The Screengrab : jeff goldblum

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS MICHAEL IN THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Following an especially painful round of orthodonture during my junior year of high school, my father brought me to The Big Chill to cheer me up, and I immediately fell in love with the movie, which celebrated the type of close-knit friendship that had sustained me through the many dateless nights of my adolescence. On the verge of young adulthood and the dissolution of those (mostly platonic) hometown relationships, I was also drawn to the film’s evocation of the big, chilly world I’d be facing after graduation, far from kith and kin, and started imagining myself as a cool, mordant loner not unlike William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet, Nick (except without the war injury impotence) -- the type of guy likely to attract weirdly sexy free spirits like Meg Tilly’s Chloe in droves once I got to college. Yet, in truth (as my friends were always happy to remind me), I was never really the Nick in our little group, but rather the Michael: i.e., Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy, needy motormouth, the guy with the painfully obvious motives and the total lack of game with the ladies -- but then again, at least he wound up with most of the best lines (and a pair of functioning testicles)! (AO)

STEVE MARTIN AS NAVIN JOHNSON IN THE JERK (1979)

The title is a misnomer. Navin Johnson isn't really a jerk. Jerks screw you over just for the pleasure. Jerks have intent. Jerks drive Hummers, talk during movies, and buy Carlos Mencia DVDs. Navin is more of a well-meaning idiot, which is the type of role that Steve Martin does best. He heads out to make his way in the world, but chance makes him rich before chance takes it away. Don't try to read too much into it. The search for larger meanings is admirable and all, but sometimes the gunman just hates cans. (HC)

JACQUE TATI AS M. HULOT IN MON ONCLE (1958)

The French had a way with fools. Like Boudu in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Jacques Tati's Hulot is less an idiot than an anarchic force of nature sweeping through the modern world and blowing away all of the little lies people tell themselves to maintain a sense of order. In the sequence above, the movie visits Hulot in the bustling corner of Paris where he lives. Ignore the Italian subtitles. You don't need to know the exact words to know what is being said. Hulot's sister lives with her family in a sterile ultramodernist nightmare, presumably in a far more affluent area of Paris. Consider the awful gurgling fountain:

It's no wonder that Hulot's nephew idolizes his goofy, absent-minded, and absolutely free uncle. Unlike Boudu, Hulot is making an effort to get along in the modern world, but it's clear that everything about it leaves him befuddled and bemused. And one of the best roles of the fool is to show his or her audience why their world is confusing and ridiculous. (HC)

CARY GRANT AS WALTER BURNS IN HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

The Cockney hustler that was inside the handsome gent called Cary Grant never made his presence more strongly felt than in this version of the great American theatrical comedy, His Girl Friday, in which Grant played the ultimate comic monster, the self-centered, bulldozing newspaper editor Walter Burns -- a role that gave him the chance to break the land speed dialogue record while demonstrating his ability to make it seem charming that he was pushing everybody around and giving the thumbs-up to the occasional felony. Burns is a man who'll do anything to get what he wants, and he could be played as a man the audience loves to hate; letting Grant run with the role turns the character into the amoral, ruthless son of a bitch that audience members suddenly realize they wish they could be. The performance may be the closest that a mortal man of woman born has come to approximating the movies' ultimate embodiment of the can-do spirit, Bugs Bunny. (PN)

W.C. FIELDS IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

If you look up "curmudgeon" in the dictionary, you may not see a picture of W.C. Fields’ glowering mug staring back at you, but you probably should. Fields made a career out of playing slight variations on his signature persona -- a guy whose disdain for women, children, animals, and other races and ethnicities was merely a subset of his overall drunken misanthropy. If Fields’ movies consisted only of him belittling those around him, they wouldn’t be funny. Thankfully, Fields realized that there was no better butt of his jokes than himself, both because it made the other characters feel less like victims of his barbs, and because getting picked on by others further fueled his misanthropy. Look at the way the henpecked Harold Bissonette rails against his wife when he’s alone only to clam up whenever she’s around. What’s more, nobody could deliver a joke quite like Fields -- beginning in his trademark nasal whine, he would often passive-aggressively swallow the end of the line, as if the people to whom it was addressed were suddenly unworthy of hearing it. And Fields was peerless when it came to the non sequitur, never more so than in his classic two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer, perhaps the purest distillation of his genius. Hard to say what makes it so brilliant- is it the sight of Fields in mittens and mukluks playing the dulcimer and singing, or such quintessential Fields lines as "My Uncle Ichabod said, when speakin’ of the city, ‘it ain’t no place for a woman, gal, but pretty men go thar’." And if the repeated "it ain’t a fit night out for man or beast" gag doesn’t make you laugh, well, there’s just no hope for you. (PC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

10. THE FLY (1986)

Horror movies, contrary to the claims of highfalutin critics like us, don’t necessarily have to be about anything. If they’re scary and well-made and don’t insult your intelligence, just being a good horror movie is enough. But when they are about something, especially in the hands of a storyteller of the depth and intelligence of David Cronenberg, they transcend genre and become something truly special. Cronenberg took a popular pulp story by George Langelaan, which had been filmed once before as a pretty straightforward monster movie in the 1950s, and remade it as a terrific modern-day horror flick, complete with terrifically suspenseful moments and plenty of nauseating fluids for the grindhouse crowd – but he also infused it with a powerful undercurrent of extremely personal terror. The Fly, carried on the hair-sprouting, wing-bearing back of Jeff Goldblum’s greatest performance, is one of the finest movies ever made about the betrayal of the body: in the story of a scientist who is transformed into an insect-like creature, Cronenberg manages to isolate not only the horror, but also the loneliness, the helplessness, and the frustration of the sick and the dying. When Brundlefly is finally dispatched at the movie’s end, the pervasive feeling isn’t one of revenge, or relief – it’s one of terrible sadness.

9. CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Half a dozen years before George A. Romero went to work re-creating the movie zombie for all time, this film, directed on a shoestring budget by Herk Harvey (with members of a filmmaking team that the Lawrence, Kansas-based Harvey used in his principal business making educational and industrial films) just about invented the modern concept of the independent horror movie, as well as doing its bit to fuzz the line between art film and amateur hour. The first and just about the last film to feature its star, Candace Hilligoss, with Harvey as the most notable of the ghouls who begin to haunt her, it has a dreamy, disconnected quality that may not have been entirely planned but that is especially well-suited to a story that may or may not be happening, about a heroine who may or may not have survived the car accident that opens the film. In fact, parts of Carnival of Souls come as close as any pre-'70s film to anticipating the world of David Lynch -- which makes you wonder if it's a coincidence that Hilligoss' character's name, Mary Henry, contains the names of the central male and female characters of Eraserhead.

8. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

The 1931 Frankenstein wasn't the first film inspired by Mary Shelley's novel, and it sure wasn't the last, but its imagery was so perfect and powerful -- the shambling monster with the squared-off head, the boxy flat-top and the jacket with the sleeves too short -- that it imprinted itself on the imaginations of generations of viewers, so much so that no later version of the monster ever really looks quite right. This sequel was put together by the same key personnel who worked on the first film -- the director, James Whale, Boris Karloff as the monster and the high-strung Colin Clive as the mad scientist -- but Whale, a campy, stylish wit who would later be played by Ian McKellan in the 1998 Gods and Monsters, really let his dark sense of humor off the leash in this one, resulting in a film that sympathizes with the monster to such a degree that the creature's rallying cry, "I love dead! Hate living!" and his final kiss-off line, after his rejection at the hands of the title figure (Elsa Lanchester), "We belong dead," take on the quality of anthems. Underneath the film's knowing silliness is a genuine, tender regard for those who cannot find love or acceptance in this world, and what greater horror could there be?

7. THE EXORCIST (1973)

William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel isn’t the best movie on this list. The Shining is a greater artistic accomplishment; Psycho is a more important film; The Fly is more meaningful. But for my money, there’s no movie on this list that’s scarier, and isn’t that the whole point of a horror movie? The movie that utterly terrified me as an adolescent still has the potential to give me nightmares as an adult; Friedkin makes judicious use of timing and tone to keep you just interested enough to be alert when the real horror starts, and once it does, he keeps up a mood of sustained menace, ranging from the suggestive to the utterly brutal, that never lets up. In less competent hands, The Exorcist could have degenerated into a boring morass of overblown theatrics and incomprehensible theology – which is exactly what happened in the sequels – but here, with everything firing on all cylinders, the movie instills an almost religious sense of dread even in those who have never sat through a Catholic sermon on the horrors of hell. An extremely formidable cast, anchored by an intense Ellen Burstyn, an ironclad Max Von Sydow, a neurotically brilliant Jason Miller, and a killer one-two punch from Linda Blair and Mercedes McCambridge, helps fix your attention throughout the film, but it’s the handful of truly terrifying moments that keep this a classic. (The restored “Version You’ve Never Seen” only amplifies the constant sense of stress and unease, and if anything, is even more frightening than the original.) Small wonder that Billy Graham claimed that the movie was literally possessed by the Devil.

6. ALIEN (1979)

My parents took my brother and me to see Alien when we were 12 and 10, respectively. To the best of my recollection, my brother bailed for the safety of the lobby sometime around the time the baby “chest-burster” burst from John Hurt’s chest in the film’s iconic and notorious horror film moment, leading to Veronica Cartwright’s stunned and horrified, “Oh, God...” (because, really, what else does one say in such a situation)? I remember feeling very big brother smug about staying bravely in my seat as the ever smaller crew of the freighter Nostromo hunted H.R. Giger’s phallic dentata extraterrestrial through the claustrophobic cabins and corridors of their vessel...until, that is, the moment when sole survivor Ripley (and her cat) abandoned ship...AND THE ALIEN WAS IN THE ESCAPE POD WITH HER! Fuck this, I thought...I wasn’t gonna risk a pre-pubescent heart attack just because my folks thought it would be funny to scare the piss out of their children. Rushing out to join my brother in the lobby, I watched the rest of the movie through a window in the door of the theater, then probably went home and had a few hundred nightmares. In my adult life, I’m more a fan of James Cameron’s 1986 thrill-ride sequel than Ridley Scott’s relatively artsy, slow-moving original...but respect must be paid to any film with the power to induce actual childhood trauma.

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

Contributors: Pierced Leonard, Philled With Evil Nugent, Android Osborne

Edie Adams, 1927-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Actress, singer, and Muriel Cigar girl of countless TV commercials Edie Adams has died at 81. On Broadway, the cuddlesome Adams won a Tony for creating the role of Daisy Mae in the musical Li'l Abner. Though never a big movie star, in the 1960s she had roles in such films as The Apartment, Lover Come Back, Under the Yun Tum Tree, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Love with the Proper Stranger, The Best Man, The Oscar, and The Honey Pot. However, she will always have a special place in the hearts of many because of her marriage to Ernie Kovacs, which lasted from 1954 until his death in 1966. By all reports the marriage was a happy one, which would seem to indicate that Adams had a sense of humor, a tolerance for chaos and cigar smoke, and just a general inclination to put up with a lot, qualities that men will always find not just endearing but awe-inspiring in a beautiful woman.

In later years, her film and TV credits included the first Cheech and Chong movie, Up in Smoke, where she and Strother Martin were somehow cast as Tommy Chong's parents; The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood; and a cameo as Mae West in a 1984 TV movie that starred Jeff Goldblum and Melody Anderson as Kovacs and herself. Her last screen appearance was in the PBS miniseries Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City in 1993.

Forgotten Films: "Mad Dog Time" (1996)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having had a versatile, many-sided career does have its down side: when Isaac Hayes died last Sunday, it quickly became a hipster punch line that mainstream obituaries often referred to him as "perhaps best known" for his role as Chef on South Park. Hayes was well-known for a great many very different things, and Chef happened to have been the most recent of these. Then there are people like Larry Bishop, who are not especially well-known at all for anything, but have a number of things for which they may be sort of semi-recognizable: add them all up, and it kind of equals minor celebrity. For example, you might trigger a faint recognition in people who are well-versed in Rat Pack mythology by noting that Bishop is the son of the late comedian Joey Bishop. Experts in Hollywood dynasties may care for all of two seconds that he once performed comedy with Rob Reiner at a time when the director of Misery was himself best known as Carl's kid. And bad-movie junkies of a certain stripe may find it in themselves to think it worth knowing that, in the late '60s and early '70s, he appeared in such pictures as The Savage Seven, The Devil's 8, Angel Unchained, and Chrome and Hot Leather. It was these credits that helped convince Quentin Tarantino (who cast Bishop as Michael Madsen's grouchy boss at the strip club in Kill Bill, Vol. 2) that, as a writer-director-star, he had a great motorcycle movie in him. Tarantino served as executive producer on the years-in-the-making Hell Ride, which reunites Bishop with Madsen, and which Tarantino believes it was Bishop's "destiny" to make. Anyone who's seen Tarantino's performance in Destiny Turns on the Radio, which established that our boy QT should be prevented, by federal law if necessary, from throwing around the "D" word, can guess at how well that's turned out.

If Bishop and Tarantino are soul mates of a sort, it's because they share a knack for throwing together ready made slogans and catch phrases and parts of old movies and kinky twists on the same, and getting an incredible number of cool people to come together to act out their fantasies. In his best work, QT has been able to shape these raw materials in such a way that the kick he gets out of them is transferred directly to the audience. In Bishop's only work as a director--Hell Ride and its predecessor, the 1996 gangster fantasia Mad Dog Time--the results tend to be an inert mess, interesting chiefly for the challenging aesthetic questions it raises, such as What was he thinking? and How hid he get this cast? The best answer to the second question probably has something to do with how many favors a man can get owed in the course of a thirty-year career in which he's done everything from episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Love, American Style to such oddities as the William Castle-Marcel Marceau collaboration Shanks.

Mad Dog Time is set in some weird gangland society where everybody is a mobster or a moll and all the characters spend their time entertaining each other with weird acting exercises and showy turns--it's as they were trapped at an improv comedy club in Hell--while plotting their next bloody move up the ladder. (There's a palpable '50s-Vegas vibe to the decor, which may be an in-joke on Bishop's lineage.) Richard Dreyfuss, whose 1978 starring vehicle and pet project The Big Fix featured Bishop in a supporting role, is the nominal head of the mob, Vic, who, making his entrance wearing a bathrobe over his PJs, has just returned from a stint in the nut house, where it was probably quieter. The other people who appear here doing things that they probably would have thought twice about if they'd known that Larry was going to be able to get the film developed include Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Diane Lane, Burt Reynolds, Billy Idol, Michael J. Pollard, Henry Silva, Gregory Hines, Billy Drago, Angie Everhart, Paul Anka, and a sick, callously exploited Richard Pryor. For hardcore devotees of movie character actors, the prize catch was Christopher Jones, whose work in such movies as the 1968 Wild in the Streets (in which Bishop played a bassist with a hook for a hand) and Three in the Attic earned him a reputation as a James Dean a the new age. But Jones, high-strung and drug-damaged, quit acting after finishing his work as the romantic lead in the troubled David Lean production Ryan's Daughter (1970). Tarantino, who offered him a role in Pulp Fiction, was unable to lure him out of the shadows, but Bishop was able to get him to drop by the set just long enough to play a sneering supposedly fearsome assassin whose bite turns out to be worse than his bark. As Tarantino himself pointed out, Jones "really doesn't have a character to play", but he still had the old charisma to go with his creepy, walking-death's-head look, and in this, his only movie appearance in the past twenty-eight years, he makes enough of an impression to make you wish that Bishop had used whatever line it took to get him to come out and play to persuade him to work for someone who might have been able to construct a real movie around him. Larry Bishop isn't the most obnoxious hustler who's ever rolled down Santa Monica Boulevard with show business in his DNA and a pile of I.O.U.s in his glove compartment, but I suspect that if it were his really his destiny to make the kinds of movies he's been trying to make--if he really knew how and it were in his blood--he'd have tried making them before Tarantino showed up and took out a patent on them. It may be that Tarantino's patronage of Bishop is really based on Tarantino feeling touched that one of the people he grew up watching in all kinds of trash is actually now trying to imitate him.

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Summer of ’78: “Thank God It’s Friday”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Because I have lost my mind, I am launching yet another new Screengrab feature today, this one called – as you may have gathered – “Summer of ’78.” The premise is simple: each week this summer we will jump back in time 30 years to check out a flick that was new and exciting in theaters that week in 1978. This isn’t necessarily about the biggest hits or biggest bombs, or the best or worst movies; it’s more about examining what was considered suitable summer entertainment then and how it compares to today’s blockbuster fare. I’m sure we’ll all learn something, right? Hello? Is this thing on?

What better way to kick off the series than with the most beloved disco comedy ever made, with the possible exceptions of Can’t Stop the Music and Summer of Sam?

Thank God It’s Friday

Release Date: May 19, 1978

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Terri Nunn, Chick Vennera, Donna Summer, Debra Winger and The Commodores

The Buzz: Saturday Night Fever was a huge hit. Add some laughs, substitute Jeff Goldblum for John Travolta, and what could go wrong?

Keywords: Discotheque, Gorilla Suit, Pinball, Leather, Dance Contest

The Plot: The hard-working stiffs of Los Angeles are living for Friday night, when they can finally cut loose on the dance floor of the Zoo, the hottest disco in town. DJ Bobby Speed has promised a live appearance by the Commodores in time for the big dance contest, but their instruments and equipment are with roadie Floyd, who keeps getting pulled over by the cops. Aspiring singer Nicole (Summer) just wants a chance to show off her pipes. Zoo owner Tony Di Marco (Goldblum) is a horndog trying to lure a married woman into the sack on her fifth anniversary. The rest of the Zoo is filled with lonely people in polyester looking for love or just looking to score.

The Test of Time: The ensemble cast, up-all-night party movie is one of my favorite genres, but Thank God It’s Friday is a pretty weak example. It plays like an extended episode of some 70s sitcom you’d forgotten about, set to a monotonous dance beat. It’s the most whitebread depiction of the disco craze imaginable; the only black people in the joint are the entertainment, and there’s virtually no gay presence at all aside from one mild joke and the recurring sight gag of a cross-dresser shaving his chest. If this movie were the only surviving artifact of the era, you’d have to assume disco was a predominantly Jewish phenomenon. The music is generally lame soundtrack album filler, aside from “Brick House” and the Donna Summer showstopper “Last Dance” (the reason you can accurately call Thank God It’s Friday an Academy Award winner). The cast is forgettable and forgotten, except for Goldblum and one girl who caught my attention by actually resembling a flesh-and-blood human being. Checking the credits later, it turned out she was Debra Winger. I wonder what ever happened to her?

Quotable Quote: “You know what this place reminds me of? Disneyland with tits!”

2008 Equivalent: If we’re talking dance-offs, the recent Step Up 2 The Streets fits the bill. If the question is which summer movie will look the most dated in 30 years, it has to be Speed Racer, right?

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews in Cinema (Part I)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.”

So says Seth Rogen’s full-time slacker Ben Stone at the start of 2007’s Knocked Up, heralding a recent shift in the pop culture persona of the Chosen People from neurotic schlimazels of the Woody Allen variety to bad-ass playas like Bana.

But, although the concept of “Jewish action star” is a relatively new phenomenon, film history is filled with tales of Hebrew heroes (and heavies), from ancient Egypt to modern Israel.

And thus, in tribute to the upcoming June 6th release of Adam Sandler’s meshuga Israeli commando/hair-stylist comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, we here at the Screengrab are proud to present...THE TOP 12 TOUGH JEWS OF CINEMA!!!!!

ERIC BANA AS AVNER IN MUNICH (2005)

Well, of course we had to start with this one. Bana’s Avner, a Mossad agent tasked with tracking down and executing the terrorists responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, isn’t a stone-cold, tough-as-nails killer like his fellow assassin Steve (a dead-eyed Daniel Craig). Not that he isn’t formidable in his own right, surviving explosions, raiding PLO compounds, dodging other assassins and negotiating tense Middle Eastern Mexican stand-offs. But Avner is more than a rage-fueled killing machine, leavening his combat skills with love of family and the mental toughness to question the wisdom of fighting violence and hatred with ever more violence and hatred. Plus, if we’re to believe the ill-conceived, much-maligned “climax” of the film, Bana’s character is tough enough to maintain his mojo during volcanic sex with his wife even while suffering vivid flashbacks of terrible murders he didn’t actually witness. Me, I usually just think of baseball.

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS DAVID JASON IN DEEP COVER (1992)

This anti-Drug War crime thriller supposedly stars Laurence Fishburne (as a fast-rising drug dealer who's actually an undercover cop), but the movie belongs to Goldblum as the lawyer for the local head (Gregory Sierra) of the drug cartel. His character embodies his culture's traditional pursuit of success through education and hard work, but he's also at least half crazed from envy of the thugs he keeps out of jail with his motormouthed brilliance. Their hair-trigger willingness to give in to their violent urges makes him feel unmanly and overcivilized. (Sierra insults Goldblum by calling him "bar mitzvah boy"; Goldblum, in turn, naively thinks he's paying Fishburne a compliment when he likens him to "some beautiful panther or jungle storm...a dangerous, magnificent beast.") After Sierra beats a man to death in front of Goldblum, he asks him if it's the first time he's ever seen a person die, and Goldblum responds with a dreamy monologue about witnessing a fatal accident when he was a kid at summer camp. He sounds as if he 's remembering his first kiss. Goldblum finally snaps, joins Fishburne in toppling Sierra in a bloody coup, and winds up decked out in black leather and slicked-back hair, machine-gunning Clarence Williams III as if in retaliation for The Mod Squad.

JAMES WOODS AS MAX AND ROBERT DE NIRO AS NOODLES IN ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

Sergio Leone's final film is an opium dream of a gangster epic starring De Niro and Woods as lifelong frenemies, two products of the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto of the tenement era who grow up to become kings of New York during the Depression years. Part of the tension of their love-hate relationship comes from the fact that they represent clashing approaches to getting the most out of life. Max, the Bugsy Siegel figure, is an unstoppable bullet of wordly ambition, a volatile schemer who won't hesitate to shoot or bitch slap anyone who gets in his way, questions his plans, or looks at him cross-eyed. For most of the film he seems to roll right over the more careful, romantic-spirited Noodles. He ultimately fakes his own death, so that he can disappear into a new life as a respectable, rich businessman (and marry the woman--Elizabeth McGovern--who's the unattainable love of Noodles' life), leaving his old pal broke and stranded with survivor's guilt for thirty-five years. But after Max has played out his string and summons the now-aged Noodles to put him out of his misery, telling him that he's "the only one I can accept it from", we see that Noodles, the mother hen, is one of those people who was born to be sixty, and that everything up to now in his life has been preparation for the moment when Max comes begging, and he says no. It's all been worth it just to get to the end of their lives so that he can say, "I told you so."

CHARLES BRONSON AS BRIG. GEN. DAN SHOMRON IN RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Though it may seem hard to believe now, there was a period of about ten years there where most of the Western world recognized the Israeli military as perhaps the last example of unfailing competence and dependable strength put at the service of a cause that was just--in a nutshell, the good guys. This glorious public relations phase began in the summer of 1967 with the Six-Day War and had its last great hurrah with the rescue mission to recover the hostages taken by Palestinian and German hijackers who sought refuge in Uganda. "Operation Entebbe", which happened to unfold in the early hours of July 4, 1976, as America was gearing up to celebrate its own Bicentennial, was such a movie-ready news event that it was dramatized in three separate movies that went into production practically overnight, including two films originally made for American TV and an Israeli feature that was directed by Menahem Golan, later of the notorious Golan-Globus Productions. The best of them, by miles, was Raid on Entebbe, directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and released to theaters internationally after premiering on NBC TV six months after the actual events. The cast, which was very classy A-list by seventies TV-film standards, included Peter Finch (who died a week after the original broadcast, and who won an Oscar for his performance in Network shortly thereafter) as Yitzhak Rabin and Yaphet Kotto as Idi Amin, but it's Bronson who gives it that all-important shot of testosterone. He doesn't really have that much to do except fill out a uniform and bark orders into his walkie-talkie, but the important thing is that it's Charles fucking Bronson in his Death Wish-era prime who's in charge of this mission, bestowing upon it his macho gravitas and leathery glamor. By comparison, the 1986 Delta Force had to try to squeeze whatever juice it could out of the combination of a past-his-prime Lee Marvin and an not-yet-ironic Chuck Norris on a rocket cycle.

LENA OLIN AS MASHA IN ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY (1989)

In this adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Olin is a house on fire as a ferociously sexy Holocaust survivor who's having an affair with Ron Silver as a Polish Jew who's been transplanted to New York after spending World War II hiding in a hayloft. (He's now married to the girl, once his servant, who loaned him the layloft.) Fear and guilt have made Silver so nervous that he's a spectral wreck, but her time in Hell has left Olin disinclined to care what anyone thinks of her and determined to take whatever she wants and apologize to nobody; when she finally kills herself, it's her final "fuck you" to a world that doesn't deserve to have somebody as hot as her livening it up. Honorable mention goes to Anjelica Huston as Silver's first wife, who he meets again in New York years after having assumed that she'd died in a concentration camp. His first words to her after they'be been reunited: "I... I didn't know you were alive!" Her smiling reply: "This you never knew."

WOODY ALLEN AS DAVID DOBEL IN ANYTHING ELSE (2003)

I was going to include Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Meyer Lansky in Bugsy here, but Kosher Nostra mobsters are well-represented elsewhere on the list, and since the Woodman was disparaged in the introduction as the personification of non-threatening Jew-hood, I figured it was only fair to mention his uncharacteristically empowered portrayal of gun-toting, windshield smashing, paranoid conspiracy theorist David Dobel in the underrated, unfairly maligned romantic tragedy, Anything Else. Like his work in the far superior Stardust Memories (which critics also hated), Allen’s performance here (as an unreliable mentor to the likeable, lovelorn Jason Biggs) is cranky and misanthropic, but also darkly funny and refreshingly prickly, with the courage of its own piss and vinegar convictions. Dobel may be just as much of a hard luck case as some of Allen’s previous incarnations, but this character would rather fight than mope, choosing anger over depression in his confrontations with the injustices of the world. Like his cool, successful Bizzaro World alter ego Nick Fifer in Paul Mazursky’s 1991 curiosity Scenes From A Mall, Dobel is the rare Allen character that strays from the comedian’s typical comfort zone to hint at the Tough Jew lurking just beneath the tsuris.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

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

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

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

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

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

10. William Hurt as Professor Eddie Jessup in Altered States

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

9. Alan Tudyk as Wash in Serenity

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

8. Cary Grant as David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for part 2.

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Smart People, Ellen Page reprises her wise-ass, brainy-sexy persona from Juno, reaffirming her place as the current It Girl for a brand new generation of future I.T. professionals and I.T.T. graduates.

Lord knows I enjoyed the standard-issue sex dolls of my Gen X adolescence, from Catherine Bach’s Daisy Duke to Sylvia Kristel’s steamy French maid in Private Lessons (which my parents naively allowed me to go see all by myself because it co-starred that nice Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati).

But horny fantasies aside, I knew from the get-go I was far too much of a Starlog-reading, drama club-joining, Honor-Roll attaining nerd to ever wind up with the hot blondes or the Bond babe, and so it was always the relatable, approachable freaks and geeks of cinema that gave me hope. And while most of the actresses on the following list were actually gorgeous starlets in real life, it was reassuring to believe the following characters, at least, would maybe lend you their panties if you ever needed to win a bet for a dozen floppy disks. (And don't worry, we'll get to the GUY geeks next week...but suggestions are certainly welcome!)

10. MOLLY RINGWALD AS SAMANTHA BAKER IN SIXTEEN CANDLES

Sure, she wound up with the hunky popular guy at the end, but she WAS nice enough to lend Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek her underwear, and I was always hot for Ms. Ringwald, especially when I read in later interviews that she eventually grew up, fell hard for a French guy and became quite the sex enthusiast.

9. ALLY SHEEDY AS ALLISON REYNOLDS IN THE BREAKFAST CLUB

A pivotal character in my early development, who inspired a life-long love of freaky Goth girls but also broke my heart, dropping the knowledge on my adolescent ass that even the misfit girls would usually choose the Jocks over the Brains of the world if given half a chance. Traitor!

8. MEG TILLY AS CHLOE IN THE BIG CHILL

Sexy, exotic and a little odd-looking, Chloe made me want to be the kind of cool, smart rebel her soulful misfit would dig (a.k.a. William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet Nick) as opposed to the gabby neurotic Jeff Goldblum-y type I actually was (and am).

7. HOLLY HUNTER AS JANE CRAIG IN BROADCAST NEWS

Friends still mock me for my obsession with Holly Hunter’s t.v. producer character, but Broadcast News was the movie to beat in 1987 for nailing the friends vs. lovers dilemma faced by supportive, dorky guys in love with female “friends” who think of them as brothers. The scene where Albert Brooks’ character finally tells off Jane, then dumps her from his life is still one of my all-time favorites, finally teaching me the best way to avoid “nice guy” syndrome with girls was not to be so goddamn nice all the time.

6. DAPHNE ZUNIGA AS ALISON BRADBURY IN THE SURE THING

This Gen-X version of It Happened One Night dramatized the other side of the friends vs. lovers dilemma: once you finally figure out how to attract girls, do you go for great sex or great conversation? With Alison Bradbury, John Cusack’s Walter Gibson found the perfect balance.

Click here for part 2!

Trailer Review: 10000 BC

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Roland Emmerich makes noisy crap that's entertaining when it isn't being too noisy and crappy. Take, for example, Independence Day. Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum firing a nuclear missile into a spaceship the size of the moon and screaming "PEACE!" is awesome, but Emmerich ruins the moment with a screen full of yelling Randy Quaid heads ten minutes later. 10,000 B.C., unlike Emmerich's other movies, is Quaid-less all around, so it's off to a promising start. But this trailer is odd. It looks like Mel Gibson trying to remake Stargate. And why are all these cavemen so pretty? Only one movie is allowed to have pretty cavemen, and that's Encino Man. — John Constantine

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Nicole Kidman's Nose in THE HOURS (2002)

Can a fake nose win an Oscar? Some might say it already did, when Nicole Kidman's turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was awarded the golden statue for Best Actress. We've got nothing against Kidman's performance in that film, but judging by the reams of press that her lightly reoriented schnozz got at the time, you'd think that it was the nose that was wearing Kidman, instead of the other way around. Of course, this was yet another award in a long series of Best Actress Oscars that went to Beautiful Women Doing Unglamorous Things — whether it was playing a tarted-up legal secretary (Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), having sex with Billy Bob Thornton (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball) or looking like a burn victim (Charlize Theron in Monster). Which is, really, the only way we can explain Kidman's decision to use such a subtle prosthetic in the first place; it's not like the American moviegoing public had any idea what Virginia Woolf looked like in the first place.

Jeff Goldblum's Jaw, Cheeks, Eyes, His Very Fucking Being, in THE FLY (1986)

Some of us were prohibited from watching more than two hours of TV a week as children. Luckily, some of us were also latch-key kids, so naturally, whenever no one was home, we gorged, often on both food and shlocky afternoon TV movies. And those of us who were unlucky enough to see The Fly at this time didn't quite grasp the extent of our mistake until it was too late. There you are, happily eating your delivery pizza, and in the middle of a big, meaty bite, you're confronted by the spectacle of one of Brundlefly's eyes falling off, like an egg yolk dripping into batter. You assume that's the most disgusting scene they're gonna throw at you. Again, big mistake. Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly is possibly the single most hideous, repugnant creature ever seen on film — worse than the Alien mother, worse than any other close competitor. Every negative trait of Jeff Goldblum's physiognomy is brought into stark relief onto an insect face; when it decays, we dare you to keep eating. We certainly didn't.

Penelope Cruz's Ass, VOLVER (2006)

Since her Hollywood debut, Cruz has been the poster child for foreign-born performers who aren't half as compelling in English as they are in their native tongue. Which is why her reunion with Pedro Almodovar was a cause for celebration — not only would she be working in Spanish again, but she was collaborating with a filmmaker who always brought out the best in her. But strangely enough, much of the buzz around Penelope's role in 2006's Volver focused less on the performance than around the generous fake derrière she strapped on for the role. According to Almodovar, the padded rump was necessary for the character, an earthy, hard-working mother in the Anna Magnani tradition, and this makes sense, since Penelope Cruz is lovely, but talk about bun cakes — she ain't got 'em. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of drawing undue attention to Penelope's prodigious prosthetic posterior, the hype allowed moviegoers to grow accustomed to the sight of the suddenly callipygian Cruz, much in the same way Alejandro Amenabar leaked stills of a heavily made-up Javier Bardem to the Spanish press so the public would get used to his appearance in The Sea Inside. The gimmick paid off in the end, as Cruz's full-bodied (sorry) performance made the rockin' world go 'round, garnering her unprecedented critical praise and a rare (for a foreign-language performer) Best Actress Oscar nomination. In fact, after the success of Volver, the only question that remains for Penelope Cruz's career is: how can she leave this behind?

Vincent Gallo's Penis in THE BROWN BUNNY (2003)

When people actually got around to seeing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny rather than just making fun of it (which isn't to say that they stopped making fun of it afterwards, or that many people actually got around to seeing it), the scene that generated the most buzz was what is delicately referred to as "the blowjob", where Gallo's lodge pole is climbed by Chloe Sevigny, for whom one has never felt more pity. The scene's verite qualities and (literally) naked emotional power are what most people talked about, although we think they were just grateful that something was actually happening in the movie after endless shots of Gallo driving aimlessly across country. Gallo, who tends to be pretty sensitive about things like this, has always claimed that the hog in question belongs to him; French director Claire Denis, on the contrary, claims that it is an artificial wang, and that, worse yet, it isn't even Vince's artificial wang — she says he stole it off the set of her 2001 film Trouble Every Day, in which he had a large part, but not that large part. In the absence of, er, concrete evidence from Gallo, we're going to go with Claire Denis' version of events; we figure that since she's not on record as hoping Roger Ebert gets cancer for giving one of her films a bad review, she's got the moral high ground.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Body in SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Hollywood's relationship with the overweight isn't exactly a history of sensitivity and kindness. Particularly where women are concerned, the mere suggestion of being a few pounds beyond anorexic means you're virtually unemployable; and in a city where people like Christina Ricci, Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears can be attacked in the press for being fat, roles for actual human women, let alone fat women, are few and far between. When the Farrelly brothers decided to make a movie about a shallow womanizer who falls in love with a 300-pound woman to prove that he can see 'inner beauty,' they had a casting decision to make: hire two people to play Rosemary Shanahan — one a beautiful, thin Hollywood blonde, to portray Hal's perception of her, and one a genuine 300-pound actress to portray the 'real' character — or just stick Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit? (It didn't help the whole unpleasant aftertaste of the movie that its male lead was Jack Black, an actor who gets romantic leads despite his own flabby physique; no actress with a body like Black's would ever nail down a leading-lady part.) Perhaps it's too much to expect anything like insight from filmmakers whose reputation is built on the gross-out comedy, but the fat suit is already a ethical minefield (representing, as it does, a sort of physical proof of Hollywood's allergy to hiring anyone genuinely overweight to appear in a prominent role) without filling it with an actress who probably weighed 110 pounds soaking wet when she was filming the role.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Willem Dafoe's Teeth in WILD AT HEART (1990)

The whole world seems to be rotting in David Lynch's nightmare road movie, and nowhere is this clearer than in the misbegotten mouth of white-trash villain Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe in full-moon mode. Unholy, irredeemable, and defiantly unflossed, Bobby Peru is meant to be the ultimate dark void awaiting the young lovers at the end of their road to nowhere, and no Satanic movie character ever displayed a less welcoming smile. Perverse to the end, the still-smiling Bobby finally slides a shotgun beneath his chin and blows his own head off, after which the part of his body above the gum line must have felt a certain amount of relief.

Goldie Hawn's Fat in DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)

In this special-effects comedy, Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play lifelong rivals who achieve "undead" immortality and spend the rest of the movie blowing holes in each other, twisting each other's necks into pretzels, knocking their heads into their chest cavities, and generally behaving as if Chuck Jones were their stunt coordinator. But the most effective physical mutation in the picture may come when Hawn slips into an old-fashioned fat suit and layers of latex makeup to depict her character's depressive obesity after Streep has waltzed off with her fiancee. Nothing in the movie is funnier than Hawn's expression of malicious satisfaction, with her features sunk deep in the mass of her cream puff head, as she imagines raining destruction down on her gal pal. At the time, Hawn was forty-six years old and had spent a quarter of a century doing her damndest to hang onto the body and mannerisms of a teenage girl. Maybe she felt wickedly giddy at even pretending to have let herself go.

Dennis Hopper's False Leg in RIVER'S EDGE (1987)

Dennis Hopper, fresh from his comeback in Blue Velvet, lays claim to the being the counterculture's answer to Walter Brennan in this generation-gap study of alienated youth. John Heard made a good grab for the position in Cutter's Way, where he staggered around pretending to be one-legged and wore an eye patch to boot, but that was nothing compared to what you get when you equip Hopper with an artificial leg, an inflatable sex doll, and the name "Feck", and sit back to watch him rock. When Hopper, who deals dope to the local teenagers, sits down to remove his false leg, it symbolizes the loss of his own youthful innocence and the disconnect between the older characters and the young people, which is fed by their use of his own product. Or something like that. And did we mention that his character's name is Feck!?

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov