The Screengrab : phil nugent trucker

Introducing Shigeo Tokuda, the Godzilla of Geriatric Porn

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

On the P.R. circuit to promote Mamma Mia!, Meryl Streep has been enjoying herself by telling interviewers how "mortified" her kids are at the thought of the 59-year-old actress prancing around the surf while crooning such deathless ABBA confections as "The Winner Takes It All." If Streep really wants to drive her offspring to scuttle around wearing Groucho noseglasses and fake foreign accents, she might consider a co-starring gig with Shigeo Tokuda, Japan's 73-year-old adult film star. Tokuda--that's his porn name--turned to on-camera balling after he retired from his gig as a travel agent and found that he "didn't have anything to do." (In a similar situation, my grandmother took up crocheting.) Now he takes on all comers, appearing with women from all across the age spectrum in the course of a career that has already racked up more than 200 titles.

According to CNN's Kyung Lah, the genre of filth for the old folks is one that Tokuda's production house "helped pioneer by accident. Ryuichi Kadowaki, president of Ruby Productions, says they started producing adult videos with people in their 30's to good sales. They creeped up to 40 year old actors and they sold even better. Kadowaki says they went up to actors in their 50's, then 60's, and now they're producing an entire line of adult videos with actors in their 70's." Kadowski theorizes that "our older customers must feel a sense of security by watching videos with an actor who is in the same generation." In the select group of septuagenarian adult film stars, Tokuda is the undisputed king. Tokuda, touting himself as a role model--and, believe me, he's preaching to the converted on that one-- notes that "Seniors get depressed because they don't have anything to do. They go crazy." Ruby Productions has just completed a deal to begin making Tokuda's films available in the U.S., so it won't be long before Americans have the chance to see Japan's sanest man hard at work in his second career. This is one Christmas where shopping for Grandma is going to be a breeze.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ERIC BANA AS AVNER IN MUNICH (2005)

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

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS DAVID JASON IN DEEP COVER (1992)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WOODY ALLEN AS DAVID DOBEL IN ANYTHING ELSE (2003)

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

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Trucker"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

James Mottern's Trucker is a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime. They still make these kinds of movies, of course, and one way to get one not just made but shown in a few places is to cast an attractive, up-and-coming actor or actress who's tired of being used as set direction and wants to show that he or she can act, or at least pass for ordinary. The title character in Trucker stars Michelle Monaghan, who looked a little too dewy fresh to be spending her afternoons interrogating neighborhood barroom toughs in Gone Baby Gone. She looks much looser and happier in her first scenes here, playing Diane, a long-haul trucker who owns her own rig and lives by herself in her little San Diego crash pad. You can see what attracted Monaghan to this role. She's terrific in her opening scene, preparing to leave a motel and get back on the room but first impatiently trying to keep a straight while listening to the naked, nameless stud in the bed sheepishly assure her that he wasn't just "using" her. She also does fine teamwork with Nathan Fillion, who plays the less macho half of their relationship; he's the married "best friend" who's been pining for her for four years while serving as her steady platonic date between one-night stands. When she joins him at a kids' softball game and stares at him in dismay when she sees what's in his go-cup, Fillion drawls, "I'm not drinkin', per se, I'm celebratin' life."

Trucker might have sustained itself better if it hadn't had any plot at all, but probably Mottern didn't feel that he was ready to try anything too avant-garde. So Diane, like half the women in movies these days, acquires a kid. Unlike Tina Fey in Baba Mama, she got hers the old-fashioned way, by getting pregnant by Benjamin Bratt and then leaving him a dozen years before the movie starts. The little life changer lands on her doorstep when Bratt succombs to colon cancer and is too busy dying to stay on top of the play date schedule. (Bratt, who could use a career jump=start of his own--didn't his character leave Law & Order because his wife was sick? has he considered offering to come back to the show, given that she must have died by now?-- has a big tearjerker death bed scene with the kid. "I guess you can tell by looking at me that I'm not in the best shape of my life," he says, but in fact he looks pretty and well-fed and hale enough to bench-press a horse. Maybe the film crew couldn't afford to rent some footage of sick people for him to look at, though the makeup department did do its best to help out by apparently painting his head light gray, perhaps to see what he'd look like playing the early version of the Incredible Hulk.)

Monaghan and the kid have a decent exchange early on; she asks him why he doesn't want to talk to her, he replies, "I don't talk to bitches," and she says, "Fair enough." But soon she's turning all motherly and repentant in the face of all the contrivance, with the little bastard functioning as a living, breathing "J'accuse!" Trying to push him away for his own good, she bawls, "I am who I am! I'm always gonna be like this," and from her tone you may end up wondering if you missed a couple of reels where she was robbing banks and sending the money to Bin Laden or sacrificing puppies to Satan, her dark lord. To fully appreciate Trucker on its own terms, you have to be prepared to react with horror to the idea that a woman who works hard at her job and who even turns out to be a pretty good mother when she has to be might sometimes want to arrange her own play date to sneak off to a Motel 6 with a handsome stranger and fuck each other's brains out.