The Screengrab : harvey keitel

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

SATURN 3 (1980)

To be honest, the scariest thing about Stanley Donen’s Cheez-Whiz science fiction chamber piece isn’t the giant “Demi-God” robot Hector (not even after the human-brained cyborg is reprogrammed with the horny, homicidal impulses of Harvey Keitel’s Abby-Normal cerebellum). Nor is it the terrible acting by Farrah Fawcett or the sight of Kirk Douglas’ naked rump in action. No, for me, the scariest thing about Saturn 3 is the inexplicable streak of Puritan fundamentalism it elicited when I saw it on the big screen many moons ago, prompting me to sit down and fire off an angry letter to Starlog magazine about all the unnecessary sexual content Donen had slipped into a genre (science fiction) that was usually a non-threatening, safely asexual haven for pubescent, maladjusted geeks like my then (barely) 13-year-old self. The fact that Keitel stared at the private parts of (scantily-clad) Fawcett’s dog, Sally, then later wrestled with a nude Douglas filled me with moral outrage (masking hormonal unease) that was later replaced by massive embarrassment when the aforementioned letter was actually published and, worse, discovered (and mercilessly mocked) by my friends. And now, thanks to the wonders of modern bloggage, I can share my Saturn 3 embarrassment with the whole wide world, all at the touch of a button...thanks a bunch, technology! (AO)

WARGAMES (1983)

In WarGames, Matthew Broderick is the first kid in America with the Internet, but unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to know how to use it to download porn. He does know how to hack into his high school’s system and change his grades, which is useful, but not as useful as changing his cute classmate Jennifer’s (Ally Sheedy) grades. He also tries to break new ground in the field of cyber-piracy by downloading a cool new game from the manufacturer before it’s even released, but instead inadvertently hacks into the NORAD supercomputer known as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) and launches a potentially apocalyptic game of Global Thermonuclear War. From a modern standpoint, WarGames plays like a goofy shotgun marriage of John Hughes-ian ‘80s teen comedy and dated technothriller, but I’ll give the movie credit for anticipating the potential for cyber-terrorism long before any of us knew what that meant and also for tapping into Reagan-era anxiety about nuclear war, accidental and otherwise. It’s harder to forgive the simplistic, preachy “tic-tac-toe” ending (seen above), but maybe they can fix that in the inevitable remake. (SVD)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

Steven Spielberg turned a Philip K. Dick story into an action vehicle for Tom Cruise, with results that actually trash the ideas in the original material less thoroughly than a lot of other moves based on Dick's work. The ideas can't said to be far from timely, either. Cruise is the head of the Washington, D.C. "Precrime" force, which uses psychics and a vast electronic surveillance network to pick out people who are contemplating committing crimes and arrest them before the crimes actually occur. Cruise, as twittishly self-satisfied as ever, sees nothing troubling about this way of doing things until he himself is identified as a potential evildoer, at which point he suddenly detects certain flaws in the system. A good movie up until the last fifteen minutes or so; not even Dick ever imagined a drug that could make the ending go down easily. (PN)

SERENITY (2005)

Most of Joss Whedon's space-cowboys fantasy (spun off from his criminally short-lived TV series Firefly) revels in futuristic technology, treating it as a blast, but it has a sting in its tail: the revelation of what terrible secret the government is sitting on. In one of his novels, William S. Burroughs once invented a drug called Bor Bor, which was "held in horror" by Burroughs' heroes and "only used as a weapon against our enemies"; its effect "is to lull the user into a state of fuzzy well-being and benevolence, a warm good feeling that everything will come out all right for America." The crew of Serenity discover the remains of a city that consists of functioning, automated buildings filled with dusty corpses; they are all that is left of a population that was fed on an experimental drug that was designed to produce a more tranquil, non-violent people less inclined to object to or protest anything, and who became so satisfied with the state of things that they stopped moving altogether and quietly starved to death. That's one version of Morning in America. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Pub Crawl: The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

BOB’S COUNTRY BUNKER, THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

I’m not exactly sure where Bob’s Country Bunker is supposed to be. I lived in Chicago for 15 years, and there’s no place in the city even remotely that rowdy – not even on the South Side. The closest we got was the Hideout, and even they managed to keep the boisterous crowd placated without the aid of chicken wire. But if I’d ever managed to find Bob’s Country Bunker, I would have spent every night there, especially if it meant getting to see the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band play dubiously down-home versions of “Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man”. Bob’s Country Bunker may not have been the best place to play – their willingness to cut off the power of anyone without enough Hank Williams songs in their repertoire and their stingy no-comped-drinks-for-the-band policy can’t have made them many friends – but the mood was infectious, the waitstaff was brave even in the face of hundreds of pounds of flying broken glass, and the atmosphere was just perfect, all Nudie suits and unironic trucker hats. Plus, they had both kinds of music – country and western!

THE CHINK’S, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Another bar I never managed to track down in Chicago was the impolitically named Chink’s. (It had to be in Chicago, because everything David Mamet does takes place there, even when it’s explicitly stated that it doesn’t.) But maybe it’s for the best; it didn’t look like the most relaxing place in the world. Oh, sure, it was a quiet little dive with cheap tiki drinks, and the Chink made a mean egg roll, and the décor was decent enough – all mail-order-catalog Chinese and whorehouse-red light bulbs. It was the kind of people you met that would stress you out: let’s say you just go in for a nice cocktail to beat the murderous heat, as did Jonathan Pryce’s helpless James Lingk. The next thing you know, some desperate, flop-sweating real estate salesman, like Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma, has sat down next to you, given you some borderline terrifying spiel about how he sometimes takes a massive shit that feels like sleeping for twelve hours, and before he even finishes telling you it’s okay to fuck little girls, you’ve agreed to buy some overpriced condo in Arizona somewhere. Nope, a man can’t relax in a place like that...

...so instead, we’ll am-scray outta Big Windy and bar hop Back East to...

TONY’S PLACE, MEAN STREETS (1973)

Arriving for the night's festivities at the crimson-tinted neighborhood dive where he and all his buddies hang out, Robert De Niro makes a phenomenal entrance, with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing as he glides along the length of the bar in slow motion to meet the best friend (Harvey Keitel) whose face registers his approach as if it were a death sentence. Soon De Niro and Keitel are adjourning to the back room for a two-man improvisational jam session in which the English language gets slapped around a little, which barely prepares the viewer for the confrontations to come: between a punk on the make (Robert Carradine) and a target he corners in the men's room (David Carradine), between a returned military veteran (Harry Northrup) and his demons, and finally between De Niro's Johnny Boy and the affronted loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus), who has to deal with Johnny Boy's amused disbelief that Michael could have ever seriously imagined that he was ever going to get his loan repaid. The movie also features a visit to a rival joint, a pool haul where the guys get into the movie's famous brawl choreographed to "Please Mr. Postman," which feels like Our Gang hijinx compared to what goes on at the home front. It's about as good a vision as any movie's ever offered of a bunch of guys trying desperately to enjoy themselves in Hell...

...not unlike the Greenwich Village denizens of the next stop on our tour...

HARRY’S BAR, THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973)

Harry Hope's waterfront bar in The Iceman Cometh is the anti-Cheers, a place where all the regulars know each others' names, and have got each others' numbers, to boot. They're really regular, too; most of them haven't left the premises in ages, not even just to stick their heads out the door to confirm that the sky is still blue. These desperate lost souls are so hard up for some diversion that all they've got to look forward to is the semi-annual arrival of their favorite drunken traveling salesman, Hickey (played in the 1960 movie version by Jason Robards, in 1973 by Lee Marvin and later on stage by Kevin Spacey), in the hopes that maybe this time his dirty jokes will have funny endings. Woe to them, Hickey has just murdered his wife and is so impressed with himself for having finally taken an active approach to dealing with his problems that he wants to make all his washed-up friends shave, change their socks, and get back out into the world. Luckily, in his big monologue, Hickey reveals that he may have had less than pure motives for throttling the Missus and is hauled off by the cops, and Harry and company, relieved to discover that they've just been humoring a psycho, can return to their daily routine of talking about how they're going to turn their lives around the day after tomorrow, just as soon as they drain this keg. If the story were set in the present day, Hickey would be given his own daytime TV series and released into the custody of Oprah.

TREES LOUNGE, TREES LOUNGE (1996)

But don’t let all the big city neuroses and overpriced drinks get you down. Just a short stagger from Manhattan in neighboring Long Island, you’ll find a slightly less depressing breed of barfly whiling away the hours at Trees Lounge, the neighborhood haunt of Steve Buscemi’s hangdog hero Tommy Basilio in the beloved character actor’s writing/directing debut. This semi-autobiographical tale unspools in a parallel universe where Buscemi never got serious about the acting thing, but instead spent his entire life in the self-loathing stupor that defined his early twenties, driving an ice cream truck and bedding inappropriate women like Daniel Baldwin’s teenage daughter, Debbie (played by Chloë Sevigny in a wise-child performance we somehow forgot to mention in last week’s Jailbait Sweet 16). Yet, while sometimes grim, Buscemi’s gin-soaked world is never hopeless, thanks to healthy shots of gallows humor, a great soundtrack on the jukebox and a who’s-who of top-notch indie drinking companions like Debi Mazar, Mark Boone Junior, Rockets Redglare, Eszter Balint, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan and Samuel L. Jackson.

Who’s up for another round? The night is still young and Screengrab’s buying as the Pub Crawl continues through Boston, Europe and beyond in Part 3!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Sydney Pollack, 1934--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Sydney Pollack has died at the age of 73, ending a recent struggle with cancer. As a young theater buff, Pollack, who grew up in South Bend, Indiana, went to New York after graduating high school and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where he first studied under and later served as assistant to the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. Early in his career, Pollack appeared on Broadway in A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Dark Is Light Enough as well as on TV, incluyding episodes of Plyahouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Have Gun, Will Travel. After Burt Lancaster, who he would later direct in the late sixties in The Scalphunters and Castle Keep, suggested that Pollack consider directing, he stepped behind the camera for work on several TV series and eventually broke into movies with the 1965 The Slender Thread. He brought a skilled rapport with actors and a taste for old-Hollywood glamour to his feature film work, and he became associated with certain high-caliber performers who placed a lot of trust in him--particularly Robert Redford, who he directed in seven starring roles, beginning with the 1966 Tennessee Williams adaptation This Property Is Condemned and including the winner of the 1985 Academy Award for Best Picture, Out of Africa. They also worked together on The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand, probably the most successful of Redford's old-style romances, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, Havana, and The Electric Horseman, which paired Redford with Jane Fonda. Pollack was also an important figure in Fonda's career, having directed her in the 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which marked her transformation from sex-kitten comedienne to hard-edged dramatic actress. That picture went a long way towards establishing Pollack as a new-style Hollywood pro; it won Academy Award nominations for Fonda, Pollack, and Susannah York, and earned Gig Young a Best Supporting Oscar for his brilliant performance as a dance-marathon emcee.

It was the 1982 Tootsie, though, that really took Pollack's career to a couple of different levels. A massive hit and instant classic, it elevated his profile as a director. And because Pollack earned many of the film's biggest laughs in his on-screen performance as Dustin Hoffman's agent, it unexpectedly revived his acting career. (Pollack took on the role at Hoffman's insistence; the actor apparently thought that the movie could benefit from the brio that Pollack brought to the many legendary screaming fights that the two of them were having off-camera.) After Tootsie and Out of Africa, he directed such big pictures as The Firm, Random Hearts, and The Interpretor; he also contributed memorable performances to Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her, Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where he was brought in an emergency replacement for Harvey Keitel. In the last several years of his career, he also branched out as a producer of others' films, including The Fabulous Baker Boys, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Quiet American, 40 Shades of Blue, and Michael Clayton, where he also played George Clooney's boss. He also served as executive producer on his own last film as a director, the 2005 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry.