The Screengrab : pauline kael

Beatrice Arthur, 1922 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Beatrice Arthur has the peculiar distinction of having provided a reason to watch the 1974 movie musical Mame, based on the Broadway show and starring Lucille Ball (and when I say "watch", I of course mean, "keep your finger pressed hard on that fast-forward button at all but the appropriate times). The movie, which was intended as a crowning high point to Ball's career, proved to be a source of embarrassment to the star, who at 62 couldn't (or at least didn't) dance and who gargled her songs in a voice that would have done Ernest Borgnine proud, but it did give Arthur a chance to reprise her Tony-Award-winning performance as Mame's formidable sidekick, Vera Charles, for the camera. (The movie was directed by Gene Saks, who was married to Arthur from 1950 to 1978.) Arthur's work in the movie inspired New Yorker critic Pauline Kael to one of those vivid prose poems of hers that made performing in light entertainment sound like an act of battlefield heroism that might get the subject's face included in the redesign of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Kael wrote that Arthur's Vera was "monstrously marvelous--like a coquettish tank. When she sings, the low growls that come out of her cathedral chest make Ethel Merman sound like a tinkling virgin. Beatrice Arthur can deliver a single-syllable word with enough resonance to stampede cattle three thousand miles away."

By the time she took home that Tony, Arthur had been a presence in New York theater and early television for some twenty years. Born Bernice Frankel--she later said that “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it."--her first husband was the screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur, from whom she took an improved spelling of his last name. Before her Broadway successes in Mame and in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, in which she played Yente the matchmaker, she had built up a strong cult following with her appearances in nightclubs and off Broadway, most notably with her performance as Lucy Brown in the 1954 production of The Threepenny Opera. She appeared often on Studio One and Kraft Television Theater, was a regular on Caesar's Hour (the variety show that Sid Caesar starred in after Your Show of Shows), and made her movie debut in 1970 in Lovers and Other Strangers. But of course, she made her biggest splash as the star of the series Maude, which premiered in 1972 and ran until 1978. A liberal-loudmouth spin-off of All in the Family, the show was powered by the old pros in the cast (which also included Bill Macy and Rue McClanahan) and quickly established a reputation as a place where touchy issues such as abortion and menopause went to get aired. In 1985, Arthur and McClanahan teamed with Betty White for another long-running sitcom, The Golden Girls. (It was created by Susan Harris, who wrote "Maude's Dilemma", the famous first-season two-parter in which the 47-year-old Maude had that abortion.) She won Emmys for both Maude and Golden Girls.

In between her two TV hits, Arthur starred in the short-lived Amanda's, a misconceived 1983 Americanization of Fawlty Towers in which Arthur was badly miscast in the role created by John Cleese to showcase his own gift for comic apoplexy. (A master of the slow burn, Arthur could raise her voice, but she was too regally self-contained to do conniption fits.) She also appeared in Mel Brooks's History of the World--Part One (1981) and the 2000 Enemies of Laughter, which was directed by John Travolta, as well as contributing memorable guest spots to Malcolm in the Middle, Futurams, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Between 2000 and 2006, she toured the country, as well as London, Australia, and Canada, in her one-woman show, which earned her a Tony nomination when she did a version of it on Broadway in 2002. (She lost to Elaine Stritch for her one-woman show.) In 2005, she turned up on basic cable at Comedy Central's roast of Pamela Anderson, where she was introduced by emcee Jimmy Kimmel as "a national treasure" who "should be treated as such," a gesture that inspired me to personally remove his name from my fatwa list. At the roast, she gave a reading from selections of Anderson's novel Star: A Novel. Some would probably judge the resulting clip below to be workplace-inappropriate, but my feeling is always that the best way to find out such things is to jack the volume up as loud as it'll go and let 'er rip.

Steven Bach, 1938 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Steven Bach, a writer, film and literature professor, and studio executive, died last week of cancer, at 70. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Bach moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and began working in public relations and as a story editor for various production companies. In the late 1970s, he produced Mr. Billion and Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, and was made vice president and head of international production at United Artists, working under UA President Andy Albeck. Albeck and Bach were in place when UA gave the go-ahead to Michael Cimino to direct his epic Western Heaven's Gate, which was in production, on location in Montana, from April 1979 until March 1980 and finally cost upwards of $40 million. (It was originally budgeted at $11 million and scheduled for a Christmas 1979 release.) The collapse of the movie at its first premiere screening in 1980 caused the implosion of UA, which was sold off by its parent company, Transamerica, to MGM, which discontinued its production arm. Five years later, Bach published Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", a witty, gracefully written account of his time at the studio. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called Bach's book "About the only good thing that has ever come from the movie"; David Thomson called it "the best book ever written about the making of a movie. It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

In Final Cut, Bach covered the last couple of years of UA's existence, including his role in the making of other movies, such as Raging Bull, and other crises, such as the studio's unsuccessful efforts to maintain its relationship with Woody Allen. (A bunch of UA executives had left to form their own company, Orion, and were wooing Allen, who felt ties of loyalty to them.) The debacle in Montana figures in the narrative as a persistent, pesky irritation--Cimino was always a vainglorious pain in the neck, but after his previous epic, The Deer Hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, he was considered a prestigious one--that steadily inflates into a full-blown migraine. Bach describes what happened, and he also makes it easier to understand how management let it happen--why, with so much else going on, they were slow to figure out how badly things had spun out of control and why they couldn't just fire Cimino when they realized that he was running amok. The book lives as a first-rate picture of what Hollywood moviemaking turned into during the period when studios were becoming the playthings of conglomerates, and an illustration of why this was not a happy development for the history of motion pictures.

Because Bach didn't go easy on himself in the narrative--both he and Albeck come across as considerate, intelligent, and decent men who were in over their heads practically from day one--the book also serves as a demonstration of why its author wasn't cut out for success in the movie industry. After leaving the business and writing Final Cut, Bach, who as a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the 1960's wrote his dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg, wrote a biography of Von Sternberg's star creation, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992), which he followed up with Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2001) and Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (2007). He also taught at Columbia University and Bennington College.

Armond White Brings the Noise

Phil Nugent — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The movie American Gangster grew out of a profile of Frank Lucas that Mark Jacobson wrote for New York magazine, and now Jacobson is back at the same place with another troublemaker, Armond White, movie critic for the New York Press and newly elected chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. As Jacobson notes, White has the position "because he was the only one who wanted the generally thankless job." That's a clue both to how seriously White takes his job and also to the mixed feelings, to put it gently, that he arouses among many of his colleagues. White is a man of strong opinions, opinions that run against the main current of received opinion more often than not. (He panned the Dark Knight and thought the world of Torque.) The late, great Pauline Kael used to say that people who could agree to disagree with other people about politics and religion and whether their own kids belonged in rehab or on Death Row would lapse into seizures and hurl death threats at you if they found out that you disagreed with them about some stupid-ass movie. You might think that people who form and express opinions about movies for a living would be beyond this sort of thing, and boy, would you be wrong. But even in the the smaller-than-it-looks world of movie criticism, White is a contentious figure. He says that his father "taught us about the rights of the working man, and also that if you didn’t have anything to say, you should keep your mouth shut. But if you did have something on your mind, you should talk up, don’t keep it to yourself." There isn't much that White doesn't feel comfortable sharing when it comes to movies and writing about movies. There was a time when Kael and the self-styled "auteurist" critic Andrew Sarris had a rivalry that inspired younger critics to pick sides and keep old fights going, but when White spoke to Jacobson, he made a point of pledging allegiance to both critics, as a way of declaring his admiration and kinship with any good writer and sharp thinker who takes movies seriously. The reason so many other contemporary critics treat White as the enemy isn't that he provides an alternative to a chorus of mainstream voices but that when he goes after his colleagues in print, he isn't shy about suggesting, or even saying out right, that they're not as serious as they should be. This can even take the form of things such as White's decision, back during his previous tenure as head of the New York Film Critics Circle in 1994, to schedule the annual awards dinner "during the Sundance Film Festival, creating conflicts for some members. White defends this decision. 'The circle is the oldest and most legitimate film-critic group in the country. We’re not the Dallas Film Critics Circle. If people wanted to carry water for penny-ante shit like Sundance, that’s too fucking bad. The circle comes first.' ”

"If you cut me open," says White, "that’s what you’d find: the movies, Bible verses, and Motown lyrics.” He recalls growing up on movies as a kid, when “I used to love to see stuff like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. To me, this was a window into the adult world. Now people watch movies so they can stay kids, which proves how infantilized the culture is. I wanted to see how grown-ups acted, in CinemaScope." And for all his vitriol, he sees himself as a positive force, claiming that "he has never knocked a film without suggesting a superior movie a viewer might more profitably spend his time watching. Instead of the usual ten-best list, White offers the 'Better-Than List,' in which he expounds on why one lesser-known or critically unfashionable movie is better than another highly touted but ultimately empty product." It sounds great in theory. In reality, you'd be surprised how few fans of The Dark Knight are soothed by hearing that while the movie they love is a piece of shit, they can redeem themselves by trading it in for Transporter 3. Meanwhile, some of the critics who respect his intelligence and faith in his own taste and who might be expected to have his back feel that he's showboating when he does what they call his "last honest, angry man" routine. His show of principles has also taken the form of writing a controversial piece a few years ago in which he castigated his fellow critics for accepting DVD screener copies of movies for review, thus ending the accepted idea, once taken as gospel among critics, that you haven't earned the right to claim to have really seen a movie unless it's been on a large screen in proper theater conditions. “I don’t say these things to call attention to myself or to get a rise out of people," White protests. "I say them because I believe them. We’re living in times when critics get fired if they don’t like enough movies. People don’t need to hear what mouthpieces for the movie industry tell them. They need to hear the truth.”

"Sex and the City: The Movie" : A Nation Braces Itself

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Chicago columnist John Kass offers his male readers a a "Get Out of Watching the Sex and the City Movie Card, or Kass' SATC Absolvo Carta for short. The movie recently premiered in England, and Kass points to the comment that "a regular guy named Phil" left at the Times Online, as evidence of why such a thing is necessary: "I don't think SATC is just for girls. I am a reasonably well-adjusted bloke and I am looking forward to seeing the film with my girlfriend. I am then looking forward to poking my eyes out with red-hot pokers, burning my skin off, and rolling around in salt for a while." Kass, who seems confused about his role as an opinion journalist, writes that "It is the never-ending question to the never-ending story, why men would rather chop their toes off with a rusty hoe than walk across the street to see Sex and the City. Why? Tell me why." If I do, do I get your salary? Kass himself establishes that it has nothing to do with the desire to avoid seeing something awful, since he himself boasts of his ability to watch Random Harvest, a movie that I am confident is worse than Sex and the City will be, given that a scientific study once confirmed that it was worse than leprosy and the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina. He also never brings up what's really hard to take about the TV series and what is probably too deeply engrained as an irreplaceable part of the franchise to have been dumped from the movie: that goddamn narration. Someone who once watched half an episode during the Clinton administration and was surprised to learn that I was a faithful viewer up until the show's death rattle, when Mikhail Baryshnikov was brought on to demonstrate the shallow attractions and ultimately the deal-breaking downside of a dating an aging Russian roue', could only think to ask me if the narration had gotten any better. I immediately told him ye, which is what we in the critical studies department call a lie. The truth is, if you got into the show, the narration was just something you learned to make your peace with, like Gil Grissom's pre-credits one-liners on CSI. (In that particular case, "making one's peace" is of course defined as "putting one's hands over one's ears and going, 'La la la la, I can't hear you!'")

Since need to stand up and declare that the thought of seeing the Sex and the City is shared even by people who'd rather watch Random Harvest than eat lead paint, its roots causes must be less aesthetic than sociological. It probably has something to do with what people who claim to be nostalgic for bear attacks would call the feminization of our culture. Once upon a time, a man knew he was a man because he had savages to fight and untamed lands to conquer; now he has a soft life and a 401K, so he has to prove he's a man by shrieking in horror at the prospect of seeing Sarah Jessica Parker talk about shoes. (I myself am immune to this sort of thing, being the result of a way-failed experiment to attempt to raise the perfect man. My mother used to hit me with an electric cattle prod whenever I'd leave the toilet seat up.) The movie, which went over well with its target audience at the premiere and which has been dodging rumors of a death in the family--and let me just mention that if Charlotte and Harry aren't both alive and still married at the end, I will personally torch the theater--appears set to steamroller on, so people disinclined to share a planet with it might be forced to just suck it up and adapt. The real question may turn out to be, is the movie too much of an okay thing? In her last interview, the film critic Pauline Kael said that she kinda liked the show because it took material that was too played out to power a feature film anymore and showed that it could still be used to power an entertaining half-hour time killer on TV. The movie runs two hours and fifteen minutes and was made on a budget of 65 million dollars. That's killing time with a bazooka!

Take Five: Sweet Revenge

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven announced his arrival as a forced to be reckoned with in the world of horror with this, his feature film debut. Too cheap, too raw and too frankly disturbing to entirely escape the exploitation-flick label, this direly unnerving story about a gang of hoodlums who opportunistically murder a pair of teenage girls only to find themselves, a short time later, staying at the home of the father of one of their victims, has far more going on emotionally, dramatically and philosophically than you might expect. But even if it were just cheap horror, it would be one of the most effective cheap horror films of its era. Powerful, creepy, and almost unbearably tense. Bizarrely, Last House on the Left is based on Ingmar Bergman's masterful medieval drama of 1960, The Virgin Spring!

THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)

Tellingly, this would be the last of a fertile period in the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's career where he explored his characters' relationship with God. He'd never make another movie like it, and though it netted him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, its shockingly open depiction of rape and revenge caused waves of controversy at the time of his release. Bergman's favorite actor, Max Von Sydow, gives one of the best performances of his career as the father of a young girl who is attacked and killed by bandits who, through empty fate or inexplicable divine intervention, arrive in his home looking for charity. They find only a bloody end. Bizarrely, The Virgin Spring is based on Wes Craven's groundbreaking revenge-horror film of 1972, The Last House on the Left, through reverse time warp technology!

STRAW DOGS (1971)

Perhaps no revenge thriller in the history of cinema has been more controversial than Sam Peckinpah's brutal meditation on masculinity and cowardice. Easily as vicious and manipulative as the worst grindhouse exploitation flick, it dresses up its blackly beating heart in such undeniable artistry that it leaves even people who have seen it and assessed it time and time again not knowing exactly how to react to it. The film features Dustin Hoffman, in an emotionally exhausting performance, as a mild-mannered professor whose good nature is taken for granted once too often by local bullies; it caused incredibly extreme reactions on its release (with Pauline Kael writing one of the most memorable reviews of her long career in startled reaction to it) and continues to do so even now, nearly forty years down the road.

CAPE FEAR (1962/1991)

This effective psychological thriller, based on a terse little novel by John D. MacDonald, has been made twice -- once in a taut quasi-noir version in the early '60s by J. Lee Thompson, and once in a much darker and more provocative way by Martin Scorsese. The particular twist of both versions of Cape Fear is who, exactly, thinks revenge needs to be taken: the protagonist, Sam Bowden, thinks he needs to take revenge against Max Cady, a vicious criminal who's gunning for his family. Cady, on the other hand, thinks he's the hero of the movie -- he's the one looking for revenge against Bowden, who failed to properly defend him in court years before and doomed him to years of harsh imprisonment. The first is too little seen by modern eyes, and the second is wrongly reviled; both are worth a good look for their tense ambiguity.

Geek Love: The Unmanliness of the New Action Heroes

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

"Now the geek is god in Hollywood." That's emerging conventional wisdom as expressed by publicist Tony Angellotti. emerging declares the veteran publicist and Oscar campaigner Tony Angellotti. "Every generation redefines its heroes and the heroes of today are slight of stature and geeky." The emergence, not just in starring roles but in action hero roles, of such as Shia LaBeof (Disturbia, Transformers, and now Indiana Jones's kid), James McAvoy (Wanted), and Emile Hirsch (Speed Racer) is apparently setting off a wave of soul-searching in Hollywood, where it seems somehow significant that these are the fellows stepping up to "replace" the likes of Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone. If this were, say, 1968, there'd probably be think pieces appearing analyzing this development in terms of a political shift in the zeitgeist; the Iraq war and other setbacks to our great national ego trip have tarnished the steroid-addled heroes who emerged full-bore in the 1980s and made audiences quicker to look for heroes who seem more thoughtful and capable of self-doubt. But nobody talks like that anymore, and today's self-appointed experts are more likely to speak the language of the pop psychologist. Angellotti, who seems personally affronted by some of the newer success stories ("Do these kids even shave?"), has this theory: "For decades, we wanted our heroes to be who we could never be, but this generation of filmgoers wants heroes they can relate to, who are similar to them. They see themselves in these somewhat awkward, geeky, hairless-faced guys. They can relate to them. Stars like Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis were men; these are boys, and they're appealing to younger audiences."

Others, such as Peter Safran, a man so smart that he freely admits to having produced Meet the Spartans, thinks it's a supply-and-demand issue. "I don't think it's happening because it's what the audience is demanding; it's happening because the old-style action hero isn't emerging. These are the people who are emerging now and clearly audiences respond to seeing themselves up on the screen. Shia LaBeouf's audience grew up with him - they are very familiar with him and he's a legitimate star today." Some of these deep thinkers may be getting a bit ahead of themselves. Whatever he can or can't bench-press, Shia LaBeouf is a talented guy with tremendous reserves of audience rapport; whatever his future holds, he's much more plausible star material than a lot of the people who've been hyped as alleged up-and-comers since Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson were figuring out which end of the razor you held to your face. (Judd's still working it out.) More to the point, some of the "men" that these guys (who, let's face it, may have their own deep-seated personal reasons for preferring heroes with hairline issues and calorie-intake counselors) love so much had their own callow periods when they first appeared on film. There were a few years there, between the point where Moonlighting started to turn brown and Die Hard's opening weekend, where it wasn't clear that Bruce Willis would ever wipe the smirk off his face and evolve into something more durable than an overage frat rat, and Mel Gibson's early success as the stone-faced pain merchant Mad Max was something he had to grow past on his way to becoming an assured, emotionally expressive leading man. (Then space worms ate his brain. But that's another story.)

In the end, the overmuscled, inaccessible terminators of the last couple of decades may be the ones who look like an aberration in the history of Hollywood stardom. Pauline Kael once defined the recipe for success as a male movie star as having the strength "to be one's own man" while still expressing "the sensitivity that is attractive to women." Stallone conveyed some of that sensitivity in the movie that made him a star, Rocky, then lost it when he pumped himself into a cartoon killing machine, a move that proved to have only short-term dividends at the box-office. And Schwarzenegger never became enough of an actor to express it even if he had access to it; if his political career continues to prosper, it'll enhance the likelihood that he'll ultimately be seen as an all-around celebrity success story whose movie career was just a stepping stone to bigger things. These guys were big, the biggest stars in the world at a time when testosterone overload was what the world seemed to want, but when the world moved on, they were painted in a corner, and left behind no progeny above the level of, say, Dolph Lundgren. (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who Arnold more or less officially designated as his rightful heir in a cameo in The Rundown, has shown himself more interested in developing as a character actor than in making a quick payday from walking away from explosions in slow motion.) The Shias and the Emiles may actually be closer to the true face of Hollywood tradition.

Roger and Out; A. O. Scott Applauds Ebert's Return to Writing

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A. O. Scott of The New York Times pays tribute to Roger Ebert, who recently announced that he won't be returning to TV--persistent illness having robbed him of the ability to speak since 2006--but that he will be returning to his regular written column. (Ebert's farewell to Richard Widmark and Charlton Heston appeared on his website last week.) Of course, Ebert had made his mark as a film writer (and as the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) long before he first teamed up with fellow Chicago reviewer Gene Siskel on Sneak Previews, the local public television show that made the two of them the most recognizable film critics in the country when it went national in 1978. That show made Ebert a TV star (and, in the process, probably did more to persuade publishers to bring out collections of his reviews than his Pulitzer ever did), as well as inspiring a wave of copycat shows and dueling on-camera critics, including such lesser tackheads as Michael Medved. It also made Ebert a target, and not just for Homer Simpson, who was once seen watching the show and guffawing, "I love watching the bald guy argue with the fat tub of lard!" Some began to think of Ebert as an overexposed grump who had thumbs for brains.

Scott isn't having it. He considers Ebert "one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment," and while his praise is scaled in proportion to some of the other film critics who may have appeared to leave a bigger mark on literature and film scholarship, he turns the relative modesty of Ebert's shadow into cause for respect. Ebert's "writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer. His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off." As he sees it, Ebert's extension of his work into television, "far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character," whereas the Internet and the blogging revolution may have resulted in "a glut: an endless, sometimes bracing, sometimes vexing barrage of deep polemic, passionate analysis and fierce contention reflecting nearly every possible permutation of taste and sensibility." While I myself am hard-pressed to think of down side at all to writing about movies on-line (got my check today, boss!), Scott's views make for an interesting and well-argued counterbalance to the recent spate of pieces wondering if film criticism will make it through the night one more time.

(As Scott freely notes, he writes as a personal friend of Roger Ebert's. This is nice to hear, since back when Scott got the job with the Times back in 2000, Ebert complained that the hiring showed a cheap disrespect for the profession of film criticism, because Scott was then known mainly for writing about literature, which Ebert deemed poor preparation for making sense of Keanu Reeves. Scott is too classy to bring that up after all these years. Fortunately, I'm not classy enough to not bring up shit.)

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Kids love to swear. I'm sorry, parents, but it's true. Your little angel is/has been/will someday soon be a potty-mouth. The first phase of cussing is the most innocent one: you know the words are taboo, but have no idea what most of them mean. You never really think through the implications of calling your best friend a "pussy-eating cocksucker" – you simply don't have all the information you need to understand how wrong it is. The thrill comes from learning and then repeating the words, and for us kids who came of age in the 70s, The Bad News Bears was an invaluable resource. Hearing obnoxious little Tanner describe his teammates as "a bunch of Jews, spicks, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron" was liberating not because we were a bunch of racists, Nazis and boogerphobes, but because we knew we'd just learned some new words our parents would kill us for saying. And there's still no more triumphant sentiment in the history of sports movies than Tanner's final kiss-off: "Hey Yankees – you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!"

FULL METAL JACKET (1997)

The training sequences at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket are so famously vulgar, intense and energetic that once they’re over, the air sort of gets let out of the movie for the entire middle passage and doesn’t pick back up until the end. For this reason, it’s often considered a lesser Stanley Kubrick film, which is somewhat unfair; there’s a lot to like about the movie even once Private Leonard Lawrence and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman exit the stage. But oh, that opening sequence! As Hartman, character actor (and actual Marine Corps sergeant) R. Lee Ermey works in obscenity the way that Picasso worked in paint; so staggeringly awful (and hilariously funny) are his vulgar degradations of his raw recruits that by the time he has his final confrontation with Private Pyle, no one in the audience has any trouble believing that someone would want to shoot him. Although Ermey has tried to claim credit for many of Hartman’s lines, what he really brings to the role is the pitch-perfect delivery; most of the lines are taken directly from Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, on which the movie is based. There’s a telling moment early in Hartman’s tirade where he singles out Pyle for abuse, after he has committed the crime of laughing at his obscene explosions, but it cuts directly to the heart of the matter: as violent, hateful and repulsive as the sarge’s speeches are, they’re also incredibly amusing. His recruits don’t have the luxury of laughter, but we do.

NETWORK (1976)

In the first on-air flip-out scene by Peter Finch's Howard Beale, the newly fired newsman gazes serenely into the camera and promises to shoot himself on the air because he just can't take "the bullshit" anymore. The real punch line came a couple of years after the movie premiered in theaters, when it was first shown on network TV. CBS, eager to show that they were in on the joke, allowed Beale's supposedly unbroadcastable "bullshits" to go throw uncensored. Bravo! But the scene was followed by one in which the movie's executives gather to discuss what just happened, and they are a foul-mouthed crew. And the soundtrack, on TV, turns into a veritable conga line of bleep!s.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

"You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can come on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, come on her face, man. She get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?"

On one level, it's the world's filthiest sales pitch, a street-corner pimp's patter for the passing johns who want to buy what he's selling. But consider the line that precedes these:

"Man, she's twelve and a half years old."

With those eight simple words, Sport's routine becomes something totally different, and altogether more chilling, thanks in no small part to Harvey Keitel's performance. Screenwriter Paul Schrader originally wrote Sport as African-American, but with Keitel standing in that doorway instead of, say, one of the gentlemen Travis sees at the Belmore Cafeteria, the scene takes on a different tone altogether. What might have been written as a scary, foreboding conversation now comes off as almost genial, with Keitel joking around with Travis' squareness before launching into his prepared monologue. It's an inspired touch by Scorsese and his actors, and one that ultimately makes the scene even creepier. It's not simply that Sport is selling wayyyyyyyyy underage girls to passersby, but that it's no big deal to him. In his mind, he's just catering to demand – after all, if nobody paid for twelve-and-a-half-year old prostitutes (it's the "and a half" that makes the line extra-creepy) he wouldn't need to sell them, right?

– Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 2!

Citizen Cruise

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In her final, book-length interview with Francis Davis, the late film critic Pauline Kael lamented that entertainment reporters were always wrting about John Travolta as if he were stupid. When Davis suggested that this might have something to do with Travolta's devotion to Scientology, Kael said that nobody seemed to have the same problem with Tom Cruise. That was then and this is now, and the furor over Andrew Morton's forthcoming unauthorized biography of the brainmaster behind Days of Thunder is shaping up to be all about the Scientology association that has done some much in recent years to type Cruise as a towering weirdo in the public eye and may be on the verge of derailing his career. Once upon a time, gossipy speculation about Cruise (and threats from his lawyers regarding same) tended to be all about his sexuality. Now they tend to be about whether it's true that he is the "defacto second-in-charge" of the "religion" and whether his choice of Katie Holmes to be his zombie bride (over such proposed candidates as Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, and Kate Bosworth) was the result of internal negotiations with his Scientologist brethren.

Morton, who made his name serving as confidante and tell-all author to then-Princess Diana (producing a book that became a bargaining chip in the public relations war surrounding the royal divorce) and Monica Lewinsky; he's also written "unauthorized" bios about Madonna and the Beckhams, and reportedly claims that Cruise's current to-do list includes a high-pressure campaign to bring David Beckham to Scientology. He also claims that Nicole Kidman has kept mum about the church since her divorce from Cruise for fear that she would be prevented from seeing the two children she and Cruise adopted together. For his own part, there have been reports that Morton himself has been keeping a low profile for fear of violent reprisals from the Scientology Mafia. Cruise's attorneys have poo-poohed such talk and concentrated on making with the legal threats against the book's publisher, St. Martin's Press. As for Cruise himself, his lawyer Bertram Fields will say only that "He has no intention of reading it." It would seem to be implicit in this statement that for Cruise to pass up a chance to read about himself is no small gesture.

Cary Grant Doesn't Vent

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz uses the excuse of sort-of-almost-as-an-afterthought reviewing what sounds like a pretty lame book (Richard Torregrossa’s Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style) to compose a love poem to the star of His Girl Friday and North by Northwest. The impoverished Cockney Archie Leach took the name "Cary Grant" when he signed to a Hollywood contract in his late twenties, but it wasn't until he was past thirty, with twenty pictures under his belt, that he became Cary Grant. The by-now standard gospel tells of how Grant, working with his frequent co-star Katherine Hepburn and the director George Cukor for the first time, in Sylvia Scarlett, suddenly "he felt the ground under his feet" (in Cukor's words) and how he then put it to use in his first really sophisticated, screwball romantic comedy, The Awful Truth. Scwartz writes that "seemingly from nowhere the Cary Grant persona gloriously appeared, fully formed. All at once there was the detached, distracted wit; the knowing charm; the arch self-mockery; the bemused awareness of his audience, with whom he was sharing a joke (a quality that made him simultaneously cool and warm); the perfectly timed stylized comedic movements—the cocked head, the double takes. And, not least, the good-natured ease combined with a genius for pitiless teasing ... Moreover, he suddenly created a new hybrid, combining qualities that hadn’t before mixed in the movies. He was oddly unplaceable: C. L. R. James, the brainy Trinidadian Marxist theorist and cricket writer, noticed at the time that Grant appeared both American and quintessentially English; at once subtle and rollicking, he seemed to James to anticipate nothing less than 'a new social type.' ”

For decades, Grant, whose name always seems to come up first in conversations about people who never won an Oscar (along with that of Hitchcock, who called Grant the only actor he'd ever loved), was everybody's ideal movie star without being taken very seriously as an actor. Schwartz gives much of the credit for his finally getting his critical due in the mid-1970s to two idiosyncratic, brilliant writers on film: David Thomson, who hailed him as "the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema” in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, and Pauline Kael, who fleshed that appraisal out in a legendary New Yorker profile, "The Man from Dream City." As for the book under review: "Torregrossa stumbles when it comes to one big thing. He devotes four pages to explicating what’s wrong with ventless jackets, how Grant came to eschew them, why double vents look best (they don’t), and the ways Grant modified his vents. He then holds up that perfectly tailored slim-line suit Grant wore during his cross-country travails in North by Northwest as an example of the star’s preference for customized vents. Torregrossa is talking here about the most famous suit in pictures. Todd McEwen wrote a smart and stylish Granta essay on it (North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit”). GQ has declared it nothing less than the best suit in film history. It’s ventless." Speaking as a man who, on his best days, can just barely figure out which Nike goes on the left foot, I am appalled.

Kubrick's Marketing Man Speaks

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

The Guardian has published an enlightening interview with Mike Kaplan, a former marketing executive and now film producer, on his relationship with Stanley Kubrick:

"His [Kubrick's] laser-like eyes locked mine: 'Why doesn't Pauline Kael like my movie?' My mind raced. I had been nervous enough rehearsing what to say. . . My answer had to meet his challenge. Perhaps a minute elapsed. Triggered by a survival instinct from some deep memory recess, I countered, 'She thought The Bible was the best movie of the year.' Our eyes didn't move but his body shifted slightly. It was my acknowledgment."

— Faisal A. Qureshi