The Screengrab : joe dante

That Guy! John Glover

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

In the late 1970s, in a string of films of wildly varying quality and interest (including Annie Hall, Julia, the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Somebody Killed Her Husband, and Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace and Melvin and Howard), John Glover established himself as a real one-scene wonder, an eccentric, highly skilled actor who was able to take a very brief amount of screen time and use it to make as strong an impression as anyone else in the movie. He was much in demand in the 1980s and into the '90s, doing a lot of work in a lot of different shades and flavors, ranging from a man trying to show the sick hero (Aidan Quinn) of the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost who to die, of AIDS, with dignity, to a doctor who sues his hospital to firing him for having a disfiguring disease on an episode of L.A. Law to the pitchman for a lethal car-protection device in a parody commercial that opened Robocop 2. Yet his combination of brazen smarts and the energy level of an electrified fence seemed to make him especially prone to being cast in villain roles, culminating in his playing the devil himself in the short-lived cult TV series Brimstone. By then, he had also given ample evidence of having the most versatile hair in the history of acting.

In recent years, Glover has been of a presence in TV and on stage than in movies; he may actually be best known to young'uns as Lex Luthor's father on Smallville, a role he played for seven seasons before the character kicked off. Since then, he's been seen as Ron Rifkin's boyfriend on Brothers and Sisters and as Zachary Qunito's father on Heroes. He's currently on Broadway, playing Lucky in a highly praised production of Waiting for Godot alongside Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, and, as Pozzo, John Goodman--Those Guys! of much repute, all.

Where to see John Glover at his best:

52 PICK-UP (1986): This Elmore Leonard adaptation, directed by John Frankenheimer, suffers from an equilibrium problem: the villains are so much more entertaining than the people they're tormenting that it keeps throwing the picture off balance. But of all the performances that inspired one critic to proclaim Glover "the prime rotter of the '80s"--including his scheming stepdaddy in Masquerade (1988) and a smiling hatchet man out for Bill Murray's job in Scrooged (1988)--this is the most flamboyantly show-stopping. His slimy mastermind and amateur filmmaker Alan Raimy is a trained bookkeeper who "found better ways of making money; these include blackmailing Roy Scheider for having slept with a lissome young thing, and then, when that doesn't pan out, blackmailing him after framing him for the lissome young thing's murder. (It goes without saying that he had filmed both the sex and violence, for maximum persuasiveness.) One reason this performance stands out in the Glover rogue's gallery is that he has a first-rate partner in another That Guy!, Clarence Williams III. While Glover, lean and gaunt, dances in place while working his motor mouth, Williams, huge and near-mute, looms menacingly over those he's trying to impress while they wonder if the color of his eyes exists in nature. In his own prize scene, Williams tortures his girlfriend (Vanity) to find out if she's sold them out to Schedier, and, after she squeals that she would never dream of doing such a thing, sits up, murmurs, "I believe you," and then, after pausing and gazing into the nether distance, laments his great character failing: "But I believe everybody!"

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990): Joe Dante's sequel to the 1984 "E.T. Goes Nutzoid"-genetic freak of a summer movie came out right about the time that Glover started confessing to interviewers that he'd like a crack at parts that were less villainous and funnier. He plays Daniel Clamp, a cartoon of Donald Trump, back in the days when Trump was a high-end cheeseball celebrity (Page Six, Spy magazine, Doonesbury) and not just a low-end cheeseball who plays a tycoon on reality TV. The role is still kind of villainous, but it's mostly a comic opportunity, and Glover delivers a sophisticated-sophomoric performance that meshes will with the general outlines of a film that's conceived as a feature-length, (mostly) live-action salute to master Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. This was especially impressive at the time, when Glover could also be seen starring in a production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People that Jack O'Brien directed for public television, which really ought to be available on DVD.

LOVE! VALOR! COMPASSION! (1997): Terrence McNally's highly acclaimed 1994 play, which follows the lives of a group of gay male friends over the course of three holiday-weekend getaways, lost something in the transition to this stiff movie version, but at least it gave Glover, a member of the original Broadway cast, a chance to preserve his dual performance. He plays a pair of English twin brothers: John Jeckyll, a sour, dyspeptic put-down artist, and James, who is beloved by all for his sweet disposition and generous nature. (Dr. Jeckyll and ... get it?) Glover shows his stature here partly by the traps he evades: he plays both brothers (the nicer of whom is dying of AIDS) as individuals and not as conceits made flesh, and does it so well that, by the end, it may be John, the acidic brother who knows that no one will ever love him as easily as everyone loves his twin, to whom your heart goes out.

Forrest J. Ackerman, 1916-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

If you had the mixed fortune to be American, male, of a certain age, and interested in horror movies and science fiction, chances are better than good that you grew up with a soft spot for Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman, who died last week at the age of 92, was a legendary figure in several categories of fandom as a writer, editor, convention goer and collector of memorabilia. But he was best known in kids' bedrooms across the country as the man behind Famous Monsters of Filmland, a nostalgia-drenched photo magazine that combined stills from classic scare pictures (taken from Ackerman's vast personal collection) with punning captions and assorted trivia. Famous Monsters began in 1958 as what was first intended, by independent publisher James Warren, to be a one-shot publication based on a French magazine consisting of classic horror movie stills accompanied by captions. Warren was stymied, though, by two problems: what he saw as the dry, academic tone of the writing, and his discovery that he couldn't simply reproduce the contents of the French magazine without dealing with a mountain of copyright problems. After Ackerman assured him that he could provide stills as good as those in the original magazine, Warren agreed to go ahead with the project, provided that Ackerman also juice up the copy with strings of "Fangs for the memories!"-style puns. (Ackerman once told a reporter that Warren's great contribution to this proess amounted to sitting across from him "holding up an invisible sign reading, 'I am eleven years old, make me laugh.'") The one-shot was so successful that it became the launching pad for what became Warren Publishing, which would go on to the horror-comics magazines Eerie and Creepy, which were spun off from the Ackerman-edited Monster World, as well as Harvey Kurtzman's Help! and the '70s reprints of Will Eisner's The Spirit. Ackerman also came up with the name of one of Warren's most durable properties, the scantily clad alien bloodsucker Vampirella, and served as associate producer of a 1996 movie based on the character. But it was as the Famous Monsters guy that he got to live out one of the great fantasies of the collector-geek, keeping his dusty old enthusiasms alive by transferring them to members of a new generation. He edited 191 issues of the magazine from its founding until it finally closed up shop in 1983. (A revival that began in 1993, launched by a fellow who decided that the title was in the public domain, led to Ackerman getting involved in an expensive, long-running, and in the end, barely resolved legal tangle.)

Ackerman, who had received a special Hugo Award for "#1 Fan Personality", was a beloved figure on the festival and fan convention circuit, and was, among a great many other titles, a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which provides a home to many items from his personal collection. More recently, he was given the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers of America. Among movie directors with a taste for his favorite genres, he was a favorite get for insider cameo appearances, in such movies as Equinox, the 1976 King Kong, Joe Dante's The Howling, Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (released here as Dead Alive), and several films by John Landis, including Innocent Blood, Schlock, an Kentucky Fried Movie. He also appeared in many documentaries and was the subject of last year's Famous Monster: Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman's own fiction was published under countless pseudonyms, among them "Spencer Strong", "J. Forrester Eckman", "Dr. Acula", and "Laurajean Ermayne", under which he wrote "sapphic" fiction. The Daughters of Bilitis once showed their appreciation for his efforts by naming him an honorary lesbian.

Video of the Day: Gremlins 2.5

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

One of the most memorable scenes in Gremlins 2 -- the underrated followup to the '80s classic that's only recently found the audience for its subversive satire -- is a cleverly done meta-joke where the marauding creatures actually take over the projection booth and insert themselves into the movie. (For the home video release, they broke the videotape and wreaked havoc until stopped by a piece of John Wayne footage.)

In this delightful little YouTube fan film, Sacha Feiner projects the gag forward 18 years, into the digital age -- both literally (with his digital manipulation of the monster footage) and figuratively (with the conceit adapted to the digital On-Demand era).

Related Posts:

Video of the Day: The New Batman Movie?

Video of the Day: 'Requiem for a Day Off'

DVD Digest for July 15, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unwatchable #93: "Howling III: The Marsupials"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here I face a similar problem as with the earlier entry Kickboxer 4: I went into the 1987 horror sequel Howling III without having seen its predecessor Howling II…Your Sister is a Werewolf. (I'm pretty sure I've seen the original Howling, directed by Joe Dante and co-written by John Sayles, but that didn't really help.) For all I know, I will encounter Howling II later in this process – as I've mentioned before, I don't peek ahead. It's possible that if I had seen Howling II, I would have been less confused by the beginning of Howling III. It's hardly possible I could have been more confused.

I knew I was in for something special right from the opening credits. Let’s start with the title. Ooh, scary! If there’s a subtitle less capable of striking fear in my heart than “The Marsupials,” I’m not sure what it would be. Howling III: The Fluffy Bunnies? Even that scares me more, but then again, I’ve seen Night of the Lepus. Then there’s this gem after the screenwriting credits: “Based on the novel by Gary Brandner.” Seriously? The Howling III is based on a novel? I looked it up at Amazon and it’s true, but if I am to believe the single customer comment, the movie is NOTHING like the book. Sigh, ’twas ever thus.

What is the movie like? Pretty freaky, actually. I don’t mean it’s actually frightening, and I certainly don’t mean it’s actually good, but I can’t say I was ever bored. We begin with an anthropologist showing footage his grandfather took in Cape York, Australia in 1905 of what appears to be a wolf-woman tied to a tree, being tortured by aborigines. “The mask on the woman is so realistic, we don’t know how they created it,” he claims. I don’t necessarily agree, but let’s not quibble. The action then shifts to Siberia for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, and then there are a few more seemingly random scenes that might make sense were I up to speed on the trilogy. I sort of doubt it, though; it’s almost as if every other scene was ripped out of the script in order to save money.

I do know that the bulk of the action takes place in Australia. I know this because the Sydney Opera House is in about seventeen different shots in the movie, so you know the makers really wanted to make it clear. There was a weird Aussie fetish going on in American pop culture in the ’80s – everything from Mad Max to Crocodile Dundee to Men at Work to that Jacko dude from the Energizer commercials. Anyone else remember this jackhole?

Anyway, Howling III is clearly trying to capitalize on the Down Under thunder, as it features a tribe of distinctly Mad Max-ish wolf people, one of whom is a hottie in the Rachel Hunter mode. At least, I thought she was a hottie until I saw her give birth to a slimy embryo and stuff it in her hairy pouch, and then suddenly I wasn’t so keen on her anymore. I guess the idea here is that a breed of Tasmanian wolf was killed off early in the 20th century, and in a quest for vengeance its spirit came into these people. Look, it doesn’t really matter. I could try to make some sense of the plot, but suffice it to say that the filmmakers are trying really, really hard to entertain you. There’s a bus full of werewolf nuns, a ballet dancer who turns werewolf in mid-performance, a were-skeleton that comes back to life, a leather-boy version of Alfred Hitchcock, a soundtrack full of synthpop power ballads that sound like Beverly Hills Cop rejects, and there’s even Dame Edna, years before her U.S. stardom. Maybe it’s just that as a child of the '80s, I’m hard-wired to be more susceptible to the junk of that era – but I know what I hate, and I don’t hate this.

Previously on Unwatchable:

94. Invasion of the Neptune Men
95. Marci X
96. Track of the Moon Beast
97. Bolero
98. Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor

"Eating Raoul"'s Mary Woronov: Still Here, Still Hungry

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap checks in with the towering Mary Woronov as the inimitable cult queen prepares to spend the weekend in Chicago, at retrospective screenings of a couple of her drive-in classics, Rock 'n' Roll High School (at the Music Box Theatre on May 9, with music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot) and, on May 10, Death Race 2000, as part of the annual Sci Fi Spectacular. Woronov entered movies through the side door after working with "the Theatre of the Ridiculous in New York, which was majorly cult--it was hardly Broadway theater or even off-Broadway," and then with Andy Warhol, which led to her getting a show-stopping role in the breakout Warhol factory picture The Chelsea Girls. For much of her movie career, Woronov seemed joined at either hip to the late Paul Bartel, who directed her in Death Race 2000 and co-starred with her in Rock 'n' Roll High School, and Roger Corman, on whose nickel both pictures were made. (She also appeared in the Corman productions Hollywood Boulevard and Cannonball, a follow-up to Death Race 2000, which she describes as "just the worst movie" and which she says inspires this outburst from Bartel, who directed it: "What is happening to me? I don�t like cars--I hate cars!�") and acted for Bartel in such labors of love as Eating Raoul and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.) As she explains it now, it was a natural fit in both cases because Bartel "really liked camp acting and that was really who I was, a camp actress," and because Corman "didn't care as long as the movie got made." Which in many ways makes him the producer of many a film crew's dreams.

By the way, about her and Bartel? "I was not married to him." Apparently this is a misconception that has come up fairly often in Woronov's experience, even if to some of is it does sound a little like Liberace being besieged with people asking when he was going to meet a nice girl and settle down. Apparently the sexless but loving relationship between their characters in Eating Raoul--"Paul and Mary Bland"--grew out of people's perceptions of them as a couple, which in turn grew out of their being teamed in so many Corman movies directed by other people, who felt the two were simpatico. Her role also grew out of her fear that, after her Nazi-dominatrix-style school principal in Rock 'n' Roll High School, she'd be typecast forever in "reeling bitch" parts. Eating Raoul, which, she says, was shot "in 28 days" over the course of year--Bartel would shoot until he ran out of money and then "would call me months later and go, 'You know that scene--we can shoot it now' "--gave her chance to show that she could flash a friendly smile to go with her mile-long gams, albeit while beating people to death with a skillet. In between such dream jobs, Woronov kept busy with work in such films as Hell Hole, in which "I run this asylum that has nothing but big-titted girls in sneakers." She's slowed down in recent years--the last time we saw her was in Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, where she brightened up the boardroom as Acme Vice-President in Charge of Bad Ideas. But the good stuff stays good. Or as she puts it, her movies "are so weird that they don't age."

In Other Blogs: Blogwars!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

There’s nothing we enjoy more than a good old-fashioned feud between movie bloggers (that is, if anything in the world of blogging can actually be called ‘old-fashioned’). This one begins at Hollywood Elsewhere, with Jeffrey Wells bemoaning the Eclipse of the Hunk. “A very significant revolutionary concept has been pushed repeatedly in films produced, written or directed by movie-comedy maestro Judd Apatow over the last three or four years, and I'm not sure it's been explained as thoroughly as it should be. The idea, admittedly old hat for anyone half-familiar with Apatow World, is that marginally unattractive guys -- witty stoners, clever fatties, doughy-bodied dorks, thoughtful-sensitive dweebs and bearish oversize guys in their 20s and 30s -- can be and in fact are the new ‘romantic leads’ (for lack of a better or more appropriate term) in today's comedies.” He cites Jason Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as Exhibit A, thanks to his “chunky, blemished ass and little white man-boobs.” Wells is deeply concerned about this trend. “Question is, what if this starts to manifest in realms outside Apatow World? Young teenage girls will always have a thing for the Zac Efrons and young Leonardo DiCaprios, but what if Hollywood, looking to follow Apatow's lead in reflecting the real-life shlumpiness of typical GenX and GenY guys, generally starts to divest itself of conventionally good-looking actors as far as the over-21 ranks are concerned?”

Yes, that’s our biggest fear exactly: that Hollywood will stop churning out good-looking stars. Clearly Jim Emerson of Scanners shares our concern. “Can you tell the person who wrote this lives in West Hollywood? All I can say is, my sympathies to Matt Damon and Adrien Brody and Brad Pitt for being 'totally out' where attractive women are concerned. At least they can console themselves with pedicures and higher thread-counts…Why is Wells so upset? He sounds like a Dixieland racist spouting off about miscegenation in the 1950s. It's an outrage, a threat to the species!” Emerson also notes one possible – and quite logical – reason that Apatow might be drawn to this scenario: as a shlump himself, he is married above his station to Leslie Mann. In any case, Wells has since responded to Emerson, but not in any interesting way.

Elsewhere in blogdom, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule talks up Dante’s Inferno, a Joe Dante film festival that kicked off last night at the New Beverly in Los Angeles. “Dante has long been one of my favorite directors, an unrepentant appreciator of the camp qualities and the genuine wit and scrappy creativity to be found among the many titles to have filled the B-movie bucket over the past 50 years or so. His encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly every movie ever released, his unimpeachable cinematic acumen, is never show-offy, either in his films or in the many interviews and DVD commentaries he has graced during his career. Nor is his command of film style and artistry. He is that rarity, a smart filmmaker with a degree of humility who allows his intelligence to shine through his work in ways that are often misinterpreted or devalued by the keepers of the cultural flame. For this reason, not nearly so many people as should tend to understand that movies like Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Explorers, The ‘burbs and his HBO film The Second Civil War are masterpieces of design, effect, satire and social commentary that far outstrip most of the movies that august bodies tend to crown with awards. Dante's movies are firecrackers, ones you shouldn't hold in your hands for long. They snap, crackle, pop and outright supernova with the kind of exuberance that most directors half his age can’t muster”

And finally, this week in List-o-Mania brings The Top 10 Places You Should Never Visit According to Hollywood, via Film School Rejects. We’re now forced to reconsider the Screengrab company retreat in Brazil. “Need a kidney? Or a spleen? Why not try the lucrative world of human organ trafficking? Whether or not you believe this concept to be an urban legend, would you blindly follow someone into the jungle of Brazil and not worry they might take your liver?” Hell, we need what’s left of our livers.

Forgotten Films: "Suspicious Circumstances" (1984) and "Face Like a Frog" (1987)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent weeks, packages of the short films nominated in the twin categories of Academy Awards (Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short) devoted to such work have had some play in a few major movie markets, just as they do every year. Because of the hook that an Academy Award nomination provides, Oscar season is one of the rare times when short films can get any attention from theatrical distributors and theater programmers. Now, thanks to DVD and the Internet and such specialty cable channels as IFC and the Sundance Channel, things are a little better for makers of short films than they used to be; if a short gets a lot of attention on the festival circuit, it may turn up on TV, often jammed together with an hour's worth of other shorts and used to plug a hole in the schedule. Or if a director breaks into features and develops a name, his or her early shorts may be recycled as "bonus features" on the DVD of a bigger movie, as Lynne Ramsay's early shorts are used in the Criterion Collection DVD for her debut feature Ratcatcher. At least it's a way to keep the films alive and in circulation. Other short filmmakers — those who don't "graduate" to features, maybe because their talents are more naturally suited to the short form — may get a lot of attention for awhile and then slip through the cracks. This may be especially true in the case of independent animators, who have to work long and hard to produce a ten-minute masterpiece, and who lost a means of getting their work seen when such annual showcases as the Tournee of Animation began drying up several years ago.

Jim Blashfield's Suspicious Circumstances, which was made in 1984 and barnstormed the country via cable TV and animation festivals in the mid-to-late '80s, is a remarkable specimen of homegrown, handmade American surrealism. The film has its own xerox-stop-motion look, which is less startling now only because Blashfield capitalized on the attention he got from the movie by accepting jobs to apply the same style to music videos for Talking Heads ("And She Was"), Joni Mitchell ("Good Friends"), Michael Jackson ("Leave Me Alone"), Paul Simon ("Boy in the Bubble"), and many others. Blashfield has a new short film, Bunnyheads, which, according to his website, is "currently infesting film festivals internationally."

Sally Cruikshank's work goes back to the seventies, when she made her classic Quasi at the Quackadero, but like Blashfield, she experienced a bump of attention in the 1980s, when she made the throbbing, mutating Face Like a Frog. It's a choice example of Cruikshank's style, which is more devoted to outright cartoonishness than many independent animators of her generation, but which has a slightly sinister, contemporary edge to it; trying to recapture the anything-goes spirit of early animated cartoons, she makes films that sometimes suggest what it might have been like if the Fleischer brothers had experienced an acid flashback. (Cruikshank worked on "It's a Good Life", the Joe Dante-directed segment of the 1983 Twilight Zone — The Movie.) Cruikshank suffered a career setback when she lost her funding for an attempt to complete a feature, but like Blashfield, she offers some of her films on DVD for sale at her website.

Holiday Trailer Roundup: Gremlins

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

For many of my peers, A Christmas Story is almost certainly the greatest unironic holiday classic, but Gremlins is probably the ultimate wicked Christmas movie. For the two of you who haven't yet seen it, it's a sly fusion of the monster movie with an idealized Norman Rockwell-style vision of the small-town Christmas. In other words, it’s a perfect Joe Dante movie, one that plays to all his strengths as a satirist of comfortable Americana. Gremlins is the kind of older kids’ movie Hollywood has forgotten how to make- with fun characters and adventure for the younger crowd, and enough of an edge to make it endlessly rewatchable even for adults. Gremlins is great any time of the year, but it’s essential around the holidays, especially for the scene where Phoebe Cates recounts her tragic (and hilarious) Christmas story. What’s even more amazing is how convincingly wholesome Cates managed to be here, just two years after her immortal scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.