The Screengrab : knocked up

Trailer Review: Funny People

Paul Clark — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Judd Apatow might have become one of Hollywood’s reigning kings of comedy by making hard-R, foul-mouthed laffers, but the films he’s directed so far have stuck to a reliable mix of laughs and lessons. More specifically, the trademark Apatow storyline involves a man who experiences a life-changing event (whether it’s getting a woman pregnant or being outed as an overaged celibate), and learns important lessons about living as a result. And while Funny People looks like he’s stuck to this same formula again, I find it interesting that he’s split his usual schlubby leading man into two this time around. While a movie star played by longtime Apatow pal Adam Sandler gets the terminal disease and the estranged wife he tries to win back, Seth Rogen is the young comic on the make who falls into Sandler’s orbit and is forced to grow up, despite a Greek chorus of sailor-tongued young dudes (another favorite Apatow meme). It’s hard to say whether this twist on the usual Apatow formula will work as well as The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up did, but this trailer has me curious to see if Apatow can handle the more serious undercurrents he’s set up for himself. Also, it’s nice to see Eric Bana in a role that doesn’t require him to be dour and tortured- as anyone who’s seen Chopper can tell you, Bana’s a funny dude, and I welcome the chance to see him cut loose again.

DVD Digest for September 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a master’s final film shares the shelves with one of the summer’s biggest hits and a number of classic horror films coming out just in time for Halloween.

DVD of the Week: For years, the Criterion Collection has been committed to releasing superior DVD version of the films of the great director Yasujiro Ozu. Now, they’re continuing their commitment with this week’s release of Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon. In many ways, the film is a color analogue to Ozu’s classic (and my favorite film of his) Late Spring, this time telling the story of an aging man and his reluctant-to-marry daughter from the perspective of the father, played as ever by Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu. With the switch in perspective away from youth to old age, it’s tempting to read An Autumn Afternoon as a kind of farewell piece by the filmmaker, a kind of passing of the torch to younger filmmakers. Yet it’s clear while watching the film that Ozu was as talented in his final years as he was in the prime of his career, and his seamless shift to color with his final films provide a hint that he might have been able to gracefully change with the times while keeping his one-of-a-kind style.

Other “classics” coming to DVD this week include the 123-minute cut of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (Ryko) and, uh, the “10th Anniversary Edition” of Can’t Hardly Wait (Sony) for which I know you were all clamoring.

The week’s biggest new release on DVD is Iron Man (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), the first and one of the biggest summer blockbusters, and much-anticipated arrival of Robert Downey Jr. on Hollywood’s A-list. Also of note is the Judd Apatow production Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Universal, also Blu-Ray), which is also included in Universal’s Ultimate Unrated Comedy Collection (also Blu-Ray) alongside fellow Apatow films The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Other recent releases coming to DVD: Taxi to the Dark Side (Image), CSNY / Déjà vu (Lionsgate), and Jellyfish (Zeitgeist).

This week’s rather sparse TV on DVD selections include: My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox) and Numb3rs Season 4 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray Only news, this week brings Universal’s “Halloween Starter Pack”, which includes Dawn of the Dead [2004], Land of the Dead, and The Thing, also sold separately, and the director’s cut of Daredevil (Fox).

Screengrab Review: Choke

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

While attending Austin's South-By-Southwest Film Festival in March of this year, I caught a screening of the big-studio adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke, which I’m told is daring and provocative and, apparently, beloved by hipsters. The theater was filled with big studio Men in Black armed with night vision goggles and whatnot to prevent any pirating of their upcoming release...odd, considering the much more likeable and successful Knocked Up got screened at the 2007 festival without nearly so much off-putting, paranoid nonsense.

Anyway, Choke tells the story of sex addict Sam Rockwell and his sex addict friends (including Joel Grey?!!?!?) and their struggles with sex addiction, which is apparently a terrible problem in Los Angeles and, uh, probably other places (like the story's New Jersey setting, Palahniuk's Washington State stomping grounds and wherever David Duchovny happens to be at any given moment)...although, to be fair, I’m guessing the condition is more of a problem for sex addicts who don’t get to screw around with gorgeous starlets like Kelly Macdonald and Bijou Phillips.

Rockwell’s character also likes to pretend he’s choking in restaurants, because the attention it brings him makes up for the love he was denied by his wacky, now Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother (played by recent bad-mom specialist Anjelica Huston).

Ho-hum. Not a bad movie exactly: there’s some funny bits involving a colonial theme park, a sit-up-and-take notice performance by Gillian Jacobs as a stripper named Cherry Daquiri (not her real name) and, of course, plenty of sex and nudity...but it all just winds up playing like the pilot for some new Showtime series I'm never gonna watch. Sam Rockwell is once again likeable yet not quite likeable (or relatable) enough to really care about, and I left the theater wondering how many better (or at least more interesting) movies, say, the Baghead mumblecore crowd, the documentarians behind Man On Wire or Young@Heart or any number of unheralded SXSW and other below-the-radar indie filmmakers could have made with the millions they spent making (and marketing the shit out of) this utterly disposable "edgy" studio offering.

Related Stories - Trailer Review: Choke, Sundance: The Final Roundup, Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

Face/Off: Judd Apatow and "Pineapple Express"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

["Face/Off" is an irregularly scheduled recurring segment in which two Screengrab regulars have an exchange of views on some recent fixture of the movie scene. In the exclusive behind-the-scenes photo below, taken at a typical Screengrab "pitch" session, Andrew Osborne [l.] and Phil Nugent [r.] persuade their delighted editor to allow them to revive this much-loved feature.]

PHIL NUGENT: Andrew, I might as well come right out with it. I grew up as one of the most socially maladjusted members of our society: the comedy geek. So I feel a certain kinship with Judd Apatow. In some ways that do not include material success and worldly achievement, we're even kind of alike. We share the same birthday and have both had dirty thoughts about Leslie Mann. He actually got to marry her, so he may have gotten to act on some of his by now. And as a fan, I go back quite a ways with him. And I'm not talking about no Freaks and Geeks, neither! I'm talking The Ben Stiller Show, baby! It was on that series and the longer-lived The Larry Sanders Show, both of which appeared at a time when I was about to be greeted at my door by a mob wielding flaming torches who had dropped by to suggest that my presence might no longer be welcome at grad school and so was sorely in need of a few chuckles, that Apatow developed his chops as a producer and screenwriter and started making the lasting connections that continue to appear in his work. And last year, when Knocked Up made him an official Hollywood player and Superbad made him a name brand, I was happy for him. After all, for a long time, this was a guy who was best known for creating TV shows (also including Undeclared) that inspired devoted cult followings but couldn't stay on the air for more than a year, or (as with the case of Sick in the Head and the other Apatow pilots that became staples of the "Brilliant but Cancelled" phenomenon) couldn't get on the air at all. Although the Internet has given us a great many wonderful things, I still think that the single best use of it that anyone has ever made came when it was used to publicly disseminate the notorious e-mail exchange between Apatow and Mark Brazill, the small crawling thing best known as creator of That '70s Show, and who thought that, by including a mash-up parody of The Monkees with a stereotypical '90s grunge band on an episode of The Ben Stiller Show, Apatow had ripped off his hackish notion of doing a similar show as a "real" sitcom. It's still a hilarious exchange between a clueless dolt with too much money and a genuine and humane wit (who, okay, probably also already had too much money). But I remember when part of the context of the whole thing was a world in which the dolt was seen as more successful. Not anymore.

Apatow has out his name on a lot of stuff since then, and some of it has been, well, a lot less successful than his best stuff. Pineapple Express was preceded into theaters by Step Brothers, which mostly serves as an announcement that it's time for John C. Reilly to, (A.) put some clothes on, (B.) get back to straight acting roles for a while, and (C.) put some clothes on! Last fall, Reilly was unable to hold together Walk Hard, which tried its damndest to sustain the parodic-skit nature of The Ben Stiller Show for the length of a feature film. One of the most discouraging things about Pineapple Express is that it reminded me of that e-mail exchange, but this time, it's Apatow playing the Mark Brazill role. The idea--and it's what we used to call real "high concept" back before someone decided that it would be the honorable thing to bury that phrase with Don Simpson--is a conventional action comedy with conventional L.A. locations and conventional gunplay and chases and explosive fireballs and shit, but with these stoned doofuses at the center. The movie works best when it suggests pure parody: when Seth Rogan and James Franco stay up late babbling about the plan they're going to implement the next morning, and wind up oversleeping by ten hours, and when they then walk off to begin the busy work of saving their asses, only to get distracted by playing leapfrog and trying to get a caterpillar high. (This lyrical interlude may be the only part of the movie that's as fully charming as the movie's trailer, which made phenomenal use of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes", and which was edited in a way that suggested more visual freshness than you get from the film itself. I am of course familiar with the standard criticisms that have been made of Apatow and the work he's been sponsoring as a producer: that he's running a boys' club, that it's politically tone dead and too insular by half, that John C. Reilly really fucking needs to put some clothes on!! But this is the first thing of his that I've seen that strikes me as struggling to meet the conventional halfway, to just take some of his and his performers' quirkier interests and skills--which here basically just comes down to stoner antics--and trying to shoehorn them into a tired action-comedy formula that neither he nor the hired-gun director, David Gordon Green, could care less about even executing with any degree of skill. Yet you, my man, have gone on record as liking this thing! In the name of Cheech and Chong--have you heard they're threatening a comeback movie, which may be something else I'll decide to blame on Judd when I catch my breath--why, sir, why!?

ANDREW OSBORNE: Since you started your critique with praise, I’ll start my defense of the Apatowniverse with my own critiques. For one thing, I thought Superbad was funny but wildly overpraised, and actually (more than Pineapple Express) a prime example of the strained, one-joke dangers of a too-limited thematic range. Jonah Hill’s Seth, Michael Cera’s Evan and, of course, Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s McLovin were all funny and charming, but sophomoric boys club humor without a corrective balance of mature XY and XX perspective eventually just feels like hanging out with sophomore boys (which got old pretty quick even when I was fifteen). A related criticism and possible symptom of Apatow’s more facile bent is his tendency to work with the same dudes over and over again while leaving his female actors (with the notable, understandable exception of Ms. Mann) out of the loop. Busy Phillips was just as funny and awesome as James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel on Freaks and Geeks, but she’s doing TV guest spots ever since while her former male co-stars are headlining one Apatow project after another. Ditto Sarah Hagan, Linda Cardellini (who’s got a steady gig on ER, but still...) not to mention poor Carla Gallo from Undeclared, who at least got cameos in later Apatow projects, although one of them (“Toe-Sucking Girl” in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) I don’t remember and the other (“Period Blood Girl” in Superbad) actually made me feel embarrassed for her. (And, really, would it have killed them to find a place for Knocked Up’s hilarious Charlyne Yi in Pineapple Express?)

I mean, there may be any number of perfectly good reasons why Apatow’s boys keep showing up in movie after movie while the girls fall by the wayside, but it does raise certain troubling questions (except maybe in the case of Katherine Heigl, who got a nice career boost with Knocked Up, only to later denounce the whole notion of a hot chick hooking up with an ugly guy as sexist before reaffirming her feminist street cred by starring opposite dreamy James Marsden in 27 Dresses as a strong, independent woman whose life revolves around fantasies of Prince Charming whisking her off to a perfect wedding).

Yet here’s why I defend the Apatowniverse in general: for one thing, it’s rare for anyone to be associated with even a single outstanding TV show or movie, let alone two of the greatest TV shows in the history of the medium (Larry Sanders, Freaks & Geeks) and a slew of smart, funny, eminently quotable and wildly popular comedies like The 40 Year Old Virgin that aren’t just funny but also have a distinctive personality and philosophy (as opposed to high-concept, anything-for-a-laugh joke factories like the Scary Movie franchise).

Even relative misfires like Walk Hard are fairly innocuous, with occasional classic moments (like Jack Black, Justin Long, Paul Rudd and Jason Schwartzman riffing as the Beatles, a scene I could have watched for hours). But it’s the egalitarian humanity of the Apatow brand I find most appealing (and most troubling when it’s missing): in his best work, there are no real villains or laughingstocks: everyone’s an asshole, everyone is foolish, everyone gets a moment of glory. The laughter is with, not at. Mintz-Plasse may be a pencil-neck geek, but he is McLovin, dammit. Mann may come across as shrewish in Knocked Up, but she’s also righteously, hilarious indignant and vulnerable by turns.

There’s much less empathetic character development in Pineapple Express, of course: Craig Robinson’s walk-on performance as a bouncer in Knocked Up was considerably more nuanced than his larger role as a drug dealer in Express, Gary Cole and Rosie Perez (both generally excellent) are essentially wasted as cardboard cartoon characters and the less said about the film’s regressive sub-Long Duk Dong Asian stereotypes the better.

But Apatow’s other strengths are on full display (and by Apatow, of course, I mean his influence on collaborators like director David Gordon Green and writer/star Rogen). Most importantly, the movie had me laughing the whole time, with nary a squirm of boredom or impatience. The action scenes may have been artless when compared to real action movies...but, first of all, Express is a parody and, to be honest, with all the CGI excesses of most 21st century action movies, it’s nice to reconnect with the simple old school pleasures of, say, a simple, straightforward car chase (especially one with distinctive but suspenseful just-this-side of realistic elements like James Franco’s panicky attempt to navigate a speeding vehicle with one foot stuck through a windshield he inadvisably attempted to kick out).

Another Apatow trademark is a certain respect for his audience: unlike any number of movies that cynically recycle tired clichés, situations and phrases (“You the man, dog!”) as if we’re too dumb or lazy to notice, Pineapple Express makes a concerted effort to be as entertaining as possible, surprising us and/or tweaking expectations whenever it can. Rogen’s character doesn’t just survive a near-miss gunshot: there’s also the ickily amusing aftermath. Conversations veer off in loopy, unpredictable directions. And did I also mention it’s just plain funny?

Sure, That ‘70s Show had funny moments despite its flaws, too, and Judd Apatow may be something of an asshole (like many if not all rich, successful people)...and indeed, I’m even willing to believe the humor and humanity of his projects may drop and his asshole quotient may rise the longer he swims with the sharks of Hollwood...but I think it’s still way too early to equate him with a genuine douch-nozzle like Mark Brazill (or at least Brazill’s evil e-mail alter ego)...so let the Apatow backlash backlash begin!

PHIL NUGENT: Your point about the way that Apatow has failed to demonstrate the same stubborn devotion to such female talent as Linda Cardellini and Carla Gallo that he's shown, say, Seth Rogen and James Franco, is well taken, so much so that I regret that I, in my role as the guy trying to start some shit here, didn't mention it myself. When it comes to some comedy writers, I don't feel like complaining about a boy's-club atmosphere because I sort of dread the results if they were to try to write about women, just because they felt they should. (I might think more highly of them as artists and as human beings if natural curiosity compelled them to experiment in that direction, but politically mandated inclusiveness is no friend of comedy.) In Apatow's case, though, there's plenty of evidence that there's a much broader side of himself that he hasn't been exploring. It happens to be the same side that didn't pay the bills for many years. There are many ways to fail in show business; with Freaks and Geeks, Apatow failed the My So-Called Life way, with Internet petitions and reruns on basic cable and reviewers decrying the stupidity of an industry that would just throw away this gem. That's got to be one of the nicer ways to go down, but at the end of the day, you're still someone who couldn't provide job security for all the people who'd turned down other offers to work with you. (Of course, many of the people who are now rich celebrities thanks to their association with Apatow will be quick to tell you that before they met him they couldn't get arrested, but still.)

Looking at the flurry of activity that Apatow has initiated in the last couple of years--including getting projects green-lighted that were based on scripts that had been waiting in the back drawer for some time--I get the impression that he's been trying to create work for his "family", paying them back for sticking with him through the rough times. (Superbad was written so long ago that Seth Rogan had orginally conceived the Jonah Hill role for himself.) In the process, he may be spreading himself, and not just himself, a little thin. You mention Craig Robinson, who in his scene with Leslie Mann outside the club in Knocked Up was able to create a surprisingly full character in one cussword-filled monologue. I expect that he was much happier when he got the script for Pineapple Express and saw that he had a lot more screen time in it, but it comes to so much less. Apatow still has moments of startling inspiration in deciding how best to use these performers; he reportedly made the call that Franco should play the role in Pineapple Express that Rogen had, again, written with himself in mind, and the result is easily the best work that Franco has done in movies, probably the best he's been since, yeah, Freaks and Geeks. And the movie makes terrific use of my man Danny McBride, who in less than three months--the period of time bracketed by the release of The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder--has emerged as the new bad-hair king of Hollywood. (I have a hunch that if Ben Stiller had invited Apatow to the read-through of the Tropic Thunder screenplay, McBride would have walked out of the room with Jack Black's part.) But in his recent productions, there only seems to be two kinds of casting--the outrageously inspired and the by-the-book routine. The cast of Pineapple Express consists of a few people who are squarely in the zone and several talented performers who look as if they're in denial about this being the final draft of the script.

Almost everybody I know loved Knocked Up while confessing to having had "a problem" with it. My own biggest problem with it was a little different from the usual ones I've heard expressed, such as that it gave short shrift to abortion as an option, or that it was implausible that a woman who looked like Katherine Heigl could ever get drunk enough to fuck Seth Rogen. My problem was that, while I had no objection to Rogen's character growing up enough to take on his share of responsibility for raising the child, I didn't think they should have gotten married. I couldn't imagine that union turning out in any way that wouldn't be hellish. Not because Rogen wasn't conventionally attractive enough for Heigl, but because Heigl, unlike everyone else in Rogen's circle, and indeed unlike just about everyone else in the whole movie, her own sister and brother-in-law included, didn't seem to have a funny bone in her body. It says a lot about the cult of standardized beauty that a lot of people felt comfortable saying out loud that Rogen wasn't good-looking enough for her but that I heard very few people ask what the hell he was going to do to keep from dying of boredom after they'd been trapped together for awhile. The fact is, movie audiences have traditionally accepted romantic partners in comedies who looked physically mismatched, such as Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, if both of them were funny; that's the real soul partnership. Heigl herself must have belatedly realized this, since her offscreen complaining about the movie has largely come down to the fact that she didn't get any laughs in it, but based on how eagerly Apatow has jumped to the task to serve funny women when he had them to work with, I have to believe that he sized her up as nice, pretty packaging and choose not to tax her. (You want to see what it looks like when a gorgeous-looking performer who's also gifted and funny is wasted by filmmakers who just want to exploit those physical assets, look at James Franco in thr Spider-man movies.) Since Apatow isn't one of those jackasses (like Al Franken) who's on record as believing that women just aren't funny--he probably gets a reminder of just how funny they can be every time he pisses off his wife--the casting of the dull but handsomely assembled TV soap star as the "normal" one in Knocked Up must be his commercial side talking; it's the part of him that probably thinks that the mass audience won't accept a romantic comedy in which the woman can hold up her end in the quirky wise-cracking department. In Pineapple Express, the commercial side of him is the part that thinks that more people will turn out to watch two comedians doing a stoner routine if somebody is firing machine guns at them, and I think that this time, the commercial side clearly outbalances the quirky, personal side. Which is an ominous development, in my view. Because if Apatow doesn't get back in touch with the side of him that once cared less about audience share and more about making the best use possible of his talents, he's never going to get around to making the movie I really want to see from him: a romantic comedy in which the woman is every bit as funny, maybe as indifferent to conventional definitions of success, and maybe even as much a challenge to conventional standards of attractiveness as the man.

ANDREW OSBORNE: First of all, let me offer you a hearty cyber-handshake for providing the definitive closing argument in the case of Heigl vs. Rogen. It’s so absolutely dead-on, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it myself, but I intend to correct that mistake by taking credit for the idea in every single future argument I have with anyone, for the rest of my life, who bitches about the Rogen/Heigel pairing in Knocked Up. I myself refused to wed 'til I found myself a comical lass who could banter with the best of ‘em...and, frankly, I can’t imagine any better qualification for spousal consideration than a solid sense of humor (which Heigl's Alison Scott definitely lacked, though Rogen’s character, Ben Stone, at least wound up with some pretty cool in-laws)!

And, since you brought it up, I feel the April 2008 Vanity Fair article, “Who Says Women Aren't Funny?” more or less gave the definitive closing argument in the whole tiresome case of “Women Vs. Humor.” As Nora Ephron says in the piece, ““There is no question that there are a million more funny women than there used to be...but everything has more women. There are more women in a whole bunch of places, and this is one of them.” Sounds good to me, though I also agree with the sociological wisdom of a later quote from humorist and Harvard Lampoon alum Patricia Marx: ““Maybe pretty women weren't funny before because they had no reason to be funny. There was no point to it—people already liked you.”

So, there are funny women out there, and I’d like to see Apatow do a better job of utilizing them, because his best stuff isn’t the bad boy buzz of exploding cars and gunplay (however entertaining some of those moments may have been in Pineapple Express, though I thought the entire “crazy cops” subplot in Superbad was tedious)...no, Apatow’s gift is capturing modern day relationships with spot-on, up-to-the-minute clarity: Franco and Rogen hanging out in Express, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera hanging out in Superbad, Busy Phillips and Linda Cardellini hanging out in Freaks & Geeks, etc., etc.

And, while I agree I’d like to see Apatow do MORE comedies where the male and female relationships are evenly matched in terms of comedy chops, I wouldn’t say he’s NEVER delivered those particular goods. Steve Carell was a scream in The 40 Year Old Virgin, but Catherine Keener was certainly no slouch in the funny/unconventional department (and, in the supporting cast, Jane Lynch went toe-to-toe with Rogen, Paul Rudd and Romany Malco without breaking a sweat). And Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Apatow produced for his boy Jason Segal, featured pretty funny turns from Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis (the dirtiest name in show biz).

Were Keener, Bell and Kunis as funny as their respective romantic comedy co-stars? Well, no, not quite: by way of comparison, my ultimate celebrity crush, Alyson Hannigan, was far more outrageous and funny playing off Jason Biggs in American Pie (a movie that would fit quite snugly into the Apatow-verse, come to think of it). And, yes, in the first American Pie, Hannigan wasn’t exactly a romantic lead, but rather a funny supporting player, like Lynch in Virgin, Leslie Mann and Charlyne Yi in Knocked Up and Amber Heard in Express.

So, okay, point taken: let’s get Apatow, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd together for a remake of Barefoot In The Park, stat!

But in the meantime, I’m not even close to giving up on Judd Apatow (yet), because, while some of his projects may fare better than others, he’s never really burned me as a viewer, meaning he’s built up quite a lot of credit in the ol' Bank of Osborne.

And I can’t really fault the man for trying a bunch of different genres (romantic comedy, action, parody, etc.) and using his newfound (and, given the nature of Hollywood , no doubt ephemeral) power to launch a bunch of projects (some good, some not as good, same as with any producer) that would never otherwise get made. Nor can I fault the man for possessing commercial self-preservation instincts...though it’s not like he’s Michael Bay, for God's sake, or even the aforementioned Nora Ephron, who gives good quote, yet also hacks up soulless Hollywood hairballs like Bewitched and Hanging Up with depressing regularity. (And, if you think about it, “stoner action comedy” isn’t exactly a sure thing/sell-out commercial genre anyway...even with all the blanks and explosions, Pineapple Express was still a personal movie, in that it directly reflected the distinct sensibility of Apatow and his collaborators.)

So, in conclusion, yes, I think Judd Apatow certainly has the capacity to go to the Dark Side – but aside from an executive producer credit on the odious Will Ferrell “comedy” Kicking and Screaming, I don't really see any evidence that he’ll be picking out a secret Sith name anytime soon. His upcoming projects (including a biblical comedy, a Sherlock Holmes comedy and a semi-dramatic film about stand-up comedians) seem to indicate a healthy willingness on his part to experiment. But, most importantly, Apatow's name on a movie poster usually means I’ll be entertained, either a little or a lot...and there are VERY few names in Hollywood that inspire that kind of brand loyalty these days.

As for Pineapple Express, which got this whole discussion rolling in the first place, my definitive closing argument is simple: "it brought the funny" (as the comedy geeks would say)...

...and for a fellow comedy geek like Apatow, that's pretty much the point.

--Contributors: Phil Nugent; Andrew Osborne

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Pineapple Express"

Face/Off: "Fargo"

Face/Off: "Children of Men"

Screengrab Review: Pineapple Express

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:25:00 GMT

On my way to the Somerville Theater last night, my lovely Polish bride noticed my eyes were mysteriously bloodshot...the result, I’m guessing, of recent sleepless nights courtesy of freaky New England weather patterns and our passive-aggressive cat Zuzu's stubborn desire for round-the-clock feeding, and not (I’m hoping) an icky dose of Knocked Up-style pinkeye.

More to the point, however, my ocular vessels were NOT dilated as the result of any quasi-legal pre-screening cheeba inhalation. In fact, I’ve been more or less estranged from the kind bud for many years now (though, as with any number of past relationships gone south, I still have fond memories).

So, no, unlike the Cheech & Chong oeuvre, you don’t have to be stoned off your ass to appreciate the manic lunacy of Pineapple Express. Though I’m sure a little ganja couldn’t hurt, it’s hard to imagine squeezing even more enjoyment from a movie so fanatically determined to entertain its (admittedly self-selecting) demographic.

Given Hollywood’s penchant for lazy, paint-by-numbers filmmaking, this gleeful desire to have as much fun as possible with every frame of film has become the hallmark of the Apatow brand in recent years, even when comedy's reigning “It” Guy leaves the directing to someone else (in this case, David Gordon Green).

Admittedly, the arrested development "Frat Pack" sensibility of the Apatow imprimatur isn’t (and isn’t intended) for all audiences, and the latest Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg-scripted bromance about two potheads on the run from a vengeful drug dealer occasionally strains too hard, but for the most part, the screaming, gun-toting, nut-kicking neo-Stooge action stays just light enough on its feet to be funny (and surprisingly exciting) rather than shrill and exhausting throughout most of Pineapple's muscular running time, thanks in large part to the engaging smart-dumb (or is that dumb-smart?) chemistry of co-stars James Franco (as a big-hearted, low wattage pot dealer) and Rogen, reprising his trademark cynical bear routine as a shady process server who accidentally witnesses a drugland murder, then spends the rest of the story in a hemp-fueled panic, doing just about everything in his power to make the situation even worse for himself.

The film essentially flies or fails based on the viewer’s desire to chill with its addled protagonists (and, to a lesser extent, Danny McBride, the newest pledge in the Apatow frat house, who seems likeable enough given what the sports radio crowd would refer to as an inconclusive sample size). And even Freaks & Geeks-loving Francophiles and Rogen enthusiasts may balk at the Tarantino-esque levels of slapstick violence on display, though for what it’s worth, my wife (a Stooge-hater from way back who usually balks at such things) seemed to enjoy every gunshot, smash-up and kitty litter face plant...so much so, in fact, we may actually go back and see the movie again just to catch all the stuff we laughed over the first time.

(And maybe the second time around we’ll even try it baked.)

Related Stories: Your 4:20 Stoner Symposium, Screengrab Predicts the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

And now that we’re all feeling nice and empowered from our Top Ten List of films with strong female characters and themes, here’s the other side of the coin: nine movies we’re guessing you won’t find on Gloria Steinem’s Netflix queue (unless she’s researching a new book on movies that didn’t exactly do wonders for the feminist movement).

(Oh, and while we're on the subject, a special P.S. to Katherine Heigl: Really? Knocked Up is more sexist than 27 Dresses? That's a fascinating theory. Please, tell me more!)

PRETTY WOMAN (1990)

Although she later improved her girl power street credit with her Academy Award-winning turn as an indomitable single mother in Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts’ breakthrough role was about as healthy (and irresistible) as a deep fried bacon Twinkie for the mobs of women (and men) who made it a blockbuster hit. I mean, I’m a dude and I certainly have my issues with some of the more strident tenets of feminism, but even I was offended by the film’s basic premise about the whore-with-the-heart-of-gold who charms a rich Prince Charming with her sparkling personality (and fellatio skills) to the point where he decides to keep her for himself, making her dreams come true by paying for all the overpriced jewels and fashion she could possibly want. Oh, and he goes down on her on a Steinway...the movie’s one true nod to progressive gender relations. This movie is offensive on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. The blatant portrayal of women as whores who only get what they want by attracting successful men? The offensiveness of Jason Alexander’s loathsome chauvinist pig character, a personification of the film’s equal opportunity anti-male stereotyping (unattractive men are icky slobs and probably rapists, whereas good looking men are more trustworthy and morally superior)? The ridiculous depiction of prostitution as an Outward Bound-style empowerment program (complete with Laura San Giacomo’s mother hen prostitute telling a fledgling whore at the end of the movie that she expects big things from her, y'know, on par with Roberts’ home run of man-bagging)? Oh, sure...it’s just a movie, and an insidiously charming one at that, and maybe I’m reading too much into it and getting all het up for no reason...yet, at the same time, it’s also worth noting that many of the girls who grew up watching Pretty Woman (not to mention the film’s original audience) now enjoy (and sometimes embody) the film’s sex-for-crass-materialism ethos in pervasive cultural incarnations from Paris Hilton and The Real World to just about every show on the E! network.

FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)

One of the most polarizing blockbuster hits of the '80s, Fatal Attraction presents us with Glenn Close as the image of the sexy, successful unmarried career woman and turns her into what the movie confidently assumes is every man's nightmare: the one night stand who won't go away. Seen alone in her apartment at night, she's not really confident at all: she's a lonely neurotic wreck -- this is what being without a family, or at least a man, presumably does to a woman, what all career women are really like underneath. Then, after the married guy (Michael Douglas) who thought they were both just having a little fling stops putting up with her, she turns into an avenging harpy, and in the process she says all the things that women who are sick of being badly used and treated as objects have said. They don't apply to the situation, and you may think the fact that she thinks they do shows how sick she is, but given that this is the era of Reagan, AIDS, the "new chastity" and the anti-feminist backlash, a lot of people in the audience thought the fact this fruitcake was saying them proved what she was saying must be crazy in any instance. The movie isn't exactly misogynist; its real cunning is the way it uses the recently politicized concept of "family" to justify its turning Close into a she-devil while advocating the use of violence or whatever else it takes to ward off attacks by outsiders who try to damage the holy unit of family. As everyone knows, the movie originally ended with Close committing suicide and framing Douglas for her murder, an ending that was actually more plausible in keeping with the character's psychology, and one that pissed off test audiences who were denied the revenge-killing catharsis they'd been made to expect. The movie was probably always fated to end with Close getting it, but the stroke of genius was in putting the gun in the hand of Douglas's wife (Anne Archer) and making it a battle between the good wife and the hussy, a choice that made some women in the audience cheer louder than the men. The family that slays together...

LEGAL EAGLES (1986)

Everything about this slapped-together, thoughtlessly conceived comedy-thriller, starring Robert Redford and Debra Winger as dueling lawyers and Darryl Hannah as a pair of frosted lips sitting atop mile-high legs, is a testament to the hackish instincts of the director, Ivan Reitman, and the screenwriting team, Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. (whose other collaborations include Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, and Anaconda). It's the kind of movie that seems to have been made by people who were in a rush to get the shoot completed because they couldn't wait to show up at the red carpet premiere, the kind of movie where less important things like telling a story or entertaining an audience never crossed anyone's mind. About the only thing of note about it is the example it provides of just how much damage simple hackishness can do, because Legal Eagles also wasted the time and bent the brain of one of the white-hot talents of the '80s, Debra Winger, at just the point in her career where she was lined up on the runway and poised for full takeoff. Her role here -- a foil to Redford and, ultimately, a damsel in distress -- is so stupidly written that it's an insult, and she's the only person in the large, talented cast who still hadn't had the idealism beaten out of her to such a degree that she knew enough to just go through the motions and collect her check. You can see her trying to bring some kind of truth to what she's doing, and you can see how unhappy she is that she isn't succeeding, and her unhappiness is contagious. The movie is said to have done Winger extended career damage, partly because it soured her on the movie business but also because the industry was appalled that she was so impolite as to complain about the director in interviews. Anywhere but in Hollywood, expressing confidence in Ivan Reitman as a director would be grounds for having a judge take away your power of attorney.

FLASHDANCE (1983)

This MTV-styled sleazefest was bad for women, sweatshirts, steelworkers, strip clubs, movies, lobster dinners, pit bulls, warehouse lofts, Top 40 radio, and Jennifer Beals' dance double. (It was also a little rough on Maureen Marder, the real-life stripper-welder who "inspired" the screenplay outline, and who was persuaded to sign away the movie rights to her life story for a flat payment of $2300. After the movie grossed in excess of $150 million, Paramount, in an industry that routinely writes checks to squelch nuisance suits, actually let Marder drag them in front of a judge after she came around begging for more money, secure in the knowledge that the agreement would hold up in court. Then, in an amazing act of chutzpah, the movie studio actually sued over a Jennifer Lopez video that was painstakingly designed as a tribute to the movie. Not that people shouldn't be penalized somehow for paying tribute to Flashdance.) It makes all the horrible sense in the world that, for this "inspirational" story of a girl who doesn't give up her dream to dance, the director Adrian Lyne cast an unknown who couldn't dance (but who had the "look") and then tried to suppress the information that her dancing was performed by a double, Marine Jahan, whom he subsequently threatened to punish for daring to publicly take credit for her own work in the movie. (He may have been successful in this: Jahan only appeared in one other movie, 1984's Streets of Fire.) Given the flashy fast-cut style that Lyne developed (with his work in TV commercials before transposing it to movies), this could just as well have been the story of a carefully lit can of peas that never gave up its dream to be a zucchini. Not trying to give you any ideas, Adrian.

MONA LISA SMILE (2003)

The thing that makes Mona Lisa Smile – the story of a bohemian art history teacher who comes to shake things up at the hyper-conservative cartoon of an East Coast university in the stodgy 1950s – so incredibly frustrating, and qualifies it for inclusion in our list of movies that are particularly disempowering to women, is that it actually thinks it’s a feminist movie. Set at a version of Wellesley University so reactionary that the board of chancellors might as well have Snidely Whiplash mustaches, the movie asks us to believe that Julia Roberts’ character has come to show young women the possibility of more than just a perfunctory education to put some polish on their cocktail party chatter before settling down into marriage, but it subverts itself at every turn, to such a degree that it actually comes across as more sexist that the milieu it rails against. Roberts shows her students the liberation possible through art – but never manages to mention any female artists. Roberts teaches her young charges that there’s more to life than being someone’s wife – but all of the characters are essentially defined by their relationship to men. Roberts encourages her students not to let themselves be limited by the expectations of others – but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is clearly condemned in the movie for her loose sexual morals, and in one of the movie’s ugliest scenes, Julia Stiles’ character excoriates an ashamed Roberts for expecting her to choose a career over marriage. When it comes to defining women by their power and potential, Mona Lisa Smile is a path to hell that’s paved with good intentions.

Click here for Part Two of Girl DisemPowering

Click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews in Cinema (Part I)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.”

So says Seth Rogen’s full-time slacker Ben Stone at the start of 2007’s Knocked Up, heralding a recent shift in the pop culture persona of the Chosen People from neurotic schlimazels of the Woody Allen variety to bad-ass playas like Bana.

But, although the concept of “Jewish action star” is a relatively new phenomenon, film history is filled with tales of Hebrew heroes (and heavies), from ancient Egypt to modern Israel.

And thus, in tribute to the upcoming June 6th release of Adam Sandler’s meshuga Israeli commando/hair-stylist comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, we here at the Screengrab are proud to present...THE TOP 12 TOUGH JEWS OF CINEMA!!!!!

ERIC BANA AS AVNER IN MUNICH (2005)

Well, of course we had to start with this one. Bana’s Avner, a Mossad agent tasked with tracking down and executing the terrorists responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, isn’t a stone-cold, tough-as-nails killer like his fellow assassin Steve (a dead-eyed Daniel Craig). Not that he isn’t formidable in his own right, surviving explosions, raiding PLO compounds, dodging other assassins and negotiating tense Middle Eastern Mexican stand-offs. But Avner is more than a rage-fueled killing machine, leavening his combat skills with love of family and the mental toughness to question the wisdom of fighting violence and hatred with ever more violence and hatred. Plus, if we’re to believe the ill-conceived, much-maligned “climax” of the film, Bana’s character is tough enough to maintain his mojo during volcanic sex with his wife even while suffering vivid flashbacks of terrible murders he didn’t actually witness. Me, I usually just think of baseball.

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS DAVID JASON IN DEEP COVER (1992)

This anti-Drug War crime thriller supposedly stars Laurence Fishburne (as a fast-rising drug dealer who's actually an undercover cop), but the movie belongs to Goldblum as the lawyer for the local head (Gregory Sierra) of the drug cartel. His character embodies his culture's traditional pursuit of success through education and hard work, but he's also at least half crazed from envy of the thugs he keeps out of jail with his motormouthed brilliance. Their hair-trigger willingness to give in to their violent urges makes him feel unmanly and overcivilized. (Sierra insults Goldblum by calling him "bar mitzvah boy"; Goldblum, in turn, naively thinks he's paying Fishburne a compliment when he likens him to "some beautiful panther or jungle storm...a dangerous, magnificent beast.") After Sierra beats a man to death in front of Goldblum, he asks him if it's the first time he's ever seen a person die, and Goldblum responds with a dreamy monologue about witnessing a fatal accident when he was a kid at summer camp. He sounds as if he 's remembering his first kiss. Goldblum finally snaps, joins Fishburne in toppling Sierra in a bloody coup, and winds up decked out in black leather and slicked-back hair, machine-gunning Clarence Williams III as if in retaliation for The Mod Squad.

JAMES WOODS AS MAX AND ROBERT DE NIRO AS NOODLES IN ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

Sergio Leone's final film is an opium dream of a gangster epic starring De Niro and Woods as lifelong frenemies, two products of the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto of the tenement era who grow up to become kings of New York during the Depression years. Part of the tension of their love-hate relationship comes from the fact that they represent clashing approaches to getting the most out of life. Max, the Bugsy Siegel figure, is an unstoppable bullet of wordly ambition, a volatile schemer who won't hesitate to shoot or bitch slap anyone who gets in his way, questions his plans, or looks at him cross-eyed. For most of the film he seems to roll right over the more careful, romantic-spirited Noodles. He ultimately fakes his own death, so that he can disappear into a new life as a respectable, rich businessman (and marry the woman--Elizabeth McGovern--who's the unattainable love of Noodles' life), leaving his old pal broke and stranded with survivor's guilt for thirty-five years. But after Max has played out his string and summons the now-aged Noodles to put him out of his misery, telling him that he's "the only one I can accept it from", we see that Noodles, the mother hen, is one of those people who was born to be sixty, and that everything up to now in his life has been preparation for the moment when Max comes begging, and he says no. It's all been worth it just to get to the end of their lives so that he can say, "I told you so."

CHARLES BRONSON AS BRIG. GEN. DAN SHOMRON IN RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Though it may seem hard to believe now, there was a period of about ten years there where most of the Western world recognized the Israeli military as perhaps the last example of unfailing competence and dependable strength put at the service of a cause that was just--in a nutshell, the good guys. This glorious public relations phase began in the summer of 1967 with the Six-Day War and had its last great hurrah with the rescue mission to recover the hostages taken by Palestinian and German hijackers who sought refuge in Uganda. "Operation Entebbe", which happened to unfold in the early hours of July 4, 1976, as America was gearing up to celebrate its own Bicentennial, was such a movie-ready news event that it was dramatized in three separate movies that went into production practically overnight, including two films originally made for American TV and an Israeli feature that was directed by Menahem Golan, later of the notorious Golan-Globus Productions. The best of them, by miles, was Raid on Entebbe, directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and released to theaters internationally after premiering on NBC TV six months after the actual events. The cast, which was very classy A-list by seventies TV-film standards, included Peter Finch (who died a week after the original broadcast, and who won an Oscar for his performance in Network shortly thereafter) as Yitzhak Rabin and Yaphet Kotto as Idi Amin, but it's Bronson who gives it that all-important shot of testosterone. He doesn't really have that much to do except fill out a uniform and bark orders into his walkie-talkie, but the important thing is that it's Charles fucking Bronson in his Death Wish-era prime who's in charge of this mission, bestowing upon it his macho gravitas and leathery glamor. By comparison, the 1986 Delta Force had to try to squeeze whatever juice it could out of the combination of a past-his-prime Lee Marvin and an not-yet-ironic Chuck Norris on a rocket cycle.

LENA OLIN AS MASHA IN ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY (1989)

In this adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Olin is a house on fire as a ferociously sexy Holocaust survivor who's having an affair with Ron Silver as a Polish Jew who's been transplanted to New York after spending World War II hiding in a hayloft. (He's now married to the girl, once his servant, who loaned him the layloft.) Fear and guilt have made Silver so nervous that he's a spectral wreck, but her time in Hell has left Olin disinclined to care what anyone thinks of her and determined to take whatever she wants and apologize to nobody; when she finally kills herself, it's her final "fuck you" to a world that doesn't deserve to have somebody as hot as her livening it up. Honorable mention goes to Anjelica Huston as Silver's first wife, who he meets again in New York years after having assumed that she'd died in a concentration camp. His first words to her after they'be been reunited: "I... I didn't know you were alive!" Her smiling reply: "This you never knew."

WOODY ALLEN AS DAVID DOBEL IN ANYTHING ELSE (2003)

I was going to include Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Meyer Lansky in Bugsy here, but Kosher Nostra mobsters are well-represented elsewhere on the list, and since the Woodman was disparaged in the introduction as the personification of non-threatening Jew-hood, I figured it was only fair to mention his uncharacteristically empowered portrayal of gun-toting, windshield smashing, paranoid conspiracy theorist David Dobel in the underrated, unfairly maligned romantic tragedy, Anything Else. Like his work in the far superior Stardust Memories (which critics also hated), Allen’s performance here (as an unreliable mentor to the likeable, lovelorn Jason Biggs) is cranky and misanthropic, but also darkly funny and refreshingly prickly, with the courage of its own piss and vinegar convictions. Dobel may be just as much of a hard luck case as some of Allen’s previous incarnations, but this character would rather fight than mope, choosing anger over depression in his confrontations with the injustices of the world. Like his cool, successful Bizzaro World alter ego Nick Fifer in Paul Mazursky’s 1991 curiosity Scenes From A Mall, Dobel is the rare Allen character that strays from the comedian’s typical comfort zone to hint at the Tough Jew lurking just beneath the tsuris.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming.

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

By this time last year, I’d already seen four of the movies that wound up on my 2007 Top Ten list: the fine, Oscar-neglected Zodiac, a sneak preview of Knocked Up at the South-By-Southwest Film Festival, along with two outstanding documentaries, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the lesser-known but equally awesome roller derby-umentary Hell On Wheels.

Even the first quarter cheese I saw last year was pretty entertaining: the silly sexploitation of Black Snake Moan, the gay-panic-at-the-disco iconography of 300, and the A.D.D. chaos of Smoking Aces, a fake Guy Richie movie I enjoyed at least as much Snatch.

So far, at the quarter-mile mark of 2008, the only truly Top 10-caliber flick I've seen is Full Battle Rattle, a SXSW Special Jury award-winning documentary (reviewed here by Mr. Von Doviak on March 17) about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq.

As for the rest of the year-to-date...feh. Cloverfield had moments, but no characters. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Penelope and 21 were all pleasantly unobjectionable but instantly forgettable, and I Am Legend’s deserted Manhattan streets were compelling until the director filled them with boring video game ghoulies.

But, hey, maybe things are looking up for 2008...only three more shopping days ‘til Zombie Strippers!

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

Regal Cinemas to Allow Trailers with Fart Jokes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As regular readers of the Screengrab know, trailers that begin with a green band graphic are approved for all audiences, while those that begin with a red band (pictured here) may contain strong language, violence, sexual imagery and other “objectionable” material. Red band trailers are rarely seen in theaters outside of art-houses; they’re generally confined to the web, even if they’re advertising PG-13 fare. This causes headaches for the makers of raunchy comedies like Superbad, who are unable to fully showcase the crude pleasures their movies have to offer for an audience that has already paid to see, say, Knocked Up.

At the ShoWest convention last week, one major theater chain decided this is just a little silly. Regal Entertainment Group, which operates over 6000 theaters in the United States, “has made the decision to program red band trailers on a case-by-case basis,” Regal spokesman Dick Westerling told the Hollywood Reporter. One catalyst for the change was the ShoWest screening of the red band trailer for Universal’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. According to the Reporter, “The movie's green band trailer establishes its premise and plot, while the red band trailer gives a much fuller taste of its raunchy humor and sexual calisthenics, and it had exhibitors laughing.” Well, of course. No one enjoys sexual calisthenics more than motion picture exhibitors.

Universal president of marketing and distribution Adam Fogelson is obviously thrilled with Regal’s decision, although he does seem to recognize some limitations. “For example, it would not be appropriate for a red band trailer for a movie like American Pie to run in front of Schindler's List. We all want to be smart and careful about the use of red band trailers, working closely with our partners in exhibition. We don't want moviegoers seeing material that is inconsistent with the movies they are going to see.”

Here’s that red band trailer for Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Enjoy the sexual calisthenics!

Teenage Pregnancy (Don't Do It!)

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Hey, have you heard that this is the year of the unwed mother? It's true! 2008's official dead horse is the trend towards movies featuring women who are unmarried, pregnancy, and strangely diffident about it. If you don't believe us, read, oh, every other film blog in the last twelve months or so.

In addition to daily blog-fodder, the Year of the Knocked Up and Wisecracking has inspired lots of back-and-forth opinionating among women, mothers, pro-choicers, anti-abortionists, and everyone else who has, or thinks they have, a stake in whether or not women should be having kids out of wedlock. Juno, understandably, has been at the center of the debate, with some unusual results: no less august a personage than right-wing cultural critic/humorless Walter Peck look-alike Brent Bozell, a man with a history of despising anything that might suggest the enjoyment of life, has come out in favor of the film because of its alleged pro-life message.

Until recently, though, nobody seems to have bothered to ask actual teenagers what they think of Juno, which is what makes this article in the Guardian so intriguing. The paper took a group of genuine teenage girls and boys to watch the film, and then asked them how realistic they found it, with some surprising results:

- One sixteen-year-old focuses on the somewhat lackluster portrayal of the child's father: "The film didn't really focus on Bleeker's reaction to the pregnancy, but then boys are quite inarticulate and don't talk to their friends much."

- Another wonders at the reaction of Juno's classmates: "At Juno's school, the other students were almost scared of her. At the school I go to, people are much more used to pregnancy. Quite a few people have got pregnant. At first, it's a big drama and you're shocked that someone's pregnant, but then you get used to it."

- One boy finds the rather blase view of teenage sex in the film hard to relate to: "It's not about our lifestyle. You got the feeling the two teenagers had sex because they were bored, but in London, you don't just get bored. . . school provides a lot of sex education — a bit too much, you think sometimes — and your parents are saying it as well."

- Most tellingly of all, almost every teenager interviewed says that they'd prefer to have an abortion than take the (suspiciously simple) route chosen by Juno. "Raising a child now would just be unfathomable," says a fifteen-year-old girl. "My friends and I talk about what we would do if we got pregnant and almost everyone I know says: 'I would have an abortion,' no questions asked."

Trailer Review: Baby Mama

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:52:00 GMT

I realize that it’s been asked many times before in recent days but, seriously, what is going on with baby movies? It’s been a more obvious trend in the past twelve months with successes like Knocked Up and Juno, but this has been brewing for a few years now. I’m convinced it all started with Idiocracy in 2006. Yeah, it’s a broad satire but the movie’s base premise is that smart people aren’t breeding. Fill us in with your theories in the comments section, we’re all ears.

As for Baby Mama, it’s looking pretty funny. Fey’s playing her forlorn-lonely-aging-fastidious thing to perfection and Poehler’s as delightfully zany as ever. They are truly the Wayne and Garth of this decade and it’s nice to see them continue collaborating. It’s also nice to see two female leads in the male-dominated screwball comedy genre. Make Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow’s respective crews look like chumps, Tina. The Grab’s got your back.

Oscar Nominations: Is the Egg Showin'?

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

So. . . what was it William Goldman said again? I suppose my predictions weren't too bad under the circumstances, but just like every other year, the Oscar nominations held plenty of surprises.

A full list of nominations can be found right here.

In no particular order:

- The almost total lack of love for Into the Wild. I figured that the acclaim for this true-life story, and the presence of Sean Penn — an actor they clearly love — in the director's chair, would make the film Academy catnip. Clearly, I was mistaken.

- On the other hand, they loved There Will Be Blood even more than I'd anticipated, looking past its darkness to see how flat-out brilliant it is (sorry, haters), giving PTA not only best director and adapted screenplay, but a best picture nomination as well. The Jonny Greenwood thing stung a bit, but the other technical nods — art direction, cinematography, sound design and editing — compensate pretty well. And Daniel Day-Lewis is looking pretty unstoppable for best actor at this point. All in all, Blood received eight nominations, tying it for the most-honored film with widely-acknowledged frontrunner No Country for Old Men.

- Atonement. Wait, this movie's chances for best picture were supposed to be more or less dead. Don't the voters read the prognosticators? Still, despite the film's considerable pedigree and handsome production values, Joe Wright was shut out of best director (in favor of Ivan Reitman's kid, no less), which leads me to believe this barely squeaked in. But you never know.

- Show of hands: who saw the best actor nod for Tommy Lee Jones coming? Certainly not me. I figured that he had a good chance for his supporting work in No Country for Old Men, but I'm surprised any of the voters actually remembered In the Valley of Elah. But I won't complain. As an avowed Crash hater, nobody was more surprised than me that Elah turned out to be pretty darn good, due in large part to Jones' great performance. I'll certainly take him over, say, John Travolta in a fat suit.

- The double dip for Cate Blanchett. Yes, she was a deserving nominee for playing the most fondly-remembered of Todd Haynes' menagerie of Dylans. But honoring Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells me that the voters ran out of suitable nominees. Lord knows I'm no fan of Angelina Jolie, but at least she tried to give a multilayered performance in A Mighty Heart, which is more than I can say about Blanchett in Nobody But Elizabeth Expects the Spanish Inquisition. Just. . . ugh.

- When I floated my best supporting actress theory — that in recent years, the great majority of nominees in this category appear in films opposite performers who also get nominated — I wasn't just blowing smoke. Seriously, look it up. But, probably just to confound me, the nominations bucked the trend this year, with only one of the nominees (Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton) appearing opposite another Oscar nominees. Just as unexpectedly, only Clayton managed more than one acting nomination, wrangling three for Swinton, George Clooney, and Tom Wilkinson.

- Three out of five Best Original Song nominations went to Enchanted. Either they really love Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz or it was a really slow year for original songs. Probably both. At least they were smart enough to nominate "Falling Slowly."

- Hey, did you know that people made documentaries this year that didn't deal with the war in Iraq? I only ask because three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees were Iraq-themed, with only Michael Moore's Sicko and the Uganda-themed War/Dance tackling different subjects. The biggest disappointment is the snubbing of Tony Kaye's exhaustive, empathetic abortion documentary Lake of Fire, by my estimation the year's finest non-fiction film.

- Finally, I leave you with four horrifying words: "Academy Award Nominee Norbit." Sure, it's for best makeup, and considering that the makeup branch loves the hell out of Rick Baker it would've been madness NOT to predict him. But think about it: Norbit, possibly the most reviled film of 2007, received more Oscar nominations than Zodiac, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Knocked Up, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and Control. . . COMBINED. Hard to believe, but the makeup branch has actually managed to outdo last year's Click nomination.

Screengrab Presents: The Hollywood Guide to Pregnancy

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A pregnancy test is not an etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet. See: Juno

Pregnancy instantly propels the father-to-be into a mid-life crisis. Luckily, women never panic about being pregnant. Women love babies! See: She’s Having a Baby, Nine Months

During your pregnancy, dreams are unusually vivid and strange. Especially when the father is a giant mutated insect. See: David Cronenberg’s The Fly

If you’re not sure who the father is, tell everyone you’ve ever slept with it’s theirs. Babysitters for life! See: Three Men and a Baby

Be sure to get adequate prenatal care, on the off-chance you’re carrying the spawn of Satan. See: Rosemary’s Baby, Village of the Damned, It’s Alive

Virgin pregnancies are only possible in three places: the Bible, Tatooine and Kevin Smith movies. See: Nativity Story, Dogma, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

The appropriate thing to yell when your water breaks is "Thundercats are go!" See: Juno

If you live in a totalitarian regime, and you get knocked up, don’t worry; your kid is probably the savior of humankind. See: Children of Men, Terminator, Willow, The Seventh Sign

Need a bomb to drop during an argument? You can’t go wrong with "I secretly aborted your child!" See: The Godfather Part II, The Anniversary Party, Cabaret

Abortion? What’s that? See: Knocked Up, Boys on the Side, Saved!, The Station Agent, Match Point, Circle of Friends, Dreamgirls, For Keeps?

If you’re pregnant and married to a police detective, you should probably leave town for a while. If you’re pregnant and you are a police detective, just keep doing what you’re doing. See: Se7en, Fargo

Pregnancy in the Deep South never ends well. See: Gone with the Wind, Steel Magnolias, A Place in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire

Make sure that the hospital you’ve chosen has all the latest technology, specifically the machine that goes ping. See: Monty Python’s Meaning of Life

The delivery room is a good place for: last-minute apologies, marriage proposals, David Hyde Pierce. It is a bad place for: fist fights, Bette Midler. See: Knocked Up, Lover Come Back, Addams Family Values, Nine Months, Beaches

Wouldn’t it be funny if men could get pregnant? Oh wait. See: Junior, Rabbit Test

— Gwynne Watkins

Previous Hollywood Guides:
The Hollywood Guide to Drinking
The Hollywood Guide to Office Romance
The Hollywood Guide to Infidelity

What a Character

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Can you handle another year-end top ten list? Can you handle it? We don't think we can, but the L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor is determined to try our patience. At the very least, she takes a fresh approach to it: in her run-down of 2007's most interesting on-screen characters, she rejects the conventional wisdom that this year's prime crop of good films reeked to an unseemly degree of masculinity and cites an unusually high number of strong woman characters haunting our cineplexes, from Catherine Keener to Lili Taylor. She particularly bigs up Meryl Streep, who, rather than dominating Oscar fare as usual, turns the trick of having "redeemed two bad movies"; Amy Ryan's "hard but not cold" single mother in Gone Baby Gone, and, in an interesting defection from a number of critics who found the female characters in Knocked Up to be half-formed caricatures, Leslie Mann, who "brings to the controlling-bitch-wife role that makes women squirm a kind of cathartic, rhythmic lyricism" that's "full of hilarious menace". The piece isn't exactly a vital chapter in the history of cinema circa 2007, but it does serve as a refreshing tonic to an increasing number or critics who praise this year's movies because of their unrelenting and unapologetic masculinity.

Elsewhere in the Weekly, there's plenty more end-of-year stuff, as J. Hoberman introduces the 2007 critic's poll; Luke Thompson argues that torture-porn and the new wave of shock-horror has captured the attention of critics but failed to capture moviegoer dollars at the box office; Nikki Finke provides a postmortem recap of the star-crossed temper tantrums and I-dare-yous that lead up to the WGA strike; and Scott Foundas argues that, at a time when America isn't exactly making friends in the rest of the world, Hollywood is the best diplomatic organization we have to offer this year.

Slate's Movie Club Still Swinging

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Just when we think we’re completely burned out on year-end critic’s awards, list-making and assorted summations of What It All Means, along comes another installment of the Slate Movie Club to remind us how much fun it is to argue about this stuff. The annual roundtable of film pundits is always at its most entertaining when the gloves come off. The 2004 edition was particularly juicy, with original ringmaster David Edelstein and guests including A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Salon regular Stephanie Zacharek gleefully taking their shots at everyone’s favorite infuriating contrarian Armond White. (White’s style is accurately characterized by the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim as “entertainingly predicated on a bullying, unpredictable subjectivity.”)

The Movie Club’s heyday may have passed; Edelstein is long gone and big names like Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert are absent from this year’s roster. Still, current Slate critic Dana Stevens and guests Scott Foundas (L.A. Weekly), Nathan Lee (Village Voice) and Wesley Morris (Boston Globe) manage to keep it lively, kicking around such water cooler topics as the ending of No Country for Old Men, the attitude towards abortion in Knocked Up and Juno, and whether Southland Tales will ultimately be regarded as a masterpiece or a mess.

Top 10 of 2007: Bryan Whitefield

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While this was an undeniably good year for film, it was also a year in which smaller movies had a much harder time getting attention — or even into theaters at all. With big-name directors like Ang Lee, Sidney Lumet and Francis Ford Coppola clogging up art-house screens, there was less room this year for new names and faces. In fact, three movies (Reprise, Lost in Beijing and Never Forever) which played at various festivals throughout the year would have certainly made this list but were excluded only because they never got U.S. distribution, meaning only a handful of people were lucky enough to see them. That said, it’s hard to complain about a year that gave us such a high level of quality and creativity in such variety.

1. No Country For Old Men

Near perfection in every sense and far and away the best film I saw this year. The Coen Brothers cut down on the camera tricks and let the forward momentum of a chase thriller carry the difficult adaptation of a novel with almost zero description and in the process made what may very well be the best film of their heavyweight careers. The brothers also moved outside of their usual casting circles and used Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones to great effect. But it is Javier Bardem’s utterly creepy incarnation of Anton Chigurh that left a stamp on people’s psyche and will haunt their memories for years to come.

2. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

It took someone with an imagination as big as Julian Schnabel to envision great cinema from a book written by a man who could only blink one eyelid. From start to finish this is a celebration of art, film and life itself and the answers Schnabel found to the challenges of presenting this story make it a notable and lasting achievement.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Probably the year’s biggest surprise for me was going into a movie directed by Ben Affleck with a whole lot of preconception and coming out blown away by the sure-handed guidance he showed in his directorial debut. There are good, even great performances and top tier writing but in the end the film’s real strength lies in the decisions made every step of the way in how to present this material. For my money this was a step above both The Departed and Mystic River because almost nothing here is easy or done for show and the questions it forces you to ask yourself lead to complex, blurry and ambiguous emotional ground.

4. The Lives of Others

Overall quality is what continues to set this film apart from the field in my mind. An airtight script, informed performances detail-heavy production design and measured yet artful filmmaking that was able to explore the most serious of political ideas while thankfully sidestepping a Spielberg-style, right-vs-wrong, happy ending in favor of a much subtler conclusion.

5. I’m Not There

Blew the biopic model to pieces and was without question the most original and inventive film I saw this year. The much discussed six actors play one singer concept is interesting even as an idea but on screen it is often breathtaking to see the genius level of insight and imagination Todd Haynes exhibits in moving from one to the other in building this composite picture of a man so well known and yet still very much a mystery. The pure pleasure of watching very talented actors set free from the constriction of straight imitation as well as Haynes’ mastery of so many different looks and styles of filmmaking should not be underestimated either.

6. Zodiac

Attention to detail was overseen with an expert’s eye and director David Fincher even held back on some of the camera magic that made him famous in favor of a more mature, straight-forward presentation that fit the tone of the film perfectly. Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. were clearly at the top of their game and while the movie did run long at 3 hours with a story arc that went too high, too soon the amount of thought and craft behind this film made it one that should continue to hold up in what is generally a disposable and easily dated genre.

7. The Darjeeling Limited

People level the same criticism at Wes Anderson every time one of his films is released – they all look the same. And while there is no denying that he has a signature style I think it is also fair to say that he is constantly working to perfect it. While he may never again reach the classic status achieved with The Royal Tenanbaums or Rushmore, this is certainly a major upgrade over The Life Aquatic and while it is stylish and funny and a pleasure to watch it is also infused with some real emotional depth with writing and performances that go well beyond montages set to obscure 60’s rock songs. The accompanying short The Hotel Chevalier is Anderson in a capsule and a near perfect vignette.

8. The Boss of it All

Lars Von Trier veered off the road of emotional devastation straight into a comedy that was the first feature to employ Automavision, a software program that chooses the film’s shots and framing at random. The technique is initially jarring but makes the story of a spineless executive who has been blaming the company’s direction on an invisible “boss” and now, wishing to sell the company for his own profit, has hired a clueless actor to pose as said boss so that he can cash out guilt-free, even funnier. Von Trier is actually able to infuse the film with a layer of depth and make a social, political and moral statement while still having his audience laughing throughout, even with jokes told in subtitles.

9. Manda Bala (Send A Bullet)

Errol Morris protégé Jason Kohn followed in the master’s footsteps in continuing to turn the documentary film format on its head. The beautifully constructed film, which cannot be shown in Brazil because it is considered too dangerous, moves at a rapid fire pace, contrasting the warm sunshine of Brazil and Brazilian music with talk of severe violence and circumstances including several intense, look-away scenes. Using first hand interviews, found footage and fictional reenactments that move from frog farms to political corruption, grisly kidnapping stories to reconstructive surgery footage Kohn showed a masterful management of the material especially in the way its visual and conceptual metaphors built to a grand crescendo.

10. Knocked Up

With so many jokey, costume driven, idiot time spoof comedies out there it was nice to finally see one that was both laugh out loud funny and actually about real people. Okay maybe it’s not every day that some unemployed, pot smoking schlub scores with a gorgeous tv host but ignoring that fact this film featured sharp, insightful writing about the absurdity of real situations that still had people cracking up without the use of any chest waxing gimmicks and to me that’s a step in the right direction and an achievement in itself.

Top Ten of 2007: Phil Nugent

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

1. There Will Be Blood, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson

A triumph of personal filmmaking, epic scale division, and an excellent argument that anyone who nominates anyone whose initials aren't D.D.-L. for the title of greatest living movie actor is a fool.

2. Killer of Sheep, directed and written by Charles Burnett

A triumph of personal filmmaking, garage-inventor division, and worth the thirty years' wait.

3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel, written by Ronald Harwood, from the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Set almost entirely behind the eyes of a paralyzed stroke victim, it is in just about every way the most adventurous movie in recent memory, Schnabel’s visual imagination, which is kinetic yet lyrical and charged with feeling, has somehow enabled him to make a movie that is a celebration of the pleasures (and a lament for the lost possibilities) of a life cut short that never feels bathetic.

4. The Host, directed by Bong Joon-ho, written by Baek Chul-hyun and Bong Joon-ho

Big rubber monsters and real blood. In his previous film, the police procedural Memories of Murder, Bong demonstrated a special talent for treating genre conventions with satirical irony in a way that only heightened the story’s emotional impact. With its rude shocks, horse laughs, family of unlikely heroes and absolute lack of faith in the official protectors of society, his twist on the rampaging-mutant horror movie may be more fun than anything else seen this year.

5. Once, directed and written by John Carney

This small love story — Before Sunrise as a Dublin-set pop musical — is also the suspense film of the year: the first time you watch it, a part of you is on the edge of your seat, waiting for the inevitable wrong step that never comes. As perfect and buoyant as a soap bubble glistening in the sunlight.

6. Away from Her, directed and written by Sarah Polley, from a story by Alice Munro

As an actress, Polley has had the hint of something wise-beyond-her-time going on behind those heavy lids since before she was ten. Her directoral debut, about a marriage of some forty years’ duration that’s finally torn asunder by the wife’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, is an uncommonly mature romantic drama, and in many ways an uncommonly hard, clear-eyed one. Julie Christie’s mere presence as the unreadable, coquettish old woman lends the movie some star power, but Gordon Pinsent and Olympia Dukakis give risk-taking performances that keep the film raw and alive.

7. Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava, written by Brad Bird.

An exhilarating triumph of sheer craft from the director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, and a major return to form for Pixar after the sugared gas tank of Cars.

8. Control, directed by Anton Corbijn, written by Matt Greenhalgh and Deborah Curtis

An uncommonly solid, beautiful-looking rock-star biopic, with relative newcomer Sam Riley giving a bracingly unsentimental yet thoroughly winning performance as Ian Curtis of Joy Division. (In one of his few previous movie roles, Riley turned up briefly in 24 Hour Party People, playing Mark E. Smith of the Fall.) With its black and white cinematography (by Martin Ruhe and John Watson), its confident grasp of the period and its milieu, and its surprising bursts of humor, this is one of the rare films that threaten to give music video directors-turned-moviemakers a good name.

9. Knocked Up, directed and written by Judd Apatow

There are nits you could pick, but here’s what makes them all seem ridiculous: more quotable, genuinely funny lines and inspired, perfectly shaped jokes per square inch than in any movie since the last time somebody produced a script by — hell, I don’t know, John Guare, maybe? Alan Bennett? Ben Hecht!?

10. Year of the Dog, directed and written by Mike White

This is the first time that White has directed one of his own screenplays, and the results are confident and exciting enough in their strangeness to make one suspect that some of the earlier movies he wrote seemed shifty and half-baked because the directors weren’t as eager to turn convention on its head as White meant for them to. Molly Shannon is amazing as the frustrated, lonely spinster-in-the-making whose attempt to change her life is dotted with missteps and false starts but ends in triumph — triumph for her, at least, whether her friends (or the audience) can see it that way or not.

Top 10 of 2007: Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

10. Zodiac

For about three-quarters of its running time, David Fincher’s serial killer procedural is about as engrossing, stylish and smartly assembled as mainstream cinema gets, expertly evoking the 1970s (Mark Ruffalo, in particular, transforms himself into a broody ’70s actor in the De Niro/Pacino mode) and humanizing a story that could have been run-of-the-mill exploitation. It’s penalized a few notches here for running out of gas in the final reels: those scenes between the obsessed investigator and his long-suffering wife were already old and tired in the ’70s.

9. Juno

The first five minutes of Juno are so overloaded with quirkiness, it’s as if director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody are desperate enough to make an immediate impression that they’ll settle for making a bad one. That the movie is able to not only recover but go on to become an affecting (and very funny) story about real people making difficult choices is a tribute to their talent, and especially that of Ellen Page in a star-making performance as the titular pregnant teen.

8. Knocked Up

Why settle for one unplanned pregnancy comedy when 2007 was fertile enough to produce twins? You could quibble about gender politics, but then you’d miss out on some of the year’s biggest laughs courtesy of the ever-expanding Apatow Comedy Empire. (Honorable mention: Superbad. Not so much: Walk Hard.)

7. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Speaking of movies that recover from the opening five minutes, here’s one that treats you to the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heaving, flabby buttocks obscuring some delightful Marisa Tomei nudity (don’t worry, though – there’s plenty of that later). In what is not so much a comeback as a rejuvenation, octogenarian Sidney Lumet has crafted a twisty tale of familial betrayal enlived by a Hoffman performance so vivid, you can smell the desperation.

6. Breach

Billy Ray makes his own special brand of what one friend of the Screengrab refers to as “guys in suits” movies. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass, Breach is a low-key yet subtly gripping thriller about a man whose life of lies crumbles within the institution that has defined him. In this case, that man is contradictory CIA agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper, never better), a deeply religious, sexually kinky traitor to his country. No 007-style glamour and action here; the suspense emerges from the mundane but meticulously detailed life of a Cold War spy trying to stay one step ahead of his colleagues.

5. Deep Water

Sure, having too much money and free time sounds like fun, but that way of life is not without its pitfalls. This fascinating, disquieting documentary details a 1968 solo sailboat race around the world, and the amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who pinned his family’s future on the whim of winning it. Pieced together from newsreels, Crowhurst’s original 16mm film and contemporary interviews, what begins as a bracing tale of men against the sea becomes a full-blown descent into madness.

4. Killer of Sheep

I am assured by publicists that Charles Burnett’s 1977 thesis film counts as a 2007 release, so there’s no reason not to include it here. This stark slice of inner city life finds drama in the smallest moments; even the routine purchase of a used motor becomes an exercise in heartbreaking futility. Never stooping to heavy-handed message-making, Sheep packs an emotional wallop in the end.

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Don’t wait for the inevitable scripted remake of this simple tale of two men vying for the world’s record high score in Donkey Kong. It won’t begin to capture the wit, drama and humanity of Seth Gordon’s outrageously entertaining documentary. Pitting an ’80s relic coasting on past glories against a regular guy with a history of failures in life, overseen by an indelible gallery of game-geeks and marked with unexpected developments and reversals of fate, it’s the most purely joyful movie experience of the year.

2. No Country for Old Men

For much of the decade Joel and Ethan Coen looked like they were heading down the long road of diminishing returns, but they came all the way back with this transcendent thriller set on the Texas border. The most faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel imaginable, it still couldn’t be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. The brilliant suspense sequences and Javier Bardem’s chilling turn as a malevolent killer are the obvious attractions, but it’s the final lyrical moments that linger when the lights come up.

1. I’m Not There

Less perfect in every way than No Country, this fractured Bob Dylan biopic is nonetheless my pick for movie of the year. Scrambling the singer-songwriter’s legend and bouncing it off a series of funhouse mirrors, director Todd Haynes delights in the ever-more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors embody various aspects of the Bard, none more memorably than Cate Blanchett, who virtually channels Dylan’s hipster-dandy incarnation. It’s a dazzling mind-fuck for hardcore Dylan fans and perhaps a complete trainwreck for anyone else, but as a biography of an artistic sensibility – warts and all – it can’t be topped.

Woman Is the Straight Man of the World

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:30:00 GMT

You may remember that, back when the year's big comedy hit Knocked Up was in theaters, there was a minor outbreak of editorials and critical think pieces wondering if it erred in not having its heroine give more serious consideration to the possibility of getting an abortion. (Then again, maybe you don't remember that. We didn't mean to imply that you don't have a life or anything.) Now the movie is out on DVD, and as tempting as it might be to have that debate again, its star, Katherine Heigl, has opted to give us something new and exciting to argue about by telling a Vanity Fair interviewer that the movie that may help her to someday price herself out of network TV series work is "a little sexist." Her grounds for this charge are interesting, not least because they take some of the earlier comments made about the film and turn them on their head. When Knocked Up first appeared, some observers took the not unreasonable position that the hero and heroine might not be the best two people to be building a life together because she was a serious career person and he was an eternal adolescent and no-account slacker who, while maybe a fun date, could not be counted on over the long term. Heigl's translation of this goes: "It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys." He may be a big kid, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she wants to be regarded as a tight-ass. (Or, to use Heigl's exact term, "such a bitch.")

In discussing this argument, Meghan O'Rourke makes some good points, especially with regard to the greater level of metaphorical and comical imagination at work in the dialogue scenes between men (such as the Vegas hotel scene between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd) than in those moments where the women, Heigl and Leslie Mann as her sister, work out their feelings. There's a long Hollywood tradition of romantic comedy heroines who are kind of batty (such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby) and even sometimes sort of, well, slutty (such as Melanie Griffith in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild) loosening up tight-assed men, and I don't know that many men, watching those movies and identifying with Cary Grant or Jeff Daniels, felt bad about seeing themselves as needing to be made over; most of us are probably just smitten with the idea that some gorgeous woman would care enough to go to the trouble. There's a tiny amount of sanctimony in Knocked Up that makes itself felt in the rapid montage of Rogen entering responsible adult life in what seems to be less take that it takes some of us to get the cable company representative on the phone. If anything, Judd Apatow may be too sensitive to women's concerns; he's not as comfortable portraying them as ridiculous as he is with the men. Of course, the final word is that however these issues look on the op-ed page, in comedy, what people really appreciate is not seeing someone grow up and becoming worthy to raise a child with their partner but getting to laugh. A cold-eyed observer might wonder whether the moment Heigl sensed there was something "sexist" about the movie came not on the set but when she saw it with an audience and realized that nobody was laughing during her scenes. And a really cold-eyed observer might wonder if that's not as much the fault of the actress droning her dialogue as that of the writer-director who wrote it for her. It's not as if being tight-assed and funny is a problem for Leslie Mann.

Making Movies, Singing Songs, and Tanking 'Round the World

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Forbes magazine has crunched the numbers and concluded that the most overpaid star in Hollywood — literally, in terms of how much she’s paid as it compares to how much good her presence onscreen seems to do her movies at the box office—-is Nicole Kidman. What’s that, you say? The talented and discerning star of Cold Mountain, The Human Stain, Eyes Wide Shut, Bewitched, The Interpreter, Fur, The Invasion, Birth, The Stepford Wives, overpaid? David Thomson can’t imagine how anyone could entertain such a churlish notion, but apparently if you run the numbers by someone who can count, it turns out that Big Red’s movies have been earning the studios a return of about eight bucks for every dollar she’s been getting paid--and Kidman got paid fifteen million dollars for her most recent release, The Golden Compass, a fantastically expensive movie intended to serve as the platform for a franchise, though it's proven such a disappointment that it may be lucky to inspire a direct-to-video sequel. She does show a better return than her countryman Russell Crowe, who earned the studios five dollars for every dollar he was paid on such ironically titled duds as Cinderella Man and A Good Year. But Crowe, who maintains a less slavish work schedule than Kidman, has lashed himself to fewer anchors in the last few years, and his current hit, American Gangster, is doing so well, even before the home-video revenues have started rolling in, that much will be forgiven. The usual response to this kind of talk from a star's camp is that a star can only do so much with the material he or she has to work with, and anyway, do you think that a movie like Fur would have done kickass business if it hadn't had Kidman's frosty mug on the poster? In the meantime, as Forbes notes, the golden boy of the moment in Hollywood is Judd Apatow, who’s been behind two modestly budgeted major hits (Knocked Up and Superbad) that didn’t have any stars at all and may have a third before the year is over if Walk Hard with John C. Reilly opens big. Of course, one reason that Apatow’s starless pictures make so much money, even after being subjected to the surreal rigors of Hollywood accounting, is that his budgets aren’t inflated from having to pay one actor fifteen to twenty million dollars right off the bat.

The Goriest Year-End List of 2007

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:15:00 GMT

Chicago film critic Jim Emerson has published the first part of his 2007 Exploding Head Awards on his blog, Scanners (not to be confused with Nerve's blog, Scanner). It's far more entertaining than most year-end lists, but we did notice a great deal of repetition. Let's run down exactly what makes Jim's head explode, shall we?

No Country For Old Men made Jim's head explode no less than 13 times. If you were sitting next to him for that one, your shirt definitely needed to be dry-cleaned.

Judd Apatow and friends caused 10 cranial eruptions: 7 for Superbad, 3 for Knocked Up.

Juno appears 3 times, meaning it caused Jim severe hemorrhaging, but he recovered.

Persepolis, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Zodiac, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, Ratatouille and Southland Tales each show up twice. They all gave Jim nasty nosebleeds. Check out the full list, if only to see the winners in such fabulous categories as "Best performance by an inanimate object", "Most cringe-worthy lines" and " Best Supporting Crotch."

FILM GEEK EXTRA: Can you identify the exploding head pictured? (Hint: Not Jim Emerson's.) — Gwynne Watkins

Pregnant Pause

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Ah, what a fecund year 2007 has been at the cinema. Katherine Heigl got Knocked Up. Keri Russell found herself in the family way in Waitress; yet another waitress tested positive in the independent drama Bella. And sassy sixteen-year-old Juno (opening in New York Dec. 5) joined the baby-bump club. Congratulations, ladies! Or not. In every one of these movies, the pregnancy iss unplanned. And in every one of these movies, the mothers-to-be opt not to terminate the pregnancy. Somewhere, the cinematic doppleganger of Randall Terry is doing a little dance of joy.

This isn't so much about taking those movies to task. Bella in particular was made with a specifically "pro-life" agenda; the other three were comedies of situation, and abortion doesn't lend itself to big yuks (Citizen Ruth notwithstanding). But for some time now, the supposedly left-leaning movie world has studiously avoided stories about women opting for abortion — which makes the raw guts of Tony Kaye's documentary Lake of Fire all the more startling for acknowledging this hard reality.

Thirty years ago, Kay Corleone announced to Michael in The Godfather Part II that she had aborted their unborn son rather than bring another child into this "Sicilian thing." Today, look who's carrying to term: A career woman who risks her big shot after a one-night-stand. A woman in an abusive relationship. A high-school student. You could call these brave narrative decisions. Or you could wonder if "lib'rul Hollywood" hasn't decided that "pro-choice" is all well and good, except when it comes to alienating potential ticket-buyers.

— Scott Renshaw