The Screengrab : jr.

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)

Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)

People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I have to go get drunk now, but first, duty calls: we damn near let 2008 end without bringing you this face. It is the kisser of James Joseph Cialella Jr.--as Hoke Moseley said in Miami Blues, I'd hate to meet Senior--who, as was reported here, was spending the birthday of Christ our Lord trying to enjoy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, no mean trick to pull off under any circumstances. Mr. Cialella was comfortably parked in a theater seat for which he had paid plenty of his good, hard-earned money, having shelled out additional funds for some delicious popcorn, because he knows that that's how theaters make their nut, which is why he would never buy Milk Duds on his way to the theater and sneak them in tucked into the band of his sweatpants like some people I could name. Suddenly, like a car smashing through the front window of a funeral home in the middle of mama's wake, an unidentified piece of shit and his dimwit son came rolling into the darkened room, rude as Frenchmen and hopped up on God knows what illegal substances, and proceeded to act as if they owned the place, running their goddamned mouths and jabbering away like cavemen in wonder at the strange images being projected before their beady, bloodshot eyes. Mr. Cialella, generously taking on the role of spokesman for the rest of the audience, implored them to show some courtesy and be quiet, or better yet, climb back into their Monstermobile and return to their garbage-strewn hovel for another stimulating evening wondering who's playing thet purty music every time the Child Services people ring the doorbell. They refused to heed his call for basic civility, as they felt that it would violate their sacred vow to Mordor. The best part of the story, and the part that I find most touching, is that, after shooting the father in the arm in what turned out to be a successful effort to get him and Pugsley to shut the fuck up, Mr. Cialella then sat back down to watch the rest of the movie in what was now a much quieter and emptier theater, a man basking in the fruits of his honest labor, until the cops showed up and yanked him out of there.

People are divided on just how totally justified Mr. Cialella was in his actions. A police spokesman shared with reporters his opinion that "It's truly frightening when you see something like this evolve into such violence," after which he went out into the snowy parking lot and broke down in tears as some eight-year-olds played "keep away" with his hat. A more soundly reasoned argument comes from blogger Scott Marks, who simply asks, "Do you think that David Fincher made a three hour film for yahoos to blab through? And what kind of a role model was the victim, encouraging his son to talk during a movie?" Marks proposes that "Mr. Cialella’s handsome photo should be flashed during pre-show entertainment on movie screens across America as a warning to all potential inconsiderate disturbance makers." It's all well and good to look to the future, but there's still a matter of the central injustice here: it appears that Mr. Cialella still hasn't seen the whole movie! If Fincher doesn't make time at some point in the busy holidays-to-awards season to arrange a private screening for him, the director of Alien3 is no friend of art.

The Rep Report (October 17-23)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:30:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: The annual "Shock It to Me" horror film festival--or, as its promoters prefer to call it, "a bonafide Horror Convention in a theater setting"--is running at the Castro Theater this weekend, today through Sunday. The special guests scheduled to be in attendance include Sid Haig, a favorite actor of Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie, who co-starred with Lon Chaney, Jr. in Friday night's big feature, Jack Hill's 1964 Spider Baby. The movie itself is an unclassifiable blend of spook show, camp comedy, and homegrown American low-budget weird; it opens with Lon, Jr. singing the title song and just rolls on from there. Also on hand: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Paker, stars of the late-'60s "gothic" daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, which made a sex symbol of Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a lovesick 175-year-old vampire in a Beatles wig that had been through the wash a few too many times. The festival will be showing both the movie spin-offs from the Dark Shadows TV series, as well as the original Night of the Living Dead and the first of Hammer Film's revivals of the classic Universal movie monsters, Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein. Plus the fest's "infamous Zombie-Eating Contest" and the promised giveaway of "a real dead body to a 'lucky' member of the audience each night." We don't know the details, but if this were a movie, it would probably mean that somebody was going to get to drive home with Sid Haig in the trunk of their car.

NORTH CAROLINA: The programmers of the Escapism film festival, running this weekend (today through Sunday) at the Caroline Theater, boldly step up to the challenge of finding a way to make people scared even when they're in Durham, North Carolina, A.K.A. God's country. (Some of you folks who've never been there may think that I'm kidding. I weep for you.) The lineup this year has quite the international flavor, including the fast-becoming-legendary Australian-exploitation-movie doc Not Quite Hollywood, the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, Takashi Miike's self-explanatory Sukiyaki Western: Django, and the French sci-fi film Eden Log. There's also "the U.S. Theatrical premiere of 1989’s [straight-to-video] The Punisher (in an uncut, director’s edition to boot!)" Dolph Lundgren fans will want to line up for that one, though they risk being run over by people who hate Dolph Lundgren's guts and are in an MST3K-kinda mood.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: "Spooky Movie: 2008", the third annual "Washington, D.C. international horror film festival", has begun and runs through October 20, at Cinema Arts Theatre and additional locations. Unlike other Halloween festivals that pile on the fondly remembered scare classics, this one concentrates on the new and the unknown, including lots and lots of independently produced short films. That tends to mean a lot of amateurishness, but it can also mean a lot of fresh ideas from people with their own, deeply personal notions about what's scary--and besides, if you have to see amateurish festival films, amateurish horror films can be more fun to watch than any other kind. There are also documentaries on William Castle and the mythology of the snuff film. Plus, this evening's "Grindhouse Night" festivities will be hosted, live, by "Count Gore de Vol", in a heartening show of confidence that the recent sex scandal will not endanger his bid for re-election.

LOS ANGELES: There actually are a few theaters in the country that aren't showing horror films this weekend. "Spotlight on Miklós Jancsó", from October 17 through October 24 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gives viewers a rare chance to see four films by the Hungarian master in all their CinemaScope glory. The program opens with the director's first international success, 1965's The Round-Up, and includes 1967's The Red and the White, 1968's Silence and Cry, and the 1971 Red Psalm, rated by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as perhaps the greatest Hungarian movie of all time.

CHICAGO: Last but not least, the 44th Annual Chicago International Film Festival opens today and runs through October 29. Things kick off tonight with The Brothers Bloom, writer-director Rian Johnson's follow-up to his Dashiell-Hammett-High-School first feature, Brick; it stars Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel Weisz. It's followed tomorrow by a "Black Perspectives Tribute" event honoring Sidney Poitier and Jennifer Hudson.

Tony Stark (i.e., Robert Downey, Jr.) to Bruce Wayne: "I Got Your Dark Knight Right Here, Pal!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.' I loved [Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan's] The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight. Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so f--king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

The first thing to be said about this is that if anyone finds that their college education helps them to better understand why Jim Gordon didn't dispatch a SWAT team to surround that boat that the Joker was aboard after Eric Roberts tipped him off, then that lucky viewer must have gone to a hell of a school. (Personally, my college education wasn't even enough to keep me from pissing away eleven dollars on a ticket to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Of course, Downey's harsh words for DC Comics will set off little tremors in the minds of comics geeks who remember bitter wars of words on the playground between self-styled DC fanboys and Marvel zombies. However much he means it, it's fun when these companies' star employees pretend to be infected with the virus, as anyone who ever saw Alan Moore take custody of the microphone at a comics convention in the 1980s, before he adopted a "plague on both their houses" attitude. It's kind of like professional wrestling without the folding chairs. Downey himself seems to get a giggle out of his bad-boy act. "You know, you're never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone," he said. "I think I've got a couple more.

On the subject of his other summer hit, Tropic Thunder, Downey has one thing he wants to make very clear: he is not Kirk Lazarus, the looney, Oscar-festooned Method actor he plays, who vows to remain in character until he's recorded the picture's DVD commentary. Speaking of the character, Downey says that "I think his fatal flaw is pretty much any and everyone's who's in entertainment, which is, on a certain level: 'Oh if they believe they're a fraud and that's creating this neurotic state,' when the truth is, you are a fraud because you've gone too far into buying into your own hype and now you're, literally crazy. I think Kirk Lazarus is nuts." Discussing his decision to make Kirk Australian, Downey adds, "I just think that the Australian phenomenon reminds me more of American as with the British invasion from the '60s. But when I was thinking about Kirk Lazarus I was thinking about Colin Farrell, about Daniel Day Lewis and about Russell Crowe and whoever was the most effective tool for whatever my thing was, I would use." When it was pointed out to him that a lot of viewers sure do see a lot of Crowe in there, Downey permitted himself a smile. "Now do you think he would see it as the highest form of flattery or do you think that he would be less than pleased?"

Indiana Does Linguistics: Nuking the Fridge with Professor Jones

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In the overall scheme of the 2008 summer movie season, which began more than a month before summer did and is already entering its winding-down stage, The Dark Knight has established itself as the Movie of the Moment, Sex and the City the stealth smash and favorite subject for op-ed kvetchers, and Robert Downey, Jr. the star who people root for as lustily as any of the characters he plays. By contrast, the fourth Indiana Jones picture performed about the way one might have expected: after months of hype and even some genuine expectations, it opened big, collected its first-weekend money, and moseyed its way out of first-run theaters. But its left something behind: a new phrase in the English language. That would be "nuke the fridge", which the urban dictionary defines thusly:

A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. A reference to one of the opening scenes of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", in which the titular hero manages to avoid death by nuclear explosion by hiding inside a kitchen refrigerator. The film is widely recognised by fans as a major departure from the rest of the series both in terms of content and quality.

Guy 1: "Wow. Did you see the new Indy movie? What the hell was that? It was like I was having some kind of flu induced absurdist nightmare."

Guy 2: "Yep... did or did not that series permanently Nuke the Fridge?"

The obvious reference point is of course to "jump the shark", the phrase for the moment when a TV series has gone south, which was popularized by Jon Hein's website of the same name sometime around the last turn of the millennium. Hein's payday came in 2005, when the site was sold to TV Guide, and since then the phrase, which apparently originated in bull sessions Hein had with his friends back in college, has slipped its leash and entered the mainstream, where it is applied willy-nilly to anyone and anything. (Last week, wild man pundit David Brooks, going far off the reservation of conventional wisdom, opined that, with his tumultuously received speech in Berlin, Barack Obama's "unity act" had "jumped the shark.") Variations on "nuke the fridge" have already started turning up in the names of website, such as nukedthefridge.com. One of the fellows who runs one such site told The New York Times' Noam Cohen that “‘Jump the shark’ is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show.” By contrast, “nuke the fridge” offers a “new, fresh take” on long-running entertainment phenomena that have entered the sucking stages. For his part, Jon Hein is magnanimous towards these youngsters, though he does point out that it's been a while since he's heard anyone use the phrase "jump the couch" (Remember? Tom Cruise on Oprah? Anyone?), so maybe the people trying to cash in on "nuke the fridge" shouldn't jump at the chance to buy any yachts on credit. Leaving aside how weird it is that some people apparently feel that their generation will be ill-served if they don't have their very own snappy three-word on-line phrase for this sort of thing, I suspect that when a replacement for "jump the shark" that will stick does arrive, it won't be one that sort of replicates the rhythm and idea behind "jump the shark." One reason that "jump the shark" caught people's attention was that it wasn't obviously engineered to resemble something that people were already saying.

Morning Deal Report: Borat vs. Iron Man

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

While his wife Madonna continues to dominate the tabloid covers, Guy Ritchie is keeping busy preparing for his Sherlock showdown. As we told you last week, Ritchie’s reboot of Sherlock Holmes is getting some competition from a rival production that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as the elementary Watson. Now Ritchie has landed his Sherlock: Robert Downey, Jr. As Variety reports, “Downey emerged as an action star with Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes also will take advantage of his physical skills as the character displays brawn as well as brains. The basis for the film is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales, but also the comicbook Sherlock Holmes.” The “comicbook” Variety refers to is an upcoming take by Lionel Wigram, not the classic DC version pictured here. Sorry, nerds.

Speaking of comics (and nerds): fans of the Elfquest series by Wendy and Richard Pini, commence sharpening your knives. Or swords. Or whatever it is elves carry. Dodgeball writer/director Rawson Thurber will bring your beloved Wolfriders to the big screen for Warner Bros., per the Hollywood Reporter. “The series -- which at certain points in its history was published by both Marvel and DC Comics -- attracted a more mature audience as it went along, with scenes of battles and sexuality that were intense for that time. Hollywood has long tried to adapt the series, and several attempts at an animated series or feature have been made over the years.” Hey, what could go wrong?

Who says print is dead? It’s not only comic books that are coming to the screen in droves. Remember the New York Times article 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' that was recently optioned by J.J. Abrams? Well, according to Variety, “Miramax Films has closed a deal to develop a movie from ‘This Strange Thing Called Prom,’ a Brooke Hauser article published in the June 22 edition of the New York Times. The article follows the prom adventures of high school seniors who came to Brooklyn from locales like Senegal, Venezuela, Tibet, Haiti, Poland and Gabon (one was a nomadic yak herder until age 12).” You may laugh, but don’t you think yak herding skills would have come in handy at your prom?

Related:
No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
The Summer of Downey

Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

DANNY OCEAN

I vividly remember the day when my esteemed Screengrab colleague, Scott Von Doviak, told me I had to drop whatever I was doing and go check out Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. “You mean the movie with that guy from E.R.?” I replied, incredulous, thinking perhaps I’d misunderstood. "The guy from One Fine Day? Batman & Robin? That guy?” “Yes,” Mr. Von Doviak replied. “I’m afraid we have to start liking George Clooney now.” And, in fact, the statement was prescient, because soon The Cloon had established himself as the Sexiest Man Alive, the Last True Movie Star, the eternal bachelor, the guy with the pot-bellied pig, the sensible humanitarian do-gooder, and the guy my wife has informed me she’d run off with in a heartbeat...and I wouldn’t even blame her, because he’s just that fucking cool. But you know what? He’s still not as cool as Frank Sinatra in 1960. Advantage: Original.

THE ELEVEN

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Carl Reiner, Bernie Mac...these are all fairly cool people. Sammy and Dino? They're so cool I don’t even need to mention their last names (though I suppose it’s a toss-up whether Joey Bishop is cooler than Scott Caan or vice-versa). The big problem is that no matter how cool Sammy and Dino are, and as well as they wear suits and swill cocktails, they’re part of a gang that just doesn’t have many good scenes, good lines, or all that much to do. Advantage: Remake.

THE DAME

Not that she had all that much to work with in an underwritten role, but the best part of Julia Robert’s performance (as the art curator at the Bellagio?) is the meta gag of “introducing” her in the credits like a dewy fresh unknown. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better, despite an arguably better wardrobe, and this category would probably be a draw if not for the mitigating factor of Shirley Maclaine’s great cameo as “Tipsy Girl” in the original, giving what noted Rat Packologist John Mitchell calls “the only actual performance in the movie,” cementing her as “any reasonable drunk’s pin-up girl.” Advantage: Original.

THE HEIST

The original scores big points for its highball concept, cooked up by five writers, including Billy Wilder(!). Meanwhile, by plotting a heist where Sammy Davis, Jr.’s character masquerades as a tap-dancing garbage man, the film either criticizes 1960s racism or embodies it (depending who you ask). But the heist in the remake (scripted by Ted Griffin) is faster paced, requires more costumes and gadgets, and wraps up with a nice, lyrical moment by the Bellagio’s dancing waters (as opposed to the original’s surprisingly downbeat buzzkill pall of failure and mortality). Advantage: Remake.

THE SCORE

Even without the groovy remix of Elvis Presley’s lost classic “A Little Less Conversation,” the soundtrack to the 2001 edition of Ocean’s is worth a listen for the space age bachelor pad rhythms of David Holmes’ swingin’ retro score and classic cuts from Perry Como, Percy Faith, Quincy Jones and Claude DeBussy. But the original featured Sammy’s aforementioned sanitation song and dance “Ee-O-Leven” and Dean Martin performing a vibe-tastic version of “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”...and you really can’t argue with vibes. Advantage: Original

THE SEQUELS

This one is pretty close to a draw, but Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were marginally less dreadful than the original’s quasi-sequels Sergeants 3, 4 For Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods, so... Advantage: Remake.

And thus, in a tight race between style and substance, the winner is...REMAKE!

(Coming up next: the dueling Dawns of the Dead!)

Supply Side Film Criticism: How Travis Bickle Saved the Reagan Revolution

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.

Here's where it gets good. Although many remember Reagan as having been supernaturally unstoppable during the early years of his presidency, he was already facing major opposition, both in Congress and from the public at large, to parts of his economic plan. But then Hinckley showed up. "According to Mundell," writes the Financial Times of London, "the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed." On the basis of this development, Mindell doesn't think that the movie's historical economic importance can be overstated. "Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," he's said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5trn and $15trn of output to the US economy." At least we think it was indirect. Stay tuned for our next chapter, in which Oliver Stone arrives waving photos of Milton Friedman and Martin Scorsese performing script doctoring chores while crouching in the grassy knoll.

Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Donnie Darko (2001), the long-gestating cult hit from writer-director Richard Kelly, is about to get an ugly little brother. Or maybe a stepbrother, or just somebody who got ahold of its credit card number and is charging pizzas to its account. The planned sequel, S. Darko, begins shooting next week and is going to be shopped around at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The film's title refers to the character of Samantha Darko, who was Donnie's sister in the original film and was played by Daviegh Chase. The plot will involve a road trip the now- eighteen-year-old Samantha takes with a friend, a trip that becomes complicated when they begin to experience "bizarre visions." (Spoiler alert: Donnie himself, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, did not survive the conclusion of the first film.) Daveigh Chase will reprise her role in the new film, and that's as close as it has to an actual, breathing connection to the original Donnie Darko. The $10-million production will be directed by Chris Fisher, who directed and co-wrote Dirty, a crooked-cop drama starring Cuba Cooding, Jr., and horror flicks about real-life murderers Richard ("Night Stalker") Ramirez and the Hillside Strangler. Fisher says that "I am a great admirer of Richard Kelly's film and hope to create a similar world of blurred fantasy and reality." Simon Crowe, of the production company Velvet Octopus, chimes in: "I think there is a new generation of cinema-goers who will be very excited to see this film."

Whatever generation he has in mind, it does not appear that Richard Kelly is among their number. Cinemascope reports on Kelly's official reaction: "Over the last couple of days, a few people have asked me what’s up with 'this Donnie Darko sequel.' So to set the record straight, here’s a few facts I’d like to share with you all - I haven’t read this script. I have absolutely no involvement with this production, nor will I ever be involved. I have no control over the rights from our original film, and neither I nor my producing partner Sean McKittrick stand to make any money from this film." Reaction from fans has been swift, too: there's already a petition on-line devoted to shutting the damn thing down. (Quick, somebody call Sprite Gum!) It's not exactly the first time that some hack has threatened to grind out a string of sausage movies "based" on an original that deserves to be treated with more respect. (Can you say The Stepfather II: Father's Day?) But it's definitely a cheeky move to try this sort of thing with such a beloved art-cult object, especially given how long it took for Richard Kelly himself to start reaping some benefits from Donnie Darko itself. Or, as Cinemascope's Peter Sciretta puts in, in a line worthy of Dr. Van Helsing: "damn the buyers that will pour money [into] what seems on the outset as a blasphemous and disrespectful project".

Mike Tyson Speaks: Lend Him an Ear

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

“I love addicts. I love these guys. That’s the people I want to be around. You know, former users. And I think that’s really crazy.”That's Mike Tyson talking to Tim Arango in The New York Times. Now 41 and, one assumes, or maybe hopes, Tyson still has his own peculiar addictions, and one of them seems to be to the filmmaker James Toback. Tyson supplied Toback with the most memorable scene of his 2000 improvisational jam session Black and White when he turned up as himself in a party scene and gets cruised by Robert Downey, Jr., a scene that ends with the unnerved Tyson ("I'm on parole, brother, please") ringing Downey's bell. (After Downey goes down, Brooke Shields, playing his wife, rushes over to see if he's all right, and then she hits on Tyson. "“They say I raped a woman,” Iron Mike tells her politely. “They put me in the penitentiary. I don’t need no white bitch coming on to me.” At the time, there was some indication that Tyson was unhappy with how he came across onscreen and felt that Toback had set him up--not an unreasonably paranoid reaction to Toback, a self-styled provocateur who likes to surround himself with celebrities and stir up some shit. But Tyson came back for an appearance in Toback's little-seen When a Man Loves a Woman, and now he's the star of Toback's new film, a documentary simply called Tyson, "which interposes interviews of Mr. Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips," and which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.

“I look at it now, and I’m embarrassed I did it,” Tyson, currently trying to keep a low profile in Las Vegas, says about the film. “There’s a lot of information people didn’t need to know.” His claims to feel shame over his past is believable. But Tyson, who spent the first half of his career easily dominating his opponents in the ring (and the second half showing a complete inability to deal with it when he could no longer easily dominate, so that he'd do anything--go down fast, aim below the belt, turn cannibal--to just make it stop) now seems to be a glutton for this kind of punishment. (He's also working on an autobiographer with a professional ghostwriter.) This focus on sifting through his past may not be entirely based on his having nothing else to peddle. He may be hoping to educate himself. “I don’t know who I am,” he told the Times. “That might sound stupid. I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.” Maybe that's why he likes hanging around Toback, who recalls that when they first met back in the 1980s, “somehow the subject got on to madness. I told him about an LSD experience I had as a sophomore at Harvard. We talked about losing the self, and the difference between dread and fear.” (It's too bad that Toback's movies aren't more like his interviews.) Why Toback wants to be around Tyson, in good times and bad, is less mysterious. “I didn’t know how to be any other way," Tyson says now about his free-spending, sometimes lunatic-seeming behavior when things were good, or at lest profitable. "I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire. I was crazy.”

Who Spoils the Spoilers? Intimations and Possible Repurcussions of the Post-Credits "Iron Man" Epilogue

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

If you're one of the many ticketbuyers who saw Iron Man this past weekend, Marvel Studios thanks you: you helped get the comic-book company's plans to produce its own line of self-generating comic-book movies off to a soaring start. (The name "Marvel Studios" has appeared in each of the movies based on Marvel's licensed characters going back to the 1998 Blade, but Iron Man is the first that wasn't a "co-production" basically funded by a major studio.) But those who declined to stay until the end of the voluminous closing credits missed Iron Man's final scene, which is not so much a revelation as a marketing tie-in. As seen in this YouTube-posted video, which judging from the crowd noise on the soundtrack may not be entirely copyright-protected, Iron Man ends with Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark, who is already known to make a drop-in appearance in the forthcoming The Hulk, receiving a visit from Colonel Nick Fury, played by one the few living American actors who might convincingly chew nails, who seems to be out on a late-night recruiting drive for the Avengers. The Avengers, the ever-shifting superhero team whose core membership has included Iron Man, the Hulk, the mighty Thor, and that dipshit Hawkeye, have been slated for their own movie next year; Iron Man's Jon Favreau has expressed an interest in directing.

One interesting thing about all this is that is suggests that Marvel Studios intends to apply the same principles that put Marvel Comics on top for decades: by linking its products to one another, by grafting as many crossover connections between them as possible, it hopes to make the little zombies desperate to see everything stamped with its logo for fear of missing something vital, or even just the latest cool one-liner that one;s very favoritest character happens to utter while making a cameo appearance in someone else's movie. At its most decadent, over-inbred stage (can you say "Secret Wars"?), this interlocking marketing process was sometimes tricky to pull off when dealing with pen-and-ink characters without trailers and competing salary demands, which is one reason that it'll be interesting to see if Marvel Studios can pull it off when working with flesh-and-blood actors. Already, there have been some complaints, as seen in the video posted above, regarding the Nick Fury casting. Of course, for some of us, Nick Fury will always be one man and one man only:

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.

Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.

The Summer of Downey

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen. The scale of Downey's talent was no secret by the time he starred in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, but the Oscar nomination he got for that performance made it "official." Attenborough has been quoted as referring to Downey as "a little Brat Pack gadfly" with no formal training but a willingness to "work his arse off," a neat way of giving himself credit for his star's performance. With regard to his lack of "formal training," Downey, talking to Rebecca Winters Keegan, recalls "hanging around and smoking weed in the stairways with my friends who had just gotten back from class. They'd tell me the exercises. It seemed like inevitably they wound up screaming and crying—screaming at each other and crying at what was screamed. I would just call that Thanksgiving."

Back in 2001, NPR's All Things Considered set aside two whole minutes of precious airtime to allow something called Stephen Lynch--it wrote for the Orange County Register, and I'm sure it's mama is proud of it--to take note of Downey's then-latest brushes with the law and the rehab centers and insist that Downey's reputation as a tragically misguided bullet of talent was inflated by the supposed glamour of his messy personal life. As an actor, Lynch declared, "He wasn't"--note the use of the past tense--"that good." What had this keen observer been smoking? One of the surprises of the recent interviews with Downey is the unexpected but not illogical connection he now draws between his triumph in Chaplin and the tabloid slide downhill. He tells Winters Keegan that he knew that he had "just knocked one out of the park", a feeling that carried an expectation that everything about his life was about to change. When everything didn't, it led to "this huge anticlimactic thing that basically took on different shades of awe, wonder, acceptance, bitterness or disassociation for the next—-what year is it?—-17 years. There was this kind of lull, and I never really found any momentum to focus my creative energy after that, so pretty expectable things happened." Cut to a few years down the line, and Downey was capable of accepting a recurring role on Ally McBeal for his next comeback, and further capable of getting himself written out of the series when his comeback was followed by more tabloid headlines, this time involving an arrest "in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume". What's striking about Downey's rough patch is that, even with his troubles, he was a dependable hire in terms of getting the role done; there are very few duff performances in his resume--one of them is in U.S. Marshals, a sequel to The Fugitive that he credited with pushing him once more over the edge, because, he once said in an interview with Mike Figgis, he wasn't in the best psychic condition to spend a few weeks running around playing "Johnny Handgun"--and he was assured of some kind of comeback every time he gave a performance that was widely seen. No one less stupid than Stephen Lynch--a select group that includes Mel Gibson and a dog I used to have that was killed trying to shake hands with an eighteen-wheeler--could fail to detect how much talent was there. The problem, in an industry where there are insurance forms to fill out, was getting someone to hire him at all.

Downey has said that he wanted to star in Iron Man in part so that he'd be in the kind of movie he could take his son to, but then, he said the same thing about U.S. Marshals. He's also said that he was tired of making movies that nobody sees, and it's bracing to hear someone intimate that he might regret having been in A Scanner Darkly or Zodiac, or at least that he'd be happier if they'd done better business. Elsewhere, Downey has cited Johnny Depp's success in a series of films based on a Disney theme park ride--"If Depp is on a Slurpee, I want to be on a Slurpee"--in a tone that seems to suggest that they amounted to giving him a kind of permission to headline a franchise for Marvel Comics. The fact is, both Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man point up what it is that, in a world where the media is as obsessed with box-office numbers as the studios, just what a Johnny Depp or a Robert Downey, Jr. might someday find himself being forced to prove. Nobody who's been paying attention can be in doubt about Downey's being a major actor; what he has to show, if he wants to have the power in terms of freedom and the options he must crave, is that he's a movie star. Which doesn't just mean the ability to command the screen or even the additional ability to put asses in seats but the control to show up and do the press junket and repeat the necessary drivel to reporters over and over without throwing a vase at somebody's head. And, yes, to look right on a Slurpee.

Tom Cruise Parodies Somebody Else for a Change

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Some good news, finally, for Tom Cruise: his cameo in Tropic Thunder brought down the house at an industry screening of the summer comedy. It's a time-honored show business tradition for stars who have encountered image problems to get back in their fans' good graces by showing that they have a sense of humor about themselves, though it doesn't always work, as Sylvester Stallone found out with Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. Cruise's deep-inside turn, in which he dons a fat suit to play "a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools" apparently works like gangbusters, especially among those who recognize it as a bitch slap at Sumner Redstone, the Paramount executive who cut his studio's ties to Cruise after speculation began building in Hollywood that the star's increasing reputation as a geek show on wheels might be killing his box office appeal. It also sounds as if the cameo might be enough of a live wire to entertain viewers in the heartland who managed to enjoy Shrek without knowing that the sort-statured, bullying royal villain was widely seen as Jeffrey Katzenberg's way of telling Michael Eisner, thanks for the memories.

As for the movie's director-star, Ben Stiller, he was reportedly unhappy when pictures of Cruise in costume made it onto the Internet and spoiled the surprise, but by now he may welcome the buzz about Cruise for giving people something to write about his movie that doesn't involve Robert Downey, Jr.'s appearance in blackface. (One more time, he's not playing a black man, he's playing numbskull actor who thinks he can give a straight dramatic performance as a black man in blackface. I think it sounds like a promising joke myself, but I often get these things wrong. For what it's worth, the New York Times reports that the consensus after the screening was that, between the two of them, Downey and Cruise are easily the best things in the movie.) Cruise and Redstone are said to have recently patched up their differences. It remains to be seen whether this latest development will compel Redstone to demand his records back, but if Cruise is doing favors for Ben Stiller, he must find it hard to stay mad at anybody, given the ruthless impression of him that Stiller used to do on Saturday Night Live and his own sketch comedy TV show. In fact, this isn't the first time the two have worked together; witness this clip, which dates from a time (oh, it seems so long ago) when Cruise's image was still so straight-laced and boringly normal that he could get away with calling somebody else a weirdo--though if you watch it all the way to the end, you can see a sign of the emergence of the scary freak we've come to know and love, maniacal laugh and all.

Rose McGowan: TCM's Latest Essential

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

The Osborne-McGowan team has also torn through The Music Box and The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie that McGowan should probably remake, just so we can see her name on the posters next to that title. Of the selections coming up, McGowan is especially high on Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a hallucinatory masterpiece starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher. “It’s heavy-handed, sure, I get it. It’s just so smart. It’s very much a classic metaphor for the big person to proclaim for all to hear how Christian he is, and then there’s Lillian Gish, who probably only weighs about 90 pounds. … And she’s the quiet Christian, and it’s her behavior that speaks for her about her Christian belief.” Of the TCM gig itself, McGowan says, “I had no idea that they were even going to pay me. Seriously, a job where I get to sit and discuss these movies? Are you kidding me? I’ve been boring my friends for years!” One can't help but wonder how any lost soul could become so miserably jaded as to ever be bored by the sight of Rose McGowan rhapsodizing about Laurel and Hardy, but perhaps she has better tastes in movies than in friends. Rose, call us! We'll introduce you to some really cool new people at Trivia Night.

Car Talk with Val Kilmer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:45:00 GMT

What with the WGA strike, there isn't a lot of TV series news out there right now, but as Spencer Tracy used to say, what's there is cherce. It's been reported that Val Kilmer will be serving as the voice of KITT, the talking car, in the "rebooted" new pilot version of Knight Rider being readied by executive producer Doug Liman, with an eye towards possibly launching a new series. Originally, Will Arnett (Arrested Development, Blades of Glory), the new reigning Mr. Smarmy, was set to play KITT, a bright idea that might have resulted in something that felt closer to Heat Vision and Jack: The Next Generation. In a surreal development, Arnett had to be replaced because the pilot's sponsor, Ford, objected to his casting because he had done voice work in commercials for General Motors, thus denying him the chance to provide the voice of a car because he was already "the voice of GMC Trucks." In a world where nobody seems to understand what constitutes a conflict of interest anymore, it's always good to see somebody deciding where to draw a line in the sand. Anyway, this is sort of movie news because Kilmer is still a movie star. Sort of. (Heck, for that matter, when I saw Wristcutters last year, the revelation that Arnett was playing the movie's mysterious cult leader was greeted by the audience with a reaction comparable to what you might get if Jesus walked out onstage and announced that he was here to introduce the Beatles reunion.) Not that we mean to tease Kilmer about this. Sure, there was a time when we'd have been happy to oblige, but in the last several years the kissy-lipped devil has ripened into one entertaining side of ham, making the most of his flashy roles in such films as Spartan and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the recent TV miniseries Comanche Moon, and giving such co-stars as Robert Downey, Jr. and Steve Zahn — men who do not live dull lives — something to write home to mother about. ("Yeah, then he started hopping, hopping around in place, and he said he thought he was a flea. Oh, it's in the movie. If you look close, you can see his nose twitch at one point. That's where the director shit his pants.") The Knight Rider pilot is slated to air sometime later this month on NBC.

Coming Soon: "Citizen Kane 2" Starring Bronson Pinchot

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Universal would prefer that you not call its forthcoming American Pie: Beta House a direct-to-video release. The preferred corporate euphemism is now "DVD Premiere." And as Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, studios have reconceived the direct-to-DVD release as an important, pre-planned moneymaking part of the operation. The key element here is the proper way to continue to exploit a well-established brand name to which you own the rights. A few years ago, if you got the numbers back on the fifth Police Academy movie and found that the profits had dropped off considerably from the first installments but that the damn thing was still making money, you had a clear choice: you could decide that, as George Clooney said after the release of Ocean's Thirteen, "This tree has been sapped," and spend the rest of your life having nightmares about the money that Police Academy 6 might have made, or you could suck it up, green-light yet another sequel, and bring shame and dishonor upon your family. Direct-to-DVD releases tied to a familiar title are a neat compromise solution. They don't cost as much to make or market, partly because they usually don't feature the same level of star power as the theatrical releases from which they sprang, but they still appeal to fans who have developed a Pavlovian reaction to seeing certain titles. At the same time, the films are often marketed a little more aggressively than you might expect, and the studios will try to maintain some kind of superficial linkage to the real movies. For instance, as Barnes explains, "the American Pie DVD spinoffs all feature Eugene Levy as a father figure — even though the character’s son stopped appearing after the series ended its run in theaters." This is crucial to what Craig Kornblau, Universal's President of Home Entertainment, insists on calling "the integrity of the franchise." (Barnes adds dryly, "Mr. Levy declined to be interviewed.")

This summer, Warners will embark on a little experiment in synergy when they release Get Smart, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway, and with Masi Oka of Heroes and Nate Torrence in small supporting roles, to theaters, and at the same time release Get Smarter: Bruce and Lloyd and Out of Control, starring Masi Oka and Nate Torrence, and with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway nowhere in sight, to DVD. Then there was Daddy Day Camp, a sort of sequel to the Eddie Murphy comedy Daddy Day Care, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. Built to go straight to DVD, the film so impressed its studio masters that they upgraded it to theatrical release, a decision that proved a bad one for the box office, the reputations of those involved, and the planet as a whole. In general, those passing judgement on the quality of these films risk being deluded because it's only natural to go in with expectations set way below the bottom of the bar. Those not pitched at children tend to be overstuffed with gore and/or full-frontal nudity, in an attempt to make some kind of virtue out of the films' not being submitted to the MPAA ratings board. As for the more family-friendly, fanciful ones, such as the "DVD Premiere" sequels to Dr. Dolittle and Garfield...well, as Barnes delicately puts it: "Special effects in these films, while improving as a result of cheaper digital technology, often require a little more imagination from viewers."

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.