The Screengrab : martin mull

In Other Blogs: Faster, Britney...Kill! Kill!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny is skeptical about a rumored remake. “A couple of my esteemed colleagues have expressed slightly guarded enthusiasm over the extremely shaky prospect that Quentin Tarantino will direct Britney Spears in a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, but I can't say it pushes any of my buttons, personal or otherwise. Of course the argument that, for what it's worth, Pussycat got made but good the first time isn't gonna cut any ice if in fact a remake is in the cards. But really...Britney Spears. Who cares. Her cultural currency—which is entirely distinct, as I'm sure you know, from tabloid currency—is as low as it's ever been…Having Tarantino hand-hold her through a turn as a loudmouth psycho drag-racing lesbian stripper will do exactly what for her at this point?” I don’t think this one’s worth worrying about. It’s taken how many years to get Inglorious Bastards going? Cooler heads will prevail.

Flickhead checks out some obscure DVD releases from restoration house Legend Films. “Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, ‘A Changing World,’ rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’”

At the House Next Door, Andrew Johnston revisits Risky Business. “As much as I loved them, teen sex comedies didn’t exactly make me feel good about being the kind of kid I was in 1983, the year I turned 15. They all took place in a world where smart and sexually inexperienced kids (i.e., guys like me) were always laughably pathetic, and rich ones (me again) were universally evil and arrogant. Here, finally, was a movie that didn’t pass judgment on those qualities. In the opening scene, our hero Joel Goodson recounts a dream in which he’s riding his bike home through his affluent neighborhood and winds up inside a neighbor’s house where a nubile girl invites him to join her in the shower, a dream that turns into a nightmare when the shower stall turns into a classroom full of his peers taking the SAT, for which he’s three hours late. How could I not identify with the guy?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson becomes the last film blogger on earth to see The Dark Knight. “When we were in college, a music critic friend of mine who delighted in making "best ever / worst ever" statements proudly (and sincerely) proclaimed that Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks was the single greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind. We teased him about the hyperbole, but I admit I liked him all the more for saying it. Unguarded, unbounded enthusiasm is a wonderful thing to behold, to feel, and to share…I waited a couple weeks to see The Dark Knight and I even though I felt lukewarm about the movie, I couldn't wait to talk about it.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, in honor of the Tom Cruise cameo in Tropic Thunder, Spoutblog presents the 10 Best Small Roles for Big Stars. Some are fairly obvious (no such list would be complete without Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross), but I admittedly had forgotten all about Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days. “Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio.”

In Other Blogs: Nazi Porn Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:30:00 GMT

We consider ourselves worldly folks here at the Screengrab, with a wide array of interests and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture minutiae. But every once in a while, we’re reminded that there’s an inexhaustible supply of weirdness in the world. Perhaps my colleagues were already aware of “Stalags,” but I’d never heard of them before reading Beyond the Multiplex this morning. “As many older Israelis apparently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early '60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as 'Stalags,' whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.” Hey, good times! These Stalags are the subject of a new documentary by Ari Libsker, who “meets a couple of the dubious characters who collect them; one insists that his face be obscured on camera (like a corporate whistleblower or a child molester on 60 Minutes), and also appears to believe that the scenarios depicted actually occurred during World War II, or at least could have.”

Speaking of porn, Glenn Kenny is inspired by the release of Zombie Strippers to reminisce about his visit to the Adult Video News Awards, which he attended in his capacity as editor of a famed David Foster Wallace piece for Premiere magazine. “Cat with a C or K wanted to know whether it would be a good idea to go to acting school, as she thought that might be a useful place to make connections. She was stage and table dancing at the Cheetah, and wanted to step up, and was wondering about doing some loops, but not sure it would stigmatize her. I sympathized. But I advised her that going to acting school in order to make "connections" was kind of a fallacy. What you want to go to acting school for, I said, was to explore yourself and find your inner instrument...”

In a more wholesome corner of the blogosphere, Reverse Shot pays tribute to Teri Garr. “With her slightly askew beauty and her compelling but unorthodox mix of neuroses and earthy sexiness, Teri Garr was always destined for underappreciation. Usually relegated to small parts and cast more often as screechy second bananas than leading love interests, Garr nevertheless always manages to cast off tremendous light from whatever corner she's been put into, whether she's vacuously rolling in the hay (Young Frankenstein) or staving off the salacious come-ons of Martin Mull (Mr. Mom); and in more serious-minded supporting roles, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Michael Apted's unfairly forgotten Firstborn, she's played conflicted, angry wives and mothers without the slightest hint of trying to ingratiate herself to the audience.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson is still writing about Judd Apatow’s taste in leading men. “Apatow makes movies about guys -- and heterosexual relationships with women, but mainly about what used to be known as ‘male bonding.’ (The fashionable term now is ‘bro-mance,’ which is cuter and invoked largely by what used to be called ‘metrosexuals.’) The Apatow guy tends to be underemployed, white, slobby, geeky, smelly, childish (not just ‘childlike) and more or less happy, unaware that he's desperate for a woman to complete him. Then, once he becomes aware, he's not entirely sure that's possible, or desirable. This, I submit, is a minor breakthrough in romantic comedy. OK, perhaps I am single and bitter, but I'm also right.”

And finally, this week in List-o-Mania brings the Cinematical Seven: Films with Hilarious Nudity. We started this post with Nazi porn, and we end it with “the horrifically transfixing moment when a naked man turns his back to the audience, bends over, and serenades us with his butt” in Pink Flamingos. We just give and give and give.