The Screengrab : jennifer tilly

A Whole Lotta Walken Goin' On

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In the back and forth that finally resulted in last week's list of the Screengrab's favorite leading men [favorite leading ladies list is being compiled now, will your favorites make the cut!?], one name that never seemed to come up was that of Christopher Walken. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I know that one reason that Walken's name never passed my own lips was that...well, I hate to say that I am not worthy, but it's kind of like that. It's not even that Walken is such a great actor (though on many occasions he has proven himself to be just that) but that he's turned into such a strange mixture of artist, self-parodying comedian, cultural icon, and "X" the unknown: who wants to take on a subject that slippery? The answer to that last question turns out to be Patrick O'Sullivan, a San Francisco standup comic and creator of (in the words of Lisa Marks in the Guardian) "a partly scripted, partly improvised, partly biographical" Los Angeles stage show called All About Walken. O'Sullivan has his own measure of Walken's place in our world: "Here was a man doing big-budget movies, independent movies, music videos, Saturday Night Live - and standups were impersonating him. So all around there was this melding of Walken and pop culture. Not everyone knows his name, but they know his persona, from little kids who know what 'More cowbell!' means, to 65-year-olds who admired him in The Deer Hunter. He floats across it all."

The show grew out of O'Sullivan's experiences with his college pals trading impersonations of celebrities, a common enough experience that in his case somehow led to assembling a cast that includes two women and five men in a theater on Hollywood Boulevard doing Christopher Walken impressions. They also do impressions of other actors, including Woody Allen and Robert De Niro, recreating scenes from Walken's movies, as well as impressions of other actors, including Jennifer Tilly and Colin Farrell, doing their Christopher Walken impressions. They take suggestions from the audience, which, on the night that Marks caught the show, resulted in a missing scene from the Sex and the City movie in which Sarah Jessica Parker got to meet you-know-who. The show has been successful enough that it's scheduled to move to San Francisco, after which O'Sullivan hopes to take it to New York. O'Sullivan told Marks that Walken himself hasn't seen it yet, "But some of his family have, and also his agent, who thought it was fantastic. One time, one of the guys in the show was at the agent's office and had a speakerphone conversation with him ... as Christopher Walken. Walken told him he was very flattered." Anything that brightens Christopher Walken's day is all right with us, but there are other social considerations to take into account. "I've had many calls over the past two years that go something like this: 'Hi. I went to the show last week with my husband and now he will not stop impersonating Christopher Walken. I ask him to put the trash out and he answers as Walken. And I just want you to know that you're responsible for that.'"

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

By the time I first encountered the film version of Richard O’Brien’s bizarre musical paean to ‘50s horror movies and polymorphous perversity, it was already a well-established cult classic, regularly attended by freaks and frat boys, geeks and fad-of-the-week trendies. But underneath the audience-participation spectacle was a gleefully subversive last gasp celebration of gender-blind free love (before pop culture sexuality became more repressive yet somehow simultaneously more commodified, fetishized and pervasive in the neo-con '80s and '90s). The invocation of Tim Curry’s infamous sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-n-Furter to “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” became highly questionable advice in the AIDS era; even in the no-holes-barred world of the film's Transsexual Transylvanians, Frank’s lifestyle’s too extreme (and the character, like many overreaching sensualists before him, meets a tragic demise). Yet, the Rocky cult continues to flourish, years after its early ‘80s heyday, with screenings often serving as safe havens for GLBT (and straight!) misfits seeking community, acceptance and glamour in the midst of a “Science Fiction Double Feature” lost in time, lost in space and meaning. (Mee-eeaaaaa-nnniiinnnggg!!!!)

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

According to the official Oscar narrative, 2005 was the Year of Gay Cinema, and Brokeback Mountain, which won three Academy Awards that year, was its purest expression. And that’s true, to a point; in a year that seemed to feature more mainstream movies than usual with gay themes, Brokeback Mountain, with its gorgeous scenic cinematography, its elegiac tone, and its powerhouse lead performances by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as doomed, love-struck cowboys, stood out. But more than a simple movie, Brokeback Mountain was that rare thing, a cultural phenomenon: a work of art that transcends its nature as merely a good or bad, popular or unpopular, example of its type and becomes something that permeates the culture and becomes a sort of intellectual shorthand for something greater than itself. Not only did the movie provide us with a genuine catchphrase in “I wish I knew how to quit you”, but it became such a phenomenon that pundits on the left and the right used its box office numbers to defend or denigrate the mainstreaming of homosexuality. One’s very reaction to it seemed to become a referendum on gay rights. And while there’s no denying that a lot of the attention it got was of the negative sort, tinged with a base and hysterical juvenile homophobia, from the first internet wag who dubbed it Bareback Mountin’ to the last sports radio talk-show guest who used its title as a cheap butt-fuck joke, it saturated the very cultural discourse of its time. And in that way, it advanced the cause of gay cinema – and maybe of gay rights in general – more than its makers could have ever dreamed.

BOUND (1996)

Because its action unfolds mostly in a couple of apartments on what appears to be the planet Earth, it's tempting to think that Bound is the only Wachowski Brothers movie to take place in the real world, when actually it's as much a fantasy as The Matrix or Speed Racer. Gina Gershon's Corky may hang out in the sort of bars where the women are built like Brian Dennehy…but she's still built like Gina Gershon. When she hooks up with breathy femme fatale Violet (Jennifer Tilly), it's the sort of lesbian romance that two dudes from Chicago would dream up. (That is, they were two dudes at the time, Larry Wachowski's later gender bending adventures notwithstanding.) Still, their love affair isn't just Skin-emax-style titillation; it's actually handled rather matter-of-factly in what might otherwise be a pretty standard neo-noir flick. Joe Pantoliano's greasy hood Caesar may disapprove, but who cares what he thinks? Violet and Corky aren't just partners in crime, plotting to swipe two million dollars out from under the noses of Caesar and his gangster pals. They have genuine love and respect for each other, a rarity in a genre where everyone is usually out to screw everybody else.

THE COCKETTES (2002)

This tremendously entertaining documentary, directed by Billy Weber and David Weissman, records through vintage footage and new interviews the rise and fall of San Francisco's pre-eminent drug-addled co-ed transvestite hippie song and dance trip. Led by the charismatic Hibiscus, footage of whom provides grounds for a convincing argument that the Second Coming occurred sometime in the late sixties and that Jesus had to leave again but wants everyone to know that he really enjoyed the acid, the Cockettes went from improvisational dancing to the accompaniment of old records before the midnight movie at the Palace Theater to elaborate, high-camp stage musicals. Their story doubles as a parable of the bust-up of the counterculture; the troupe eventually split up over the question of whether they were in it to make money or for love of performance with quasi-religious ambitions. Hibiscus and his devotees broke apart to form the Angels of Light, while the other Cockettes stormed New York for a disastrous run on Broadway before sneering crowds of jaded, black-hearted sophisticates. They crawled back home and had a few more local triumphs (including the sci-fi extravagaza Journey to the Center of Uranus, starring special guest Divine), but time and medical bills began to tear them apart. Some of the survivors interviewed in the movie look as if they're still trying to catch their breath since having stormed the Bastille, but between their stories and the clips of the troupe in action, few movies have made a misspent youth look like such a noble and enviable calling.

LAW OF DESIRE (1987)

In 1987, American audiences shell-shocked from AIDS and the sexual revolution made a blockbuster out of Fatal Attraction, the movie that created the modern stereotype of the spurned one-night-stand turned stalker as the ultimate embodiment of the fear of the loss of control that can come with romantic obsession and sexual freedom. That same year, Pedro Almodovar, a Spaniard liberated by the death twelve years earlier of the dictator Franco, served up Antonio Banderas as a young, straight stud who experiences one night of bliss with the celebrity director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) and is so determined to make just one more trip to the well that lays siege to his reluctant love object's life, killing the boy-man of Pablo's dreams (who's such a dullard that the audience couldn't care less) and holding his sister (Carmen Maura), who used to be his brother, hostage until his steamy demands are met. With Banderas in the role and with Almodovar nudging him on, it is very hard to watch this without thinking, "Sure wish somebody loved me enough to put a gun on my family and pitch my significant other off the nearest cliff." Some sniff at early Almodovar as a frivolous artist, but for all his camp humor and extravangance, he was deadly serious in his insistence that respect be paid to those willing to go all the way for love.

Click here for Part One, Part Two and Part Four

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

Take Five: Take Four

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

As a professional film critic, it is my most sacred duty to deliver honest, truthful assessments of the films I am assigned to see — and to review them fairly without prejudice or favor. It would be a betrayal of my professional and personal standards to review, positively or negatively, a film without actually seeing it. Having said that, here’s a prediction: Saw IV, which opens today nationwide after having been completed approximately three days ago, is going to suck. Now, I say this without having seen Saw IV; for that matter, I say this without having seen Saw I, Saw II or Saw III. For all I know, they’re cinematic masterworks the likes of which Orson Welles could never dare to dream. But let’s face it: the fourth installment in any series, let alone one as misbegotten as the Saw series, has the deck stacked against it from the jump-off. The number of Part 4s that have been worth watching can be counted on one hand; it just so happens that I have five fingers on my left hand, so here’s five fours that aren’t complete wastes of time.

THUNDERBALL (1965)

Believe it or not, there was a time when there weren’t so many James Bond movies that nobody bothered to count them. Thunderball wasn’t quite as good as Goldfinger and From Russia with Love, the two films that preceded it, but it’s still a Bond flick in the grand tradition, with lots of fun lines, exciting action sequences, and swell spy gear, and it’s one of the last 007 adventures that still feels like something you can enjoy rather than just live through, like most of the long-slog installments of the 1970s. At any rate, Sean Connery seems to be enjoying himself, and who wouldn’t, with Claudine Auger around?

ROCKY IV (1985)

Ha, ha! Just kidding. This isn’t a good Part IV at all. It’s terrible. But taken strictly for laughs, it’s an inadvertent masterpiece, with its overblown jingoism, mindless commie-bashing, and endless hilariously bad dialogue. It also introduced the world, however briefly, to currently unemployable Swedish galoot Dolph Lundgren and Sly Stallone’s gargantuan Danish girlfriend, Brigitte Nielsen. A movie decidedly of its era, it is a fine measure of the tenor of its times, and I had the pleasure of getting thrown out of a theatre during its initial screening for loudly cheering for the Russian fighter to pound the obnoxious Rocky into soup.

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)

The fourth installment of the "Chucky" series of tongue-in-cheek horror movies following the adventures of a homicidal doll, Bride of Chucky benefits enormously from not taking itself at all seriously. Surprisingly well-directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu, it features a genuinely funny script, some surreal dialogue between the supremely professional Brad Dourif and a game-for-anything Jennifer Tilly, and one of the most ridiculous sex scenes in cinema history. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to win any Oscar nods (by the time you get to Part IV, you’re generally running on fumes even if the original film was decent), but it’s highly enjoyable just the same.

CITIZEN TOXIE: THE TOXIC AVENGER IV (2000)

Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma pictures may not be particularly well-crafted, which is not unexpected given that they are generally made for as much money as Kaufman happens to have in his pocket at the moment. And they aren’t Art with a capital A, dealing as they do with things like surfing Nazis and the question of whether or not they should die. But they’re occasionally hilarious, brilliantly campy, and damn it, they give their fans what they want, which is more than you can say for a lot of studio films. Citizen Toxie’s shotgun approach guarantees at least a couple of solid hits, and it’s chock full of ridiculous celebrity cameos, from Corey Feldman to Ron Jeremy.

LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)

Why is it that horror movies rack up the biggest sequel counts as well as the biggest body counts? If a movie title is followed by a Roman numeral higher than V, it’s a, well, dead certainty that its plot revolves around serial killers, monsters, and/or megadeaths. Anyway, the fourth of George Romero’s zombie series (after Night of the Living, Dawn of and Day of the Dead) is by no means the best; it’s full of plot holes, marred by a ridiculous ending, and generally a tad ridiculous. But it’s also George Romero, and that means it’s chock full of visceral thrills, black comedy, and social commentary — and this time around, we even get a couple of juicy star turns from Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo.

— Leonard Pierce