The Screengrab : john lithgow

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

Take Five: Cryptozoology

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Despite the fact that multiple reports of gremlins, wing-monsters and foo fighters by American flyers in WWII were all almost certainly the result of ordinary mechanical failure, combat fatigue, or smuggling a bottle of Old Crow into the cockpit, the Army took them seriously enough to launch a legitimate investigation, and by the 1960s, the beasties were entrenched enough in popular culture to inspire a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone. When a movie adaptation rolled around some twenty years later, a remake of this episode was arguably its high point, thanks largely to a wildly over-the-top, and yet somehow perfectly suitable, lead performance by John Lithgow. (Amusingly enough, almost twenty years after that, William Shatner — who'd played the gremlin's victim in the original TV version — was paired up with Lithgow on his own show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and the two baked hams overacted like there was no tomorrow in a sly inside gag about their shared past.) Nowadays, the movie is remembered largely for the disastrous accident that took the lives of several crew members, and given John Landis' rather contemptible behavior at a subsequent trial for negligence, it's surprising he didn't try to blame the helicopter crash on an invisible monster only he could see.

SPLASH (1984)

Yes, folks, there are those in the cryptozoological community — and apparently there is one — who believe that mermaids are really real, and not just the product of a dugong and a very lonely, very drunk sailor coming into contact with one another. It is to them and to you that we recommend a fresh viewing of this charming '80s comedy. It's long been an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape; few people even think about it these days. But Splash is in fact a very fine comedy of its day, not boisterous or insulting like the majority of Eighties comedies that reached its level of success. And it also functions quite well as a time capsule: it brings us a pre-iconic Tom Hanks, a pre-crazy-recluse Darryl Hannah, a pre-self-important Ron Howard, and a pre-death John Candy in one of his most appealing roles — all wrapped up in a genuinely funny, if slight, Bruce Jay Friedman screenplay. There's only five dugongs in captivity, but DVDs of Splash can be found anywhere.

ANACONDA (1997)

Despite an incredibly dismal record of investigations into various Nessies, Jersey Devils and Bigfeet, the cryptozoologists have been right exactly once: the giant squid. Long considered a myth, a dead Architeuthis washed up in New Zealand in the 1870s, and in 2004, scientists finally captured living speciments on film. Many believe that if the fringe biology crowd is going to score another stopped-clock victory, it will be with the discovery of gigantic specimens of the already huge constrictor snakes known as anaconda, and when that day comes, perhaps this movie will be viewed as eerily prophetic instead of an embarrassingly hokey, campy creature feature with a mind-blowingly unrealistic rubber snake as its villain. Anaconda isn't entirely unsalvageable; Jon Voight hams it up deliciously as a great white hunter, Ice Cube is entertaining in full-on Private Hudson mode as a doomed photographer, and there are many fine shots of Jennifer Lopez' structurally pleasing hiney. However, the script is an utter dud, the special effects look like they were done by a dull fifteen-year-old, and the plot makes The Mothman Prophecies look brilliant by comparison.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)

When the history of Richard Gere's movie career is written, it's unlikely that this will be one of its most glorious moments. It's hard to imagine a worse title than The Mothman Prophecies, and if the movie isn't quite as terrible as the title promises, it sure as hell ain't great, either. Supposedly based on true events, the flick is about as good as you might expect from a movie prefaced by such a claim; back in the 1970s, they used to make thousands of flicks like this loopy would-be chiller about a West Virginia town haunted by mysterious visions of the future and visitations by a rubbery, bug-winged extraterrestrial something-or-other, and they were all pretty bad, albeit in a different way. The Mothman Prophecies is plenty expensive as opposed to a cheap filmed-in-a-weekend exploitation flick, and it tries for a post-modern moody ambience instead of pure shock, but it's still pretty dire. There's a big, garish steel statue of the Mothman in the actual West Virginia town where the events of the movie allegedly took place; it's a safe bet that Gere's performance — alternately bored and confused — will ever be similarly immortalized.

That Guy! Classic: Vincent Schiavelli

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Like his fellow New Yorker and paisan Joe Spinell, Vincent Schiavelli was a tremendous character actor with a distinctive appearance and a wide range who died far too young. Before succumbing to cancer in 2005 — complicated by a lifelong struggle with Marfan syndrome, which contributed to his distinctive appearance — Schiavelli was an incredibly prolific character actor who appeared in over a hundred films and nearly as many television shows over a thirty-year career. Easily remembered for his hangdog expressions, drooping eyes, frazzled hair and looming height, Schiavelli was also capable of playing a wide gamut of roles; though he was usually cast in comedies, he was equally adept with drama, action and even voice-over work, as his frequent appearance in video games and animation proved. Schiavelli was also renowned as a gourmet cook, writing three books on Italian cuisine and a number of articles in food magazines, all of which contributed to his winning a prestigious James Beard award in 2001. In his latter years, Schiavelli moved to Sicily, where he wrote, produced, directed and starred in a number of plays for the local theatre, and endeared himself to the locals in his father's homeland by speaking the native dialect to perfection. Even in his lesser roles, Schiavelli had always taken such a perfectionist approach, and it was always surprising, given his stretched-out, gangly appearance, how adeptly he played his roles physically — he was a master of inserting little bits of business with his hands, movements of his back and shoulders, and bobs and weaves of the head that helped him round out his character. Whether it was in his recurring TV roles (including a handful of memorable appearances opposite Andy Kaufman in Taxi, which were weirdly echoed when he played an executive in the Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon) or in one of the many movies that led Vanity Fair to call him one of the finest American character actors in history, Schiavelli had the ability to redeem a film just by his presence — perhaps the best compliment an actor can receive.

Where to see Vincent Schiavelli at his best:

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

Although it’s an extremely minor role, it's noteworthy for the success of the film and the impression it leaves on viewers. One of the first roles in which Schiavelli left a major mark on moviegoers was that of Mr. Vargas, the Ridgemont High School science teacher. Playing off Jeff Spicoli (played by Sean Penn, whose career would go on to take a decidedly different course), he takes his students on a field trip to the local morgue to get a glimpse at fresh cadavers — and inspires Spicoli to seek out an exciting new occupation.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION (1984)

Even more so than any of the films of the Coen Brothers, cult hit Buckaroo Banzai is a sort of perfect storm of well-regarded character actors. In addition to a baked ham of a performance as the lead villain by John Lithgow, beloved second-stringers like Christopher Lloyd, Clancy Brown, Carl Lumbly, Dan Hedaya and Matt Clark put in appearances, and Schiavelli — frighteningly little-changed by all the alien makeup he's wearing — gets in a handful of good scenes (including a memorable bird-flip) as John O'Connor, the toady to Lithgow’s insane alien overlord.

GHOST (1990)

Probably Vincent Schiavelli's biggest mainstream success came when he played the phantasmal remnant known as the "Subway Lord," a figure even more ghostly and spooky-looking than the actor himself. Scoring more laughs than Whoopi Goldberg as the spirit of a man pushed in front of an express train, Schiavelli gives one of cinema's most longing looks (to a pack of cigarettes) and fulfills many moviegoers' lifelong dream (telling Patrick Swayze to go fuck himself).

— Leonard Pierce