancy was unwarranted! Here, help me tie off this tourniquet?" The raid, which is actually a cover for a meeting in the men's room between Popeye and an informant, establishes Popeye's adversarial relationship to the city's civilian population, his casual racism, and the gleefully sadistic tinge to his brutality. (Obliged to rough up his informant so that no one will suspect the guy is a rat, Popeye asks him, "Where do you want it?" The man thinks about it for a second and points to his right cheek, and Popeye slugs him on his left. The blow looks hard enough to crack the guy's jaw, but this is Popeye when he's just playing.) In a recent interview in Reason, Ed Burns, the twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department turned TV writer whose HBO series The Wire dismantled the logic behind the nation's "war on drugs", called the scene "iconic" and blamed it for instilling the wrong mindset in a generation of cops by "put[ting] out the idea of this guy who cracks heads," Popeye set police work back by reinforcing the idea that cops should act like swaggering badasses instead of establishing a functional relationship with their communities. So if you're a fan of The Wire -- a not uncommon condition among Screengrab writers -- then give it up for Popeye Doyle; without him, The Wire might not have been necessary.

Related Stories:

Tavern On The Screens - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

CGI Must Die: Five Reasons Why

Harvey Korman, 1927--2008

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

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

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

Back in my misspent Hollywood days, my friends and I used to enjoy the occasional round of “bar golf” through the dives and strip clubs of Hollywood Boulevard. The rules were simple: a “par one” bar meant we’d have one drink and move on, “par two” meant two drinks, etc., and the goal was to drink in at least nine separate bars by the end of the night. We’d usually “tee off” in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, followed by pitchers of cheap beer in the “par two” Power House on Highland, and somehow the night always seemed to wind up with fire-breathing transvestite strippers at Jumbo’s Clown Room.

And so now, in honor of the recent Memorial Day kickoff to the official Summer Drinking Season, we here at The Screengrab invite you to join us on another pub crawl, though the Top 15 watering holes of cinema...so brace yourself with a nice starchy meal, grab your smokes and aspirin, and join us as we tee off at our first bar of the evening...

THE DRESDEN ROOM, SWINGERS (1996)

Unlike most of the bars on this list, The Dresden Room actually exists in the real world (1760 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Feliz, CA), as well as the fictional universe of Jon Favreau’s neo-rat pack classic Swingers. Maybe it was just the booze talking, but whenever my friends and I would hit the swanky-tacky Dresden on the Back Nine of an East Hollywood bar golf jaunt, we’d all feel as “money” as Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston and the rest of the film’s hepcat posse of unemployed actors, even though I’m pretty sure we never (A) dressed as well, (B) Lindy-Hopped as well or (C) scored digits from (or even met) any super-friendly, super-nice, conveniently single ladies with the suspiciously low standards and drop-dead movie star looks of Heather Graham’s swing-dance enthusiast, Lorraine (who, in L.A., at least, is a mythological figure on par with Liv Tyler’s elf princess in The Lord of the Rings). We did, however, spend plenty of nights enjoying the peculiar jazz stylings of Dresden’s house band staples, Marty & Elayne, who also straddle the line between reality and fiction...much like our drinking buddy a little further down the street in...

THE SKID ROW DIVE BARS OF BARFLY (1987)

To all my freeeeenz! The late Charles Bukowki, the poet laureate of the Thunderbird wine company, wrote this semi-autobiographical fantasy after he himself had stopped going to bars, and he must have wanted to get both his dream image of himself -- the great wino writer Henry Chinaski, played by Mickey Rourke -- and his idea of the bar of his dreams on film to warm himself in his dried-out dotage. The bar in question is a magical place where the women all look like hookers played by Sylvia Miles and the men stand around gawking in awe as our boy Henry shows off his verbal gifts by giving the bartender-bouncer (Frank Stallone) such tips as, "Your mother's cunt stinks like carpet cleaner." When Rourke (who holds his body here in a way that makes him look like a chicken carcass that was taken apart and reassembled by a blind crackhead with a science project due) and Stallone aren't taking turns going back in the alley to stomp a mud hole in each other's ass, Faye Dunaway and Alice Krige are celebrating Ladies' Night by rolling around on the floor, having a diva cat fight over this gorgeous hunk of man. They were going to include a scene showing what goes on there during Trivia Night, but then the picture would have been rated NC-17.

Next stop...the future, as we settle in for a little synthetic skin (and we don’t mean silicon boobs) at...

TAFFEY’S BAR, BLADE RUNNER (1982)

The world of Ridley Scott’s masterful Blade Runner is, for all its gorgeous set design, a pretty intimidating one: creepy warehouses full of nervous marionettes, run-down tenements and strangely glowing noodle shops, and huge corporate arcologies belching fire into the skies of Los Angeles. The only place we can see really spending a lot of time in the L.A. of 2019 is at Taffey Lewis’ rambunctious nightclub. It’s got a highly picturesque clientele, chainsmoking weird tobaccos and speaking the polyglot Creole of the moment; Taffey himself (greasily portrayed by Hy Pyke) always has Louie the bartender ready to hand out free drinks to anyone who can jeopardize his liquor license; and best of all, it’s a full-service erotic establishment, complete with robotic animal acts and the finest in genetically engineered bestiality. In fact, until her unexpected retirement, it was the only place in town where you could see the lovely Zhora (Joanna Cassidy, a million miles from Falcon Crest) “take the pleasures from the serpent which once corrupted Man”! Now that’s the kind of entertainment that money just can’t buy.

Tired of the city? Then grab a designated driver and we’ll head out to the desert for last call at...

THE BEER TAVERN, FEAST (2005)

This horror comedy, directed by John Gulager, is, if you'll excuse a real low ball of a compliment, by far the best of the movies produced by the Miramax-sponsored Project Greenlight TV series and talent contest. It's set in the Beer Tavern, a rickety-looking juke joint whose customers have to get all Straw Dogs when the place is besieged by slavering, man-eating monsters. It's a real mystery where they've come from -- the customers, I mean. The Beer Tavern looks to be set all by itself in the middle of a desert, and the people there appear to be a modest cross-section of everyone within a hundred miles who've worn out their welcome in all the more civilized establishments and no longer dare stick their head in the door anywhere else for fear of getting it shot off. Luckily, the bar is so well-equipped with secret exits and tunnels and hidey-holes, as well as such diversionary elements as the deer head mounted on the wall that one of the monsters, well, mounts, that it seems to have been constructed with a creature assault in mind. When Judah Friedlander is one of your best customers, it pays to take every precaution.

And, since we’re heading north anyway, might as well stop in for a quick one at...

THE PINK ROOM, TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

Welcome to Canada! The conversation may not be all that stimulating ("I am the Great Went." "Don't expect a turkey dog here."), if you can even hear it, but the ambiance is out of this world. In our recent list of TV shows-turned-movies, we singled out this scene from Fire Walk with Me, noting that it's "set in what appears to be Satan's roadhouse." That's evident from the pulsing red lighting, the grinding, relentless rock band (playing a Lynch-composed track called "The Pink Room," which may or may not be the name of this place) and the array of seedy characters and half-naked zombie-women among the clientele. This is where innocence comes to die, as Laura Palmer, who long ago lost it, learns when she spots squeaky-clean pal Donna in a drugged topless clinch on the dance floor. As you can see from the above clip, somebody thinks this is one of the worst movie scenes of all time, which is ludicrous. It contains at least two signature Lynch shots I'll take to my grave: a vertiginous, drunken whirl past the repulsive Jacques Renault and into the lights above, and a pan across the unbelievably filthy floor, piled high with broken bottles and the smoking ash from thousands of cigarette butts.

Then it’s back across the border for a little marital advice at...

THE OVERLOOK HOTEL BAR FROM THE SHINING (1980)

On the surface, this nook in the corner of the Overlook Hotel's grand ballroom would appear to be the perfect bar. The stock is self-replenishing, you have the bartender's full attention, and most importantly, your money's no good here. On the other hand, since the place is supposed to be closed up for the winter and completely deserted except for you and your wife and son, there might be a problem: either you're crazy or the joint is haunted or both. But why worry about that? It's always New Year's Eve here, and Lloyd – "the best goddamn bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine – or Portland, Oregon for that matter" – will always be happy to serve you the hair of the dog. As long as you steer clear of awkward encounters with the waitstaff in the blood-red bathroom…what could possibly go wrong?

And speaking of bathrooms, we’re gonna take a quick break to go “powder our nose,” but we’ll meet you over in Chicago for Part Two of the Screengrab Pub Crawl!

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

Indiana Jones and the Running Dog Lackey of the Capitalist Propaganda Machine

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When Indiana Jones fought Nazis back in his movies made in the 1980s, any old German war criminals hiding out in Brazil and keeping up their subscription to Variety were probably just grateful to be remembered. They sure didn't call any press conferences. But now that Indy is fighting a hot KGB agent (played by Cate Blanchett in She-Wolf of Siberia drag) in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, some old Russian Communist party members are peeved. These guys have been stubbornly holding onto the faith since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than fifteen years ago, and now, as if they didn't have it tough enough, they have to put up with Harrison Ford prancing across the screen to rub it in their faces? "What galls," says one party member, Viktor Perov, "is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have no shame." Sure, sure, but what have done for us lately? And don't think we've forgotten about The Blue Bird, Comrade.

The new Indiana Jones movie opened last week on more than 800 screens in Russia. The party members are concerned that ill-informed youngsters will come away from it with their heads stuffed with lies about Russian activities in the previous century, which they equate with "ideological sabotage." Example: "In 1957," insists St. Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich, "the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the U.S." Oh, I don't know, everybody thinks they know their history so much better than the kids these days. As Criswell used to say, can you really prove that it didn't happen? In any case, there's a late-blooming, presumably doomed campaign to ban the film. There's also a call to deny Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett, described by one aggrieved party member as "running dogs of the CIA"-- just like Omar Sharif,-- entrance to the country. This last move they maybe could have thought out a little better. If you've seen Ford's face while he's been doing his publicity chores, having his chest waxed to raise awareness of the plight of the rain forests and staring in disbelief at someone who asked him whether Indiana Jones would beat Han Solo in a fight (Indiana Jones and Han Solo would never get in a fight, because Han Solo lets his Wookie kick people's asses for him), you might suspect that he'd consider being called a running dog a small price to pay not to have to meet the Moscow equivalent of Regis and Kathie Lee.

OST: "Blade Runner"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Blade Runner has been described as a movie where everything comes together. This might seem like an odd description for such a rambunction mess of a film, which was marred by so much studio interference and difficulties in editing that director Ridley Scott felt that the director's cut of the movie left something to be desired, but what's meant is that it was a movie that in many ways was the career peak for everyone involved. Scott, a talented visionary but also an undisciplined egomaniac, never again made a film where he was so fully in command of his powers. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher went on to do some interesting work, but nothing on this level. Harrison Ford became a superstar, but one often defined by mediocrity and flatness; Sean Young's career would be sunk by rumors of her unpredictable emotional state; and Rutger Hauer would sabotage his own acting talents by appearing in anything that came with a paycheck -- but all three turned in fantastic performances. Even the movie's rich population of character actors, all of whom did great work elsewhere, seemed to hit their peak in Blade Runner -- including Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Brion James, and Joe Terkel. Even Daryl Hannah isn't an embarrassment. The cinematography is among Jordan Cronenweth's best; the set direction, costumes, and production design are all top-notch; and it would be far and away the best movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel -- not that the author would live to see any of the rotten ones to come.

Even the composer of the film's score did what many consider to be his best work in Blade Runner. Vangelis (born Evangelos Papathanassiou) had built a career around his light New Age compositions that, if they weren't exactly triumphant, were at least slightly less boring than the music of most of his peers, but he scored a major success in 1981 with his stirring soundtrack work for Chariots of Fire. On the strength of that album, director Ridley Scott personally selected him to write the score to Blade Runner, instructing him to capture the film's mixture of depressing urban dystopia and shimmering, artificial advertised reality. Vangelis himself claimed he was attracted to the tortured character of ex-cop/blade runner Rick Deckard, and some of the thematic movements reflect this, shying away from the composer's usual use of high-toned, open chords to indicate triumph and transcendance, replaced with contracted, moody, jazzy movements and a sense of melancholy and despair. Much like the movie, the album fools you: the key notes, fills and musical cues are all a bit off, a bit subverted and turned around, leaving you uncertain how to feel, just as the script intends with characters like Deckard and Roy Batty. Vangelis would go on to have a rich and rewarding career as a film composer, but he'd never do anything this good again. Unfortunately, legal disputes with the record company -- as well as objections from the composer himself -- kept an 'official' soundtrack from being released for many years; the most widely available one featured the score being played by a thrown-together and inferior group of studio musicians. The multi-disc set released decades later at least features the original music, but it's lacking a number of cues, bits of incidental music, and one of the best compositions on the record; let's hope that a "final cut" of the film music is imminent, just as we now have the definitive version of the film.

BEST TRACKS: The "Blade Runner (End Title)" theme is the most recognizable piece of music on the album, and in many ways, it's the best: the soaring synth riffs cut off at their zenith with menacing rolls on a kettle drum as a relentless percussive beat worthy of Giorgio Moroder drives the entire thing along. The haunting "Rachel's Song", an inchoate piano piece with jazz chords and a peculiarly eerie feel, perfectly suits its scene, where Sean Young's character learns that she's a machine and that all the memories she has -- including taking piano lessons -- are inventions. And the "Love Theme from Blade Runner" breaks up the otherwise almost impenetrable darkness and moodiness of the score with a romantic saxophone melody that seems lifted from classic noir. (Sadly, one of the best pieces of music from the film -- the bizarre middle eastern techno piece played in a strip club, with vocals in the wierd melange of languages used by street people in the movie's futuristic setting -- is not included on any official release of the score.)

Screengrab Rant: Indiana Jones in 2008

Peter Smith — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I think we can all agree that Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest adventure films ever made. Its two sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade both have some serious flaws. Temple of Doom is shrill, silly, arguably racist and saddled with an atrocious love interest; Last Crusade is a hammy rehash of Raiders where the jokes are all broader and the characters are all stupider. But they have their moments. As I sit here trying to review Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I just can't muster the enthusiasm. Crystal Skull, sadly, makes Temple of Doom and Last Crusade look like, well, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In fairness, it's hard to imagine a fourth Indy movie being particularly good at this point, for reasons that become all-too-clear in the first fifteen minutes of Crystal Skull. With Harrison Ford twenty years older than he was in Last Crusade, the film couldn't be credibly set in the '30s. Thus, Crystal Skull takes place in 1957. Divorced from his pre-war milieu — an era when lost cities and ancient artifacts could plausibly still be hiding off the map — Indy looks sad and out-of-place. He's a great, iconic character, but a lot of the power of that iconography comes from its pre-World-War-II context. There's something jarring about watching a fedora-clad Ford in an Eisenhower-era suburb.

And speaking of that suburb, into which Indy stumbles at the beginning of Crystal Skull — well, it's a test site, and our man is about to get nuked. Sure, the Indiana Jones movies have always been frantically action-packed, but Steven Spielberg used to know how to build to a climax. That the hero survives a nuclear test in the first fifteen minutes says something about the filmmakers' lack of restraint. That lack of restraint (and I know, "restraint" and "Spielberg" don't always go together, but look again at the pitch-perfect balance of Raiders ) is also apparent in Skull's comedy, which is as precious as Last Crusade's and clumsily executed to boot. Watch for a sequence wherein Shia LaBeouf, as Indy's son (by no means the worst part of the film, contrary to fan expectations) rescues his father from a pit of quicksand. . . by using a snake as a rope. Indiana Jones hates snakes, remember? (I'm guessing this was George Lucas's idea.) Ford mugs through this scene like no one fetched him his Metamucil; in fact, for the whole movie, despite being remarkably fit for a sixty-five-year-old, he's given little to do. At the big finale, he pretty much gets out of the way. As for the father-son relationship, given that it's one of Spielberg's favorite tropes, it's remarkable how little resonance he gets out of it.

But again, resonance may have been a lost cause, given the constraints of setting. I can think of only one way Crystal Skull might've worked. Don't ignore the problems — embrace them. Instead of making Indy's age and the time period a relative non-issue after the obligatory gags about crankiness, make the movie about his age. Make it about the loss of the pre-war world. Where the other Indiana Jones movies end with supernatural cataclysms, scrap the ludicrous ending of Crystal Skull (the titular skull is an alien's, and I'll say no more) and end with the film's one memorable image — the old adventurer, silhouetted against a mushroom cloud. A man out of time, faced with a technology orders of magnitude more destructive than any cursed artifact he could ever dig up. That might be a bit of a downer, but it'd mean something. And I'm sorry to say it, but unlike its motley bunch of predecessors, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull doesn't mean much of anything.

In(dy) Other Blogs

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Because the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been so criminally overlooked by the mainstream media, it’s been up to the blogosphere to pick up the slack. As Paul Clark tipped you in his revisitation of the Temple of Doom, Cerebral Mastication is the hub of Indy blogdom, so a tip of the well-worn fedora to Ali Arikan for the centralized linkage.

The House Next Door offers a three-fer, looking back at all three previous Indiana Jones movies. Matt Zoller Seitz emerges from semi-retirement to offer his own thoughts on Temple of Doom, which he says “has the series' simplest plot, most annoying love interest, most casually racist and imperialist attitudes and most grotesque imagery (Doom and its summer-of-'84 blockbuster cousin, the Spielberg-produced Gremlins, sparked the creation of a new MPAA rating, PG-13). At the same time, though, it's the most viscerally intense entry in the series and the most wide-ranging in its moods, spotlighting the imaginations of Spielberg and his co-producer, George Lucas, at their most freewheeling. It's a blast from the id—like Close Encounters, 1941, E.T. and A.I, a rare instance of the director appearing to construct images and situations for his own private reasons, rather than keeping his eyes and ears attuned for signs of viewer discontent.”

At Edward Copeland on Film, David Gaffen has narrowed his focus to a single scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark – the one “where Indiana Jones, realizing that the Ark of the Covenant is to be placed on a plane and flown out of Egypt, sets out to sabotage the plane.” Gaffen proceeds shot-by-shot to dissect the workings of a signature action sequence. “The escalation here is deliberate – slowly ratchet up the tension within a scene that is already filled with active movement, derivative of Hitchcock in its cleverness even if Spielberg still names the 1950s serials as his original inspiration. The elements added in are small, careful ones – a shot of the wing grazing a nearby fuel truck, which spills gasoline. Just as the large German was introduced as a potential opponent this is presented as a problem, the proverbial gun in Act I that has to be fired in Act II.”

At Cinema Styles, Jonathan Lapper is trying to get excited about this whole thing. “A lot can change in 27 years. That's how long it's been since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark and it's been nearly two decades since the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Look at it this way: Two of the biggest adventure hits of 1954 were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Naked Jungle. Now imagine Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston making sequels to those movies in 1981, 27 years later. By 1981 the movie landscape was decidedly different than it was in 1954 and 2008 is decidedly different than 1981. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't sense the excitement about a new Indiana Jones film like I did in the eighties. When the other two sequels were released they, like the Star Wars sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, were the summer movies to see. Now Indiana Jones is practically lost in the shuffle.”

Cinematical has a week’s worth of Indy stuff on offer. They’ve got us covered for List-o-Mania this week with Seven Indiana Jones Knock-Offs. Number one is Tomb Raider: “It's like all the initial three Indiana Jones films wrapped up in one, with added sex appeal in casting Angelina Jolie in the Harrison Ford role. Yet Jolie as Croft is too serious to be the female counterpart to Ford's Indy. Also, while the Indiana Jones films deal with some level of magically religious fantasy, they're at least grounded by ‘real’ or familiar artifacts such as the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. And they tend to remain just realistic enough to avoid things like giant six-armed statues that come to life.”

Remember those kids who made the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders back in the 80s? Well, they’ve hit the big time – sort of. According to Underwire, “On May 14, eight days before the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, now-grown filmmakers Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb will showcase their movie at the landmark Mann's Chinese Theater. But the guys who made it won't see a dime. ‘Due to copyright issues, revenue from the screenings of our film must go to a nonprofit organization,’ said Strompolos…While Adaptation can't be screened for profit, the DIY back story has turned into a moneymaker for Strompolos, Zala and Lamb. Big-shot movie producer Scott Rudin (There Will Be Blood) purchased rights to their real-life filmmaking adventures and hired Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) to write the script for Paramount Pictures.”

Yesterday's Hits: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984, Steven Spielberg)

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Written for the Indiana Jones Blogathon at Cerebral Mastication.

When it comes to enduring popularity, most of the films I’ve written about so far for Yesterday’s Hits have fallen by the wayside. They had their moments of glory, but now they’ve been cast aside in favor of films that have either aged better or simply had the good luck not to wear out their welcome too soon. By contrast, this week’s entry is a movie I’m guessing almost everyone here has seen, and which I’d venture to guess most of you own on DVD. Yet Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom often seems to be treated as the odd man out in the Indiana Jones franchise. In conjunction with this week’s release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I’ve tried to figure out why exactly this is the case.

What made Temple of Doom a hit?: Talk about a silly question. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the biggest hit of 1981, a hugely popular adventure that turned a whip-cracking archeologist into one of the truly iconic Hollywood characters. Raiders was a rarity, a movie with almost universal appeal, with plenty of action, a hint of romance, evil Nazi villains, far-flung locations, and a hero audiences would follow to the ends of the Earth. So it was inevitable that director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas, and star Harrison Ford would bring the character back to the big screen, and nearly as inevitable that the film would scare up a lot of business. And that it did, becoming the #2 hit of 1984, trailing only Ghostbusters.

What happened?: One of the cardinal rules of sequels is that it’s difficult to live up to the original, doubly so when the original film is as great and beloved as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sure, it happens on occasion, but how often? So despite Temple’s box office, it was almost a foregone conclusion that it couldn’t match the popularity of its predecessor. Audiences still loved Dr. Jones all right, with two more sequels still to come, but most viewers today see Temple merely as a fun, well-crafted thrill ride, rather than the classic Raiders is.

Does Temple of Doom still work?: All in all, the critical rep for the film isn’t far off. Spielberg’s skill at generating excitement is as keen here as ever, but overall the film lacks the charm of Raiders. Part of the blame rests on the shoulders of Ford, who doesn’t appear to expend much effort in his performance. Especially in his early scenes, Ford seems to be acting while hung over, so bland and flat does he appear onscreen. Eventually he comes alive, around the time the action starts, but Temple was the first sign of the sluggishness that would begin to creep into his performances more and more over the next two decades.

Perhaps the most frequent criticism of the film is Kate Capshaw’s performance as Willie, and I’ve got to say I’m in full agreement with the naysayers. Granted, Capshaw isn’t entirely to blame- Willie is an extremely thin character, her distinguishing characteristics being that she’s (a) Indy’s designated love interest, and (b) not Marion. But Capshaw herself doesn’t help matters. Most of her performance consists of shrieking, whining, and bitching at Indy, but Capshaw is too prosaic onscreen to make any of it work. She’s got no style, and not much charisma. And when an actress can’t even manage to deliver the line “are you crazy?” and make it sound convincing, there’s something wrong.

But while many people are prone to criticizing Indy’s pal Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), I have to admit I’ve always liked the little guy. Whereas Willie’s presence seems to be dictated by the film’s need to have some kind of female lead, the real love story in the film is the mentor/sidekick relationship between Indy and Shorty. Look at the way Spielberg frames these two together- time and again we see Short Round patterning his behavior after his idol, and it’s he, not Willie, who ends up having to save Dr. Jones when all seems lost. True, he’s given a little too much cutesy dialogue (“hold on to your potatoes!”), but the love he has for Indy is genuinely moving in spots, and he actually gets some fighting of his own to do, while Willie stands on the sidelines and punches at the air.

When I was younger, I always found it odd that Indiana Jones would take time to hunt for a bunch of stones after he’d already discover the Ark of the Covenant. But while the MacGuffin of Temple of Doom lacks the built in mystique of Raiders’ object of desire, the relatively small-scaled quest ultimately suits the film’s storyline. The Ark is an archeological milestone, so naturally the man who found it would want to go down in history. By contrast, Temple finds its hero setting out for “fortune and glory” only to discover a more important cause to fight for in the end. Faced with personal gain, he instead decides to do the right thing to save others. It’s an old story, but done right it still works, and Spielberg and company make it work.

And of course, it’s still exciting as hell. For all the awkwardness present in the 80 minutes of the story, the last 40 minutes more than compensate. But what really puts these scenes over is how brutal they are at times. Temple of Doom is often remembered as the film that helped bring about the PG-13 rating, and even today it’s surprising how hard-hitting and violent the film is in spots. I don’t think this is an accident. Spielberg, coming off blockbusters like Raiders and E.T., was becoming ill at ease with being Hollywood’s resident family entertainer, and his darker impulses come through loud and clear in Temple of Doom. For every funny animal trick we see, there’s a genuinely scary or disturbing bit that makes its mark (Mola Ram scared me way more than Toht when I was little). And while this mishmash of tones doesn’t always work, it’s nonetheless fascinating to see. As a stepping stone in Spielberg’s attempts to grow from the blockbuster king into the cinematic Elder Statesman we know him as today, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is an key work, something one couldn’t have known way back in 1984.

Indiana Jones and the Internet Critics' Pre-emptive Strike: Ain't It Cool News Sandbags Spielberg and Co.

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes its official debut with a press screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, four days before it opens wide theatrically. The picture has been immersed in a protective bath of secrecy; Steven Spielberg likes his intended surprise to, you know, surprise. But, perturbingly enough, the first reviews have started trickling in, thanks to that bastion of cutthroats and jacka;s known as the Internets. The initial "quick reaction" was posted to Ain't It Cool News last Thursday evening by "ShogunMaster." The spoiler-heavy review reports that Harrison Ford "has a few lines that work and a million that don't", trashes the other performers, laments the last of tension or suspense "During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero ... was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.. He just never shows signs of worry or distress."), and sums up the proceedings with the judgement that this is "the Indiana Movie that you were dreading."

Not having seen the movie ourselves, we have no way of verifying these claims, but the truest thing in the review (which has since been joined on the site by what Michael Cieply describes as "two other less critical, but less than sparkling, reviews") is probably its author's admission that "it doesn't matter what I say, you will see this movie regardless." Still, you have to wonder who the fellow is and how he managed to be one of the first people on Earth to see the movie. Now Cieply reports that "ShogunMaster", "reached via the Web site, said he is a theater executive who saw the film at an exhibitors’ screening this week." Cieply notes that "Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen. As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film’s release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws. Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms." If that's what ShogunMaster is all about--trying to dampen the perception of public enthusiasm for a sure-fire hit as a negotiating ploy--then Ain't It Cool News' participation for the sake of a scoop might threaten the good name of on-line film criticism, if it had a good name. As everybody keeps reminding me, it kind of doesn't, but still!

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

Trailer Review: Indiana Jones 4 Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With the summer movie season now in full swing, this week brings a handful of new versions of big summer blockbusters, released just in time to play before Iron Man. Here’s the new Indiana Jones full trailer, with more footage of Harrison Ford in action, looking hale and hearty, and as irritable as ever. In other words, just the way we like him. In addition, there’s plenty of Cate Blanchett, some actual Karen Allen dialogue, and the first trailer appearance of John Hurt. Even Shia LaBeouf finally looks at home here, now that we see him in context. Plus Spielberg brings the action and makes stuff blow up real good. So yeah, I’m pretty excited about this. For some reason, my Screengrab colleagues don’t share my belief that Indy 4 is going to be the biggest hit of the summer. But I say that if the trailer is any indication, this is going to be hard to beat.

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab celebrated the 10 Sexiest Girl Geeks in Cinema...and now, in tribute to the return of that dreamy Professor Henry Jones, Jr. (in the hotly anticipated Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), we present our equal opportunity list of ten hot nerdy guys.

As with the previous list, most of these so-called nerds, geeks, dorks and maxi-zoom dweebies are played by actors who, in real life, are pretty easy on the eyes. But their characters, at least, are misfits and loners, undervalued diamonds in the rough just waiting to be discovered by some lucky, sharp-eyed lady (or gentleman).

Why lucky? Because as Robert Carradine’s Louis Skolnick says in Revenge of the Nerds (and as we at The Screengrab know oh so well), “Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex.”

10. William Hurt as Professor Eddie Jessup in Altered States

Back in the 1980s, William Hurt was the poster child for brainy-sexy-cool, thanks to his breakthrough role in Ken Russell’s nerd-tastic acid trip Altered States. Hurt stars as Professor Eddie Jessup, a Harvard scientist who is so totally obsessed with his research into universal consciousness that he’d rather “experiment” on himself than have sex with his hot primatologist wife...and what’s geekier than that?

9. Alan Tudyk as Wash in Serenity

Not being a lady or a gay gentleman, I was a little unsure of the actual “hotness” of some of the geeks on this list, and when I ran my original #9 (Jeff Goldblum as doomed scientist Seth Brundle in The Fly) by my wife, she shrugged, “Yeah...uh...I guess.” And while no less an authority than Geena Davis apparently found Brundlefly plenty damn sexy, I nevertheless decided instead to dedicate this space to the late, lamented pilot of the good ship Serenity, who my friend Julia informs me is quite the nerd hottie. Sweet, technology-obsessed and a little bit dorky, poor Wash is gone but evidently not forgotten.

8. Cary Grant as David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby

In last week’s girl geek list, I noted that Scarlett Johansson playing a geek in Ghost World was about as believable as Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist, and I freely admit it seems hypocritical to list this uber-suave icon of urbane manliness in a top ten list of cinematic nerds...yet Grant’s stuffy paleontologist is the ancestor to any number of sweetly sexy absent-minded professor characters too obsessed with their studies to recognize their biological needs or the effect of their powerful chemistry on the world around them. Speaking of which...

7. Ryan O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up Doc?

I deferred again to my wife here in the #7 spot after she violently rejected my original pick: Jon Cryer as Phil “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink, about whom I said: “Sure, Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh ultimately chose Andrew McCarthy’s limp noodle preppie, but in the same way all my guy geek friends preferred the pre-makeover Allison in The Breakfast Club, just about every alterna-girl I know would have picked Jon Cryer’s sometimes annoying but always stylish and devoted Duckie in a heartbeat.” To which my wife, an alterna-girl in her own right, shot back, “No. He’s not a hot nerd. He’s just a dork.” So, instead, I’ve substituted Ryan O’Neal’s befuddled, wife-approved musicologist as my #7 pick, in part to beef up the 1970s content of this list, and in part because any character who spends the majority of his time obsessed with igneous rock formations yet still manages to attract offbeat beauties like Madeline Kahn’s Eunice Burns and 1970s-sex-kitten-era-Barbara Streisand’s Judy Maxwell is clearly a nerd to be reckoned with.

6. Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts in American Beauty (by Paul Clark)

When we first came up with the idea for this list, we went back and forth about the idea of including Ricky Fitts. Sure, he's an outcast at school, but does that make him a true geek? Ricky certainly doesn’t fit the mold on the surface -- no horn-rims, not especially studious, and so on. But, to quote American Beauty's tagline, "look closer." With his ever-present camera and intense gaze, he has the bearing of someone who's spent his life on the outside looking in, the way all geeks feel during their high-school years. Listen to his famous monologue about the plastic bag -- there's an analytical mind at work here that distinguishes him from his more socially-adept, less self-aware peers. Being a loner has given him plenty of time to step back from life and think about the world around him in a way most people his age don't have time for. It's also given him a serene acceptance of his life that proves irresistible to his troubled next-door neighbor Angela (Thora Birch). When she's not sneaking him up to her bedroom to have sex, he's everything a good boyfriend should be -- sensitive, empathetic, a good listener, the whole shebang. So Ricky doesn't look the part, but so what? In many ways, he's the real deal in a way those Urkel wannabes aren't, and a kind of ideal for young women who find themselves frustrated with the limited possibilities of dating popular jocks. -- Paul Clark

Click here for part 2.

Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Hollywood Accountants

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Moviemaking is "still a very challenging business," says media analyst Richard Greenfield. "The average movie still loses money." The question is, will Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull turn out to be an average movie? In a piece calculated to make you break out the crying towels, Claudia Eller of the Los Angeles Times reports on "the new economic realities of the movie business" and how they're reflected in the deal that Paramount Pictures cut with director Steven Spielberg, star Harrison Ford, and fount of contemporary mythology George Lucas in order the get the fourth Indiana Jones picture up and running. The franchise is different from most of the more recently forged brand-name pictures (such as your Spider-Mans and your Pirates of the Caribbeans) in that the producer, Lucas, rather than the studio, owns the property, which puts Paramount more in the position of a distributor than a proud parent who can expect the movie's long-term revenue potential to take care of it in its old age. After it became clear that the picture was going to cost much more than originally projected--not an unheard-of occurrence in Hollywood--the major participants agreed to sweeten things for them by forgoing their upfront salaries. Eller reports that the studio "spent about $185 million to make the movie and will pay at least $150 million to market it worldwide. The studio will earn a distribution fee of 12.5% of the revenue it receives from the film's release in all media, including theaters, DVD and television." Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford will stand to make 87.5 cents off every dollar the movie makes after the studio has been fully reimbursed for the cost of the movie and been paid their distribution fee, but that means that they won't start to clear anything until after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has made $400 million.

The thing is, if the movie makes less than $400 million, Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford will have spent a year of their lives killing themselves--well, Ford, anyway--just for the exercise. Is there a chance in hell they'll go home empty-handed? Eller: "Although the "Indiana Jones" franchise is considered one of Hollywood's surest bets -- the first three pictures amassed $1.2 billion in worldwide ticket sales -- there is no guarantee that younger moviegoers will turn out in droves to see a now 65-year-old action hero in a fedora dust off his trademark leather jacket and crack his bullwhip. Today's under-25 action junkies are wowed by computer-generated effects spectacles, such as Spider-Man, Harry Potter, 300 and Fantastic Four." Stress the age of the leading man (and the franchise) and the fact that the movie is built around old-school physical stunts instead of CGI, and it starts to sound more and more like Live Free or Die Hard, a movie that did better than respectably at the box office (and not half bad with the critics) but that has yet to clear the $400 million hurdle. Hollywood: where success has a thousand fathers, and failure sometimes clears $3,999,999 in profits.

Indiana Jones 5: Marauders of the Bronze Hip Replacement

John Constantine — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:43:00 GMT

Can you smell it, Screengrabbers? The summer blockbuster season approaches and it is filled with heretofore unknown riches! Respected actors playing gaudy superheroes, neon fantasias about cars that spit on the physical laws of nature, and George Lucas humping the leg of nostalgia one final time. Maybe not though! USA Today has a hot new interview with that spry upstart star of hits like Witness, Harrison Ford, and Calista Flockhart’s boytoy says he’s down for more whip cracking.

Actually, there’s not even a full quote from Ford about it. Just this sentence in the article: “He also might consider a fifth installment of Indiana Jones, though he hopes it wouldn't take twenty years to pull together.” Not nearly as interesting as you might hope, I know. The rest of the interview is pretty average slice of life stuff. Sorry about that. Here, let me make it up to you! Here are some pictures of wacky Japanese Indiana Jones toys coming out with the flick!

That mini-Sean Connery is ADORABLE!

Indiana Jones 4: LaBeouf Apparently Doesn’t Mind Being Called Junior

John Constantine — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:53:00 GMT

Alright, I admit, that’s cheating. Indiana Jones doesn’t call Shia LaBeouf "Junior" anywhere in this new featurette on the official Kingdom of the Crystal Skull website. You, however, will delight in this reference to a fondly remembered film starring related characters! Ill-suited allusions aside, I found LaBeouf pretty endearing here and it’s helped get me more excited to see just what the movie’s going to be like. Given, I’m already pretty endeared towards people who get arrested at Walgreens. Nothing brings people together like shared experience.

What’s up with this picture though? Why are the Jones boys on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple?

You can check out the featurette here. Thanks to Cinematical for the spot!

Trailer Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

John Constantine — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:22:00 GMT

I remember going to see The Waterboy early in November of 1998. I was there for one reason and one reason only: to see the trailer for Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Even then, I could see the seeds of tragedy waiting for me in the coming spring. But sixteen year-old John Constantine was filled with nerd zealotry and managed to convince himself that the few minutes of lightsabers and wooden dialogue he saw on screen promised a great film worthy of its legacy. Twenty-five year old John Constantine knows better. This trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens with an explicit attempt to get the nostalgia juices flowing but gets awkward fast. We get a few scenes of dominatrix-fantasy Cate Blanchett chasing Henry Jones Jr. through some very, very familiar locales, a vintage theme song that seems oddly out of place, and some one-liners that feel a little too fan fiction for comfort. Don’t take this as typical pop-culture addict cynicism. I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Regarding Henry (1991, Mike Nichols)

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the past four decades, the career of Mike Nichols has gone through its share of ups and downs. Nichols made his name as a director with a number of popular, acclaimed films, but he also has several inexplicable films to answer for. I might have spotlighted 2000’s awful What Planet Are You From? had Nathan Rabin not done so already. But Regarding Henry is a more than acceptable alternative, with the bonus of demonstrating the worst tendencies of Nichols’ later films.

Nichols has long been one of Hollywood’s go-to filmmakers for classy star vehicles, particularly “dramedies” geared to adults like Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge, and Primary Colors. But much of Nichols’ enduring critical rep still rests on his seminal early classics Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and (my favorite) Carnal Knowledge. Without these films, Nichols would be little more than a slightly more upscale version of Lasse Hallstrom.

In short, Regarding Henry is a pandering comfort blanket of a movie that’s smothering instead of cozy. It’s also a textbook White-Collar Guilt movie, in which an affluent protagonist (in this case, a lawyer played by Harrison Ford) suffers a tragedy (here, a shooting that causes memory loss) that forces him into a crisis of conscience that makes him a better person. Movies like this invariably divide people into two categories- morally-compromised rich people, and salt-of-the-earth poor people. This dichotomy feels like a cynical attempt on Hollywood’s part to flatter the less financially successful viewers while allowing the more privileged to vicariously experience the hero’s awakening before speeding home in their BMWs.

Regarding Henry, based on the first produced screenplay by Jeffrey (later J.J.) Abrams, contains no surprises on this front. In fact, the film is so intent on concentrating on the psychological stuff that it skates right through the physical healing process. Once Henry learns to walk and talk (his first word is “Ritz,” the significance of which feels like a bad joke) again, he’s soon ready to go home. After he arrives back in his expensive apartment, everything happens as it should- his once-rocky marriage is quickly mended, he becomes a better father, all that. Heck, the movie begins with Henry successfully smooth-talking a jury in defense of a hospital that’s being sued by a dying old man. If you can’t see where that subplot is going, then congratulations, because you’ve finally seen your first movie! Too bad it’s this one. And let’s not get started on the film’s simplistic view of minorities, especially Bill Nunn’s ever-cheerful Magical Black Man caregiver.

After his shooting, Henry’s memory loss causes him to regress to a state of childlike naïveté. But while Ford is about the 500th actor one would cast to play childlike, the movie itself does a bang-up job of regressing to a grade-school mindset. Regarding Henry is a movie in which the hero’s problems are solved by getting a puppy, moving to a new house, quitting his job, and pulling his daughter out of her exclusive boarding school. Sure, the money won’t hold out forever, but you don’t think about those things when you’re young, do you? The way Regarding Henry paints it, it’s a wonder more rich people haven’t tried to put themselves through the profound spiritual experience of getting shot in the head.

Click here for previous When Good Directors Go Bad posts.