The Screengrab : jason statham

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: April 11-17, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s not funny, you know. Sure, Woody Harrelson Launches Method Assault on Undead Photographer makes for a cute headline. But if you knew anything about the craft, you’d know that this sort of thing goes on all time when we actors get so deeply involved with our characters. Do you know how many natives Brando beheaded with a machete on the set of Apocalypse Now? Sure, Paramount covered it all up, but when you’re in Hollywood’s circle of trust, you hear about these things.

It’s been a bad week for Woodies all around, as you know if you read Woody Allen, Larry David and the Blackness of Eternity and How Much Is Woody Allen’s Good Name Worth? Let me ask you this: When is Woody Allen gonna make a zombie movie? About time, I’d say.

Anyway, that paparazzo is thinking of suing me, so I’m gonna go consult The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six). And then maybe I’ll get around to the rest of these:

Reviews: Lemon Tree, Sleep Dealer, State of Play, Grey Gardens, The Hemingway Night

The Screengrab Holiday Special , Parts One, Two, Intermission & Three

The Legend of "Him", the Lost Dirty Jesus Movie

Transported: The Jason Statham Think Piece

Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Unwatchable #37: Bad Girls from Valley High

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998) & SNATCH (2000)

The Guy Ritchie formula seems deceptively easy: mix several colorfully bemonikered, slang-slinging con men, lowlifes, and petty criminals with a couple of scary sociopaths, a handful of intersecting scams and a hundred thousand bullets and beat to a pulp. And yet, as deeply uneven films like Smoking Aces (and Ritchie’s own Revolver) have demonstrated, good-natured ultra-violence can be just as tricky to pull off as the doomed get-rich-quick schemes favored by the sub-genre’s hapless anti-heroes. First, there needs to be a good Maguffin, like the antique shotguns in Lock, Stock or Snatch’s 86-carat diamond. Next comes a solid rooting interest (like the indispensable Jason Statham) and a credibly scary criminal kingpin like P.H. Moriarty’s murderous pornographer “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale or Alan Ford’s psychopathic pig enthusiast, Brick Top. From there it’s all about delaying the inevitable showdown with as many undercard bouts as possible between interesting supporting characters like Vinnie Jones’ relatively nice bad men Big Chris and Bullet Tooth Tony and various allies, enemies and enemies-turned-allies (and vice-versa) played by the likes of Goldie, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina and Brad Pitt's memorably mumbling pikey brawler, Mickey O'Neil. The real trick, though, is taking the material just seriously enough to maintain dramatic tension, while never quite taking it seriously enough to require tortured method acting from, say, Jeremy Piven. (AO)

THE STING (1973)

While The Grifters made the life of a con artist look bleak and despairing, as fit the work of a born cynic like Jim Thompson, The Sting – a smash hit when it first appeared in 1973 – made it look like quite a dreamy little profession, all natty outfits and colorful slang and snappy patter with your partner, accompanied by the rollicking ragtime strains of Scott Joplin. Of course, no one ever accused George Roy Hill of going for realism in The Sting; what he was trying to do was recapture the dynamite charisma his leads, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, had shared in their previous outing, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amazingly, he captured lightning in a bottle twice, and even if audiences had a hard time following the big-payoff swindle that Redford and Newman had planned against the sting’s intended target, Robert Shaw, they didn’t seem to care. It all looked like such a lark, who cared about the details? (LP)

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

Explaining his reasons for lighting out from his dishwasher's job in Texas, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) says that there's "a lot of rich women back there beggin' for it -- payin' for it, too. And the men are mostly tooty fruities!" Not long after arriving in the big city, Joe beds Sylvia Miles, which settles any doubts you might have had about how hard he's willing to dedicate himself to his craft. However, he ends up paying her, a sure sign that he may lack the management skills necessary to be successfully self-employed. Luckily, Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), the slimy, crippled greaseball with the tubercular cough takes him into his apartment in a condemned building and offers to pimp him to the best of his abilities. The film doubles as a snapshot of the Times Square New York of the pre-Giuliani cleanup era; anyone who sees it and still professes feelings of nostalgia for the good old days is seriously ill. (PN)

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville was the high priest of French noir, and Bob le Flambeur was one of his crowning achievements, a heist film so expertly orchestrated that, along with the preceding The Asphalt Jungle, it helped set a template still employed half a century later. The set-up involves aging, dapper gambler and thief Bob (Roger Deuchesne), who’s so well-liked that he’s friends with the chief of police, and who – after finding himself down on his luck – endeavors to change his fortunes by recruiting a crew for a lucrative casino score. Bob’s day-to-day existence revolves around taking chances, meaning that his eventual decision to pull off one last robbery is simply an example of a man recognizing his inherent nature. If Bob remains true to himself until the end, so too does Melville, whose expressionistic direction magnificently set the stage for the forthcoming French New Wave. Dark, sumptuous shadows, stunning iris shots, and on-location cinematography breathe melancholic life into this portrait of the romantic allure of a big score, and of the inescapable hand of fate. (NS)

CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940)

By the standards of Preston Sturges's later, wilder films, the dreams on display here are rather modest, but they manage to inspire an impressive amount of damage anyway. Dick Powell, at his most ingratiatingly sappy, is the luckless young striver who wants to secure a solid enough place for himself that he can marry his girl, Ellen Drew. Dick decides that his best chance is to win the $25,000 top prize for the Maxford House Coffee Slogan, a shot in the dark that becomes a major point of his masculine pride when Ellen casts doubt on his submission: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (She persists in not liking it even after he's explained it to her, which he does at some length.) In perhaps the most straightforward plotline Sturges ever conceived, pranksters trick Dick into believing that he's won, Dick somehow gets his hands on the money and plays Mr. Big Spender, his boss forces a promotion on him in recognition of his previously unsuspected genius for concocting advertising slogans, the truth is revealed, Dick is chastened, and then of course it turns out that he really did win the contest because nobody sent in anything better. (PN)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Transported: The Jason Statham Think Piece

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I had traveled half-way across the country to spend some quality time with my father. We were drinking Tomintoul scotch whiskey in his Colorado cabin. It was snowing outside and we were quiet, watching a movie, entranced. I turned to my dad and shared with him the undeniable truth I had gleaned from the film: "Transporting is the greatest job on earth." He sipped his drink, reflected on his years of wisdom, and nodded: "Yes. Yes it is."

If you're unfamiliar with Luc Besson's Transporter series — or wonder why a father and son would spend a portion of their few, precious hours together watching a movie about a guy and his car — its appeal can be summed up in two words: Jason Statham. The titular star doesn't make transporting look easy, of course. Adhering to a strict moral code while transporting goods for less-than-reputable businessmen is taxing. The guy has to make BMWs perform stunts that would confound a physicist. Cars just don't move like that, and if you're carting around a petite young woman in the trunk, as a transporter often does, you've got to factor in her continued survival as a goal. Plus, the job keeps you so busy — maintaining your pristine black suit and kicking the crap out of nameless thugs — that you don't get much of a chance to enjoy your secret seaside villa. (Incidentally, The Transporter has five named thugs in its credit list — Thugs 1 through 3, Little Thug, and Giant Thug — but Statham seems to brutalize quite a few poor, uncredited thugs, as well.) And getting your work finished in a timely manner is complicated by your nagging sense of honor. Human trafficking? Crap, you can't transport when you know that's going down. A wan model, wearing nothing but an unbuttoned nursing uniform and two uzis, kidnaps the rich toddler you're driving to school? Shit, doesn't look like you're punching out early today. And with all that going on, when does Statham find the time to sculpt his guns?

This is what you think about when you experience Jason Statham movies. You ask the big questions. The biggest of which is: why the hell can't I stop watching him?

Take 2006's Crank and its sequel, Crank: High Voltage, which opens this Friday. That a sequel to Crank even exists is a testament to Statham's rising star power: the original Crank ended with Statham's character falling umpteen-hundred feet from a helicopter, landing on a car, then bouncing onto the ground and dying. (Poster tagline for new film: "He was dead, but he got better.")

Crank is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life, a brutishly stupid set-piece pileup that finds Statham getting maimed by an army of racial stereotypes. Statham's character, hit-man Chev Chelios, has been injected with the poisonous "Beijing Cocktail" and therefore needs to maintain a constant stream of adrenaline running through his system or he'll die. The plot, in Statham's own words, is: "Run, run, fucking run. I do not stop." It features a sex scene between Statham's and Amy Smart's characters that's (I think) supposed to be funny: when Chelios feels himself flagging at a bus stop, his only choice is to have street-sex with Smart, on a mailbox in front of a gaggle of picture-taking Japanese tourists. It's about as titillating as a porta-john. I couldn't look at mailboxes for a week, I was that embarrassed for them. But now, when I see trailers for Crank: High Voltage, which actually manages to look stupider in two minutes than Crank does in eighty, I think, "Hmm. Yes. I cannot wait to see it. I needed plans for Friday night and thankfully they have presented themselves. Thank you, Mr. Statham."

Perhaps it helps that Statham appears to feel much like I would, if forced to stimulate sex with Amy Smart in front of a large group of strangers: slightly disgusted, but willing to get the job done. Speaking about a public-sex scene in the Crank sequel (we can only imagine), Statham said, "Trying to do an aggressive sex scene is quite difficult, especially in a public place with a crowd of screaming extras with their little camera phones going click-click, taking pictures of your pasty white ass." Statham is the action-star who isn't afraid to tell it like it is, or insult his own ass cheeks.

But where the hell did this sort of self-denigrating hero come from? The twenty-first century rebirthed the marquee action star, but today's dominant, male-fantasy models are a far cry from their Reagan-era forebears. The big-muscle, low-vocabulary Schwarzeneggers and Stallones have given way to the sad, silent, and speedy Matt Damons and Daniel Craigs, intelligent action peddlers who — off-screen — deplore the violence they peddle. Statham doesn't play in their league, though; he's a C-lister. In some ways, he's closer to the Clinton-era, thick-skulled, martial-artist-as-actor tradition of Seagal and Van Damme, but that lineage doesn't quite fit him either; though Statham's acting has never won an Oscar, and his American accent has been derided, he looks like Orson Welles next to the Muscles from Brussels.

Jason Statham's early life seems as oddball and awesome as some of his roles. The son of a lounge singer and a dancer, he was on Britain's National Diving squad for twelve years, which led work modeling for the French Connection. To bankroll his scuba-diving hobby, he hustled perfume and jewelry on London street corners. This, plus his modeling and his martial-arts training, led him to his acting debut in Guy Ritchie's hipster-faves Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch at the turn of the century. He played one-named roles, guys called Bacon and Turkish, swarthy Cockney con men who spent their onscreen time doing everything to avoid violence, not dole it out. But how did he go from skinny, balding Brit spouting witticisms to becoming the Transporter? And why do I like him so much as the Transporter?

Let's be honest. Statham's never as cool as Craig, but no one can be. No man has that many smooth things to say and, even if they did, no random woman on a beach is going to respond when you say them. He's never as collected as Damon, but Jason Bourne is a government-made super-spy. Chev Chelios doesn't jump off a bridge because it's the strategic maneuver he's been trained to take. He jumps off a bridge because, well, that's about the only choice he has. He's hassled and busy, annoyed by the demands of survival, but will do whatever it takes to survive.

Maybe it's that hint of everyman exasperation that makes Statham so irresistible, that, counterintuitively, makes his most outsized exploits (flipping luxury sedans onto moving trains, etc.) seem plausible. When Statham's interrupted while transporting, or he's given a drug that's going to make his heart explode, he responds with a begrudging sigh. A rolling of the eyes. God, why did it have to be today? I have things to do! That hint of reality establishes that for all his toughness, Jason Statham is One Of Us. If I gave up carbs and worked out eighteen hours a day, he suggests, I, too, could live his golden life. And if I did, I would feel about life the way his characters feel. (There are differences, I suppose. I, for one, would gently caress Ms. Smart in the comfort and safety of the mail truck.)

I was wrong. Transporting isn't the greatest job on earth. Being Jason Statham is.

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

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

CELLULAR (2004)

Despite flying under many moviegoers’ radars in 2004, David R. Ellis’ Cellular is a crackerjack thriller that overcomes its somewhat preposterous central conceit via unflagging breakneck energy. Co-written by B-movie master Larry Cohen, the story hinges on a kidnapped woman (Kim Basinger) using a smashed telephone to make a random call to the cell phone of a stranger (Chris Evans). Basinger successfully convinces Evans to help her escape her predicament, though complications arise at every turn, from dying cell phone batteries, to the cops’ unwillingness to lend a hand, to a bit of signal-crossing that forces Evans to steal someone else’s cell phone and car. Bolstered by a strong cast that also includes Jessica Biel as Evans’ ex-girlfriend, Jason Statham as Basinger’s kidnapper, and William H. Macy as a police officer, and enlivened by director Ellis’ no-nonsense, pulse-pounding orchestration of his various high-wire set pieces, Cellular remains the type of efficient, no-frills genre flick that Hollywood has – save for the rare exception – mostly given up on in favor of high-concept, big-budget spectaculars. (NS)

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Jonathan Demme’s 1991 serial-killer fantasia has been so celebrated (after winning a shocking number of Oscars and turning Dr. Hannibal Lecter into a household name) and its performances so justifiably celebrated that it’s easy to forget: at its heart beats a good old-fashioned thriller, cleverly conceived and exquisitely realized. A huge amount of the tension in a movie crammed full of it derives from the fact that Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Lecter knows exactly what the murderous Buffalo Bill is up to, but he doesn’t care. As he notes, he has all the time in the world, but as for Bill’s latest victim – “Tick tock”, he says with casual menace. Even after it’s become clear that Lecter is doling out information as part of an overarching plan to free himself, the movie never stops screwing with the bloody deadline it’s set; when Buffalo Bill’s house is finally raided, it’s a masterful fake-out that only increases the tension. Demme and his screenwriter, Ted Tally, deserve tons of credit for adding psychological depth and character to what is, at heart, a terrifically paced old-school murder mystery. (LP)

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

This camp horror classic stars Vincent Price as a brilliant madman outfitted with a voice box, a Moe Howard haircut, and the red-rimmed eyes of a lifetime High Times subscriber. Peeved at the medical team he blames for the death of his beloved wife -- and if you looked like this and managed to find a beautiful woman who wanted to marry you, you'd take the loss of her hard, too -- Price sets about dispatching them by means of a series of murder plots inspired by the plagues that God, under Charlton Heston's supervision, once inflicted on Egypt. The climactic zinger is a terrifically tense draining-hourglass sequence that is Price's version of the curse that claimed the country's first born sons. Instead of killing the chief surgeon (Joseph Cotten), he kidnaps and drugs the man's son, implants a key inside the boy's chest near his heart, and leaves him lying on a surgical table beneath an acid-filled container. Doc Cotten has six minutes to perform the delicate surgery necessary to retrieve the key so he can free the boy and move him out of the way before the acid eats its way through and destroys his face. In the end, Cotten pulls it off, and the acid falls on Price's mysterious woman assistant, who thus forfeited the chance to appear in the sequel. (PN)

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

This little-seen but influential 81-minute noir, directed by Irving Lerner on a low budget, stars Vince Edwards as a businesslike hit man who hits Los Angeles and hooks up with a couple of mooks who are to support him in his efforts to kill a government witness who is being kept under heavy guard while waiting to give testimony against Mr. Big. Despite its brief running time, the movie is to most race-against-time films what O. J. Simpson's televised 2004 tour of California was to Vanishing Point. To his assistants' consternation, the brainy Vince chooses to while away his first few days in the city before turning to his work, only to explode when he discovers that the target is a woman -- not because he has any philosophical or sentimental objections to killing a woman, but because he regards women as more "unpredictable" than men, which makes them more likely to veer from the routines on which he bases his elaborate murder plans. After a re-negotiation of his fee, Vince sets to work, but damned if there doesn't seem to be something to his gender-based theory. After bombing out a couple of times. and with the clock ticking down, Vince breaks character and makes a last, desperate, hands-on stab at dispatching his target, finally coming to grief in the end. It's an unusually zen thriller. (PN)

Cut the red wire, the green wire...or Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

DVD Digest for March 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008, and an animated classic gets released from the Disney vaults again.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD includes some of 2008’s best-reviewed films, including Sean Penn giving an Oscar-winning performance in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (Universal, also Blu-Ray), Anne Hathaway in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (Sony, also Blu-Ray) [the best film of the year, says I], Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (Disney), and the Swedish vampire chiller Let the Right One In (Magnolia). Also this week, Jason Statham in Transporter 3 (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the real-life blues story Cadillac Records (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in Role Models (Universal, also Blu-Ray), Charlize Theron in the WTO-centric ensemble piece Battle in Seattle (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and finally, one of the worst-received films of 2008, Mark Herman’s Holocaust-themed family movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Disney).

The big news in classic releases this week is the 70th Anniversary “Platinum Edition” of one of Disney’s greatest animated classics, Pinocchio. Also coming to Blu-Ray, the new DVD includes new commentary from Leonard Maltin and others, some newly-unearthed deleted scenes and storyboards, and a bunch of new features for kids and animation buffs alike. Also this week: Richard Gere and Edward Norton in Primal Fear Special Edition (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), and perhaps the least likely “classic” I’ve spotlighted to date, Howard the Duck Special Edition (Universal).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings South Park Season 12 (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) and The Starter Wife Season 1 (Universal).

Finally, the biggest Blu-Ray only release this week is Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology 1989-1997 (Warner), which is great news if you don’t mind paying for two DVDs you’ll probably never watch just so you get DVDs of the Burton Batman movies. Also, where’s Mask of the Phantasm?

Morning Deal Report: 2009! Much Like 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Marley took another bite out of the box office (Bad Marley! Bad dog!) over the weekend, running away with another $24 million for a total of $106.5. Before you start thinking sequel, a certain spoiler I heard would seem to put the kibosh on that notion. Bedtime Stories retained the second spot with $20.3 million, while Benjamin Button and Valkyrie continued to do surprisingly robust business. Really, the only stinker of the holiday season is The Spirit, which plummeted to a weekend take of $3.3 million. The Shadow and The Phantom sympathize.

Can The Night Projectionist succeed where The Spirit failed? The latest comic-to-screen adaptation “takes place on Halloween Eve in a small-town movie theater, where an all-night Draculathon draws throngs of moviegoers who suddenly find themselves locked inside the theater, which is slowly filling with vampires,” Variety reports. I’ve been to that theater, and I could have sworn they closed it down.

Forest Whitaker may be expendable. The actor is in talks to join Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li and Jason Statham as “the CIA liaison for a group of mercenaries who are clandestinely sent to South America to overthrow a dictator” in The Expendables, per The Hollywood Reporter. Stallone is also writing and directing.

Related:
I'm a Sexy Vampire
Stallone Is Expendable

Year-End Roundup: AFI, Boston Critics…and Stephen King?

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Here’s your Monday afternoon update on the year-end award and Top 10 list derby. The American Film Institute has released its annual top ten list – I’m not sure I knew the AFI had an annual top ten list, but apparently they’ve been doing this since at least 2000 – and most of the titles are familiar from other such lists. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk and Frost/Nixon are among the predictable entries, but superhero enthusiasts will be pleased to see both The Dark Knight and Iron Man represented. The full list is here, along with the AFI’s top ten television shows, which include The Wire, thank you very much.

The Boston Film Critics had an indecisive year in 2008. They awarded ties for both Best Picture (WALL-E and Slumdog Millionaire) and Best Actor (Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler). No big surprises here, aside from maybe the Ensemble Cast award for Tropic Thunder.

The most idiosyncratic Top 10 list to date has to be that of Entertainment Weekly columnist and Screengrab 24-hour marathon inspiration Stephen King. “I'm not trustworthy when it comes to movies… This is almost surely the only 10-best list you'll read that contains not one but two Jason Statham movies.” Indeed, King singles out both The Bank Job and Death Race for praise (he hasn’t caught Transporter 3 yet), along with the craptastic The Ruins. “It could have been ludicrous. Instead, it's unrelenting.” Yes, unrelentingly ludicrous. Anyway, check out his full list here – it’s the scariest thing he’s written in years.

Related:
Roger Ebert Supersizes Top 10 of 2008
Film Threat Unveils Frigid 50 of 2008

Site of the Day: A John Waters Christmas

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

With the holiday season in full swing, we're about to be inundated with enough Christmas-related cinematic claptrap to make you want to go after Frosty the Snowman with a jumbo bag of Halite. Not only will we see dozens of Christmas films in theaters, but TV will be spilling forth its endless tankful of Yuletide cheer, and we'll get to hear a bunch of rookie entertainment reporters ask the likes of Todd Haynes and Jason Statham about the true meaning of Christmas. There's even a rumor that one of the schmucks who writes for this blog is going to start a Christmas-themed feature to run the rest of the month.

But don't despair, indie kids! There's still plenty of misanthropic dark-side-of-Christmas stuff out there for you even if you can't afford that Criterion Collection DVD box set of all the Silent Night, Deadly Night movies. For example, the good people over at Dreamland News have brought us this delightful Noel gift: Season's Greetings from John Waters!

It seems that every year, the Lowbrow Bard of Baltimore sends out a set of Christmas cards to his nearest and dearest that would be considered, well, slightly inappropriate for the general public. A few of Waters' friends have allowed these specially made cards to find their way onto the internet, and Dreamland News has done us the favor of collecting them -- from the cockroach tree ornament seen above to a post-surgery Elizabeth Taylor to a shot of Steve Buscemi impersonating Waters himself. As if all that's not enough, there's also a link to Waters' holly jolly essay, "Why I Love Christmas". Just the thing to pass the time while you're waiting for Annual Gift Man to arrive!

Related Posts:

John Waters Smokes Crack

Location, Location, Location: Baltimore

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

KILLA SEASON (2006)

I guess I'm kind of ridiculously humorless, because the whole idea of "guilty pleasures" strikes me as part of the reason people are getting dumber: it's easier to recognize bad material, sit back and mock it than try to engage with anything serious and remotely challenging. For some people, the whole genre of "guilty pleasures" takes over entirely from the non-guilty kind and they surrender. Which is fair enough if you're working a demanding job or have a tough life and don't really care about movies and just want the laughs. But if you have the time and leisure (unemployment induced or otherwise) to want a guilty pleasure that actively challenges your endurance, say hello to Cam'ron's directorial debut Killa Season. Not technically a direct-to-video film (limited tri-state area screenings were scheduled for its release), Cam'ron's endless ode to gangsta life begins with a back-alley craps game which turns into a man getting whacked over the head with an empty bottle for a minor betting infraction, then everyone cheering as Cam'ron pisses all over him while chanting "No homo." Killa Season's main achievement is being consistently morally depraved and technically incompetent at all times. If the amateur videography and dialogue that makes mumblecore sound like the snappiest film noir you ever saw (Juelz Santana: "They trying to take over the block"; cut to random guy: "Yo, let's take over the block") aren't enough to entice you, stay for levels of moral filth surpassing Salo. For sheer grossness, the close-ups of coke pellets being shat out by mules are hard to beat, but less-extreme scenes like the ones where Cam'ron spits on a little girl are constantly forthcoming. At well over two hours, Killa Season will make you question your dedication to unintentional hilarity. Me, I watch it once a year.

TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)

Transporter 2 treats real-world physics with less precision than your average Looney Tunes cartoon. Over the course of Louis Leterrer's film, Jason Statham, when not systematically evading and defeating various goons and hirelings (including a hired assassinatrix who, for good kinky measure, shoots up a hospital in her lingerie — Transporter 2 defeats subtext by being even dumber than you'd expect) — consistently test-drives cars in ways I've never seen. My favorite is when, to get rid of a time-bomb on the car's underside, Statham's character hooks it on a construction crane as part of a perfect 360 that lands him on the opposite roof just as the bomb explodes. But there's also the completely nonsensical climactic fight, where Statham and his Euro-foe (Alessandro Grassman) duke it out, bullets and all, while a plane plummets into the ocean, and even after. With such sublime visions of human possibility, why carp about the real world? There's also a smaller pleasure here: anyone fond of the Europudding productions of the '70s — where a bunch of awkwardly accented actors were brought together into an under-written film calculated for nothing so much as maximum exploitation of every country the cast came from — should dig the awkward polyglot cast. When Grassman hisses (in relation to his evil plot to disseminate air toxins) "That's right. Breathe, my friend, breathe" — well, if you're not amused, I can't help you.

HANNIBAL (2001)

The Silence Of The Lambs is a well-crafted and compelling film, but it's basically kind of a drag: with every year, the sexual tensions driving Buffalo Bill seem a little less compelling and defensible, and the sexism card seems like more of a time capsule. Hannibal, on the other hand, is just stupid. Although Ridley Scott's come a long way since Alien, it takes a truly brain-dead mind to settle on his unique way of expressing conflict. When Hannibal's on, the "Goldberg Variations" play; when his nemesis (Gary Oldman) is chewing the screen, the "Blue Danube" plays. And when they meet, they both play at the same time. Hannibal is mostly remembered for its final gross-out brain-eating scene, but it offers more than that: if the sexism seems a little dated in Silence, the leering misogyny of Ray Liotta here is entirely, uh, Liotta-esque, and the constant shots of Florence are pretty without getting all Merchant-Ivory.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Star Trek Can't Be Metrosexual; Or, Why Action Heroes Must Have Manly Haircuts

Vadim Rizov — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:59:00 GMT

So the long-awaited Star Trek trailer dropped, by all available evidence, sometime on Saturday and was exhaustively analyzed on the Internet by everyone capable of typing with an interest. As a franchise now over the forty-year mark, there's legions of the (overly-)invested just waiting to see what J.J. Abrams was going to do to Gene Roddenberry's long-straggling franchise. (Never mind that the Mission: Impossible had been kicking around for just as long when he got around to doing the third installment; presumably no one was that invested in the series' '88 iteration, whereas there's some desperate souls out there who still want to talk about how awesome Deep Space 9 was.)

And, of course, no one can agree on anything. But we can all agree on one thing: men who spend too much time on their hair aren't manly.

Yes, Abrams' Star Trek cast is full of pretty young things who'd be just as home on network TV making 13-year-old girls' hearts sw jasoon: Chris Pine, a TV journeyman, as Kirk, and Zachary Quinto (who apparently is on this show called "Heroes" that I really have never bothered to watch) as Spock. The smaller parts have been filled out with better but presumably less expensive supporting actors: Eric Bana, Simon Pegg, John Cho. (God bless the smart-ass who cast Winona Ryder as Spock's human mom; to suggest that her career has sunk so far that she had to find marriage on another planet is pretty hilarious.) No one, however, seems to be interested in their qualifications. Old-school Trek fans have recently been suggesting that the success of the original show rested upon its casting "real" actors with presence in the leads. This is obviously insane: Shatner was a journeyman actor going around doing bad things like trying to be one of The Brothers Karamazov, Leonard Nimoy was a guest-star on pretty much an TV series that would have him, etc. They lucked it in being a show that, whatever its campy excesses, had enough bold-faced Ideas to engage college students and create its own visual iconography — one that would subsequently be confused for a wonderful and brilliant vision, which it isn't. It's just part of the American pop-culture landscape.

Regardless: the big problem seems to be that everyone's haircut is too pretty. One "sott68" was one of the first, over at Ain't It Cool News, was the first to raise an important concern: "No Hetero kid actors available?" he wondered. "Kirk looks a bit womanish." The conservative commentators over at right-wingnut film site Dirty Harry's Place had similar concerns: "If I were a commander in a military-type body like Starfleet," explained one Jared, "any pretty-boy with the frosted hair that looks like it was commissioned in a beauty-salon instead of a barbershop would have to scrub the latrines with a brush made up of the hair we shaved off his head." One "whiskey" gets a little more explicit: "We are talking here [...] the kind of gay vibe that Hollywood insists on pushing. Guys don’t like it — they want leading men who are tough, not highly groomed, salon-friendly, sort of gay Russell Brand types."

Forget about the latent homophobia disguised as some kind of "respect" for the original; if a bunch of Star Trek nerds wants to have a nice day worrying about Kirk's masculinity (and pillory the buzzword "metrosexual" further to death), let 'em have it. What I'm really intrigued by is the idea that you can measure action-hero-viability via hair. One time I made a horrible mistake and went to the Atlas Barber School for a $4 hair-cut, only to find out that what I wanted wasn't possible; real men, it seems, get their haircuts with clippers; layering is for effeminates. Apparently this same kind of logic applies to action heroes.

But when you think about who's been cast lately as ass-kicking heroes, these commenters aren't that far off; they're merely responding to a casting stereotype that's been going on for years. Nothing against Jason Statham (no one's a bigger Transporter fan than me) or the growly-voiced likes of Vin Diesel, but if you look at the list of frequently-shaven-headed actors who've been trying to kill everything that moves on-screen in recent years, then yes: it does definitely look like J.J. Abrams isn't just taking his casting ideas from what kind of 20something inspires teen viewing on TV, but he's actively trying to queer things up, Kirk-Uhuru sex scene or no. At least Schwarzenneger and Stallone got to keep their hair, as ridiculous as it is. If Star Trek lets action stars get nice hair-cuts, then I'm all in favor of turning Star Trek into the Brokeback Mountain of sci-fi space action.

A high-quality trailer is here; far as I'm concerned, it's just fine.

Morning Deal Report: Stallone Is Expendable

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:45:00 GMT

We’ve seen warring volcano movies, giant meteor flicks and Capote biopics, but nothing can prepare you for the drama of Gods vs. Titans! War of the Gods is set to start shooting in February for Relativity, while Clash of the Titans is slated for a April launch at Warner Bros. “Both are sub-$100 million projects, though the budget for Gods, at approximately $85 million, is believed to be higher than Titans, which is closer to the $70 million range. The studios have been in a fierce battle to get their product to market first, in a battle echoing the scramble between competing studio projects Troy and Alexander in 2004,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Sylvester Stallone has written and will star in The Expendables, which “follows a team of mercenaries on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator,” per Variety. Jason Statham is also aboard and Jet Li is in negotiations to join the action picture for Nu Image/Millennium Films.

Antonio Banderas is in discussions to play Salvador Dali in a biopic for director Simon West. “Film will blend music with CGI sequences in an effort to capture the inventiveness and color of the painter. Story will explore how Dali conquered America and the world with sex, sin and surrealism only to succumb later to worldwide scandal and misfortune,” Variety reports.

Related:
Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again
Woody Harrelson Eats Your Brains

Morning Deal Report: Post-Election Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The news out of Hollywood is a little scarce this morning. Apparently there was some kind of political thing going on last night or what-have-you. Things are so slow, The Hollywood Reporter is headlining Jonathan Lipnicki news. You remember Lipnicki, right? The kid from Jerry Maguire? “The human head weighs eight pounds”? Well, the lad is now a senior at Los Angeles' Agoura High School and plans to star in the psychological thriller The Other Side of Innocence. (That would be “guilt,” I think.) He’ll play “a damaged young man who becomes romantically involved with the unhappy daughter of the local chief detective while a serial killer is threatening their town.”

Tough guys galore have signed on for 13, an English-language remake of the 2005 French pic 13 Tzameti. Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, Jason Statham, Sam Riley, 50 Cent and Ray Liotta are all on board for the story of “a young man who stumbles into an underground competition where the wealthy gamble on human beings in a Russian Roulette-like competition,” per Variety.

Ginnifer Goodwin and Nicholas Hoult have joined Colin Firth and Julianne Moore for A Single Man, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel. “Goodwin is Mrs. Strunk, a suburban mom who doesn't share her husband's dislike of their neighbor, a gay professor (Firth). Hoult will play Kenny, a sexually ambiguous grad student who shows an unusual interest in the professor,” per THR.

Related:
Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas
The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Fox Takes Marvel's Dare

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Adaptations of Marvel Comics have been doing great business at the box office for almost ten years now, from X-Men to Spider-Man to Iron Man. And, just like in the comics, when one creative team doesn't find an audience, the big bosses at Marvel Films have been more than willing to try again with new writers, directors, and stars; Fantastic Four wasn't a critical success, but it made enough money to spawn a sequel; Ang Lee's Hulk was an ambitious letdown, but Marvel handed the property over to Edward Norton for a second chance; and The Punisher is being given another go-round despite two dismal adaptations so far. The one Marvel superhero franchise that hasn't been talked up for a reboot so far has been Daredevil (and its even worse spin-off, Elektra). That's probably because the original -- helmed by a hapless Mark Steven Johnson and starring an out-of-it Ben Affleck -- was such a piece of junk that no one wanted a second try at it.

That may be about to change. 20th Century Fox's co-chair, Tim Rothman, insists that the studio will be pairing with Marvel Films to produce another installment of the adventures of everyone's favorite blind lawyer/costumed vigilante; he's just not saying when. Or who. Or where, how, or perhaps most importantly, why. In a cagey interview with IESB, Rothman says the deed will get done, but fails to name names, and cites a curious precedent: "I think that the thing The Hulk showed...is that it is possible, that if you really do it right the audience will give you a second chance." Exactly what was done right about Norton's Hulk reboot and exactly who gave it a second chance is unclear: the movie was tepidly reviewed, and made almost exactly as much money as Ang Lee's famouse 'failure'. But hey, the spirit is willing even if the facts are weak.

While Rothman goes on to namecheck Christopher Nolan and his approach to the Distinguished Competition's Batman franchise as a possible peek at what the tone of the next Daredevil film might be, it's clearly too early to start talking about personnel. Which, in a way, is too bad: if Daredevil's worth doing, it's worth doing right. As we reported in this space a while back, Frank Miller and Jason Statham have both expressed some interest in a Daredevil movie, and one of the hottest action stars of today combined with the man who wrote some of the best Daredevil stories in comic book history could make for an intriguing film. On the other hand, if all Fox intends to do is find the next Mark Steven Johnson -- well, wake us when X-Men 4 is ready.

Related Posts:

Jason Statham: I Dare You

Don't Mess With The Norton

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 2-8, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

First of all, I should mention that we here at the Screengrab are sensitive to your complaints that the place has become something of a boy’s club, strewn with boxer shorts, empty beer cans, baseball cards and “adult reading material.” To that end, we’ve tidied up a bit, sprayed some lilac-scented Febreeze around, and are now prepared to welcome the newest member of the Screengrab team, Sarah Clyne Sundberg. Sarah made her debut earlier today with Olympic Games Past, so please extend your warmest greetings. As for the betesticled among us, we’ve been busy this week:

You ever think “Hey, that movie could have been directed by that other guy!” Well, so have we! Here are 15 Movies That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed by Someone Else (Parts One, Two, Three and Four).

The Midnight Meat Train probably won’t be coming anywhere near you, but maybe you can catch Elegy or In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

How about a triple feature from the Summer of ’78: Revenge of the Pink Panther, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Hooper were all clogging the drive-ins 30 years ago. None of them really summed up the season like The Endless Summer, though.

Best wishes to Morgan Freeman for a speedy recovery and a painless divorce!

Scarlett Johnasson and Penelope Cruz did their best to lower our expectations of their lesbian makeout session in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

While cleaning out Screengrab headquarters, we found these Boxes of Kubrick.

Jason Statham as Daredevil? Britney Spears in Faster, Pussycat…Kill! Kill!? Maybe in the Parallel Universe Film Guide.

Rejoice in my misery as I resume my Unwatchable quest to view every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list, including College Road Trip and Kickboxer 3: The Art of War.

That’s it. Get your motor running, head out on the highway!

Jason Statham: I Dare You

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Marvel's recent forays into the world of superhero films have been dynamite. With the Spider-Man franchise more or less held up as the gold standard of super-action, the X-Men movies still holding up strong despite the disastrous third installment, the recent Iron Man film reminding everyone of how much fun comics are supposed to be, and even the Hulk reboot carrying with it the perception of success even though it basically matched the box office numbers of its unfairly vilified Ang Lee predecessor, it's easy to forget they're plenty capable of super-duds. The 2003 adaptation of Daredevil is one of Marvel's few notable duds (the less said about the Elektra spinoff the better); a lukewarm lead performance by Ben Affleck, a morally and technically confused plot, and uncertain direction by Mark Steven Johnson were largely to blame.

Still, for comics fans, the character has a lot of life to give, and most devotees of the comic -- particularly of the so-called "Born Again" plot arc of the 1980s, with its stark religious imagery, sense of moral atonement, and brutal, noirish crime elements, all of which were present in the 2003 movie but ineptly handled -- would be more than willing to give a chance to a potential remake. And while there's nothing official in the works, according to Geoff Boucher, proprietor of the L.A. Times' genre-driven "Hero Complex" blog, if a remake ever gets made, it may benefit from an infusion of a much more dynamic, enthusiastic and charismatic lead actor in the person of Jason Statham.

In the waning hours of the San Diego ComicCon, Boucher found himself in a hotel bar in the presence of stuntman turned actor Statham (there to promote his remake of Death Race 2000) and Frank Miller, who wrote the "Born Again" stories and was primarily responsible for Daredevil's stunning renaissance of the 1980s and early 1990s (and who was there to hype his movie version of Will Eisner's The Spirit). Statham expressed a keen interest in playing the alter ego of blind lawyer Matt Murdock: "Just give me the chance. I would love to play Daredevil." Miller quietly agreed that he thinks Statham's good for the role. But does the rest of the world? It's easy to see the explosive, rough-and-tumble Statham turning Daredevil's action scenes into gripping, bloody street combat, but it's less easy to imagine him losing his bluster to play the sightless attorney, who hides himself behind a mask of timidity to lull his many opponents. Whether or not this really happens is contingent on Marvel's permission (though they maintain strong times to Miller), and how successful the Spirit movie is -- a bomb may take Miller out of the driver's seat, while a success may make him a player with the resources to make whatever movie he wants, including an adaptation of one of his best-loved works in "Born Again".

Can you see Statham in the devil horns and red long johns? Sound off in comments...

Marvel Comics is Ready for Its Close-Up

DVD Digest for July 15, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a comedic visionary gets the Criterion treatment, Jack goes nuts on Blu-Ray, and the unholy pairing of Martin Lawrence and Donny Osmond hits DVD.

DVD of the Week: Jacques Tati was one of the greatest comic filmmakers ever to man a camera, a brilliant visual filmmaker whose skill at engineering gags was only matched by that of Buster Keaton. Criterion has previously released Tati’s classics M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time, and now they’ve made available a snazzy new edition of Tati’s final theatrical feature Trafic. In Trafic- also the final onscreen appearance of Tati’s signature character Monsieur Hulot- Tati takes on car culture, as Hulot takes to the highways in a souped-up camper and encounters all sort of automotive mishaps and outrageous technology. Compared to the almost impossibly ambitious Play Time, Trafic’s humor is quirkier, but Tati’s sense of timing and gentle humanism are as present as they ever were. The DVD also includes the two-hour documentary In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot from 1989, as well as a number of interviews with the filmmaker and a new essay from critic Jonathan Romney. Trafic may not be as well-known as many of Tati’s beloved classics, but it’s nonetheless an important title in his filmography, definitely worthy of the attention Criterion has lavished on it for this release.

This week’s recent releases on DVD include: College Road Trip (Disney, also Blu-Ray), the aforementioned Lawrence/Osmond vehicle; Jason Statham in the true-crime inspired The Bank Job (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Step Up 2 the Streets (Disney, also Blu-Ray), a sequel no one actually asked for; Aaron Eckhart in Meet Bill (First Look); the Christina Ricci-starring fractured fairy tale Penelope (Summit Entertainment); and the Brazilian Oscar submission The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (WEA). In addition, this week brings a trio of horror releases- Asylum (MGM), Shutter (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and the omnibus film Trapped Ashes (Lionsgate), whose participants included Ken Russell, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante.

TV-on-DVD releases this week include Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (Warner) and Saving Grace: Season 1 (Fox).

Finally, the week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Warner).

In Other Blogs: They Shoot Bloggers, Don’t They?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Along with movie fans everywhere, film bloggers bid farewell to Sydney Pollack this week. Bright Lights After Dark sums up the prevailing sentiment in the title of this post: Good Director, Great Actor. “One of the best, certainly one of the most unusual, episodes of the half-hour anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was 1960's 'The Contest for Aaron Gold.' Directed by Norman Lloyd and based on a story by Philip Roth, it’s about a camp counselor, a teacher of ceramics, who observes a special talent in Aaron (Barry Gordon), one of the boys he is instructing in arts and crafts. While the other boys are using their clay to make crude snakes and pots, Aaron is making a finely detailed sculpture of a knight. But there’s a problem. The sculpture is missing an arm, and for some reason, Aaron refuses to complete it. The night before the boys’ parents are due to arrive, the counselor decides to complete the sculpture himself – with unexpected results. I recall this episode today, among other reasons, because of the extraordinary natural performance by the actor who played the camp counselor. It was the late Sydney Pollack, and to see him in this role is to wonder why he didn’t have the major acting career of a Hoffman or a De Niro. Instead, of course, Pollack became a director, and - not surprisingly - directing actors was one of his greatest strengths.”

Arbogast on Film offers a somewhat more pointed appreciation. “Sydney Pollack rates about half a dozen references in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which means, I guess, that Biskind doesn't consider Pollack (who died yesterday at the age of 73) one of those saviors. Well, fuck Peter Biskind. I'm not knocking Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Paul Schrader or Brian DePalma - I like a lot of their movies, too - but at least Pollack never got high off his own supply and turned into a pathetic caricature of himself.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has a post-Cannes wrap-up. “Along the Croisette, the enormous billboards for international co-productions that may never be made, let alone seen by the paying public, will quickly come down. This year's most ubiquitous and puzzling ad was pushing an Egyptian-made thriller (or something) called The Baby Doll Night, featuring a tank on a ruined street with a woman's slip hanging from its cannon. It asks: ‘Can one night of pleasure mend 60 years of pain?’ Well, I'm just not sure. Another total baffler was a film called The Seven of Daran: The Battle of Pareo Rock, which appears to feature a baby giraffe, two kids, a helicopter and the slogan: ‘A myth never been told.’ (Fellow blogger and Cannes drinking buddy Glenn Kenny prefers the tagline for the Jason Statham vehicle Transporter 3: ‘The rules remain the same. Except some changes.’)”

Cinema Styles proprietor Jonathan Lapper has put together a terrific movie clip montage called Frames of Reference. “I knew I wanted to take just one piece of music, and using no ambient sounds from the films themselves, edit together clips building a rhythm according to the natural rhythm of the music. I had another goal in mind as well. I did not want to move through film history chronologically, working from a hundred plus years back and moving forward or going in reverse, and I did not want to break it down into sections according to genre. What I wanted to do, and did, was take advantage of the language of film, the words and letters, and the fact that so many films, whether consciously or not, use the same shots, the same angles, the same movements when telling their story. And so the montage exploits these similarities and puts them to the rhythm of the music.” Watch it here.

And finally in List-o-Mania, ReezChannel commemorates the release of Sex and the City with a Tribute to Big-Screen Cougars, “that special breed of single woman, generally in her 30s or 40s, who tosses aside traditional notions of femininity with a bold, independent, sexually adventurous approach to life.” Has the world forgotten Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment? (The correct answer is “yes.”)

Jason Statham Mixes Things Up in Crank 2

John Constantine — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:13:00 GMT

Nah, I’m just razzing you. Looks like Jason Statham is set to continue his nearly decade-long streak of playing the exact same dude punching other dudes in Crank 2. Spoiler TV has got details on the plot (as it were) and some of the roles yet to be cast. If you’re, and I quote, a "tough fowl mouthed British kid with a cockney accent" you could play the child version of Statham’s character Chev! Who, I guess, has chickens in his mouth. Or something. There are also open roles for one-hundred-year-old Chinese men (Hu Dong) and ladies in their twenties who MUST BE OKAY WITH NUDITY.

For those not in the know, the original Crank is about a tough who needs to keep his adrenaline high or his heart will explode. It features the least sexy public coitus ever filmed.

Screengrab Review: The Bank Job

John Constantine — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:17:00 GMT

The Bank Job says it's based on a true story, proudly proclaiming on its striking retro posters, "The true story of a heist gone wrong. . . in all the right ways." Unlike some movies that make similar claims, like the upcoming 21, The Bank Job doesn’t take too many gross liberties with its foundational truths, such as they are. This much is fact: in 1971, Lloyds Bank on London’s Baker Street was robbed. During the burglary, the criminals’ walkie-talkie communications were overheard by a ham-radio enthusiast. It was the biggest story in town for about a week, until a government-issued D-notice, or gag order, was put in effect and that was the end of it. (The U.K. government denies a D-notice was ever issued.) The bad guys got away with it, and no one ever found out why. Bank Job writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, along with director Roger Donaldson, take these events and spin them into a decent story about amateur crooks, thuggish pornographers, pervy politicians and evil Black Panthers.

Clement and La Franais’ version of events revolve around Terry, played by Jason Statham in patented tough-guy mode, and his gang being unwittingly hired by MI5 to retrieve pornographic photos of a British royal stored in black activist/extortionist pimp Michael X’s safe-deposit box. Statham’s become a regular face in the trashy action genre, but The Bank Job finds him returning to his Guy Ritchie roots as a small-time player in London’s seamy underworld. Statham and his crew make up the best parts of the film, their canned heist-movie dialogue ("The one score that will change everything") delivered with enough charm to keep the tedium of cliché at bay. The rest of the players don’t pull their weight. Peter De Jersey’s Michael X isn’t very threatening, David Suchet’s Lew Vogel comes off as less imposing and more ready for an episode of PBS’ Mystery, and the film’s numerous cops and G-men are just set dressing. Taken as a whole, The Bank Job is decent fluff. The only real knock against it is Roger Donaldson’s failure to pursue the '70s-exploitation trappings so prevalent in the movie’s marketing and first half. It’s more Joe Carnahan than it is Peter Collinson. When the movie focuses on the titular job, it’s great stuff, satisfyingly seedy and exciting. Everything else goes a little wrong and, no, not in all the right ways.

"The Bank Job": Lock, Stock, and Dirty Pictures

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

The Bank Job a new British film directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Jason Statham, offers a twist on a spectacular true crime story. In September 1971, someone broke into the vault of Lloyds Bank in London on Baker Street, tunneling through a concrete floor from forty feet away, and made off with more than three million pounds' worth of loot from the safety deposit boxes. It was an audacious heist — the biggest bank robbery in British history — but what was even more remarkable was the way the story suddenly disappeared from the newspapers a few days later. As Will Lawrence reports, "This was prompted by the issuing of a D Notice, a government order that forbids the press from reporting on certain events. Ordinarily, such a measure would be employed only if the story threatened national security. So why was it slapped on this particular story? What else did the robbers find in those safety deposit boxes?" Dick Clement, who co-wrote the movie with his writing partner Ian La Frenais, thinks he knows. Clement, who has been working on getting a movie project based on the story for almost ten years, says he got the straight dope from George McIndoe, who once tried to sell the idea himself to Hollywood when memories of the robbery itself were still fresh. McIndoe, who claimed to have gotten his information from two of the robbers themselves, reported that the thieves had found "sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret inside one of the deposit boxes."

According to the theory offered up by McIndoe and the screenwriters, the pictures supposedly belonged to Michael X, the drug-dealer, pimp, extortionist, and questionable political leader who was immortalized, in fictionalized form, by V. S. Naipaul in his novel Guerrillas, and later in Naipaul's long journalistic essay "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad." In the movie, Michael X (who died in 1975) uses the photos to keep the law at bay, threatening to make them public unless he was given a wide berth by the authorities. The writers suggest "that the robbery was masterminded by MI5, which was eager to get its hands on the photos and thereby neutralise Michael X's threat." "That's the theory, anyway," adds Clement, invoking the time-honored escape hatch of conspiracy theorists since time immortal. Audiences can chew all this over when The Bank Job opens in Britain later this month. Others have already made up their minds — such as Robert Rowlands, a ham radio operator who tried to alert the police that the robbery was underway when he intercepted the burglars' walkie-talkie transmissions. "The film is an amusing series of misconceptions, dragging in royalty," he says cheerfully. "I am in touch with the princess's solicitors."

Morning Deal Report: Re-Cranked

Peter Smith — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Now here's some news you can use: Lionsgate is making a sequel to Crank. This one pins Jason Statham against "a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working." Um, awesome. But the same story drops still-more-intriguing news: Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under, Dexter) will star in a futuristic thriller called Game with 300's Gerard Butler. Michael C. Hall rules.

The latest movie in the Philip K. Dick adaptation wave, Radio Free Albemuth, stars. . . Alanis Morissette. I will not make jokes. I will just say that Alanis Morissette almost single-handedly ruined the mid-nineties, and I wish she had gone away forever. That is all.

Heath Ledger and Sean Penn will costar in Terrence Malick's next film, Tree of Life.

— Peter Smith