The Screengrab : isabelle huppert

Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors. Though made by the same people who worked on the theatrical production, the fil adaptation trumped the live version because they were able to use a real pig, causing many reviewers to remark that seeing the movie put the viewer in the unusual position of seeing a blameless pig robbed of its dignity. (I have never seen Futz! myself, and not for lack of trying. I sometimes wonder if there is a single remaining print out there somewhere, and if so, if cast member Sally Kirkland might not be hiding it under her bed.)

Queenan also cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, "the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful", and The Way We Were, which differs from those pictures in that it doesn't have any Nazis in it, though I'm not sure I'd argue that it doesn't belong. In the end, though, he takes the practical-minded position that a real contender has to have practical consequences: he's looking for "a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock..." Yes, he's giving the title to old-school favorite Heaven's Gate, the one that took down United Artists. "This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates." I'm pretty sure that the "mounted on roller skates" theme is one that even Futz! let slip through its fingers, but again, I haven't seen it and can only guess. Queenan reports that he knew someone who worked for the public relations company that handled the picture: "He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend." Of course, that was then and this is now, and while it seems unlikely that it'll ever start smoking The Godfather in the AFI polls, Heaven's Gate now has a hardy band of deeply committed, easily riled defenders, every one of whom I know in my heart is a superior person who dresses better than I do. That, too, is part of the charm of a true worst movie--enough vision, talent, and passion should have gone into it that someone will see grounds for its defense in there. I do no forsee a day in which there will be a ravening cult sticking up for The Hottie and the Nottie, but if that does ever happen, I'd keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The life of a killer can be a lonely one, whether pursued professionally or as a hobby. In last year's Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner, who based on some of the stories about his on-the-set behavior that have hit the papers ought to have had some experience with having no one to play with, was so lonesome that he had to summon up an imaginary friend (William Hurt) to give him someone to talk to on those long nights of stalking and shooting. (In the course of the movie, a real person who knows about his secret life approaches him and asks if he can apprentice with him as an aspiring psycho, but since this asshole is played by Dane Cook, having to put him up with him just means Costner needs to lean on the nonexistent Hurt more than ever.) Michael Haneke's new English-language version of his 1996 Funny Games also underlines the need for a killer to bring along a spare, someone with whom he can trade wisecracks and rely on to keep an eye on the prey and one hand on the remote control. (If you haven't seen the movie, don't ask. And if you haven't seen the movie, also don't see the movie.) Then there's Pete and Sidney, who work for Joe Brody in the classic The Big Sleep. After Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe meets them, he asks Brody about the weedier, goofier one: "Is he any good?" "Sidney?" replies Brody. "He's company for Pete." ("He kills me," says Pete, by way of an unsolicited testimonial.) These pairs kill us:

Henry (Michael Rooker) & Otis (Tom Towles), HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990)

When watching a couple of characters prancing through a movie laying waste to half the cast, you might let your mind wander to the question of just how these folks met. Are there conventions? Classified ads? It's easier to understand why a serial killer would want another pair of hands than to envision how he'd go shopping for someone to supply them. There are any number of ways that such a conversation could go wrong. Not the least of Henry's virtues is that it addresses head on the issue of how a solo killer goes about trying to establish a franchise. Henry is already well into his serial-killing career when, after a good long stretch on Otis's couch, he concludes that his old friend might have the stuff to join him on his visits to the homes of strangers. For a while, it does look as if having the fun-loving Otis along has made it more rewarding to rampage around town performing random acts of dismemberment. But, as our nation has learned since 2000, being a good person with whom to have a beer is not the best qualification for a job requiring careful planning and precise execution. Careless and uncontrollable, Otis finally proves himself an unacceptable risk and winds up as one more load of filler weighing down a Hefty bag. Like Rick in Casablanca, Henry is forced to consider the possibility that he is destined to be one of life's romantic loners.

Mingo (Earl Holliman) & Fante (Lee Van Cleef), THE BIG COMBO (1955)

There’s a lot to love about Joseph H. Lewis’ nasty little noir: the gorgeously dark camerawork by John Alton, the snarling screenplay by Philip Yordan (its vicious snap most clearly evident in an early scene where the mob boss, played toothily by Richard Conte, chews out a losing boxer), the barely sublimated sex and the creative violence. It’s one of the best movies of its kind, and criminally underseen by audiences both today and when it was released. One of the most enjoyable bits of the movie, though, is the presence of Mingo and Fante. These two characters, with their bizarrely unlikely names, are the goons of Conte’s Mr. Brown, and they’re memorably played by the lunkheaded Earl Holliman and the domineering Lee Van Cleef, respectively. Alternately menacing, comical and even sympathetic, they’re two of the best-written minor characters in noir history, but one of the reasons that they’re fondly remembered by a handful of film buffs today (Joss Whedon named a couple of characters in his Firefly series after them) is because, predating Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever by a good twenty years, they are perhaps the first murderous duo on the big screen to be portrayed as gay. Of course, this being the ‘50s, neither Yordan or Lewis could come right out and say so, but it’s made plenty clear for anyone who’s paying attention: Fante and Mingo share a room together, sleep feet apart, bicker like a married couple, express a great deal of, er, manly fondness for one another, and even dine together. Which, in fact, leads to the movie’s big oh-what-a-giveaway line: holed up in a ratty dump waiting for the heat to die down from their latest killing, our gruesome twosome are reduced to dining on take-home lunchmeat, leading Mingo to lament, “I can’t swallow any more salami!” Even if the movie version of The Big Sleep had been allowed to be as explicit about the sexuality of Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook as the book was, they wouldn’t have been this much fun.

Al (Charles McGraw) & Max (William Conrad), THE KILLERS (1946)

These guys have a special weapon: the dialogue from the classic original short story by Ernest Hemingway. In the story, two strangers walk into the small town diner where they plan to kill "the Swede" for reasons unspecified, and, feeling serenely untouchable in their big-city arrogance, proceed to taunt the rubes while they sit there and wait for their target to walk in. ("We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.") The first fifteen or twenty minutes of this movie amount to probably the most faithful film adaptation that Hemingway ever got: McGraw, the star of the cult noir The Narrow Margin (and a man who looked as if he'd been carved out of granite and was royally pissed off about it) and Conrad (TV's Cannon and the narrator of the Bullwinkle cartoons) just play out their little scene together, and then the Heningway story runs out. The movie, which was co-written by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks, and which is not bad at all, proceeds to fill itself out to feature length by having an investigator, played by Edmond O'Brien, fill in the backstory of why the Swede — Burt Lancaster, in his film debut — had a price on his head. There was a sort-of remake in 1964, directed by Don Siegel, which is best remembered as Ronald Reagan's last film as an actor. (He plays the head villain and gets to slap Angie Dickinson around.) The remake, which hews closer to the Lancaster movie than to the Hemingway, eliminates the O'Brien-investigator figure and has the killers themselves — called Charlie and Lee, and played by old pro Lee Marvin and younger hepcat punk Clu Gulager — decide to find out why they'd been hired. This version lacks the crackle that the earlier one had, but it does have a scene where the title characters trap Norman Fell in a steam bath while Gulager mockingly wipes his sunglasses on Mr. Roper's head.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) & Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), LA CEREMONIE (1995)

Bonnaire and Huppert are two of France's greatest and most fearless actresses, and it's a wonder it took a director so long to put them together. But when Claude Chabrol finally did so in his masterful thriller, the result was quite possibly the finest psychotic duo in French cinema. Bonnaire plays Sophie, an illiterate yet hyper-competent young maid for a rich family, and Huppert is Jeanne, a nosy, gossipy postal clerk who becomes her friend. "What a pair," Sophie's employer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) exclaims. "One can't read and the other reads our mail!" It's clear that the two women need each other — Jeanne, with her playfully forceful personality, draws Sophie out of her shell, while Sophie gives Jeanne a sympathetic ear compared to the other townspeople who shun her for the accidental killing of her young daughter. Soon, the two of them are partners in crime, getting into all manner of mischief around town and at the charity where they volunteer. But after Sophie is fired for trying to blackmail the family's pregnant daughter, she and Jeanne sneak in one night to take revenge. The night begins innocently enough — some torn clothing here, some ruined bed sheets there — but quickly turns deadly once the girls see the shotguns hanging on the wall. Jeanne wants to have fun by scaring them, while Sophie insists on loading the guns, yet it's entirely possible that they hadn't planned to kill anyone until Cassel happens upon the gun-toting duo in his kitchen. Once they've killed him, they have no choice but to kill off the rest of the family as well. For all the big-screen psychopaths who plan their murders down to the last detail, cases like Sophie's and Jeanne's are arguably more chilling, as the killings aren't a premeditated act of vengeance but the climax of a prank gone horribly wrong. Funny games, indeed.

Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) & Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

Like Sophie and Jeanne, Heavenly Creatures' heroines Pauline Parker (Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet) are a pair who first bond over their shared outcast status. In their case, they both suffer from health problems, and as their classmates take exercise, they become fast friends. Together they rule over a lurid, elaborate fantasy world of their own creation. The pair are inseparable, spending every possible moment together, and they eventually their frenzied teenage hormones lead them to experiment with sex. But more than anything else, it's their fantasies that sustain them and help them to escape their difficult lives in 1950s New Zealand, but they also lead to their downfall. From the beginning, they look down on anyone else, and eventually this disdain turns to paranoia about those who would threaten their happiness together. Of all the perceived threats to the world they've created, the most threatening is Pauline's pragmatic, hardworking mother, so one day the girls decide to join her on a leisurely stroll, and when they're alone on a path, they bludgeon her to death. Heavenly Creatures was based on a real-life case, and while the facts might have lent themselves to a sensationalistic treatment, director Peter Jackson keeps us with his heroines all the way. The film follows Pauline and Juliet into their fantasies (rendered in loving detail by a pre-Lord of the Rings Jackson), mostly because it's the only way to truly understand what led them to carry out their hideous crime. Along the way, we grow to love the sinners even as we hate their sin, and it's because of this that the film's final scene, in which Pauline and Juliet are forced apart by the courts, is almost unbearably sad.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

THE QUIET EARTH (1985)

Suppose they gave an apocalypse and nobody came? That’s the question faced by the always-engaging Bruno Lawrence in Geoff Murphy’s delightful little sci-fi thriller, The Quiet Earth. Made in New Zealand before it was home to hobbits and every low-budget syndicated action show on television, the movie opens with scientist Lawrence awaking one day to find that, due to an experiment gone rather substantially awry, he is the last person left on Earth. By far the film’s greatest charms lie in the subsequent scenes, where Lawrence tries to balance his attempt to find out what happened (and if there is any way of correcting it) with his somewhat bemused attitude towards being the last living human being on the planet. This bemusement, unsurprisingly, slowly degenerates into neurosis and from there into near-madness as Lawrence transforms from the sort of quirkiness one expects from a guy who lives alone and doesn’t get out much into outright loneliness-inspired lunacy. (It is in these scenes that Lawrence has a brief but highly amusing conversation with Adolf Hitler.) When he finally discovers that there is at least one other living person on the planet — in a scene that can only be described as the post-apocalyptic genre’s biggest meet-cute — the movie shifts gears into a more conventional science fiction contrivance, but it’s kept alive by swell performances from Lawrence and the Maori actor Peter Smith, as well as some highly inventive and rapid-fire camerawork from director Murphy. The Quiet Earth is an interesting take on the whole genre, and it nicely blends its psychological approach with the typical what-would-you-do-if-you-were-the-last-man-on-earth gameplaying seen in such movies.

THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969)

The end of the world as brought to you by giggly British weirdos. Directed by Richard Lester, it depicts what's left of England after World War III, which, we're told, lasted "three minutes and forty-seven seconds... including the peace treaty." The cast includes Ralph Richardson in the title role (after he mutates), Michael Hordern, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, Marty Feldman, and Rita Tushingham, who trumps Shelley Plimpton by giving birth (to Christ knows what) after she's been pregnant for thirteen months. This is one of the most truly horrifying visions of the end of the world ever caught on film, because it's supposed to be a comedy but there isn't a laugh in it. It is the anti-Dr. Strangelove, demonstrating the desperate inability of talented people to make you laugh at its subject matter, and so making the subject matter seem terrifying to a degree that sober-faced when-they-drop-the-bomb movies such as On the Beach can only dream about.

THE BIRDS (1963)

This Hitchcock film has been the subject of considerable textual analysis and speculation as to its symbolic meaning, but I like to think that Sir Alfred made it just so that he boast that they'd let him. Imagine what the pitch must have sounded like: "So, Alfred, it's called The Birds, huh? What's it about?" "Check the title, Einstein. It's about the birds." "Birds, huh. The birds, though? Is it about any particular birds?" "Nope, it's about the birds. Pigeons, parakeets, ostriches, penguins, crows, buzzards, ducks, tufted titmice... " "I see. And what do the birds do exactly?" "Turn on us. Wage war on us. Peck our eyes out." "But... why do the birds do this?" "How the hell am I supposed to know? You think I speak toucan?" "Okay, fair point. How do we stop the birds in the end?" "We don't. They kick our ass. Make Rod Taylor their bitch." "Un-huh... so... um... " "Hang on, I'm sorry, I have to take this. Mildred, did you get ahold of the gentleman with the bulldozer yet? I really need to get those bags containing the money I made off Psycho out of the driveway, they're blocking the jet... " Hitchcock himself fought with the studio to prevent them from actually tacking the words "The End" onto the final shot of our feathered friends gathering to welcome the new day, sensing that it would count as overkill.

TIME OF THE WOLF (2003)

When Michael Haneke, the European director known as the master of everyday horror for his uncanny ability to wrench suspense out of the slightest disruptions to bourgeois culture, decided to make a post-apocalyptic film, it was dead certain that it wouldn’t be a typical mosh pit of explosions, zombies, and atonal stings on the soundtrack. And, indeed, Haneke succeeded in making one of the quietest, most subtle visions of the end of the world imaginable — but also one of the most disturbing, and probably the most depressing. Haneke gives us almost no clue as to what happened to bring about the end of civilization; all we know is that the authorities are gone, the power is out, the water is tainted and no help seems to be coming from anywhere. As with all of his films, we aren’t overwhelmed with gore or beaten over the head with abject terror: instead, we’re presented with the even more profound horror of constant uncertainty and abject helplessness. When Isabelle Huppert’s family arrives at their rural cabin in hopes of waiting out the nebulous catastrophe that’s taken place, they experience the one moment of hope in the entire film; Haneke, of course, strips them of it swiftly and heartlessly, and before you know it, Huppert and her children are utterly alone, with no more possessions than they can carry and no one to protect them against a world that has grown almost instantly feral. Soon enough, they are huddled in an abandoned train station where xenophobia and sexual assault are almost tangible stinks in the air and where they are completely at the mercy of the few people bothering to pass themselves off as authority figures. Through it all, very little in the way of violence or disruption actually takes place: what chills the soul is the omnipresent fear, the certain knowledge that just as it did in a fatal and inexplicable moment at their cabin, everything can go horribly wrong at any moment and there is no safe place, no safe time. A remarkably skillful, effectively understated, and powerfully upsetting drama that conjures an apocalypse that is terrifying because it is so small and petty.

WATERWORLD (1995) & THE POSTMAN (1997)

It is the mark of a true artist that he is never satisfied with his work. Take Kevin Costner, for example. Unhappy as a mere sex symbol, he transformed himself into an Oscar-winning director, but that, too, was not enough for this nobly ambitious man. He took the only logical next step: spending close to a third of a billion dollars making two ridiculous, overblown, awful post-apocalyptic epics that would almost single-handedly destroy his career. Now that’s dedication! First came the notorious Waterworld, an early global warming scare flick that became much more famous for its colossal cost overruns (and its feeble box office) than it did for its clunky story. In it, Costner plays Mariner, a gill-festooned mutant piss-drinker who comes into contact with a bunch of unmotivated pirates called the Smokers. The leader of the Smokers is portrayed by Dennis Hopper, in full-blown Hindenburg mode as always; pitted against the supremely wooden Costner, he is as overwrought and bombastic as the Mariner is stone-faced and boring. Between the two of them, you might just be able to build one decent performance, which would be one more than is featured in Waterworld. The movie, which cost $200 million and made back about thirty bucks, was such a disaster that Costner, never a man to rest on his laurels, decided that the best way to follow it up would be to basically make the same exact movie, except this time he would direct and star in it. Of course, The Postman cost a mere $80 million, not even enough for half a Waterworld, but it made up for it by being even worse. At least the former had decent sets and costumes, whereas The Postman was a jerry-rigged piece of junk that still cost a king’s ransom and yet ended up looking bad, sounding bad, and probably even smelling bad. In this post-apocalyptic world, civilization has collapsed and America has been taken over by the Promise Keepers. Costner, a bad movie actor who here portrays a bad Shakespearian actor, poses as a postal carrier from the reformed U.S. government in order to cadge free meals off of local yokels, but soon enough, he is dispensing real hope to the legions of downtrodden mopes who have to appear in this cruddy movie. The movie only once loses its putrid reek of vanity project, and that’s at the end, a jaw-dropping exercise in the inability to suspend disbelief: the Promise Keepers, despite their inhuman levels of military discipline, have a rule that anyone can be the boss if they defeat the current leader (played by a nose-holding Will Patton) in a punch-out. Naturally, the mighty Costner prevails, and then turns to the vast army of murderous brutes who have been marauding the countryside for a decade and says "There’s gonna be peace!" They all shrug noncommittally and wander off to become chartered accountants or something, and we’re treated to another replay of the scene where Kev makes a little girl cry by wrapping himself up in the American flag. In the annals of postal lore, this thing rates slightly below Patrick Henry Sherrill’s bloodthirsty Oklahoma rampage as a point of pride.

— Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

No, But I've Seen The Movie: MADAME BOVARY

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

For a book that's often referred to as one of the all-time great unfilmable novels, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary has a long and storied history on the screen. It's been adapted for the cinema no less than six times, and an additional five adaptations for the small screen. The most well-received version, however, is Claude Chabrol's 1991 adapatation. It was widely praised at the Moscow International Film Festival when it debuted; it got Chabrol his first-ever Golden Globe nomination; and it was especially beloved in France — and who better to judge the success of an adaptation of one of France's greatest novels by one of France's greatest filmmakers than the French? Then again, there's always the counter-example of Jerry Lewis to argue against their taste as a nation. It's understandable why so many moviemakers have been drawn to the story of Emma Bovary; she's one of the most fully fleshed-out characters in all of fiction, entirely believable and completely three-dimensional. Her flaws run as deep as any character in modern literature, and her personality is as recognizable today as it was when the book was published in 1857. However, it's also understandable why so many adaptations of the book go astray; Flaubert's greatest strength as a writer was not his ability to draw deep and true psychological portraits — though that was an ability of his rivaled perhaps only by Dostoevski, his true power lay in his ability to realize those portraits in cool, elegant prose unparalleled by his peers. Due to the essential difference between the media of film and literature, much of that prose, and the incomparably refined descriptions and turns of phrase that made Flaubert's work so compelling, are inevitably lost in a filmed retelling. But in Claude Chabrol, Madame Bovary found perhaps the one director who truly shared the novelist's style and sensibility. Did he deliver a film worthy of the novel? Or was it just another misstep?

WHAT IT HAD: That rarest of things, a director sympatico with the novelist. Claude Chabrol is a holdover from the first sparks of the French New Wave, but he's developed into a filmmaker with a very unique style and signature. He's often called the French Hitchcock, a lazy shorthand that's unfair to both men — his early suspense films have given way to extremely deep and adept dramas later in life. He's also exceptionally skilled at portraying female characters, especially ones who are sympathetic despite very profound moral flaws, a perfect description of Emma Bovary. The set and costume design in the adaptation are flawless (Corinne Jorry was nominated for an Oscar for the latter), and Isabelle Huppert plays the role to chilly perfection. Her performances suggests depths that the novel reveals in full.

WHAT IT LACKED: It takes an actress of Huppert's skill to suggest those depths, and not everyone in Chabrol's Madame Bovary has that level of skill. Jean Yanne, in particular, isn't quite up to the demanding task of playing M. Homais, and other members of the supporting cast attempt to suggest with noise what Huppert conjures with silence. Elsewhere, silence works against the movie: since Chabrol cannot tell, he must show, and at times, this is tremendously effective, but at other times it can slow the movie to a tedious crawl. Where Flaubert can stun with perfect description and narrative, Chabrol must hope that the image alone can overwhelm until the next progress of plot. This gambit (which, to be fair, is no fault of Chabrol's) succeeds when Huppert is front and center and fails when she's not.

DID IT SUCCEED?: For the most part, yes — albeit for entirely different reasons than the book succeeded. Madame Bovary is a pretty perfect example of why great novels are extremely difficult to transfer to great films, but Chabrol manages to make at least a very good film by sidestepping most of the requirements for making a straight-up adaptation of the book. Where the film doesn't work, it's because it is simply impossible to convey some of the complex ideas in Flaubert's prose through the medium of film, and where it succeeds, it succeeds because of his skill as a filmmaker. Chabrol's Madame Bovary plays far more to his strengths than to Flaubert's, but where the two interweave — specifically in the portrayal of strong, difficult, women morally uprooted by circumstance — the overlap makes for a fine film.

Take Five: The Classics

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Read the classics, sir," advises Jason Miller's Lieutenant Reno in The Ninth Configuration. "It improves the entire respiratory system." Sure, but who has time for that? When it comes to the great works of western literature, it's all well and good for academics to slog through the thousands of pages of their Penguin Classics editions, but we're busy people. We have screenings of Saw V: Saw Harder to get to. We need our classics simple, direct, stripped of poetry and obscurity, and preferably less than two hours long and starring someone who can sport a decent six-pack. Robert Zemeckis' all-star adaptation of Beowulf, opening wide this weekend, is much more our speed; if we have to sit through a bunch of crazy Old English dialogue, even brought up to speed by comics legend Neil Gaiman, it better be accompanied by some naked Angelina Jolie. Here's a handful of other cinema-clarified classics.

FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

America's middle school students have one thing to look forward to in the long slog through English classes: Frankenstein. It's part of the holy triumvirate of bona fide classics (along with Dracula and Beowulf) that spice up the prose with a good solid monster. Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his "Adam" have become such iconic figures in our culture that it's hard to imagine a time when he was perceived as anything other than Boris Karloff's shambling, neck-bolded patchwork man; and James Whale's confident direction here, remarkably sophisticated for a film that was made over seventy-five years ago, is still electric today.

TOM JONES (1963)

As school-assigned, instructive Classics of Western Literature go, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is a relative favorite, containing as it does lots of screwing and fart jokes. Tony Richardson's big blow-out adaptation, like the novel a compelling combination of arch and earthy, tries to bring the same tastes-good-and-good-for-you sensibility to the big screen and largely succeeds, despite having been made in the early 1960s when a few of the book's raunchier moments had to be implied rather than depicted. Aided by some gorgeous photography, the film boasts a terrific cast led by young and studly Albert Finney and Susannah York, who's never looked better.

MADAME BOVARY (1991)

Though a number of adaptations of Gustave Flaubert's essential novel have been attempted over the years, perhaps the definitive version comes from the talented and prolific Claude Chabrol. In many ways, he's the perfect director to take on the project: quintessentially French, like Flaubert, but also like Flaubert, just alienated enough from his society and times to view them with a properly jaundiced eye. Given his history of making compelling films about unsatisfied women who come to a bloody end because of their frustration and lack of options, Chabrol was almost born to make Madame Bovary, and he couldn't have made a better choice to play Emma than his Violette Noziere star, the phenomenal Isabelle Huppert.

RICHARD III (1995)

When discussing the classics and their transition to film, there's no avoiding ol' Will Shakespeare. But if you're trying to get the kids on your side, forget glitzy romance and postmodernist flash; forsake the pomposities of a Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and go straight for Richard Loncraine's inventive, delightful Richard III. Nothing animates a Shakespeare play like a good villain, and Ian McKellen — who wrote the adaptation — plays the twisted, perverse, gleefully murderous Richard to the hilt. The setting is likewise outstanding, and the conceit of setting the story in an alternate England of the 1930s, overcome by fascist nationalism, works like a charm, particularly in a dynamite opening sequence.

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY (2005)

If someone tells you often enough that a great novel is unfilmable, you might just start to believe it. For the first hundred years or so of the motion picture industry, no one would tough Laurence Sterne's brilliant, hilarious, rambling Tristram Shandy — a work of postmodernist genius written at least a hundred years before there was even modernism — with a ten-foot lens. It took the arrival of Michael Winterbottom, a man who has made a career out of not listening to people when they tell him what kind of movie he should make next, for anything remotely resembling a big-screen adaptation to be made, and even then, it was more of an impression than it was a reproduction.

— Leonard Pierce