The Screengrab : peter jackson

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:45:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

Some comedian, possibly Seinfeld, did a routine once that perfectly captured my own pubescent experience during the final moments of The Empire Strikes Back, that sinking, slowly dawning realization that...holy shit! To Be Continued? Is THAT where this is heading? Are you fucking kidding me, Lucas? You’re gonna make me wait THREE YEARS to find out what happens to Han Solo? Last time around, the big finale was the Rebels blowing up the Death Star and this time it’s...Luke getting a new hand? As an adult, of course, I eventually learned to accept years-long gaps between, say, seasons of The Sopranos and Lost (and...uh...girlfriends), but way back when, it seemed like George Lucas was pulling a cruel prank on his faithful fans. (Little did we freakin’ know...) (AO)

RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

Bad:

Worse:

My esteemed colleague Andrew Osborne said of this last week: "And then, to make matters worse, Egghead suddenly materializes at the grand finale Ewok rave with the shiny, happy ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi...a scene Lucas inconceivably managed to make even worse decades later by adding Hayden Christensen." Yessir, this movie was the first clue that George Lucas had no idea how to separate his best impulses from his worst. What can I say? I was 11, and I knew that bouncing Ewoks singing a creepy-awful song while the ghosts of Jedis past grin at Luke was a miserable way to end things. Then, when Lucas got around to taking a crap on his legacy with the three prequels, suddenly we had to deal with whiny ol' block of wood Hayden Christensen taking scary ol' Egghead Vader's place, while the Ewoks sang a New Age anthem that left me longing for the relative greatness of the "Yub Jub" song. Hey, Lucas, here's an idea: you put Lawrence Tierney under that mask and then have the Rebels celebrate their victory on a planet where the inhabitants aren't covered in fur. Because when the furry people in your universe get together to celebrate, everyone loses. (HC)

DR. T & THE WOMEN (2000)

Critics were unkind to this movie, but I'm willing to cut Altman some slack. It's not that bad. Even as it states that Dallas society forces its women to interact with constant near-brainless patter, it suggests that underneath each perfectly coiffed hairstyle is a powerful intelligence trapped in a socially empty cage. But it all falls apart at the end. After the above clip, when Dr. Travis' daughter runs away from her wedding with her maid of honor, everything in Dr. Travis' life cruelly falls to pieces and he drives off in an increasingly frantic rain, which suddenly turns into the tornado from The Wizard of Oz, and then he's deposited in Big Bend, where he helps a young woman deliver a baby. I mean, I get the point: somewhere over the rainbow, Dr. Travis is practicing the business of bringing life into this world for the needy rather than assisting rich women with their petty neuroses. But Altman asks too much of the viewer with his sudden left turn, and it doesn't make a lick of sense. (HC)

PLANET OF THE APES (2001)

Tim Burton was in a bind when it came to ending his remake or reboot or re-imagining or retardification of Planet of the Apes in 2001. After all, he couldn’t go with the original surprise ending and expect it to wow audiences all over again. At the same time, it’s Planet of the Apes, so it needs some sort of mind-blower of a twist ending. Ultimately, Burton decided not to spend too much time thinking it through. Wouldn’t it be cool if the astronaut played by Mark Wahlberg manages to get back to his own time…only when he looks up at the Lincoln Memorial, he sees the face of his ape nemesis Tim Roth? And then a bunch of ape police show up with guns? Whoa! It was a nifty image to be sure, but could it possibly be explained by the events leading up to it in the movie? Attempts were made to justify it, but none by Tim Burton. "It was a reasonable cliffhanger that could be used in case Fox or another filmmaker wanted to do another movie," Burton claimed on the DVD commentary. Sadly (or not), no one has taken on the challenge…although as you’ll see in the clip above, some enterprising young people did make an attempt to improve on Burton’s finale. There may be some plausibility issues here, as well. (SVD)

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE (2003)

Run, Kate Winslet, run! Look to the sky and scream, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" And then, ohmigodIdidn'tseethatcoming, it turns out that the anti-death penalty activist framed his own death so that they could prove that the Texas legal system gives innocent people the death penalty. No! And the smoking gun (or, in this case, unsmoking gun) was always right there, just beyond her fingertips! No! No! No! Well, actually yes. As in Alan Parker's repulsive Mississippi Burning, which suggested that change came to Mississippi in the 1960s through the work of white FBI agents rather than the brave, but inconveniently often non-white, people of the Civil Rights Movement, here Alan Parker tries to suggest that an anti-capital punishment advocate in freakin' kill-happy Texas has to frame himself to prove that the Texas justice system occasionally puts innocent people on death row. Jesus, a thousand times no. Here's Roger Ebert from his review: "let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein." I might have gone with Idi Amin, but I think you get the point. (HC)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

Since we spoke earlier of how a great movie earns its ending by putting us through so much with the characters we feel they deserve their closing moments, let’s look at a movie that goes about it entirely the wrong way. There’s no question that the Lord of the Rings trilogy earns a good ending; the cast of characters we know and love absolutely deserve a great moment of closure after all that we’ve been through with them over the space of three entire movies. The problem is, Peter Jackson doesn’t give us one ending; he gives us a dozen. There are so many moments of building climax and rest that it starts to seem like a joke when the credits don’t actually roll through one false stop after another. Sure, Jackson and his writers were working with an incredibly long source trilogy, and to their credit, they did cut out plenty; it was just all the wrong stuff. For a director who seemed all too willing to hack bits out at the beginning of the series, he seemed downright reluctant to lose anything at the end, no matter how tedious it became; and even then, some of the choices he made were dubious. Why did we lose the Harrowing of the Shire – one of the more gripping parts of the final novel – so we could have ten minutes of the hobbits bouncing around on a feather bed? For a movie that gave us scene after scene of excitement in the early goings – for that matter, for a movie whose every installment left you begging for the next movie to come out – the endgame left even the most diehard fans longing for the credits to roll.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Trailer Review: District 9

Paul Clark — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

If I was really cynical, I would complain about the way this trailer spoils this movie’s big “twist”. But in the world of marketing, there’s a thin line between a twist and a hook, and I dare say that this movie wouldn’t find its intended audience if it there were no aliens to be found in the trailer, to say nothing of the pissed-off arthouse fans who probably wouldn’t enjoy having their docudrama on the issue of illegal immigration suddenly full of extraterrestrials. So instead, I’ll just say the trailer for the Peter Jackson-produced, Neil Blomkamp-directed District 9 is pretty damn cool. For one thing, the idea of flip-flopping the traditional alien-invasion storyline, with the visiting aliens oppressed by the human race, is a solid one. Indeed, the idea of treating making the story’s metaphorical “illegal aliens” into actual ones is so obvious that I’m surprised I’ve never seen it before (feel free to set me straight, commenters). And to set it in present-day South African is an inspiration, since the old wounds from apartheid are still fresh in everyone’s memories, but all humans black and white are still happy to bring down the newcomers. So much for Truth and Reconciliation...

"The Hunt for Gollum": Raising the Fan-Film Bar

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Tim Masters interviews Chris Bouchard, writer-director of the forty-minute "not-for-profit" fan film The Hunt for Gollum. Made on HD video by a 160-member volunteer crew for £3,000, and set between the action of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the film, which exists in legal limbo, is intended as a love letter to the Peter Jackson films; it not only approximates their visual style as best it can, but stars a Viggo Mortensen look-alike named Adrian Webster as Aragorn. The film, which recently premiered at the Sci-Fi London film festival, can now be viewed online here.

In response to the question "Isn't the charm of a fan film that the villain looks like he's made out of cornflake packets?", Boucher replied, "I suppose most fan-films tend to be that way, but you're always dreaming that you can make something that has good production values. So we went for that, to try and raise the bar of what is possible on a low budget." At the same time, "It's a story that's not too ambitious for our budget - there are just three or four main characters, but we could put in loads of orcs and there's a huge fight scene in the middle of the film." Boucher says that he's reached an understanding with the Tolkien estate that they're okay with his film so long as it remains a non-profit venture, though of course, he'd like to use its success as a launching pad "to do an original film on a more commercial, professional level." Not that he thinks that fandom will never see his like again. "I think that we'll see more fan-films with better production values. They've already turned into a genre, which is cool - because they're free and you can see that people have put a lot of love into them. And if you're a fan of a particular genre it's nice to be able to return to that world briefly - even if it is another fan's interpretation."

Video of the Day: "Alive in Joburg"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Some moviegoers who checked out Wolverine this past weekend came out muttering about the trailer for District 9, a sci-fi film that's set for release on August 14. Produced by Peter Jackson, the movie, which is set in Africa and deals with a segregated population of extraterrestrial visitors, marks the feature directing debut of Neill Blomkamp, a 29-year-old filmmaker who made a series of short promotional films for the Microsoft game Halo. Jackson and Blomkamp originally teamed up with the intention of making a movie version of Halo, but shifted their plans towards District 9 after funding fell through. Some excitable rumormongers online have spread the word that District 9 actually is the Halo movie, but the studio has decided to keep its true identity under wraps for fear that fans will go see it. In fact, the movie is an expansion of Alive in Joburg, a short film that Blomkamp made four years ago:

He Died, but Then He Got Younger: The Prequel Perplex

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ryan Gilbey suggests that, now that it's barely even fun anymore to complain about sequels and remakes, we should shift gears and reserve our disgust for the concept of prequels. By some accounts, the term "prequel" was coined by George Lucas to describe the young-Don-Vito sections of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Godfather, Part II. However, the first time the term was widely used in the press to label a feature film which had no other discernible reason for being may well have been in 1979, when Tom Berenger and William Katt starred in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.

This was not the first time that somebody had built a new work around a speculative history of what happened to the characters in an earlier work before they reached the point in their history where they made the audience's acquaintance in the first place. Even before The Godfather, Part II, this approach actually had a tony literary pedigree. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (filmed by John Duigan in 1993) filled in the pre-history to Jane Eyre, and the 1971 movie The Nightcomers, with Marlon Brando, attempted to lay the groundwork for Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But Butch and Sundance established the basis for regarding prequels as a singularly uninspired and parasitic form. Apparently it was made because some genius noticed that the tenth anniversary of the money-making Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was approaching, and it seemed a shame to waste such a ripe excuse to try to cash in again. There was just one problem: the first movie ended, famously, with Butch and Sundance being turned into Swiss cheese by the Bolivian army. So a sequel was out of the question, but it might be possible to go backwards. And since there was this new actor in town whose major qualification for stardom seemed to be that he looked a lot like a young Robert Redford...

In the end, Butch and Sundance tanked, William Katt transitioned from starring in movies to appearing on TV each week in The Greatest American Hero and looking as if he was praying to take a bullet between line readings, and it looked as if prequels might turn out to be one of those momentary fancies of the movie industry, like disaster epics or Steven Seagal. A few more prequels did trickle out in later years, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Amityville II: The Possession. But the concept wasn't revived big time until, yes, George Lucas decided to jump-start his fantasy of actually making another Star Wars trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace. Even now, though, prequels, which are much more commonly found in the ranks of the straight-to-video than among actual theatrical releases, tend to occur only when a franchise has been tapped to pitiful death (see Hannibal Rising) or when the producers are desperate for a gimmick that might help to compensate for the fact that the original stars want nothing to do with it (see Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd).

We might also want to define our terms a little. Gilbey, anticipating the day when movie prequels themselves become "respectable", cites Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming The Hobbit, as a prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the book that del Toro is adapting before he wrote the Rings books; surely that matters more than the fact that the books have somehow managed to get themselves filmed in the wrong order. On the other hand, J. J. Abrams's Star Trek straddles the line between "reboot" and prequel: it means to reinvent the old franchise, but in the process of doing so, it introduces the audience to James T. Kirk and his merry band at an earlier stage of their development than Gene Roddenberry dared, or cared, to go. Ideally, this kind of thing might be done with a little humor, teasing the audience with the shared knowledge we have of what these characters are fated to become. At worst, it might give us the chance to see what it looks like when fan fiction is perpetrated with a $150 million budget.

Of the high-profile releases about to come barging through the door, Wolverine is closest to the dreaded prequel prototype. The signs are pretty much there, except in reverse: the X-Men franchise has been pronounced dead, or at least mothballed, but everybody's favorite moody mutant is indestructibly immortal, and Hugh Jackman is still at an age where he can pull off the role. So maybe the best way to try to squeeze a little more money out of the character, minus his familiar supporting cast, is to zap back to before most of them were born and fill in some of the bad boy's back story, which apparently goes back for fucking ever. Wolverine's director, Gavin Hood, who readily acknowledges that "Prequels are usually bad," adds that, since "most of the audience knows what's coming... the excitement should be not 'what?' but 'how?' It changes the emphasis. Usually a movie is about what will happen. Here it's 'How will what we know will happen, happen?'" That sounds about right. And it's true that even when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, the movies can still surprise you. For instance, I saw Gavin Hood's previous films, Tsotsi and Rendition, and now, people who may well have seen them too have hired him to direct a big-budget summer movie. Boy, am I surprised.

Unwatchable #55: “APE”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

A*P*E (also known as Hideous Mutant, Super Kong and, um, Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla) was released in 1976, the same year as the Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. The conspiracy theorist inside me would like to think that De Laurentiis secretly financed A*P*E so that his incredibly fake-looking Kong wouldn’t look so bad by comparison. In reality, A*P*E is a South Korean-American co-production with no apparent connection to the De Laurentiis empire. But I’m allowed to have my suspicions.

The first five minutes of A*P*E set a standard for gut-busting awfulness that few movies could sustain – and indeed, the remainder of the movie is a routinely terrible Kong ripoff. But oh, those first five minutes! It begins with a title card thanking the United States Army for its cooperation in the making of this motion picture. Wha? The United States Army cooperated with this? For what possible reason? Did anyone in charge read a script? You figure there has to be one guy in the Army who has the task of reading all the scripts submitted by producers looking to borrow some tanks and helicopters. (And by the way, how did this guy get that job? Is his brother fighting on the front lines while he sits at a desk reading Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla? Must make for a fun time at Thanksgiving.) Maybe this guy just wanted to assure us all that the Army would be on the case if we’re ever attacked by a giant ape. Or maybe there was some misunderstanding with the Korean producers over the use of the word “Kong.” Something was lost in translation, I’m almost certain.

Anyway, A*P*E skips all the usual tedious nonsense about assembling a crew, chartering a freighter to the island, dealing with the natives and capturing the giant ape. You know, all the stuff that took up about seven hours worth of the Peter Jackson King Kong remake. As the movie begins, we’re already aboard the ship with the drugged 36-foot-ape locked down in the hold. But not for long! The ape awakes, crashes through the deck, and – for reasons I could not discern from the mise-en-scene presented by director Paul Leder (I Dismember Mama) – the entire boat explodes. Apparently the freighter has been cruising along in about fifteen feet of water, because the ape now stands, waist-deep in the ocean, and dances with a rubber shark. (Here is a clip of his escape, which sadly, cuts out right before the shark-dancing.)

Eventually ape defeats shark and reaches land. Specifically, he makes it to Korea, where American movie star Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) is making her latest picture. (From the clips we see, she appears to be starring in the story of a woman in constant danger of being raped.) Ape and actress are destined for a rendezvous, but unlike Kong, this big gorilla does not appear to be a misunderstood gentle soul. Actually, he’s kind of a dick. He rampages around willy-nilly, knocking over schools and hospitals and whatnot. He defies physics by being 36 feet tall and yet towering over four-story buildings. When the inevitable helicopter attack arrives in the final reel, the ape deploys a rude gesture the original Kong could never have gotten away with.

When the beast meets his violent demise, his carpet-remnant fur rippling in the breeze, Marilyn’s weenie boyfriend gets the last word. “He was just too big for a small world like ours.” Poignance, thy name is A*P*E.

Previously on Unwatchable:
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz
58. Ed
59. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!
60. Carry On Columbus

Austin’s Zombie Girl Goes to Slamdance

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

We’ve seen more than our share of zombie movies in recent years (and someday I’ll get around to tell you my own zombie movie story, so there’s something to live for), but as the documentary Zombie Girl: The Movie will show when it debuts at Slamdance on January 16th, Emily Hagins’ Pathogen is a little different. That’s because Hagins was twelve years old when she made it.

“Most twelve-year-olds are busy with friends, homework, and online chatting,” according to the helpful press release that just arrived via email. “But film obsessed Emily Hagins spends her time writing and directing a feature-length zombie movie, starring her young friends and classmates. ZOMBIE GIRL: THE MOVIE documents the exhilarating and heartbreaking two years it took her to shoot, edit, and world premiere the film to a sold out audience in Austin, Texas. Encouraged by famous friends and fans - including Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), who she corresponds with in third grade, and journalist Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News fame, ZOMBIE GIRL: THE MOVIE traces Emily’s remarkable vision and youthful will to succeed.”

Emily is now 16 and “currently in post-production on her second feature film, The Retelling.” Feh, that’s nothing. Why, I’ve just completed my third blog entry of the day!

(shoots self, others.)

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

Forrest J. Ackerman, 1916-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

If you had the mixed fortune to be American, male, of a certain age, and interested in horror movies and science fiction, chances are better than good that you grew up with a soft spot for Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman, who died last week at the age of 92, was a legendary figure in several categories of fandom as a writer, editor, convention goer and collector of memorabilia. But he was best known in kids' bedrooms across the country as the man behind Famous Monsters of Filmland, a nostalgia-drenched photo magazine that combined stills from classic scare pictures (taken from Ackerman's vast personal collection) with punning captions and assorted trivia. Famous Monsters began in 1958 as what was first intended, by independent publisher James Warren, to be a one-shot publication based on a French magazine consisting of classic horror movie stills accompanied by captions. Warren was stymied, though, by two problems: what he saw as the dry, academic tone of the writing, and his discovery that he couldn't simply reproduce the contents of the French magazine without dealing with a mountain of copyright problems. After Ackerman assured him that he could provide stills as good as those in the original magazine, Warren agreed to go ahead with the project, provided that Ackerman also juice up the copy with strings of "Fangs for the memories!"-style puns. (Ackerman once told a reporter that Warren's great contribution to this proess amounted to sitting across from him "holding up an invisible sign reading, 'I am eleven years old, make me laugh.'") The one-shot was so successful that it became the launching pad for what became Warren Publishing, which would go on to the horror-comics magazines Eerie and Creepy, which were spun off from the Ackerman-edited Monster World, as well as Harvey Kurtzman's Help! and the '70s reprints of Will Eisner's The Spirit. Ackerman also came up with the name of one of Warren's most durable properties, the scantily clad alien bloodsucker Vampirella, and served as associate producer of a 1996 movie based on the character. But it was as the Famous Monsters guy that he got to live out one of the great fantasies of the collector-geek, keeping his dusty old enthusiasms alive by transferring them to members of a new generation. He edited 191 issues of the magazine from its founding until it finally closed up shop in 1983. (A revival that began in 1993, launched by a fellow who decided that the title was in the public domain, led to Ackerman getting involved in an expensive, long-running, and in the end, barely resolved legal tangle.)

Ackerman, who had received a special Hugo Award for "#1 Fan Personality", was a beloved figure on the festival and fan convention circuit, and was, among a great many other titles, a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which provides a home to many items from his personal collection. More recently, he was given the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers of America. Among movie directors with a taste for his favorite genres, he was a favorite get for insider cameo appearances, in such movies as Equinox, the 1976 King Kong, Joe Dante's The Howling, Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (released here as Dead Alive), and several films by John Landis, including Innocent Blood, Schlock, an Kentucky Fried Movie. He also appeared in many documentaries and was the subject of last year's Famous Monster: Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman's own fiction was published under countless pseudonyms, among them "Spencer Strong", "J. Forrester Eckman", "Dr. Acula", and "Laurajean Ermayne", under which he wrote "sapphic" fiction. The Daughters of Bilitis once showed their appreciation for his efforts by naming him an honorary lesbian.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:30:00 GMT

SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER (1993)

If you’re ever standing around awkwardly at a cocktail party with my father, just mention this movie and watch his eyes light up: you’ll instantly have a new friend and at least half an hour of fresh conversation fodder. Before he retired, you see, my father was a public school teacher who worked with “gifted and talented” students – and no, despite the beliefs of every pushy parent in America, not all of their little darlings are technically “gifted” – but Joshua Waitzkin, the real-life chess prodigy at the heart of screenwriter Steve Zaillian’s directorial debut, would definitely qualify. And that’s the character’s problem: as the saying goes, “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.” Waitzkin (portrayed with believable, naturalistic grace by a then-eight-year-old Max Pomeranc) has undeniable talent, but worries his gift will ultimately rob him of a normal, happy life. The movie comes down to a battle for Waitzkin’s soul, with Ben Kingsley’s joyless mentor on one side, urging the boy to use his abilities to win at all costs (like World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer), and Laurence Fishburne’s laid-back speed chess guru on the other, reminding Waitzkin that Fischer’s exclusive focus on winning eventually drove him into bitter seclusion. The notion that winning and happiness aren’t necessarily the same thing is a rare theme in Hollywood (and the U.S. in general)...which is exactly why my Dad and me both dig this film so much.

HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

Before he came to Hollywood with dreams of elves, walking trees, and ancient CGI hobbits dancing in his head, Peter Jackson made a few films best described as ‘muppet porn’...and then he made Heavenly Creatures. Heavenly Creatures is the true (or true-ish) story of one of the most notorious murders in New Zealand, in which two teenage girls murdered one of their mothers in 1954. Jackson chooses to focus on the relationship between the girls, an obsessive closed-circuit of fantasy and romance that is surprisingly mundane and normal to modern eyes. Many people have intense friendships in their early teen years that involve storytelling and attachments to pop culture and so forth. Well, okay, these girls begin exploring their sexuality with each other at some point, which was extra-freaky for their parents – products of their times – once they start to catch on. Jackson shows how the girls’ fantasies have idealized the parents of the richer one (who’s played by a young Kate Winslet, by the way, just starting her career of cinematic nakedness), thus adding an interesting class dimension to their decision of which parent to murder for standing in their way. And Jackson brings their fantasy world to life with a deftness that helps to explain – if not forgive – how the girls came to choose murder as the solution to their problems. I should point out that I’m pretty fond of the elf movies, actually, and Heavenly Creatures has the wit and humanity to illustrate how Jackson brought those books to filmic life without embarrassing everyone involved. Well, okay, there’s a little embarrassment (for instance, all of the hobbits jumping on the bed towards the end, for 17 straight hours in dreadful slo-mo), but it’s minimal in the grand scheme.

GODS & MONSTERS (1999)

I don’t know how true this story is, but it’s better than a lot of biopics of creative people. The subject is James Whale (Ian McKellen, who also appeared in Peter Jackson’s elf movies), a director of 20 movies between 1930 and 1941 – most notably Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein – and only one thereafter. Whale was openly gay at the time, which is remarkable considering the contemporary horror of homosexuality. The movie runs with the idea by focusing only on his last days, after a stroke has left him lost in his memories. Whale is constantly flashing back to his time in the trenches in WWI, where he lost someone he loved, and to the making of Bride of Frankenstein. He becomes attached to his new gardener, played soberly by Brendan Fraser. Fraser comes to realize that the Frankenstein movies are a metaphor for the isolation Whale felt throughout his life because of his sexual orientation. All of this is a little overblown, naturally (this is a biopic, after all), but it fares fairly well when compared to the hoke-fests of Ray, Walk The Line, A Beautiful Mind, and their ilk. One of the best moments comes near the end, when Whale is walking in silhouette with a hulking figure that appears to be Frankenstein’s monster, but a flash of light shows it to be Fraser. Quite nicely done.

QUIZ SHOW (1994)

Robert Redford has a blunt directorial hand. The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Horse Whisperer, Ordinary People, and even (and this is hard for me, because I love to fly-fish) A River Runs Through It: all pushy where they should be gentle and preachy where they should be guileless. With two movies, though, Redford’s insistence that his audience agree with him is subsumed into his narrative, making them far more enjoyable viewing experiences: The Milagro Beanfield War and Quiz Show. Quiz Show is the true(-ish) story of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, which led to congressional hearings into whether or not the shows were rigged. Amazingly, these hearings somehow failed to stamp out producer-rigged game shows for good. So the movie has a classic competition between a not-ready-for-prime-time slob (the “ethnic” ex-GI Herb Stempel, played by John Turturro, who is apparently all ethnicities in one) and an elite pantywaist (Columbia professor of English Charles Van Doren, played by the cinematic face of privilege, Ralph Fiennes). The producers rig the show (spoiler!) so that Stempel loses to Van Doren, but then renege on their promise to keep Stempel flush with TV work. There’s certainly some bluntness in this movie, but Redford does take the time to murky the waters by making Stempel a little unlikeable and Van Doren a little charming and regretful. Not too shabby.

RESCUE DAWN (2007)/LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY (1997)

The story so amazing that Werner Herzog had to tell it twice, Rescue Dawn is the fictionalized biopic version of the story Dieter Dengler tells about his life in the documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly. The documentary will blow you away, guaranteed. Herzog has Dengler re-enact many of his ordeals while telling the story of his capture and desperate escape from a Laotian prison camp. Dengler is a fascinating guy with a positivity and self-assurance that seem bottomless, especially in circumstances where most people would see no other options than despair. It’s no wonder that he’s so interesting to Herzog, who is clearly attracted to people who remain in thrall to their dreams even in the most extreme situations. Rescue Dawn is the Hollywood movie treatment of Dengler’s story, but since Herzog remains in the director’s chair, it has an extremity and beauty that usually don’t appear in Vietnam epics. Christian Bale captures Dengler’s spirit well, and the cast is excellent. There’s still something a little too idealized about it, though. To feel like you know Dengler, you should see the documentary. To be swept up into his life, supplement with the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

Set Your DVR!: November 3 - 10, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Whew! I'm happy that the Halloween season is over! I watched a ton of great movies, but I have horror fatigue. Let's see what the next week has to offer. There's some world-class movies on TV this week!

Mon, Nov 3:

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

4:15/5:15 pm: I Am David on IFC. Paul “Freaks & Geeks” Feig directs a completely unfunny and somewhat mawkish film about a boy who escapes a Stalinist concentration camp and learns to love. Feig is awesome, but this movie is not. Consider this a warning.

7/8 pm: True Stories on VH1CL. David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of kookiness, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

Tues, Nov 4:

UPDATED!

9:05/10:05 am: The F Word on IFC (repeat at 4:05/5:05 pm). Catch the Screengrab's own Andrew Osborne as the character mysteriously named "Andrew!" Thanks to Scott Von D for the hat tip.

10:30/11:30 am: Grand Theft Parsons on IFC (repeat at 5:30/6:30 pm and on 11/5 at 4:55/5:55 am). Not a great movie, but it's about the untimely demise of Gram Parsons and what happened thereafter.

7/8 pm Decision at Sundown on TCM. Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott in a taut little no-budget Western. Not the best of their collaborations, but it's decent.

Wed, Nov 5:

9/10 am: The Straight Story on FX. David Lynch's G-rated film about an aging man who travels via lawnmower to make amends with his long-estranged brother. It's utterly fantastic.

11:30 am/12:30 pm: Burden of Dream on IFC. Les Blank's documentary about Werner Herzog's maddening attempts to make Fitzcarraldo. This is the rare film where the making-of documentary is better than the fiction. If you haven't seen it, this is essential viewing. You will reach the other side in greater awe of Herzog, nature, Kinski, madness, and the folly of human ambition.

12:30/1:30 pm: The Blue Gardenia on TCM. A scalding film noir by Fritz Lang.

8/9 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC (repeat on 11/6 at 12/1 am). Some of the Factory Records bands are stunning, and some (The Happy Mondays in particular) are dull and overrated. But Tony Wilson was mesmerizing, and Michael Winterbottom's postmodern bio makes the case for his greatness.

10/11 pm: The Filth and the Fury on IFC (repeat on 11/6 at 2/3 am). If you're curious about the Sex Pistols, this is the definitive documentary.

Thurs, Nov 6:

1:45/2:45 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM. Pretty much the greatest screwball comedy.

5:05/6:05 pm: Ride with the Devil on IFC (repeat on 11/7 at 4:40/5:40 am). Ang Lee's odd Civil War drama where everybody's on the wrong side of history.

Fri, Nov 7:

8/9 am: Heavenly Creatures on LOGO. Before the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson directed this movie about the intensity of fantasy in a teenage friendship and the lengths to which two girls actually went (this is based on a true story) to keep themselves together.

Sat, Nov 8:

12:15/1:15 am: La Jetee on TCM. This is the best movie I've recommended yet, and it's only 28 minutes long. I recommend watching it twice in a row, then waiting two weeks and watching it again. See what you remember about it. Watch Vertigo again in the meantime.

1/2 am: The Trip on TCM. This is, like, whoa. And then you'll be all what? And then, man, like, you know, then, you'll get it. And you'll be all really? But you'll know.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata II on IFC. Kurosawa's third film, the sequel to his first. The climactic scene is scarred pretty badly, but Kurosawa's eye is as sharp as ever.

9:30/10:30 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and on 11/9 at 4/5 am). Peter Weir's second feature film, this is an existential horror film. Several girls and a teacher disappear on an outing to Hanging Rock. One girl turns up mysteriously days later. The disparity between the proper Victorian British and the great untamed Australian Outback serves to heighten the oddness of this movie.

Sun, Nov 9:

7/8 am: Amarcord on IFC. The most felliniesque of Fellini films. One of his last major films. I have never thought it was as good as 8 1/2, but it still packs a punch.

9:05/10:05 am: Umberto D on IFC. De Sica's neorealist classic about an old man cast aside by society. Prepare for tears and a greater awareness of the plight of the elderly. You'll never be able to name a dog "Flike."

9:15/10:15 am: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek on TCM. What a conundrum! Umberto D and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek playing at the same time! This is a fantastic, censor-baiting Preston Sturges comedy. Eddie Bracken may not be the greatest male lead ever, but the jokes come hard and fast.

1:15/2:15 pm: The Cars That Ate Paris on IFC. Peter Weir's first feature film. I've never seen it, but it's bound to be interesting.

8/9 pm: Wild at Heart on IFC (repeat on 11/10 at 2/3 am). This may be David Lynch's worst film. Or maybe it's the one with Sting. Hard to say, but there's still something worthwhile in each.

Mon, Nov 10:

8:20/9:20 am: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years on IFC (repeat at 3/4 pm). Don't let too many years pass without watching Ozzy make breakfast.

2:45/3:45 pm: Becket on TCM. It's Oscar-bait, sure, but not a bad movie.

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

JESSICA ALBA

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I like sexy women. Sometimes, I like to hear them discuss foreign policy in a purring Greek accent (Arianna Huffington...mrowr!), while other times I've been known to enjoy a more prurient visual display of nubile hips and boobies. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this interest. Unlike, say, my lonely passion for Whit Stillman films, which can apparently no longer be satisfied, the demand for sexy women has glutted the market to the point where it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. Everywhere you look (in pop culture, if not my local gym) there are sweaty, well-toned H-O-T girls and women gyrating their pelvic muscles and shaking their butts in thongs and Daisy Dukes and whipped cream bikinis...so WHY, out of all the sexy women in the world, from Arianna to Miss November 2008, does Jessica Frickin’ Alba get to be in so many movies? Yes, she has a nice bod, and I enjoyed watching her undulate in Sin City as much as the next straight guy...until, that is, the camera panned up to her completely vapid expression, on a face completely devoid of mystery, personality or even the lusty carnality of supporting co-star Brittany Murphy. In real life, Alba may be a sweet, darling lass who bakes pies for orphans, but onscreen she’s got less acting talent and charisma than Ryan Gosling’s sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl...and yet Alba is somehow considered an A-list player, who gets to appear not just on the cover of Maxim, but in major motion pictures, in multiple genres, from action and horror to romantic comedy, while far more interesting and far sexier actresses like Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Mila Kunis, Thora Birch, Marley Shelton (and, no doubt, a huge percentage of the rest of the female S.A.G. membership) bob along under the surface, crossing their fingers in hopes of landing some of the high profile lead roles currently going to America’s favorite bleach-blonde void.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Oh, boo yourself. In the years since his unfortunate death, it has become distasteful bordering on offensive to say anything even remotely critical about Christopher Reeve. And certainly, it’s not my intention to impugn him as a man – he was, by all accounts, a decent human being, a loving husband, and a fine father to his children. The tragic accident which cost him his health was an event to be lamented, and he became a hero in its wake by advocating relentlessly for the rights and dignity of the disabled; and the comeback he made from his paralysis was very nearly a miracle. But before he took that unlucky tumble from a horse, a lot of people already knew what no one is now willing to say: Christopher Reeve was a terrible actor. Wooden, clumsy, and extremely limited in range, he started out as a pretty boy who might have been a modest success if he’d stuck to what he was good at. But Reeve was an ambitious man who soon discovered that his ambition led him to places his talent wasn’t able to go. He was laughable in Somewhere in Time, embarrassing in Monsignor, and, matched up against genuine heavyweight Michael Caine in Deathtrap, he just looked like he wanted to go home. His reputation as an actor, such as it is, rests on the Superman movies he did in the 1980s, but a lot of that adulation is vested in the character he played, and a lot more in the man who was playing him; looking at Reeve’s actual performances in the movies, it’s hard to believe anyone got very excited over that.

HALLE BERRY

It must have taken a phenomenal amount of determination and perseverance for Berry to work her way up through decorative eye candy roles in such movies as Strictly Business, Boomerang, and The Flintstones to more challenging dramatic parts in Losing Isiah and Bulworth, and then to her landmark win as the first African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actress for Monster's Ball and all the attention about her becoming the first black Bond girl in Die Another Day. But Monster's Ball is still a ridiculous movie, and Berry is hardly the least ridiculous thing in it. And her Bond girl made a great entrance, walking in from the surf, but then, as is so often the case with Berry's characters, wore out her welcome as soon as she started talking. Berry can be off-putting because, like Demi Moore, she seems to be less interested in entertaining the audience than in daring them not to respect her; at her worst, she radiates a defensive insistence on her own stature as an actress that is way out of proportion to her proven abilities, which in moments of high drama seem to consist mostly of a tremulous, anxious quality combined with a "Who farted?" expression. And that's when her mouth isn't even moving: her big line from the first X-Men movie ("Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lighting? The same thing that happens to everything else.") has the special distinction of being both the lamest-written and the lamest-delivered line in the history of superhero movies. It's just too bad that her need to be taken seriously may preclude her from doing more comedy. Because if the clip above is any indication, we do have to give her props for having a sense of humor.

ORLANDO BLOOM

Did Peter Jackson have him grown in a lab? In the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings pictures, most of the cast can be seen with hair and sweat flying while Bloom, as the elf Legolas, always looks as if his smooth plastic surface had just been wiped clean with a damp cloth. When I saw the movies, I assumed that he'd been CGI'ed to look that way, on the theory that elves never have a hair out of place even when they go on the flume ride at the water park, but Viggo Mortensen has since told interviewers that he used to stare at Bloom in disbelief while they were filming, wondering how the little bastard kept looking like a fashion spread no matter what got thrown at him or what exertions were required of him. Will Bloom ever find another role as perfectly suited to his lightweight, poreless quality as that of an arrow-shooting elf? He hasn't so far. He was cast as the romantic hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, only to have the movies use his inability to hold the screen with Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley as a running in-joke. It was fun getting to see Brendan Gleeson slap the pluperfect shit out of him in Troy, but the directors who've given him the chance to carry a picture -- in Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown and the barely released Haven -- have only succeeded in putting nasty dents in their own careers. So far, he hasn't done enough damage to otherwise promising projects to qualify as a menace, but that could change: he's supposedly threatening to play the Alain Delon role in Hong Kong action master Johnny To's planned remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 French gangland classic Le Cercle Rouge. If he pulls that off, all will be forgiven. If he screws it up, film geeks of many kinds will want to lasso his balls and leave him hanging upside down from a Times Square billboard.

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

Where did Renée Zellweger come from, and what did she ever do to earn her keep in the gallery of semi-major starlets? She has the acting abilities and charisma of a lutefisk. There is little that is redeeming about her in any of her movies. Especially not her uhm, "method" act as "fat" in Bridget Jones's Diary. Whose hand she greased to win an Oscar for Cold Mountain we will never know. And speaking of Oscars, a nomination for her role in Chicago? You must be joking. Just about every other actor in that movie swept the floor with her. And that includes Mr. Cellophane. All this is quite aside from the fact that she perpetually looks as if she just bit into a lemon.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

There’s a certain amount of humor in the notion of a big fat guy playing an indestructible martial arts machine. But Steven Seagal isn’t laughing. Ever. In fact, he may not even have the physical capability. And if watching close-ups of his portly mug intercut with shots of an obviously thinner stunt man kicking ass on the roof of a speeding train in Under Siege 2 didn’t get the man to laugh out loud, I guess he never will. Which is probably all for the best: based on the witty one-liners in his godawful body of work (as evidenced in the clip above), the only thing worse than Seagal’s “enlightened” action flicks would be a string of inspirational Zen comedies. Speaking of which...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, Mike Myers (despite his loveable Wayne’s World and Austin Powers personas) is a hellacious douche, largely despised in Hollywood for both the right and some of the wrong reasons, by good and evil people alike. As if beating the Powers franchise to death and helping Jim Carrey and Theodore Geisel’s money-grubbing widow to destroy the wonder and magic of Dr. Seuss’ legacy weren’t enough, Myers actually said The Love Guru was “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas,” a statement that’s actually funnier than anything in the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Vintage Trailer Review: Incredible Two-Headed Marathon Special

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It’s the middle of October, and many of you are no doubt getting ready for your Halloween festivities. But for all you movie lovers who are planning to be in Central Ohio this weekend, check out the area’s premier horror-movie event, The Incredible Two-Headed Marathon. Currently in their fifth year as co-hosts, Bruce Bartoo and Joe Neff have once again lined up a diverse and crowd-pleasing lineup, with something to delight horror lovers of practically every stripe. This year, to commemorate the Marathon, I’ve decided to post some trailers for the classics that are being shown, to go along with the Trailer Reviews I've already posted this week for the area premiere films playing at the Marathon, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Let the Right One In.

We begin with the trailer for Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill!, one of Bava’s early classics and a favorite of giallo fans. I’m woefully underversed in my Bava, but there’s no mistaking that style, even in trailer form. Dig those zooms!

Next, we move on to the original Wes Craven version of The Hills Have Eyes, back before he got all mixed up with Kevin Williamson and violins and the like.

Another genre master being represented this year is John Carpenter, whose 1980 film The Fog will be playing here. Not exactly one of my favorite Carpenter films, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless.

Finally, Bruce and Joe always seem to include a movie that doesn’t necessarily fit with the “horror” theme but is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. This year, they’ve chosen Peter Jackson’s cult favorite Meet the Feebles, which should be a blast to see with a Marathon crowd.

If you’re planning to attend a horror marathon where you live, feel free to tell us about it in the comments section. And for anyone who’s interested in finding out more about the Incredible Two-Headed Marathon, check out the official Web site.

Reviews by Request: War of the Gargantuas (1966, Ishiro Honda)

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Beginning this week, I’m changing the format for Reviews by Request in an attempt to allow more people to participate in the requesting process. See the note at the end of the review for details.

Special thanks to reader Kent M. Beeson for requesting this week’s review, of which he said, “I'd love to hear what you think, but I fear the words will get stuck in your throat.” Hope I did it justice, Kent.

As sophisticated as I like to pretend my moviegoing tastes are, there’s still a part of me that loves old-school Japanese monster movies with a childlike glee. I’m guessing a lot of this has to do with the monsters themselves, which without fail tend to make me want to emit loud, Harry Knowles-like cheers of “man in suit! Yeeeeeah!!!” But while I (usually) refrain from doing this, there’s still something about this antiquated technique that takes me back to my youth. In an age when practically any monster imaginable can be created on a computer, it still proves tricky for FX whizzes to really give their CGI beasties a real presence in the action.

Now, some people out there aren’t as keen on old-school monsters as I am, presumably because they’re still in the thrall of the new and the flashy. But in my experience, it’s rare to find a digital monster with even half the personality of the man-in-suit creatures of yore. Peter Jackson’s Kong came close, as did the slimy baddie in The Host, but most of them are too graceful and weightless to really work in the same way as, say, the classic incarnations on Godzilla. By actually dressing a person up in an oversized rubber costume, a monster takes on a kind of imperfect human physicality that’s nearly impossible to duplicate on a computer. This is the difference between a monster who works as an actual character in the story and one that’s merely a plot device. And if a monster movie succeeds or fails on the basis of how good its monster is, Ishiro Honda’s War of the Gargantuas is one of the greatest monster movies ever made.

The plot is… well, I’m sure you can guess. A giant monster attacks Japan, the army tries to fight it off, and scientists work to determine how to destroy it. As with most of the classic “kaiju” movies, science is to blame for creating the monster- in this case, an American scientist (played by Russ Tamblyn) who once created an ape-like hulk who later escaped into the wild. The characters usually refer to the monster as “Frankenstein,” although anyone who paid attention in Brit Lit will no doubt recall that “Frankenstein” was the doctor’s name, while his creation was “Frankenstein’s Monster” or “The Creature.” No matter- the monster’s out there now, and much effort is expended to take it down.

But suddenly… wait, what’s this? There are actually TWO Frankensteins! Of course, there’d kind of have to be, or else the title wouldn’t make much sense. Anyway, it seems the creature currently menacing the coastline of Japan is not the same creature as the escaped Frankenstein. The new Frankenstein (called Gailah) is the destructive one, while the one that originally escaped (now called Sanda) tries to stop him. At one point, Tamblyn helpfully explains that human cruelty apparently caused Sanda to lose a piece of his body, which eventually developed into Gailah. “It’s kind of like cloning,” he says, although it sounds more like budding to me. If there’s a subtext here, it’s that the man’s appetite for destruction will only sow more hatred and evil in the world. Needless to say, this development leaves the army at a bit of a loss, since they can’t risk creating more Frankensteins in their efforts to destroy the one they’re facing.

I know what you’re saying- what about the monsters? Well, they’re awesome, in large part because they’re not the godlike creatures you’ll find in many movies of this sort. Gailah is basically an overgrown baby, panicking at the sight of fire or bright light, injuring fairly easily for a being of his size. Meanwhile, while the Japanese army would prefer to simply rid themselves of both Frankensteins, Tamblyn and comely assistant Kumi Mizuno know that Santa is really a gentle soul. In my favorite shot of the film, Sanda slides down a mountain in slow-motion to rescue Mizuno, who he remembers from when he was (much) smaller.

What’s inescapable about the Frankensteins is how clumsy they are. They don’t leap around with a balletic grace, but instead lumber and lurch like, well, Frankenstein’s monster. When they fight, they stomp around, they occasionally miss their punches, they fall with a thud. And of course, they do plenty of damage to the city, both inadvertently and purposely. In the end, they take their battle out to sea, where they are presumed destroyed by the sudden emergence of a massive volcano (a volcano ex machina?). Yet it’s never quite clear if they’ve actually been destroyed. One yearns for a sequel, but alas, it never happened.

War of the Gargantuas has pretty much everything you could want from a Japanese monster movie, and nothing you don’t. There’s very little “human interest” in the movie, aside from a hint of a love story between Tamblyn and Mizuno. Instead, the movie gives you 90 minutes of monster mayhem, army battles, wanton destruction, and stern-faced scientists trying to puzzle out what it all means, all in glorious Tohoscope™ and accompanied by music by the great Akira Ifukube. Yes, it’s formulaic, but when the formula is done this well, it’s churlish to complain. If you like movies like this, War of the Gargantuas should be right up your alley. I know I enjoyed the hell out of it.

~~~~

Beginning this week, I’ve decided to switch the format of my Reviews By Requests columns. Rather than taking suggestions in the comments section, I’m going to start using a poll to determine my next Review By Request. Below, I’ve listed five noteworthy films I haven’t seen. I ask only that you, the readers, choose your favorite from this rather diverse bunch. So, what’ll it be? Andy Warhol’s two-projector art film? Monte Hellmann’s Warren Oates-starring B-movie favorite? Werner Herzog’s early documentary about a blind and deaf woman? The Vincente Minnelli/Rat Pack classic that has lent its name to the blog of Screengrab fave Glenn Kenny? Or Kon Ichikawa’s epic account of the 1964 Olympic Games? It’s up to you:

Which of the following should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

This poll will remain active through Friday, and whichever movie receives the most votes will be my next Review By Request. So feel free to stump for your favorite of the bunch in the comments section below, or even suggest a few titles for the special horror-themed Review By Request that will run the week of Halloween.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 21-27, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve had some fun with the Entertainment Weekly list of new classics, but let it be known that we here at the Screengrab have some new classics of our own! Personally I get all choked up thinking about the time we maybe confirmed a rumor about Gael Garcia Bernal, but for others, the seminal moment was the story about how Crispin Glover requires cash and sushi. Reaching all the way back to Monday, here are the rest of the posts we’ve deemed absolutely timeless, to be treasured for generations to come.

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What’s Wrong With U.S. (Parts One, Two and Three)

The week in lawsuits: Gibney vs. ThinkFilm and Adams vs. Marvel

The films of yesteryear: Top Gun, Smiles of a Summer Night and Heaven Can Wait

The films of today: The Wackness and Garden Party

The films of never, please: American Soldiers and Soccer Dog: The Movie

The filmmakers of some repute: Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar and Peter Jackson

The lovely ladies: Ellen Page, Hilary Duff and The Women

The one that got away: George Carlin

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Frighteners (1996, Peter Jackson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Today, Peter Jackson is best known to most audiences as one of Hollywood’s big-ticker filmmakers, the New Zealand visionary who was responsible for bringing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the big screen in rousing, ambitious fashion. But in 1996, he was still trying to make his way in Hollywood, with a handful of low-budget genre movies and the critically-acclaimed Heavenly Creatures to his name. He came to America in the hope of eventually making a big-budget remake of King Kong, a dream project of his since he first decided to become a filmmaker. But first, he had to make a name for himself in the American film industry, which he hoped to do with a horror movie/comedy like the ones that made his reputation in his native land. That movie was The Frighteners.

Trouble is, most critics weren’t on to Jackson’s game yet. Jackson’s early films such as Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste and Dead Alive had yet to make much headway with American moviegoers, so critics’ only point of comparison was Jackson’s relatively restrained true crime drama Heavenly Creatures. Those who wanted more of the same were sorely disappointed, and found Jackson’s latest film a loud, obnoxious bore. Roger Ebert’s review of the film was typical of this reaction, as he wrote: “One of the more excruciating experiences for any movie lover is to sit through a movie filled with frenetic nonstop action, in which, however, nothing of interest happens. The Frighteners is a film like that… Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.”

But while those who were in the know were more receptive to the charms of The Frighteners- Mike D’Angelo wrote, “At last, a big-budget summer movie that actually delivers on its promise of entertaining escapist entertainment, without insulting the audience's intelligence in the process”- the film never really caught on even after the Lord of the Rings trilogy propelled Jackson to mainstream fame. And that’s a shame, because while The Frighteners doesn’t reach the frenzied heights of Jackson’s best work in the horror genre, it’s still a blast, especially if you’re a fan of his early films.

For one thing, to dismiss the film as Ebert does as merely being empty, frenetic action is to overlook the infectious strain of sick humor that runs through the film. Look at the character of Judge (played by John Astin), a ghost who’s been dead so long his body is literally falling to pieces. At least once, we see Judge’s jawbone fall to the floor, only to be snatched up by a spectral dog. But that doesn’t stop Judge from forging on with his life, even bursting into a museum exhibition to satisfy his sexual longing with a mummy. After doing the nasty so that his alive, ghost-wrangling pal Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) can see him- even though nobody else can- the satiated Judge turns to Frank and sighs, “I like it when they lie still like that.” How many big-studio summer movies would even attempt a joke like that? Very few, I’d wager.

And it’s this refusal to make nice that makes The Frighteners so much fun. Sure, Jackson had executive producer Robert Zemeckis (fresh off Forrest Gump) in his corner, but it’s still surprising how much of Jackson’s sensibility made it into the film intact. One of my favorite elements of the movie is the gleefully unhinged supporting work by Jeffrey Combs as Dammers, a very odd FBI agent. From Dammers’ initial entrance, Combs’ live-wire performance takes the film to a new and more exciting level. It’s the sort of performance most directors would discourage, citing the old saw that, when acting onscreen, “less is more.” But Combs’ work is so inspired and hilarious that it works magnificently in spite of flying in the face of conventional wisdom. Watch him in the scene where he interrogates Frank, as Combs chews up and spits out line after memorable line (my favorite: “What did *he* do? Piss on your Hush Puppies?”). Eventually, it’s all Fox can do with simply sit there and bury his head in his hands, as if to ask the audience, “what? Are you really still watching me?”

Best of all is the climactic sequence of the movie, in which Frank and his love interest Lucy (Trini Alvarado) are chased through an abandoned mental hospital by a deranged Dee Wallace Stone and her ghostly lover, an executed serial killer played by Jake Busey. On one level, it’s exciting to see Jackson’s talent firing on all cylinders, as he effortlessly cuts between past and present, with Frank seeing the murders that took place decades ago even as he is pursued by those very same killers today. But even in the midst of impressive wall-to-wall effects (provided of course by Jackson’s own Weta Digital), the film’s wicked sense of humor remains intact. If you don’t crack a smile when Wallace Stone picks up a pickaxe and declares, “I’m in the mood for a little vivisection,” then chances are you have no soul.

Through some miracle, the disastrous box-office and critical showing of The Frighteners didn’t completely torpedo Jackson’s career in America, and while it took a few years, Jackson even convinced New Line to pony up the dough for his massive Lord of the Rings trilogy. And the rest, as they say, is history. But as much as I love Jackson’s recent films, I do miss him making movies like The Frighteners, and every nod he makes to that side of his sensibility fills me with ghoulish glee. Until Jackson can use his clout to make another movie that fully recaptures that old feeling, there’ll always be The Frighteners, an underappreciated title on his filmography that definitely warrants a second look.

Remake vs. Original: Kong vs. Kong vs. Kong

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

After marveling at the remarkably rendered 1930s New York of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, I got a mad craving to go back and revisit my first Kong...not the 1933 classic, but the 1976 version I saw as part of a long-ago birthday field trip, sitting uncomfortably close to my grandmother while naked Skull Island native boobies bounced gloriously on one of the big, wide screens of the late, lamented Westgate Cinema in beautiful, balmy Brockton, Massachusetts.

Even more recently, my wife rented the original as part of her own private ongoing Netflix survey course of film history, allowing me to compare all three apes in a cinematic steel cage match. Which film is The King of Kong? Let’s check the scorecard!

THE BEAST:

It’s the eternal question: stop-motion, CGI or a guy in a monkey suit? The original Kong was groundbreaking and iconic. Peter Jackson’s ape was fearsome and expressive and goofed around on an icy pond. And, as Dino De Laurentiis promised vis-à-vis his bicentennial version: “When Jaws dies, nobody cries. When Kong dies, they all cry.” To be honest, this race is too close to call, so I’ll go with the chimp that started it all. Advantage: Original.

THE BEAUTY:

Jessica Lange, God bless her, is automatically disqualified for playing a character named “Dwan.” Naomi Watts delivered a charming, well-rounded performance as Ann Darrow, generating about a hundred times more chemistry with her simian co-star than she did with Sean Penn in 21 Grams. But as good as she was, Dr. Frank-N-Furter didn’t sing about Naomi Watts in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He sang about the one-and-only iconic Fay Wray. Advantage: Original.

THE HERO:

A little Adrian Brody goes a long way for me, and I don’t remember much about Bruce Cabot’s performance as Jack Driscoll in the original (other than it was perfectly fine). But, c’mon...Jeff Bridges on Skull Island in a crazy Amish beard? The Dude abides. Advantage: 1976.

THE SHOWMAN:

Jack Black gave a fine, relatively understated performance as Carl Denham in the 2005 version, and Robert Armstrong totally owns the classic line, “It was beauty killed the beast.” But I have to say I’m partial to Charles Grodin’s oilman turned showman for providing the classic Kong story with a truly hissable villain...plus he’s the only one who gets squashed by a giant ape foot. Advantage: 1976.

SKULL ISLAND:

The 1976 version featured the aforementioned naked breastices, and Kong’s battle with the dinosaurs in Peter Jackson’s remake was insanely exciting, but the original directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack achieved the same level of wonder and excitement with a quarter of the technology. Bonus points for Noble Johnson’s portrayal of the Skull Island chief, the only truly dignified, humane and memorable “native” character in any version of Kong. Advantage: Original.

THE SHOWDOWN:

Kong’s original battle with the biplanes atop the Empire State Building is classic movie magic, and Kong’s battle with helicopters on and around the Twin Towers now sadly packs an emotional wallop it didn’t originally possess, but I could have spent hours drinking in Peter Jackson’s obsessively detailed CGI New York, even without the breathtaking action in the foreground. Advantage: 2005.

And so, after tallying the votes, the winner is...ORIGINAL!

Stay tuned for next week’s exciting Original vs. Remake smackdown (in honor of the release of The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector's Edition DVD box set): Sinatra's Eleven vs. Clooney's Eleven!

Del Toro on the Hobbit Trail

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

By now me and you and everyone we know is aware that Guillermo del Toro has been tapped to direct not one but two new hobbit movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. (Initial reports indicated that the second film would span the period between the end of the book and the beginning of Lord of the Rings, but now that appears not to be the case.) Now that years of accounting disputes between New Line and Peter Jackson are finally resolved, the AP reports that del Toro “will move to New Zealand for four years to make the films back-to-back with executive producer Peter Jackson.”

Seems like a perfect match, right? If Jackson himself can’t direct them, why not substitute another hobbit-looking fantasy filmmaker? But Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir smells a rat. O’Hehir interviewed del Toro at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and asked him about Tolkien’s influence on his work. “I was never into heroic fantasy,” del Toro replied. “At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits -- I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”

I suppose you could make the argument that hiring a hobbit-hater to direct The Hobbit could spark some creative tension, but O’Hehir isn’t having it, especially since the whole process will consume four years out of del Toro’s career. “I'm riding a major bummer if del Toro is shelving 3993 (the third of his Spanish history-fantasy trilogy, after Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone), his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness or his Doctor Strange blockbuster. All three of those projects are vastly better fits than the hairy-footed little guys and dragons.”

Meanwhile, Defamer has been hard at work coming up with more suitable nominations for the Hobbit director’s chair. We particularly enjoy the suggestion of David Lynch: “A natural short-lister for any film involving midgets. Plus we all know how well his previous would-be fantasy franchise went.” Yes, that would be Dune.

That Guy!: John Rhys-Davies

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Genre films are something of a trap for actors and actresses. One memorable role in a movie franchise beloved by one flavor of geek or another, and they're pretty much set for life -- as long as sequels keep getting made, they'll keep getting steady work, and the sun will set on their acting careers about five weeks after they die. On the other hand, as long as they're best known for genre parts, those are the parts they're likely to keep getting ad infinitum; there's a reason it's called the genre ghetto. Unfortunately, actors who take up residence there are awfully reluctant to leave because the paychecks are good, but they soon find out it's not easy even when they decide to move to a ritzier neighborhood. More than a few actors of some talent and range have found themselves, after cashing in off of a big genre-character role, being judged for the rest of their careers not on how well they can act, but how well they can still fit into their old costumes. Such an actor is the big, hearty Welshman John Rhys Davies: a man of impressive range and flawless credentials playing the classics on stage, his portrayal of a handful of unforgettable characters in sci-fi and fantasy films has somewhat derailed his career while at the same time ensuring that he'll always have work. He's gone from being the poor man's Brian Blessed to being one of the innumerable people who pays for his house by spending half the year in New Zealand filming syndicated sci-fi television shows.

It wasn't always this way for John Rhys-Davies. He started out in theater (as did his childhood friend and sometime co-star, Patrick Stewart -- an actor who is in a similarly precarious predicament, career-wise) and has an extensive background in Shakesperian productions of great acclaim. But aside from the movie roles listed below that launched him to wide, if not deep, fame, he likewise co-starred in the 1990s cult sci-fi show Sliders, forever assuring him a seat of honor at a science fiction convention near you, and likewise cutting him off from getting the kind of parts that would demonstrate the kind of range he had early in his career. Even when Rhys-Davies plays, as he has, Gamel Nasser, a Spanish conquistador, or the King of Troy, he's forever going to be thought of by his most devoted fans as Prof. Max Arturo or one of his other genre roles. Then again, it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for the guy, given that in 2004, he pissed all over his reputation by publicly endorsing the crackpot demographic beliefs of Mark Steyn and other right-wing demagogues, worrying himself over the allegedly insufficient breeding habits of white people and sweating over the nonsensical and pointless belief that Muslims will be 50% of the population by 2015. It's ironic that a man who has many times played the part of Arabs or Muslims -- including in one of his most famous roles -- shows such knee-jerk horror of the real thing; but for all that, he's still a gifted actor who deserves a few more chances to stretch his feet outside the genre ghetto.

Where to see John Rhys-Davies at his best:

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

For over twenty years, John Rhys-Davies' most recognizable role to geeks and squares alike was Sallah, the Egyptian archaeologist who served as advisor, assistant, friend, and grand vizier to Indiana Jones. He had some of the most memorable scenes in the first two movies, including one where he warns our hero that there are worse consequences to bad dates than just blowing fifty bucks on dinner and a movie. For reasons it would be ungentlemanly to discuss, the character will likely not be appearing in the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it's still one of his warmest, most charismatic roles he's ever played.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

Timothy Dalton's first role as 007 was a tricky one: in the era of perestroika, it didn't seem quite right to portray the Russians as the unrepentant monsters they had been in previous James Bond films. But it was so darn hard to let go of such juicy villains! Thus it fell to our Welsh wonder to portray Leonid Pushkin, the mysterious Russian general who may or my not have been as bad as he seems. It's that rare thing, a character in a James Bond film with a charcterization with more than one dimension, and Rhys-Davies obviously has a lot of fun with it, and even gets a meaty Bond-movie kill line.

LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)

Oh, yeah, that thing. Yes, John Rhys-Davies got the role of his career when, after auditioning for much more minor roles in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" epic, he snagged the part of Gimli the Dwarf. It was one of the more underwritten parts in the film, in fact, consisting mostly of short jokes after an intial burst of hotheadedness, but Rhys-Davies makes the most of it, and his charisma with Orlando Bloom is undeniable. (It's a bit amusing that Rhys-Davies, who is a solid six-footer who's taller than most of the members of the cast, was selected to play a four-foot-tall character, but at least he had a sense of humor about it.)

Tintin Revealed

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Mark Brown at the Guardian scores a few minutes with Thomas Sangster, soon to be better known as Tintin. A seventeen-year-old native of London, Sangster will star in the projected Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson "photo-realistic" movie based on the canonical comic-strip adventure series created by Georges Prosper Remi, the great Belgian cartoonist popularly known as "Herge'". (Stop-motion god Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson's one-man repertory company, is penciled in to co-star as Tintin's bearded, apoplectic sidekick, Captain Haddock.) To prepare for his role, Sangster reports that he recently sucked it up and started actually reading some of the Tintin comics. He was familiar with the character from watching TV cartoons based on the real stuff, but "I never saw the books because I was never that big on reading." Well, it's not as if he's likely to be called upon to perform brain surgery during the shoot.

Luckily, he does seem to have a firm grasp on the character's enduring appeal. "I love cars and aeroplanes and stuff, any car or any aeroplane or any gun that was ever used in Tintin would always be real, an exact copy of it so if it was a car it would be a Citroen and if it was a gun it would be a Luger. Tintin is like a super boy scout. He knows how to fly these things. He knows how to drive these things. It's just like common sense: he jumps in and goes, he doesn't need to think about any safety, he just goes where he pleases. For such a small kid he's very good at beating people up and, being a cartoon, nowadays you know, there's all that 'we can't be violent'. Tintin would hit people over the head with bottles and shoot people. He probably wouldn't kill them but he'd shoot them in the shoulder." Note the "probably"--young Sangster is already a seasoned industry veteran who understands that things need to be remain open in case Spielberg and Jackson are called away on urgent business and the project winds up in the hands of Eli Roth or Robert Rodriguez. (Sangster had good-sized roles in Love, Actually and Nanny McPhee, and also appeared in an especially creepy two-part episode of the rebooted Doctor Who. However, his creepiest role was almost certainly in the 2003 TV miniseries Hitler--The Rise of Evil, though it's debatable which is more unnerving--that he played the ten-year-old Adolf Hitler, or that the Hitler he played grew up to be impersonated by Robert Carlyle.) The first TIntin movie is expected to be released sometime in 2010.

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The life of a killer can be a lonely one, whether pursued professionally or as a hobby. In last year's Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner, who based on some of the stories about his on-the-set behavior that have hit the papers ought to have had some experience with having no one to play with, was so lonesome that he had to summon up an imaginary friend (William Hurt) to give him someone to talk to on those long nights of stalking and shooting. (In the course of the movie, a real person who knows about his secret life approaches him and asks if he can apprentice with him as an aspiring psycho, but since this asshole is played by Dane Cook, having to put him up with him just means Costner needs to lean on the nonexistent Hurt more than ever.) Michael Haneke's new English-language version of his 1996 Funny Games also underlines the need for a killer to bring along a spare, someone with whom he can trade wisecracks and rely on to keep an eye on the prey and one hand on the remote control. (If you haven't seen the movie, don't ask. And if you haven't seen the movie, also don't see the movie.) Then there's Pete and Sidney, who work for Joe Brody in the classic The Big Sleep. After Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe meets them, he asks Brody about the weedier, goofier one: "Is he any good?" "Sidney?" replies Brody. "He's company for Pete." ("He kills me," says Pete, by way of an unsolicited testimonial.) These pairs kill us:

Henry (Michael Rooker) & Otis (Tom Towles), HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990)

When watching a couple of characters prancing through a movie laying waste to half the cast, you might let your mind wander to the question of just how these folks met. Are there conventions? Classified ads? It's easier to understand why a serial killer would want another pair of hands than to envision how he'd go shopping for someone to supply them. There are any number of ways that such a conversation could go wrong. Not the least of Henry's virtues is that it addresses head on the issue of how a solo killer goes about trying to establish a franchise. Henry is already well into his serial-killing career when, after a good long stretch on Otis's couch, he concludes that his old friend might have the stuff to join him on his visits to the homes of strangers. For a while, it does look as if having the fun-loving Otis along has made it more rewarding to rampage around town performing random acts of dismemberment. But, as our nation has learned since 2000, being a good person with whom to have a beer is not the best qualification for a job requiring careful planning and precise execution. Careless and uncontrollable, Otis finally proves himself an unacceptable risk and winds up as one more load of filler weighing down a Hefty bag. Like Rick in Casablanca, Henry is forced to consider the possibility that he is destined to be one of life's romantic loners.

Mingo (Earl Holliman) & Fante (Lee Van Cleef), THE BIG COMBO (1955)

There’s a lot to love about Joseph H. Lewis’ nasty little noir: the gorgeously dark camerawork by John Alton, the snarling screenplay by Philip Yordan (its vicious snap most clearly evident in an early scene where the mob boss, played toothily by Richard Conte, chews out a losing boxer), the barely sublimated sex and the creative violence. It’s one of the best movies of its kind, and criminally underseen by audiences both today and when it was released. One of the most enjoyable bits of the movie, though, is the presence of Mingo and Fante. These two characters, with their bizarrely unlikely names, are the goons of Conte’s Mr. Brown, and they’re memorably played by the lunkheaded Earl Holliman and the domineering Lee Van Cleef, respectively. Alternately menacing, comical and even sympathetic, they’re two of the best-written minor characters in noir history, but one of the reasons that they’re fondly remembered by a handful of film buffs today (Joss Whedon named a couple of characters in his Firefly series after them) is because, predating Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever by a good twenty years, they are perhaps the first murderous duo on the big screen to be portrayed as gay. Of course, this being the ‘50s, neither Yordan or Lewis could come right out and say so, but it’s made plenty clear for anyone who’s paying attention: Fante and Mingo share a room together, sleep feet apart, bicker like a married couple, express a great deal of, er, manly fondness for one another, and even dine together. Which, in fact, leads to the movie’s big oh-what-a-giveaway line: holed up in a ratty dump waiting for the heat to die down from their latest killing, our gruesome twosome are reduced to dining on take-home lunchmeat, leading Mingo to lament, “I can’t swallow any more salami!” Even if the movie version of The Big Sleep had been allowed to be as explicit about the sexuality of Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook as the book was, they wouldn’t have been this much fun.

Al (Charles McGraw) & Max (William Conrad), THE KILLERS (1946)

These guys have a special weapon: the dialogue from the classic original short story by Ernest Hemingway. In the story, two strangers walk into the small town diner where they plan to kill "the Swede" for reasons unspecified, and, feeling serenely untouchable in their big-city arrogance, proceed to taunt the rubes while they sit there and wait for their target to walk in. ("We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.") The first fifteen or twenty minutes of this movie amount to probably the most faithful film adaptation that Hemingway ever got: McGraw, the star of the cult noir The Narrow Margin (and a man who looked as if he'd been carved out of granite and was royally pissed off about it) and Conrad (TV's Cannon and the narrator of the Bullwinkle cartoons) just play out their little scene together, and then the Heningway story runs out. The movie, which was co-written by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks, and which is not bad at all, proceeds to fill itself out to feature length by having an investigator, played by Edmond O'Brien, fill in the backstory of why the Swede — Burt Lancaster, in his film debut — had a price on his head. There was a sort-of remake in 1964, directed by Don Siegel, which is best remembered as Ronald Reagan's last film as an actor. (He plays the head villain and gets to slap Angie Dickinson around.) The remake, which hews closer to the Lancaster movie than to the Hemingway, eliminates the O'Brien-investigator figure and has the killers themselves — called Charlie and Lee, and played by old pro Lee Marvin and younger hepcat punk Clu Gulager — decide to find out why they'd been hired. This version lacks the crackle that the earlier one had, but it does have a scene where the title characters trap Norman Fell in a steam bath while Gulager mockingly wipes his sunglasses on Mr. Roper's head.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) & Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), LA CEREMONIE (1995)

Bonnaire and Huppert are two of France's greatest and most fearless actresses, and it's a wonder it took a director so long to put them together. But when Claude Chabrol finally did so in his masterful thriller, the result was quite possibly the finest psychotic duo in French cinema. Bonnaire plays Sophie, an illiterate yet hyper-competent young maid for a rich family, and Huppert is Jeanne, a nosy, gossipy postal clerk who becomes her friend. "What a pair," Sophie's employer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) exclaims. "One can't read and the other reads our mail!" It's clear that the two women need each other — Jeanne, with her playfully forceful personality, draws Sophie out of her shell, while Sophie gives Jeanne a sympathetic ear compared to the other townspeople who shun her for the accidental killing of her young daughter. Soon, the two of them are partners in crime, getting into all manner of mischief around town and at the charity where they volunteer. But after Sophie is fired for trying to blackmail the family's pregnant daughter, she and Jeanne sneak in one night to take revenge. The night begins innocently enough — some torn clothing here, some ruined bed sheets there — but quickly turns deadly once the girls see the shotguns hanging on the wall. Jeanne wants to have fun by scaring them, while Sophie insists on loading the guns, yet it's entirely possible that they hadn't planned to kill anyone until Cassel happens upon the gun-toting duo in his kitchen. Once they've killed him, they have no choice but to kill off the rest of the family as well. For all the big-screen psychopaths who plan their murders down to the last detail, cases like Sophie's and Jeanne's are arguably more chilling, as the killings aren't a premeditated act of vengeance but the climax of a prank gone horribly wrong. Funny games, indeed.

Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) & Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

Like Sophie and Jeanne, Heavenly Creatures' heroines Pauline Parker (Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet) are a pair who first bond over their shared outcast status. In their case, they both suffer from health problems, and as their classmates take exercise, they become fast friends. Together they rule over a lurid, elaborate fantasy world of their own creation. The pair are inseparable, spending every possible moment together, and they eventually their frenzied teenage hormones lead them to experiment with sex. But more than anything else, it's their fantasies that sustain them and help them to escape their difficult lives in 1950s New Zealand, but they also lead to their downfall. From the beginning, they look down on anyone else, and eventually this disdain turns to paranoia about those who would threaten their happiness together. Of all the perceived threats to the world they've created, the most threatening is Pauline's pragmatic, hardworking mother, so one day the girls decide to join her on a leisurely stroll, and when they're alone on a path, they bludgeon her to death. Heavenly Creatures was based on a real-life case, and while the facts might have lent themselves to a sensationalistic treatment, director Peter Jackson keeps us with his heroines all the way. The film follows Pauline and Juliet into their fantasies (rendered in loving detail by a pre-Lord of the Rings Jackson), mostly because it's the only way to truly understand what led them to carry out their hideous crime. Along the way, we grow to love the sinners even as we hate their sin, and it's because of this that the film's final scene, in which Pauline and Juliet are forced apart by the courts, is almost unbearably sad.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

George Miller: The Furious Multimedia Road

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:54:00 GMT

Saying that 2008 is an interesting time for visual media is an understatement. As an art form, filmmaking has never been more accessible. Making a movie is cheap and distribution is only a Youtube account away. It’s interesting then to watch the growing trend of successful theatrical filmmakers looking to other mediums, specifically video games, as a new avenue of not just business but expression. Peter Jackson’s working on multiple projects within Microsoft’s omnipresent Halo franchise, Steven Spielberg’s developing three separate games for Electronic Arts (the first of which, Boom Blox for the Wii, you can check out here), and Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis have beaten the ravages of aging by turning to games for a third Ghostbusters. Now George Miller, of Mad Max and Babe fame, is getting in on the action. In a series of exclusive interviews with N’Gai Croal (arguably the most important voice in games journalism and who also happens to be a filmmaker himself), Miller announced that he’s collaborating with game developer Cory Barlog on a number of new projects, the first of which being a Mad Max game that will be created alongside the long in development Mad Max: Fury Road. Barlog is most famous for his work on the God of War series that, while different in subject, has quite a bit in common thematically with Mad Max. Miller and Barlog will be working together on both film and game, utilizing the same cast for both.

What’s fascinating about this partnership is not just Miller’s interest in games as a narrative medium offering opportunities beyond film’s natural constraints but that he’s sought out a singular auteur to work with. Modern game development, as Croal discusses with both Barlog and Miller, is not unlike Hollywood sixty years ago: directors are traditionally studio employees and not independent artists for hire. This collaboration is an exciting moment for film and game alike. Plus new Mad Max! GIBSONLESS MAD MAX!

After Forty Years, the End of the New Line

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

The latest development marked the end to a long, strange trip to the top for a funky little company that had its first big successes in the early 1970s marketing John Waters's 1972 Pink Flamingos and the camp revival of the 1936 drug-hysteria picture Reefer Madness. New Line hit a new level of mainstream commercial success with the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which the company built into a powerhouse franchise. By the end of the eighties, New Line had one foot in the art house and one in exploitation/genre movies, a formula that it made work with a lively mix of films such as The Evil Dead, Sid and Nancy, The Hidden, House Party, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Player, Glengarry Glen Ross, Menace II Society, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Se7en, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Austin Powers, Friday, Blade, and Final Destination and the franchises that grew out of them. The studio's biggest gamble, and biggest success, was probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a high-stakes commitment that left the company CEOs looking brilliant--at least, until they proceeded to alienate the director Peter Jackson so badly that he become but one of a long line of litigants who filed lawsuits that grew out of controversy about the company's accounting practices and charges that they failed to honor various pledges and legal committments to everyone from bit players in the movies to the heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien. New Line had recently updated its corporate logo to celebrate its fortieth birthday last October 5.

The Lawyering of the "Rings"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

New Line Cinema only recently settled a lawsuit filed by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that was supposed to clear things up between the studio and the filmmaker and open the way to production on Jackson's version of The Hobbit. Now the studio has been hit by a suit by heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien and a group of publishers who are looking to tap the studio for millions. Also waiting for their day in court: the Saul Zaentz Company, which once upon a time owned the film rights to Tolkien's work--they sold them to Miramax, which in turn sold them to New Line, and which has already had its own complicated round of legal action with New Line — and "sixteen New Zealand actors who appear in supporting parts in the films, who last year charged New Line with bilking them of a share in an estimated $100 million profit from the sale of video games, caps and other film-related merchandise." As The New York Times reports, "the trilogy may be turning into the first true cinematic 'franchise' for local legal representatives. The lawsuits, to some extent, have fed one another, and are providing a feast for those who bill by the hour."

Much of the — let's be generous and call it "miscommunication" — between all these warring parties may come down to New Line's status as an "independent studio", albeit one owned by Time Warner, which has its own manner of accounting for international revenue that differs from that of the major, worldwide studios. That's cold comfort for New Line when it considers the full ramifications of the Tolkien family suit, which "has the earmarks of a public relations nightmare." The studio stands accused of shafting the heirs of a beloved author, including a charitable trust whose revenues go to various very good causes, by ignoring a long-standing agreement regarding the money they were to receive from any film adaptations of the Rings books. Bonnie Eskenazi one of the lawyers for the Tolkien forces, has said that her clients waited so many years before filing suit because they were innocent enough to think that the greedy movie hustlers could be dealt with on a reasonable level, without bringing lawyers into it: "They do things politely, in a certain manner," she said, a statement that for all the sense it will make to most lawyers in the greater Los Angeles area might as well have been issued in Esperantu. Certainly it seems a long, long time ago that the Rings movie project smacked anyone of a risky financial venture. It'll be the ultimate sick joke about Hollywood accounting if the comparatively modest follow-up project The Hobbit never gets off the ground because New Line can't get everyone paid to the courts' satisfaction.

Afternoon Deal Report: Coens to Adapt Chabon's "Yiddish Policemen"

Peter Smith — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:10:00 GMT

Joel and Ethan Coen have two or three original projects in the pipeline (Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and Hail Caesar), but apparently the mainstream success of No Country for Old Men (okay, the Coens have never really lacked mainstream recognition, but with its literary pedigree, No Country is certainly the most prestige-y thing they've ever done) has spurred them towards more adaptations. Scott Rudin has just hired them to adapt Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. (Rudin also has an adaptation of Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in the works, written by Chabon himself.) As someone who liked No Country well-enough but missed the Coens' usual irreverance in the midst of all that apocalyptic atmosphere, I'm sort of sad to see them moving towards adaptations. Their original voice is one of the best things they have. Thoughts, readers?

Marisa Tomei will star with Mickey Rourke in Darren Aronofsky's next movie, The Wrestler, about an '80s pro-wrestler. Sadly, this is not the Macho Man Randy Savage biopic we've all been waiting for.

After a protracted scuffle with Peter Jackson over the division of the spoils of his Lord of the Rings adaptations, New Line has now evoked the legal wrath of J. R. R. Tolkien's estate. In other lawsuit news, the co-writer of The Passion of the Christ is suing Mel Gibson for misleading him about the film's budget. Drive out those moneychangers, Mel.

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

MANHUNTER (1985, Michael Mann)

I've got four cuts of Manhunter on my shelf: the original theatrical version, a re-cut for broadcast on TCM, another cut allegedly for a preview, and then Mann's final definitive cut. Anything significantly different about these cuts? It's basically trimming down a few scenes and putting one or two back in, most of them documented on this excellent fan website. Mann has gone back to his movies before, re-cutting Last of the Mohicans (in the process removing a Clannad song that dated the flick), Ali, and even preparing a three-hour cut of Heat for a TV broadcast that never happened. Here, though, was an instance where a director's revisionist tinkering harmed the flick, removing dialogue from William Peterson that actually showed how much he empathised with the serial killer he was hunting. Though it might not be Mann's preferred cut, for me the original theatrical release is the definitive cut of the film so far.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY (2001-2003, Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson had made it clear during pre-production of his adaptation of Tolkien's trilogy that an extended cut would be coming out, and so it did, and the fans lapped it up, thus putting even more cash into New Line's coffers. But were these cuts any good? It depends on what you're looking for. I always thought the theatrical releases were pretty rushed and the extended versions did have a more relaxed pace about them, but did Tolkien fans really want to see hobbits getting tall from Ent juice or a bit of extended battle butchery? Apparently so. I thought these were a mixed bag. (I mean, do you really want to see an extended ending for Return of the King? Wasn't it long enough anyway?) All credit for Jackson for giving consumers the options, but was it really that much of an improvement?

THE STAR WARS TRILOGY (1977-1982, George Lucas, Irvin Kersher, Richard Marquand)

Han fired first. Among all the extra tidbits that were included in the trilogy, the one that angers the fans most is George Lucas changing the infamous Han vs Greedo confrontation from this:

To this:

And its downhill from there. Yes the special editions made a bundle when re-released. Yes, most people probably have them on their DVD shelf, but if you just give audiences one option, that's what they have to go with. It was only last year that Lucas relented and finally released the original, unaltered films on DVD and even then, they were non-anamorphic transfers. Does the additional material add to the films? Nope.

THE NEW WORLD (2005, Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick is notorious for taking a long time with the editing of his movies, so it wasn't a surprise to hear that his last film, The New World, wasn't going to make its original November 2005 release date. A month later though, a 150-min cut was screened for critics with hopes that it would qualify for a few Academy Awards. In 2006, the film went into general release with a shortened cut, which Malick considered his best version; a log of the changes can be found here. The only place to get a copy of the first cut is if you have a copy of the Academy screeners or you get the special edition Italian DVD. Never fear though, as according to producer Sarah Greene, Malick has started work on another cut of The New World. Though considerable work had been done on it, its still up in the air when it may come out, though I suspect this may be due to the director mulling over what HD format he should release it on. After this, one hopes he can get back to finally finishing his alternate cut of The Thin Red Line, which is rumored to be a completely new film altogether. But then, even a re-edited Malick film is better than no Malick.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci)

The Last Emperor is one of those old-style epics that needs to be seen on the big screen. No amount of CGI could have the power to surprise and astonish like this scene:

It was the original 160-minute cut that picked up the Academy Awards, but Bertolucci preferred his director's cut and until recently, you could only get a decent copy of both cuts from the U.K. But when Criterion recently announced its special edition containing both cuts, it quietly noted that the cinematographer, Storraro again, once again applied his Univisium concept by re-formatting the film to now be shown at 2:1 aspect ratio. It's unimaginable to see a film like this in a compromised halfway-house aspect ratio, but in this case, fans of The Last Emperor at least have a choice.

RUNNERS UP:

REVENGE (1989, Tony Scott)

Most alternate cuts have stuff being put into the film, Tony Scott went one better by chucking stuff out of Revenge. He waited eighteen years to remove twenty-four minutes out of Tarantino's favourite flick. Do we get to see more Madeleine Stowe in her prime? Disappointingly, not really, but we do get a much tighter and meaner story of two men who are righteously pissed off with one another because of a bitch in heat.

LEGEND (1984, Ridley Scott)

There are about four cuts of this flick flying around the world. Do any of them improve Scott's flawed fairy tale? They try. Until the 2003 DVD release, U.S. viewers were only familiar with a Tangerine Dream-scored cut of the film. The film's devoted fan base resulted in the release of a director's cut that revealed that even with the director at full control, the film may have had little chance at the box office but now was held together by the late Jerry Goldsmith's more sumptious score. Tim Curry as Darkness steals the show from everyone.

ALIEN 3 (1993, David Fincher)

David Fincher's debut nearly killed off the director's career, and until the release of the special edition, the only other version of the film was a leaked three-hour bootleg. The new cut is a revelation, even though it was done without Fincher's collaboration. A completely new version that makes you re-assess an otherwise neglected and flawed contribution to the Alien franchise. And if you disagree with that, I got two words to say to you: Alien: Resurrection.

TERMINATOR 2 (1992, James Cameron)

Cameron first got alternate cut success with the release of Aliens: Special Edition. T2 got a bunch more footage thrown in, most of it of the type that filmmakers refer to as "character development". To his credit, Cameron's DVD producers were the first ones who used "branching" DVD software, where extended footage would be seamlessly intergrated within the original cut.

SUPERMAN 2 (1992, Richard Lester, Richard Donner)

An alternate ending to Superman 2.:

Watching Donner's cut of Superman II is painful. The additional Marlon Brando footage really adds to the film, as do his conceptions of the scenes, but unfortunately, Richard Donner was kicked off the film after only two-thirds of it had been completed. The rest of it was re-shot by Richard Lester. Donner's insistence on using as little of Lester's footage as possible creates a curious discontinuity, but it's the repeat ending that really lets it down. If Donner had been allowed to finish the sequel, he may have come up with something that didn't rehash the first film, but in this case the Lester film is more complete.

— Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.

Afternoon Deal Report: Some White Dudes Make Some Movies

John Constantine — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:35:00 GMT

Marky-Mark Wahlberg is adding yet another meaty role to his busy schedule. He’ll be starring in Peter Berg’s untitled dramatization of the life of infamous drug lord Jon Roberts. Roberts was the subject of 2006’s much acclaimed Cocaine Cowboys. Wahlberg’s other upcoming projects include Peter Jackson’s Lovely Bones adaptation, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fighter, and M. Night Shymalan’s hilariously titled The Happening.

2007’s boytoy du jour Zac Efron will star in Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Me and Orson Welles. I actually penned a script with the same title back in ’98. It was about me and the ghost of Orson Welles watching the animated Transformers movie for twenty-four hours straight. It was mostly just Welles crying.

Speaking of crying, it looks like Timothy Olyphant is going to continue sabotaging his once-promising career by starring in David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway. Sure, its premise of a honeymooning couple being stalked by two killers in Hawaii sounds reasonably interesting. But Twohy’s last major writing/directing effort was The Chronicles of Riddick. Say it ain’t so, Olyphant!

Location, Location, Location: Times Square

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

When we think of New Year's Eve, we think of short-lived resolutions, ill-advised groping and hangovers that would cripple King Kong. But we also think of the lighted, bejeweled ball dropping in Times Square as an increasingly withered Dick Clark counts down the seconds until the new year's arrival. So on this final day of 2007, we can think of no better way to kick off a new recurring feature dedicated to notable locations and their portrayal on film than with Times Square. Here are a few of our favorite movie moments set - though not necessarily shot - in that ever-evolving hub of humanity.

The bygone glamour of the '30s and '40s is evoked in Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen's most nostalgic work, which concludes on a nightclub rooftop overlooking Times Square on New Year's Eve, 1944. It's a set - certainly one of the most beguiling ones in the Allen filmography, all colorful neon signs and cigarette billboards blowing smoke as snow begins to fall. This era's Times Square is recreated in another spectacular set - albeit for a less wistful moment - in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong, as the ape escapes his "Eighth Wonder of the World" display on Broadway and goes on a rampage:

The square's later incarnation as a seedy pit of sin provides the backdrop for two counterculture classics. In Midnight Cowboy (1969), country boy Joe Buck has a rude awakening when his dreams of the high life as a top-dollar New York hustler are dashed in the Square's filthy hotels and run-down porno theaters. For Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), the Square is no less than hell on earth; his late-night cruise through rain-slicked streets oozing steam and bad vibes remains the iconic image of Times Square from this period.

The latest version of Times Square is often described as "Disneyfied," and it is indeed a cleaned-up, corporate intersection of Gap stores and ESPN Zones. It does retain the outsized billboards and extravagant neon of decades past, however, and as this clip from the otherwise regrettable Vanilla Sky (2001) shows, it still has potential for creepiness:

The Square is used to similar effect as a deserted wasteland in I Am Legend, although this Times Square of the near future, crumbling and overgrown with weeds, is entirely computer generated. Still, we have the feeling Travis Bickle would approve.

Peter Jackson and New Line Make Kissy Faces, Movie About Little People

John Constantine — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:53:00 GMT

Good news for fans of slow motion and hairy feet! Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have agreed to stop bickering over millions of dollars and make not one but two new movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Jackson’s production company Wingnut Films sued New Line back in March 2005 for withholding an undisclosed amount of the over $3 billion made on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Things got ugly after that. But now that their money issues have been settled, Jackson and New Line have decided that even more money would be good for everyone involved. The first proposed Hobbit picture will be a straight adaptation of the novel while the second will act as a bridge between the original and Fellowship of the Ring.

By my estimation, this will lead to approximately thirty-nine hours of new movie.