The Screengrab : jerry lewis

Cannes Roundup: Day Six

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

They still love Jerry Lewis in France. Lewis was working the press at Cannes, talking up his latest project, and Manohla Dargis of the New York Times was on hand. “‘Jerry’s here to announce the film he will be starring in next October,’ the French translator said. ‘We’re going to do Mutiny on the Bounty again,’ Mr. Lewis said, as laughter filled the room. ‘I’m playing the Christian part, and we need an Arab so we can beat’ the stuffing ‘out of him.’ Silence fell like a lead curtain. Being an old nightclub performer, he didn’t use the word stuffing. Being an old nightclub guy, he also recovered fast, but he clearly wasn’t going to make himself especially loveable. I wonder if he ever had.”

Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces looks a bit too familiar to some critics. “Pedro Almodovar offers nothing new in his latest feature, Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), but that’s probably enough for his devout followers,” writes Eric Kohn in Indiewire. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds it “a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself. Yet I wonder if Almodóvar isn't in danger of retreading old ideas.”

“Von Trier and the festival's standout, Police, Adjective, notwithstanding, the energy has so far come mainly from Asia,” J. Hoberman writes in the Village Voice. “Chinese, Filipino, Iranian, Japanese, and South Korean movies have stoked the most anticipation and inspired the most heat. Both the Competition and Un Certain Regard gave prime early slots to movies that, as taboo-breaking as they are, were shot on the QT and are unshowable in their homelands--China and Iran.”

Morning Deal Report: “Waterworld” Sequel Washes Ashore

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

They said it would never happen, but Kevin Costner will grow a new set of gills for Waterworld Freezes Over, the much-belated sequel to the notorious 1995 mega-bomb Waterworld. “Waterworld was always intended as a trilogy,” says Universal spokesman Heywood Jablomi. “Enough time has passed that the original movie has acquired a whole new generation of fans via DVD and cable television. They don’t even know Waterworld was a colossal disaster that nearly cost me my job – they just want more.” Universal is so bullish on the sequel that Costner has actually been signed to a two-picture deal, with the proposed third installment, Steamworld, tentatively scheduled for summer 2013.

The Criterion Collection will release a deluxe, 3-disc edition of The Day the Clown Cried, the long-lost Jerry Lewis masterpiece about alcoholic circus clown Helmut Doork, who entertains children at Auschwitz as they are led into the gas chambers. The controversial film was once described by Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen it, as “really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.” The Criterion edition contains a fully restored version of the film, along with a documentary on its making, Lewis’s first interview on the subject in more than 30 years, and a special 210-minute version of Hardly Working prepared specifically for this edition by Lewis.

Last but not least, we’re finally able to announce a piece of news we’ve been sitting on for months. Troma Pictures has purchased the movie rights to our humble blog, and Screengrab: The Motion Picture will be coming soon to a theater near you. John Waters is tentatively set to direct, and preliminary casting includes Larry the Cable Guy as Phil Nugent, Rob Schneider as Paul Clark, and Brad Pitt as yours truly. Further details are available here.

Related:
Martin Scorsese to Direct Final Harry Potter Movie

Ron Silver, 1946 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Ron Silver has died, at 62, after a two year battle with esophageal cancer. The living image of the "New York actor", Silver, was something of a specialist in fast-talking, saturnine cynics, an association that became even greater after he won a Tony Award for his semi-legendary performance as a Hollywood shark in David Mamet's 1988 Broadway hit Speed-the-Plow. Silver's performances in the Mamet play and in David Rabe's 1984 Hurlyburly--neither of which, sadly, he got to repeat on film--cemented his image as the great white way's modern notion of a successful movie industry sleazeball. Ironically, he never became the star in movies that he was onstage, but he had a long and healthy career in TV and movies anyway. After a barely detectable film debut in the unfunny underground comedy Tunnel Vision (1977) and a recurring role alongside a fellow Broadway baby on 1980's The Stockard Channing Show, Silver began to develop a name for himself in movies with his rambunctiously funny performances in the romantic comedies Best Friends (1982), in which he played, yes, a Hollywood producer, and Lovesick (1983), in which his character, a Hollywood star returning to his New York stage roots, gave him the chance to mock Al Pacino.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Silver would move freely from stage to TV to movie roles, including a starring role in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks (1984). His peak of national visibility probably came in 1989 and 1990, when he played Jerry Lewis's son in a multi-episode story arc of the cult series Wiseguy; gave the performance of his movie career as the lead in Paul Mazursky's superb movie version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story; stalked Jamie Lee Curtis as a deranged stockbroker turned serial gunman in Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel; starred as a leftish screenwriter navigating the 1950s blacklist era in the British TV film Fellow Traveller; and don a Groucho mustache to play Alan Dershowitz in counterpoint to Jeremy Irons's Oscar-winning turn as Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's torn-from-the-headlines Reversal of Fortune.

Though he continued to work steadily, his days of playing leads in theatrical features that people went to see receded behind him, and he began to enjoy his best opportunities in movies as a campy villain, in such movies as the Jean-Claude Van Damme picture Timecop (1994), where he confronted his younger self with a plea that he lay off the candy bars, and The Arrival (2006), where he got to deliver a speech explaining that global warming was part of a plan for an imminent extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. (He parodied this side of his career in the famous Ben Stiller-directed, unaired TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, in which he played a sinister character named Ron Silver whose acting career was a cover for his principal occupation of serving the conspiracy to install a New World Order.) He made his directing debut with the 1993 TV film Lifepod, a sci-fi variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He returned to the courtroom to play Robert Shapiro in American Tragedy, a 2000 O. J. Simpson docudrama written by Norman Mailer, was hilarious as tennis hustler Bobby Riggs in the TV film When Billie Beat Bobby (2001), convincingly dogged as Angelo Dundee in Michael Mann's The Greatest biopic Ali (2001), and reunited with Lumet for Find Me Guilty (2006), yet another fact-based courtroom drama, for which he was upgraded from lawyer to judge.

Silver also had recurring or regular roles on the TV series Chicago Hope, Veronica's Closet, Skin, and The West Wing, where he played a political consultant who, over the course of the show, had a political conversion from left to right. Silver himself experienced his own sea change after September 11, 2001, and became a highly public proponent for his changed views, making the rounds of the TV talk shows, appearing at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and blogging for Pajamas Media. He also narrated FahrenHYPE 9/11 (a 2004 documentary response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and co-directing, with Kevin Knoblock, the documentary Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60. His last performance was in the 2008 Distant Runners.

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, we here at the Screengrab gave our predictions for this year’s Academy Award nominees in the six major categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress, and yours truly won the bragging rights as Top Prognosticator (with 24 correct guesses) with Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark tying for the steak knives in second place with 22 correct guesses apiece.

But now the play-offs are done and it’s time for the Super Bowl as we make our predictions about the winners in every category (except those weird technical ones Jessica Alba presents in a Denny’s on Sunset before the official ABC-televised Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, February 22nd (8:00 PM Eastern/5:00 PM Pacific)).

If you’d like to play along at home, just submit your own winner predictions in the Comments section below!

And now, without further ado, THE OFFICIAL 2009 SCREENGRAB OSCAR PREDICTIONS!

BEST ACTRESS

And the nominees are...

Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie – Changeling
Melissa Leo – Frozen River
Meryl Streep – Doubt
Kate Winslet – The Reader

Paul Clark Predicts: Kate Winslet

With six nominations under her belt already, you can’t say she’s not due to win one. Shame that sentiment wasn’t in the air for a better performance.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Kate Winslet

Sorry, Anne and Melissa, you’ll have to wait your turn. (And quit scowling, Angelina.) SAG-winning Meryl’s the spoiler, but I think this is finally Kate’s year.

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Angelina Jolie

This has been Kate Winslet’s year in a lot of ways; she laid down two terrific performances in 2008. Unfortunately, the great job she did in The Reader was in service of a truly mediocre and vastly overhyped film. Meryl Streep’s nomination is more or less a formality at this point. Anne Hathaway deserves the gold for her compelling performance in Rachel Getting Married, but it’s likely to go to Angelina Jolie in a role that presses the Academy’s buttons.

Should Win: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Will Win: Angelina Jolie, Changeling

Nick Schager Predicts: Kate Winslet

The Reader is almost a parody of an awards-season prestige pic, but since the Academy usually eats up such faux-serious drivel – and because none of the other actresses seem to have much heat going into the race’s final stretch – count on Winslet to win. And then, if we’re lucky, to accept the statue in her awful Reader old-age make-up.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Melissa Leo

Melissa Leo will be this year's surprise win in a major category. Meryl Streep is nominated mostly for being Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet winning for playing a Nazi prison camp guard would be too predictable.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Kate Winslet

Voters who didn't actually see The Reader but did see Revolutionary Road will vote for her anyway, so it's like she's nominated for two movies in one.

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS PREDICTION: KATE WINSLET!

Stay tuned for a very special tribute to Heath Ledger and appearances by Amy Adams, Josh Brolin, Peter Gabriel and Alexandre Desplat as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

The Rep Report (April 8--18)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.

NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.

And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.

Suzanne Pleshette, 1937 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Suzanne Pleshette died this past week, at the age of seventy, after a long bout with cancer. The husky-voiced Brooklyn-born actress, who James Wolcott once likened to "a beautiful black swan", made her stage debut in 1957 in Ira Levin's Compulsion and would go on to successfully replace Anne Bancroft in the original Broadway production of The Miracle Worker. She made her film debut in 1958 in Jerry Lewis's The Geisha Boy , and would go on to give affecting supporting performances in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Nevada Smith with Steve McQueen, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and the minor camp classic Youngblood Hawke, in which, as the editor of the title character, the great novelist (author of Alms for Oblivion) played by James Franciscus, she got to adjust her eyeglasses while staring at his manly form and ask, "Should I call you Youngy or Bloody?" Perhaps fearing that anything else Hollywood had to offer would seem anticlimactic after a beaut like that, Pleshette spent more and more of her time acting on television; eventually, of course, she would become most closely associated with her role on one of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, The Bob Newhart Show, where for five seasons she pulled off the neat trick of being stylish and funny while making it seem plausible that her potato-like co-star was a sexual being.

Most of the rest of her career was spent on TV: she played inappropriately loving mother of young Tom Berenger in the controversial 1979 TV film Flesh & Blood, glued black caterpillars to her eyebrows for the title role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990), and had recurring, motherly roles on such comedies as Good Morning, Miami, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and Will & Grace. She also made the occasional return trip to the movie screen; most of her film roles were forgettable, but she did get a piece of one great movie towards the end of her career when she voiced the characters of Yubaba and Zeniba in the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated masterpiece, Spirited Away. That same year, she married the actor Tom Poston, with whom she had appeared more than forty years earlier in the Broadway play Golden Fleecing (and who would be a regular on Newhart's second long-running sitcom,Newhart). Poston himself died last year. Suzanne Pleshette will posthumously receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on January 31, which would have been her seventy-first birthday.

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent