The Screengrab : phil nugentent

What Just Happened? Peter Bart Changes Job Titles, Film Bloggers Get the Vapors

Phil Nugent — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

When it was announced recently that Peter Bart, who has been editor-in-chief of the trade bible Variety for the past twenty years, has been kicked upstairs--his new position if "vice president and editorial director", from which office her will "report directly to [Reed Business CEO Tad] Smith, assisting him in furthering Variety's editorial mission in print and online and expanding the brand's position in new revenue streams"--all hell broke out on-line. One of those leading the charge was Nikki Finke at her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, who summed up the changes at Variety this way: "Hollywood can now safely ignore Bart. [Editor Tim] Gray is the guy to suck up to there." Finke and other bloggers have been laughing in the face of the "official" story that Bart had long planned to give up control of the news division this year, and that Gray had long ago been out in place with plans to step in for him when he moved on.

It should be made clear that the bloggers are far from disinterested parties in this. Bart will continue writing his column and maintaining his blog"; as Finke puts it, he'll "be allowed to continue as the 'face' of Variety in public -- which is something Bart cares a lot about." Under Bart's direction, Variety had waged war on bloggers in such articles as Michael Fleming's recent piece on shifting ethical standards in show business journalism in the age of the Internet, which at one point criticized Finke for having once put herself "in the unenviable position of debunking a rumor that she had started." According to Finke, "Bart was one of the staunchest proponents that Variety has to remain a print publication, while others at Reed want to move the trade more (and even completely) into the digital era because of eroding advertising." Putting it that way, Bart sounds like the old-school fogy who's sadly resistant to grasping the new truth that the future is in cyberspace, and his supposed "ouster" is a win for the bloggers' side. "Bart," David Poland has written, "was in the way of the future."

Now Bart himself is fighting back, in the manner of someone who, as a kid, was fed that line by his mother about how the best way to deal with bullies is to just ignore them and who noticed that putting that into practice didn't stop the bread balls from bouncing off the back of his head in the caefteria. Speaking to New York Observer's Matt Haber, Bart insisted, "It's not a very sexy story, and that's why I'm sort of amused by all this speculation about 'behind the scenes' stuff." Bart, who doesn't see himself as having moved that far away from the red hot center of things at Variety--"I still have my office and I still come in everyday. I'll still have opinion about breaking news. I still write a weekly column. I write a blog, there are a lot of interesting plans for the future," has no problem taking criticism: "That's what you're there for. I just think that's part of the territory. If I was never criticized then I'd consider myself a failure because I'd be boring." He claims that's what he does find exasperating about all the speculation about what "really" happened is that it's "so irrelevant, it makes it sound like I'm this 35-year-old kid who lost a power struggle. And I'm 76-years-old and there is no power struggle."

Remaking "Sideways" for the Japanese Market

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Ari Karpel reports on recent developments in the field of remaking major feature films for foreign audiences. When talkies first came in, it was standard practice at many Hollywood studios to shoot foreign-language versions of new movies at the same time the English-language releases were being made, sometimes with the original stars babbling their dialogue in phonetically learned Spanish. In some rare cases, such as that of the Spanish-language version of the 1931 Dracula, directed by George Melford and starring Carlos Villar as the Count, these instant remakes have shadow reputations among cultists who hold that they're more cinematically inventive than the movies they were spun off from. But the practice died out as soon as some genius invented dubbing. But, writes Karpel, "As film industries in China, Russia, Japan and India have grown exponentially, particularly when it comes to homegrown fare, United States studios have taken the phrase 'Think globally, act locally' to heart. Nearly every studio has set up an international operation for producing and distributing original movies made in local languages. Now a handful of those studios are scouring their catalogs, seeking films (box-office smashes and middling performers alike) to remake for new audiences." For a start, the "Walt Disney Company is turning its High School Musical franchise into a cottage industry, redoing the teen song-and-dance phenomenon one country at a time." The real trick, though, is finding solid material that can be translated into something appealing to foreign audiences but that wasn't such a megaton international hit the first time around that seeing it again with a local cast would strike filmgoers as redundant. Taking that into consideration, a movie like Titanic is less tantalizing than something like the crackerjack 2004 thriller Cellular, with Kim Basinger and William H. Macy, which was recently turned into a a Chinese film called Connected. And then there's Sideways, Alexander Payne's much-loved, middle-aged road comedy starring Paul Giamatti as a failed novelist and alcoholic wine connoisseur and Thomas Haden Church as a TV actor hell-bent on enjoying one last fling before his wedding. A Japanese remake, still called Sideways but with the lead characters' names changed from Miles and Jack to Michio and Daisuke, is currently in production.

Interviewed by the Times about this development, Alexander Payne indicated that he can live with it: “I don’t know a damn thing about it, but I hope it’s better than the original. No, I’m really delighted. I got a check for it, and the check cleared.” Payne, who Karpel claims responded to the information that has an executive producer credit on the remake with the observation, "Oh, I do?", added, “I cared desperately about Sideways while making it, but now it’s behind me,” he explained. “So it has its own life, and if part of its life is having a twin in a parallel universe, then so be it.” The people who are currently making Sideways presumably care about it a lot right now, though some of the changes they've adopted serve as a window into the world of remaking other people's movies for a different culture. Although the film is being made on location in California, the heroes' getaway destination has been changed from Santa Barbara to the Napa Valley, because Japanese audiences are assumed to have heard of Napa Valley. This also accommodates the director Cellin Gluck;s theory that “You can’t do a road trip in California without going over the Golden Gate Bridge.” The filmmakers also tweaked the details of Miles's/Michio's wine snobbery, as a conciliatory gesture to wineries where they wanted to shoot on location: wine sellers blamed the original Sideways for a drop in merlot sales, and so the movie's hero no longer deliveries a savage tirade against the stuff. Gluck doesn't see that this choice, and the fact that "In the resulting scenes each location gets a plug that approaches parody... [with] signs visible in nearly every scene, close-ups of wine labels and real-life employees, in bit parts, stiffly reciting lines like 'Welcome to Old Faithful Geyser, Calistoga, California,' ” compromise the movie. “We didn’t set out to make a tourism film,” Gluck says. “If there’s going to be a benefit, let it be for those who helped us out.” He added, “When you’re a small film, that’s sometimes all you have to offer.” There, perhaps, is the most revealing change of all. The new Sideways is budgeted at $3 million; the original, the very model of an "indie" feature about grown-ups, made without big stars or expensive locations or special effects, cost $17 million.

Sharon Stone Loses Ground in the Race for Mother of the Year

Phil Nugent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

With her movie career basically on permanent hiatus, Sharon Stone continues to maintain her hold on the world's attention as some species of gossip-blogger freak. Stone has just wrapped up her lastest sideshow, the child custody hearings centered on Roan, the eight-year-old boy who Stone and her former husband, newspaperman Phil Bronstein, adopted during their six-year marriage. Stone lost her bid to have her son move in with her in Los Angeles, in part because of the judge's determination that she "appears to overreact to many medical issues involving Roan", and that her "overreactions" to nonexistent problems is a "painfully real" problem for the boy. Stone apparently became convinced that Roan had a spinal problem and couldn't be talked out of seeking treatment for it by doctors who assured her that Roan was perfectly healthy. Of course, delusions of spinal meningitis are one thing, but the tidbit from the proceedings that's really gotten people excited is the news that Stone, as the court delicately put it, "suggested that Roan should have Botox injections in his feet to resolve a problem he had with foot odor. As father appropriately noted, the simple and common sense approach of making sure Roan wore socks with his shoes and used foot deodorant corrected the odour problem without the need for any invasive procedure on this young child." One website claims that Stone was heard to say of her little one's pungent stumps, "If you smelled Roan's feet, you'd lose faith in God." Wait a minute, are we sure we're not talking about my mother? (To fully appreciate the impact of Stone's comments, keep in mind that she was apparently able to hang onto her faith in God even after seeing herself in the rushes for Catwoman.

Other bloggers have offered, in the place of fearless investigative journalism, cruel and snarky comments of a nature that just make us here at the Screengrab reach for the smelling salts, lest we swoon before copy them down here so we can share them with out own appalled readership. One blogger has even gone so far as to offer a long-distance diagnosis that Stone might suffer from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, rare and scary psychological disorder that compels parents to detect and even inflict illnesses on their children for the sake of the attention it gets them, adding, "Phil Bronstein must be thanking his lucky stars that he left with his man berries still in the tree." This may or may not be a veiled reference to what may have been the high point of the Stone-Bronstein marriage, at least for those of us on the outside gawking through the protective glass: the fabled moment back in 2001 when, with baby Roan in tow, the happy couple went to the zoo for a summit meeting that Stone had arranged for her reptile-happy husband with a Komodo dragon, which proceeded to try to eat his foot. (Bronstein had removed his tennis shoes after the zoo keeper expressed concern that the creature might mistake them for the white rats that are a staple of his diet when no movie star's husband is around.) We've all learned a lot from Stone and Bronstein's marriage. The most important lesson I've learned is that if I'm ever introduced to a Komodo dragon, I should not wear my kilt.

Paul Newman, 1925--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The death of Paul Newman cuts our movie culture's last ties to a generation of 1950s leading men. Newman himself had long since transcended his film debut, The Silver Chalice (1954), a terrible performance in a terrible movie that he, typically, loved to make fun of. A paragon of classical handsomeness and unostentatiously fit-looking, with eyes that people wrote songs about, Newman arrived on the scene at the same time as Method firebrands such as Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, though at first he looked to have more in common with such male mannequins as Rock Hudson and Robert Wagner. He wound up casting a shadow as long as any of them, and better sustaining a career than any of them, by taking his work seriously and endeavoring make it mean something. As Richard Corliss writes, ""Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint." At the same time, he never seemed to be in danger of letting a little thing like being the best-known movie star and sexiest man in the world go to his head.

Newman has to have been one of the most famous movie stars for whom there is no automatically recognizable caricature version; he gave nightclub impressions few outsized mannerisms to latch onto. Newman was someone who moviegoers probably felt they knew better from his offscreen image than from any carefully maintained screen image. His image was that of a superior being who laughed at the idea that he was anything but a regular guy who'd been very, very lucky; a supreme sex symbol who, if given the chance, would probably bore you blind telling you how crazy he was about his wife of fifty years, Joanne Woodward, and his family life (""I have steak at home," Newman once famously told a Playboy interviewer who had the balls to ask him what he had on the side, "why go out for hamburger?"); a celebrity liberal who put his money where his mouth was and became a leading philanthropist, plowing hundred of millions of dollars into charitable causes, much of it generated by Newman's Own, the fantastically profitable food line that Newman and writer A. E. Hotchner began in 1982 as a joke. (Dalhlia Lithwick has a great piece about Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, the summer getaway he established for seriously ill children.) Because he was Paul Newman, and because he chose his causes so well and didn't seem to possess whatever gene creates the appearance of smugness, Newman could indulge his political urges and never seem like a polarizing figure to anyone outside the ranks of the bitterly deranged, and though the news that Richard Nixon had been so thoughtful as to have included him on his White House enemies list He is sometimes said to have embodied the "anti-hero" in such movies as Hud, and that willingness and ability to play morally ambiguous and even downright rotten characters no doubt helped him keep him seem "relevant" as the 1950s crashed into the '60s and '70s, but the truth is that Newman was a logical choice for dislikable characters because, even as he gave meticulous, honest performances in those roles, his own likability took the box-office curse off them. After Newman appeared in the William Faulkner adaptation The Long, Hot Summer as Ben Quick, the sexy lout who is ostracized after being falsely accused of being a barn burner, Pauline Kael wrote that Hollywood had figured out that a hero could burn barns all day and night and audiences would love him anyway, so long as he was played by Paul Newman.

The Long Hot Summer, notable as the first of ten features in which he and Woodward acted together, was also one of three films from 1958, along with Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun, in which he played Billy the Kid in the big-screen version of a Gore Vidal TV play and the movie version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that pinpointed his transition from sincere juvenile to assurec leading man. He achieved classic status in 1961 playing the pool hustler Fast Eddie Felsen in Robert Rossen's The Hustler, a lowlife melodrama whose smoky atmosphere and acting duels between Newman and George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason retain their chewy zest more than forty-five years later. Of the aforementioned Hud, Manohla Dargis writes in yesterday's New York Times: "His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the wide-screen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray. The character would be a heartbreaker if he were interested in breaking hearts instead of making time with the bodies that come with them. That’s supposed to make Hud a mean man, but mostly he seems self-interested. No one is tearing him apart and Mr. Newman doesn’t try to plumb the depths with the role, which makes the character and the performance feel more contemporary than many of the head cases of the previous decade. He finds depths in these shallows." Hollywood legend has it that it was because of his success in those two movies that, in 1966, when Newman played Ross Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer, the character was re-christianed Harper so that the studio could cash in on what was apparently the sure-fire good-luck charm of releasing a Paul Newman movie whose title began with the letter "H." (Though not one of Newman's best--as in, way not--the movie was a hit, which may be why, a year later, he was rounded up to star in a Western, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, called Hombre.)

Newman's major contributions to the rebel strain of the counterculture were Cool Hand Luke (1967), in which he played a nonconformist on a chain hang who becomes a martyr figure--Christ in a sweat box--and the 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where his performance, engaging though it is, now looks like part of a charitable enterprise aimed at making a star of his buddy, Robert Redford. He would prove devoted not just to Redford--leading to a partnership that would be dipped in gold and garlanded with Oscars in the 1973 The Sting--but to the directors of those movies: respectively, Stuart Rosenberg, with whom he would re-team for WUSA, Pocket Money, and The Drowning Pool, in which he would reprise the role of Lew Archer, I mean, Harper; and George Roy Hill, who went on to direct The Sting and Slap Shot. For some of us, these hold up less well than many of his other hits; they feel self-satisfied and smirky, with the adolescent wisecracks piling up like foam rubber peanuts. In general, a complacency seemed to settle in for Newman in this period, if not so much in his acting as in his choice of roles. There's plenty of evidence that he had grown tired of presenting himself for the camera's delectation. He had a high-profile side career as a race car driver, but he had also turned to directing. He directed six films in all, four of them--Rachel, Rachel (1968), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1973), the TV film The Shadow Box (1980), and The Glass Menagerie (1987)-- starring Joanne Woodward, and two, the Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Harry and Son (1984) starring himself. (Both he and Woodward won Golden Globes and New York Critics Cricle Awards for Rachel, Rachel.)

There were signs that he had begun to stir again when he signed on to star in two pictures directed by Robert Altman, but Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Quintet (1979) did not mark the finest hour for either of them. But by now Newman was in his mid-fifties and wide awake, and he seemed to enter the 1980s with a renewed commitment to his craft. Unlike some other make stars who became public embarrassments by their determination to prove that aging hadn't slowed them down or cost them a drop of testosterone, Newman seemed genuinely, and even playfully, curious about seeing just what he could do with this new state of affairs and how long he could keep it going. His performances in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), Absence of Malice (1981), and The Verdict (1982) were as forceful and finely shaded as anything he had ever done, maybe as good as anything any star at his age had done, and the Academy Award that he received for revisiting the role of Fast Eddie twenty-five years down the line in Martin Scorsese's The Hustler sequel The Color of Money (1986) may have been even more well-deserved as it was unneeded as a confirmation of his stature.

After that benchmark, he seemed to settle in doing whatever it pleased him to do. He had what looked like a terrific time being miscast as tomcatting Louisiana governor (and secret desegregationist) Earl K. Long in Ron Shelton's Blaze, reunited onscreen once more with his wife in the Merchant-Ivory Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, indulged his taste for screwball nonsense as the capitalist villain of the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), kept a firm grip on his sex appeal even as he approached and passed his seventieth birthday in two movies directed by Robert Benton, the underappreciated 1994 charmer Nobody's Fool and the grim memento-mori detective story Twilight (1998). Some fifty years after playing George Gibbs in Our Town on TV, he returned to the play, this time playing the Stage Manager in a Broadway revival that was also recorded for television. He made his last on-camera movie appearance as Tom Hanks's gangster boss in Road to Perdition but continued to do voice work, including a role in the Pixar animated feature Cars. He also played Ed Harris's father in the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls, whose cast also included Joanne Woodward. In May of 2007, he publicly announced his retirement from acting, a decision that was cause for considerable sadness among his fans. The news of his death might best be seen as cause for gratitude, both for the pleasure he gave and the example he set, and for gobstruck admiration at just how much one man was able to get right in the conduct of his life. Presumably Newman would begin any list of his achievements with the names of his children: Susan Kendall and Stephanie, from his early marriage to Jackie Witte, and, from his marriage to Woodward, Elinor "Nell" Teresa, Melissa "Lissy" Stewart, and Claire "Clea" Olivia. (Elinor appeared in both Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays under the name "Nell Potts".) Newman and Jackie Witte also had a son, Scott, an actor who made his movie debut opposite his father in The Towering Inferno (1974), who died in 1978 from an accidental drug overdose. The Scott Newman Center, which seeks to prevent substance abuse through education, was established in memory.

Will Elder, 1921--2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Will Elder has died at the age of 87, after a battle with Parkinson's. A commercial artist and cartoonist, he spent much of his life all but joined at the hip to the great Harvey Kurtzman, who created Mad for EC Comics in 1952. Elder, who had been a classmate and collaborator of Kurtzman's from years before, became the defining artistic voice of Mad in its comic book period; he and Kurtzman had similar senses of humor, and when Elder illustrated Kurtzman's scripts eviscerating such cultural touchstones as Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, and Archie and Jughead. After Kurtzman left Mad in 1957, Elder followed him loyally through a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump (a Garden of Eden for print humor of the period, and one that lasted all of two issues), Humbug (which is set to be republished in its entirety later this year by Fantagraphics), and Help! Though it was the most uneven of all these publications, it was for Help! that Kurtzman and Elder created the doomed all-American careerist boy Goodman Beaver, star of their masterpiece, "Goodman Goes Playboy," featuring characters from their earlier "Archie" parody. That story was kept out of circulation by years due to threat of legal action from the publishers of "Archie" comics, who were unamused to learn that their red-headed cash cow was throwing orgies in his vast hipster crash pad after selling his soul to the devil. Which is ironic, since everyone who participated in suppressing the story has, of course, gone to Hell for it.

After Help! went bust, Kurtzman (who died in 1993) and Elder mainly kept their hand in with irregular installments of the Playboy feature "Little Annie Fanny", which boasted eye-popping, gorgeous painted artwork by Elder. In his later years, Elder busied himself by jovially witnessing his belated transformation into a living legend, a process helped along by the publication (in two volumes) of all the "Little Annie Fanny" stories as well as the gratifyingly thick tribute volumes Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art and Chicken Fat. Although he never actually worked for the movies, to a great degree, movie comedy of the second half of the twentieth century is unimaginable without Elder's influence. His propensity for packing gags upon gags is there in the work of such directors as Richard Lester and the Louis Malle of Zazie dans le Metro, not to mention Airplane!, and the self-conscious analysis of pop culture that he and Kurtzman developed in their work planted the seeds for much of what sprouted in movies in the 1960s and 1970s, from the use of old gangster and private eyes movies as the basis for something new and self-critical in Bonnie & Clyde and The Long Goodbye to George Lucas reviving old Saturday matinee serials with a more or less straight face. Portzebie, and out.

Hollywood "P.I. to the Stars" Sent Up the River

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano has been found guilty of 77 out of 78 charges including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft. (He was acquitted of a single count of unauthorized computer access. He still has a racketeering-related charge yet to be decided.) The case attracted much in show business circle because of the high-profile nature of some of Pellicano's clients, and also some of his victims. Among those who hired him included Brad Grey of Paramount Pictures and Michael Ovitz. Pellicano's downfall began with Ovitz hired him to "handle" a reporter named Anita Busch, who contacted the FBI after she "walked out to her Audi outside her home to find a dead fish under a pan, a hole in the windshield, and a note saying 'STOP.'" Pellicano also placed taps on Busch's phone, as well as on the telephones of Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine (the last at the behest of Carradine's ex-wife, who Pellicano was dating) and conducted a smear campaign against Garry Shandling in response to Shandling filing suit against his own former agent.

Prosecutor Daniel Sanders told the jury that "This case is not about Hollywood", and as Carla Hall notes in the Los Angeles Times, the government did its best to see to it that it wouldn't be about Hollywood by not charging or investigating Pellicano's rich, powerful employers, whose knowledge of just what he was up to remains shrouded in mystery. A few notables, such as Die Hard (and, more recently, Basic and The 13th Warrior) director John McTiernan, who thought it would be at least as good idea to lie to feds about the case as it was to remake Rollerball, were scooped up and convicted of charges related to Pellicano months ago, but most of the big names dragged into the case managed to steer clear of legal involvement. Charged alongside Pellicano were his associates and co-defendents Mark Arneson, a former member of the LAPD; retired telephone company field technician Ray Turner; computer expert Kevin Kachikian; and a former Las Vegas businessman, Abner Nicherie. As Carla Hall dryly puts it, "No one in the group was likely to be spotted dining at the Ivy or skiing in Aspen."

Smarter People Than Us Pick the Five Most Realistic Science Fiction Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

To celebrate the success of Iron Man, which apparently does a much better job of realistically depicting how a man might go about turning himself into an armored guilded missle than, say, Spider-Man did in its speculation on the probable effects of being bitten by a radioactive spider ("Mommy, hiw come he's not turning brown and lying crumpled on the floor weeping?"), New Scientist has compiled a list of "five science fiction movies that get the science right." This is one of those areas where we'll just have to take their word for it, along with whether the kids in Spellbound got those words spelled right or not, or what circumstances would make it possible for a strange man to flirt with Julia Roberts on the street and not wind up in traction. It may be no surprise that 2001 leads the list; it is, after all, an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre whose "strikingly realistic depiction of space travel" was forged in a collaboration between a serious sci-fi author and a cerebral, perfectionist director. And besides, it always puts us to sleep, just like science class. (New Scientist notes that the film's "crew members are shown coping with the boredom and routine of a long, straightforward trek across empty space", which sure is one way of putting it.)

More surprising, perhaps, are the thumb's-up for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which accurately "depicts memory as essentially a network of links," its distant cousin Solaris (either version), and Gattaca, which posits a "grimly plausible vision of a society dominated by genetic prejudice", and which some may consider an even greater film than 2001, simply because it's even more boring. The there's Alien, which impresses for the thought given to the life cycle of its title character, "in particular for the finer details of its life cycle." Cynics and subscribers to The Daily Worker will also point to the film's cold-eyed view of the characters' unfeeling employers and the nature of blue-collar labor in space, though the fact that two of the lowest-level, bluest-collared workers appear to belong to a union now clearly stamps the film as a pre-1980s period piece. On the other hand, extensive study into the behavior of people in emergency situations has concluded that it is true that if you stick half a dozen folks aboard a spaceship and have them plot their escape from a terrifying, homicidal shape-shifting monster, one of them will wander off to look for the cat.

And Fredo Is the Green Party

Phil Nugent — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Have you been sitting there staring at CNN thinking, I wish someone would translate the political debates of the day into terms I can understand, such as classic '70s movies? Good news! In an article in the journal National Interest, John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell use The Godfather and the conflicting approaches suggested for dealing with the threat from Sollozzo and the Tataglia family to explain the thought processes of what the authors identify as tht three main currents of American geopolitical thought following September 11, 2001. It is Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the consigliere and family diplomat, whp represents "liberal institutionalism"; his mantra is "we oughta talk to them." "First, like many modern Democrats," write the authors, "Tom believes that the family’s main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to 'reclaim its proper place in the world.'” He butts heads with Sonny the hothead, who is the voice of neoconservatism, brandishing a big stick and quick to accuse anyone who expresses a lack of enthusiasm for seeing him swing it of disloyalty to the family. When Tom offers advice and counsel, Sonny (James Caan) replies that there is only one thing of value that Tom can offer: "Just help me win." As the authors see it, "Sonny’s damn-the-torpedoes approach belies a deep-seated fear that the only way to reestablish the family’s dominance is to eradicate all possible future threats to it. While such a strategy makes emotional sense following the attempted hit on his father, it runs counter to the long-term interests of the family."

Fortunately, we still have Michael (Al Pacino) to arrive at a compromise alternative to namby=pamby compromise and kneejerk aggression. "Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family’s interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today’s foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist. Viewing the world through untinted lenses, he sees that the age of dominance the family enjoyed for so long under his father is ending. Alone among the three brothers, Michael senses that a shift is underway toward a more diffuse power arrangement, in which multiple power centers will jockey for position and influence. To survive and succeed in this new environment, Michael knows the family will have to adapt." So he marshals his forces, considers his options, and the next thing you know, bada-bing, Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey have been duly adapted to the new realities. Not the least of the many things to love about this essay is that it essentially describes the current administration and its enablers as "yearning for the moral clarity" of a fictional Mafia organization. But what we want to know is, does this mean that Crawford, Texas is the new Lake Tahoe?

Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Donnie Darko (2001), the long-gestating cult hit from writer-director Richard Kelly, is about to get an ugly little brother. Or maybe a stepbrother, or just somebody who got ahold of its credit card number and is charging pizzas to its account. The planned sequel, S. Darko, begins shooting next week and is going to be shopped around at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The film's title refers to the character of Samantha Darko, who was Donnie's sister in the original film and was played by Daviegh Chase. The plot will involve a road trip the now- eighteen-year-old Samantha takes with a friend, a trip that becomes complicated when they begin to experience "bizarre visions." (Spoiler alert: Donnie himself, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, did not survive the conclusion of the first film.) Daveigh Chase will reprise her role in the new film, and that's as close as it has to an actual, breathing connection to the original Donnie Darko. The $10-million production will be directed by Chris Fisher, who directed and co-wrote Dirty, a crooked-cop drama starring Cuba Cooding, Jr., and horror flicks about real-life murderers Richard ("Night Stalker") Ramirez and the Hillside Strangler. Fisher says that "I am a great admirer of Richard Kelly's film and hope to create a similar world of blurred fantasy and reality." Simon Crowe, of the production company Velvet Octopus, chimes in: "I think there is a new generation of cinema-goers who will be very excited to see this film."

Whatever generation he has in mind, it does not appear that Richard Kelly is among their number. Cinemascope reports on Kelly's official reaction: "Over the last couple of days, a few people have asked me what’s up with 'this Donnie Darko sequel.' So to set the record straight, here’s a few facts I’d like to share with you all - I haven’t read this script. I have absolutely no involvement with this production, nor will I ever be involved. I have no control over the rights from our original film, and neither I nor my producing partner Sean McKittrick stand to make any money from this film." Reaction from fans has been swift, too: there's already a petition on-line devoted to shutting the damn thing down. (Quick, somebody call Sprite Gum!) It's not exactly the first time that some hack has threatened to grind out a string of sausage movies "based" on an original that deserves to be treated with more respect. (Can you say The Stepfather II: Father's Day?) But it's definitely a cheeky move to try this sort of thing with such a beloved art-cult object, especially given how long it took for Richard Kelly himself to start reaping some benefits from Donnie Darko itself. Or, as Cinemascope's Peter Sciretta puts in, in a line worthy of Dr. Van Helsing: "damn the buyers that will pour money [into] what seems on the outset as a blasphemous and disrespectful project".

Indiana Jones and the Internet Critics' Pre-emptive Strike: Ain't It Cool News Sandbags Spielberg and Co.

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes its official debut with a press screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, four days before it opens wide theatrically. The picture has been immersed in a protective bath of secrecy; Steven Spielberg likes his intended surprise to, you know, surprise. But, perturbingly enough, the first reviews have started trickling in, thanks to that bastion of cutthroats and jacka;s known as the Internets. The initial "quick reaction" was posted to Ain't It Cool News last Thursday evening by "ShogunMaster." The spoiler-heavy review reports that Harrison Ford "has a few lines that work and a million that don't", trashes the other performers, laments the last of tension or suspense "During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero ... was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.. He just never shows signs of worry or distress."), and sums up the proceedings with the judgement that this is "the Indiana Movie that you were dreading."

Not having seen the movie ourselves, we have no way of verifying these claims, but the truest thing in the review (which has since been joined on the site by what Michael Cieply describes as "two other less critical, but less than sparkling, reviews") is probably its author's admission that "it doesn't matter what I say, you will see this movie regardless." Still, you have to wonder who the fellow is and how he managed to be one of the first people on Earth to see the movie. Now Cieply reports that "ShogunMaster", "reached via the Web site, said he is a theater executive who saw the film at an exhibitors’ screening this week." Cieply notes that "Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen. As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film’s release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws. Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms." If that's what ShogunMaster is all about--trying to dampen the perception of public enthusiasm for a sure-fire hit as a negotiating ploy--then Ain't It Cool News' participation for the sake of a scoop might threaten the good name of on-line film criticism, if it had a good name. As everybody keeps reminding me, it kind of doesn't, but still!

Which Came First? "Poultrygeist" vs. "Blood Freak"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, a film directed by Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, opens in theaters this weekend. Which is kind of weird, because it already opened in New York a couple of Christmas seasons back, and then had a belated general opening last year. Apparently the always-innovative Kaufman has decided to keep opening it at periodic intervals until somebody notices. (We noticed, Lloyd. You can stop now.) What's also unusual about Poultrygeist is that, by making a film about "chicken zombies," Troma has opted to make a movie that will probably not be the worst movie of its kind ever made. With the Toxic Avenger series, Troma all but cornered the market in bad franchise films about a superhero born of toxic waste. No sorrier examination of the phenomenon of fat guys going nutzoid exists than Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid; all surf Nazis films are surpassed in lousiness by Surf Nazis Must Die. But without having seen Poultrygeist--a state of virginal innocence that I fully intend to maintain for the remainder of my days on Earth, so that it'll be a fresh experience for me if they want to show it to me in Hell--I feel confident in my belief that his film will pale in ghastliness to the immortal Blood Freak, co-directed in 1972 by Brad F. Grinter and the picture's star, Steve Hawkes. Lloyd is getting on in years and has been at this a while now, and certain things benefit from the enthusiasm of youthful amateurism.

The film opens with a monologue delivered by Grinter, seated at a desk, smoking, and creepy enough that Larry Flynt would decline his offer of a lollipop. Looking seedy and pissed off--maybe he didn't want to appear on camera but had no choice but to jump in when Brando pulled out at the last minute--he stresses the instructional nature of the passion play we are about to behold. Enter Hawkes as the burly, massive-haired Herschell, who crashes a pot party held by the well-tanned Ann (Dana Cullivan) and settles in for a good, all-night theology discussion. Unfortunately, the combined power of Ann's sultry wiles and her addictive wacky weed prove too much for Herschell, and he's soon violating his Christian vows right, left, and sideways. Blood Freak is available in an impressively bonus-packed DVD from Something Weird Video, and it would be wrong of me to give away too much of the plot even if I understood it, but suffice to say that after Herschell, his internal defenses weakened from too much free love and hemp, takes a job as a test subject for some pointy-head scientists working on an experimental turkey-breeding drugs, it's only a matter of time before crazed bloody homicides and a big papier-mache bird hand are in his future. The trailer below can give you a hint of the awful wonders that are to come in this film, which is unusual for its mixture of proselytizing for the Christian-message market and its unrestrained use of the blood pump. This is especially notable in a scene involving a circular saw, for which the filmmakers hired the services of a man with a false leg. The scene is all the more remarkable for how unconvincing it is, due to the man's agonized screaming, which is not of Actor's Studio quality. I guess that if you're making a Christian poultry zombie splatter flick on a very tight budget, you figure you can't just say to the first one-legged man who shows up at the audition, "Listen, physically you're what we're looking for, but we're going to hold out for a one-legged guy who really needs the fifty bucks and who can act!" But still...

Democracy in the Western: Charles Taylor on "Rio Bravo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"To the left, Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness. That his screen persona was neither swaggering nor crude hardly mattered." So writes Charles Taylor in the latest issue of the pinko-liberal publication Dissent. While the above statement can be taken as definitive proof that Taylor has never seen McQ, it'll stand for the performances that Taylor cites as among Wayne's best, such as those in Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, and the one he's here to preach about tonight: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. As Taylor writes, "The inspiration for Rio Bravo came from perhaps the most praised of Westerns, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. High-Minded Noon it might have been called. Existing for no other reason than to impart a lesson in good citizenship, High Noon was a transparent metaphor for the failure of Americans to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Hawks hated it. Narratively, Hawks felt it made no sense for Gary Cooper’s sheriff to spend the movie soliciting the townspeople’s help to fend off the killers coming for him only to prove, in the end, that he didn’t need help. Hawks was offended by the idea that a sheriff would endanger the lives of the people he was meant to protect by trying to recruit them to save his skin. So Hawks made a movie in which Wayne’s sheriff turns down the help offered him, and needs it at every turn... Part of the beauty of Wayne’s performance here is the way, even when Chance is refusing help, he never undervalues others. When Chance’s friend, the cattleman Wheeler (the inevitable Ward Bond), derides his deputies by asking, 'A bum-legged old man and a drunk—that’s all you’ve got?' Chance answers, 'That’s what I’ve got.' It’s the single best line reading of Wayne’s career. There’s a world of respect in the weight he puts on that one word, 'what,' an irreducible sense of people’s worth as individuals."

Rio Bravo's open affection for its characters--characters that we, the viewer, spend a lot of time cooped up with in small, confining spaces--helps to account for its status as, in Quentin Tarantino's terminology, one of the greatest hang-out movies of all time. Wayne's John T. Chance "is the heroic figure whose self-sufficiency inspires the others to rise above their shortcomings. But because this is a celebration of democracy, the result isn’t a race of isolated heroes but a community in which the strength of each individual buoys up everyone else. Even Chance, the strongest person in the movie, can’t do without those people." Indeed, because without Dean Martin fumbling with the last shreds of his self-respect, Walter Brennan lurching and gabbing, and Rick Nelson leading the camp sing-along, there woule nothing to watch except for Claude Akins complaining about the quality of the jail food until Wayne went back to his cell to bludgeon him to sleep, not that this wouldn't have been something to watch. As it is, it is a film that, in Taylor's eyes, "justif[ies] the idea of America." It is good to know that a film that justifies the idea of America has a scene in which Angie Dickinson appears wearing fishnet stockings.

Polanski Sexual Assault Victim Gives Thumb's Up to "Polanski: The Movie"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:30:00 GMT

When Roman Polanski won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Pianist, he became the first filmmaker to win that Oscar while a fugitive from U. S. justice. In 1977, Polanski was arrested and charged with rape and drugging a minor after Samantha Geimer (or Samantha Gailey, as she was then known), a thirteen-year-old girl who he wanted to photograph for French Vogue, claimed that he had plied her with champagne and quaaludes and then assaulted her at the private shoot he had arranged at Jack Nicholson's house. Polanksi, who has always maintained that he was set up as part of a scheme by the girl's mother to blackmail him, arranged a deal to plea to a lesser charge, only to flee the country after being advised that the judge intended to set aside the plea bargain and throw the book at him. (He faced a possible prison term of fifty-years.) He hasn't been back to the States since, though Samantha Geimer, interviewed in the wake of The Pianist's release, said that as far as she was concerned, "Straight up, what he did to me was wrong. But I wish he would return to America so the whole ordeal can be put to rest for both of us."

All this and more is covered in the eagerly awaited HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which had its premiere showing in New York this week. Jada Yuan of New York magazine's "Vulture" blog reports that one party of three that showed up for the event were: Samantha Geimer, accompanied by her mother and husband. Geimer, who lives in Hawaii, has three kids and works for a real estate developer, agreed to let the filmmakers interview about what happened thirty years ago because, ""Generally for me, it's just easier that if people want to talk to me, I talk to them. That way they don't sit out in front of my house and wait for me." Still, you might think that she wouldn't have been up to flying in from the big island to see it all gone over again onscreen. On the contrary, "We thought this would be really fun. We don't get many chances to come to New York, so I was really happy to come and see the city and do all this fabulous stuff. Got to be back to work on Friday or the boss will fire me." As for the movie, she endorses it heartily, and maybe, a bit, to her surprise: "I didn't think somebody could make it that interesting."

Long-Lasting Gum Does Its Part to Chew Uwe Boll Out of the Business

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It has come to our attention--mainly because they sent us a press release about it--that Stride Gum, the ridiculously long-lasting gum, has jumped on board the anti-Uwe Boll bandwagon. To do its part, the company has pledged to dole out a million packs of gum if the petition urging Boll to shred his Directors' Guild card reaches the required one million signatures. (Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of the underground lair he sublets from the Monarch, Paul Clark shakes his black-gloved fist.) Who knew the CEO of Stride Gum was such a movie geek? Actually, it appears that this is the company's way of declaring its allegiance to the video-gamers it sees as an important part of its demographic. “Since gamers are one of our most supportive groups, we’ve been looking for ways to return the favor,” said Gary Osifchin, Stride North American Marketing Director. “And what better way is there to get gamers’ backs than by helping them rescue their cherished videogames from the clutches of Uwe Boll?” Osifchin added, "Look, it's nothing personal against the guy. Maybe his non videogame-based films are unbelievable!" (Uwe Boll has made non-videogame-based films? I guess it's possible--Wes Craven once made a music appreciation movie starring Maryl Streep, and then there's that Bill Murray remake of The Razor's Edge--but it still seems wrong.) If the petition racks up its millionth signature between May 7 and May 14, 5 P.M. EST, each signer will receive "a digital coupon for a pack of gum, downloadable on May 23, 2008," which is the day that Boll's Postal, featuring Verne Troyer in the challenging dual role of "Himself" and "Voice of Krotchy", is set to hit theaters. I don't know if there's anyone out there who regards the two most important things in life as chewing free gum and someday getting to see BloodRayne 3, but if there is, I'd imagine there's some internal conflict going on right now.

Before we get in trouble here, let us stress that our reporting this news does not in any way represent a paid or unpaid testimonial for Stride Gum. We ourselves have never tried Stride Gum, but not because we have any particular reason for avoiding it. We just haven't used chewing gum since we were eight years old and somebody told us you weren't supposed to swallow it. (But we used to get so hungry sometimes, waiting for Mama to come back from the bar where she'd go to visit Uncle Fred, and Uncle Jerry, and Uncle Marshall, and Uncle Zeke...) This guy we know who spends his days sitting in front of the entrance to the Columbus Circle subway station did once tell us that it's like chewing a dead rat soaked in battery acid, but he also has an ornate theory about how Princess Diana was killed because she knew about a sex tape featuring the Pope and Bela Lugosi, so any consumer advisories from him should probably be taken with a grain of salt. The important thing is that Uwe Boll is really bringing people together, in ways that bad directors never dreamed might be possible in Ed Wood's or Phil Tucker's day. Big blue marble!

Who Spoils the Spoilers? Intimations and Possible Repurcussions of the Post-Credits "Iron Man" Epilogue

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

If you're one of the many ticketbuyers who saw Iron Man this past weekend, Marvel Studios thanks you: you helped get the comic-book company's plans to produce its own line of self-generating comic-book movies off to a soaring start. (The name "Marvel Studios" has appeared in each of the movies based on Marvel's licensed characters going back to the 1998 Blade, but Iron Man is the first that wasn't a "co-production" basically funded by a major studio.) But those who declined to stay until the end of the voluminous closing credits missed Iron Man's final scene, which is not so much a revelation as a marketing tie-in. As seen in this YouTube-posted video, which judging from the crowd noise on the soundtrack may not be entirely copyright-protected, Iron Man ends with Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark, who is already known to make a drop-in appearance in the forthcoming The Hulk, receiving a visit from Colonel Nick Fury, played by one the few living American actors who might convincingly chew nails, who seems to be out on a late-night recruiting drive for the Avengers. The Avengers, the ever-shifting superhero team whose core membership has included Iron Man, the Hulk, the mighty Thor, and that dipshit Hawkeye, have been slated for their own movie next year; Iron Man's Jon Favreau has expressed an interest in directing.

One interesting thing about all this is that is suggests that Marvel Studios intends to apply the same principles that put Marvel Comics on top for decades: by linking its products to one another, by grafting as many crossover connections between them as possible, it hopes to make the little zombies desperate to see everything stamped with its logo for fear of missing something vital, or even just the latest cool one-liner that one;s very favoritest character happens to utter while making a cameo appearance in someone else's movie. At its most decadent, over-inbred stage (can you say "Secret Wars"?), this interlocking marketing process was sometimes tricky to pull off when dealing with pen-and-ink characters without trailers and competing salary demands, which is one reason that it'll be interesting to see if Marvel Studios can pull it off when working with flesh-and-blood actors. Already, there have been some complaints, as seen in the video posted above, regarding the Nick Fury casting. Of course, for some of us, Nick Fury will always be one man and one man only:

Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds: 2 B 2-Together 4-Ever!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds are getting hitched, and we here at the Screengrab haven't been this proud and excited since our guppies mated! These are two of our favorite people: Reynolds, because he's a likable fellow who's shown himself to be a reliable, capable actor whether he's flexing his chops in bad comedies (Van Wilder), bad action movies (Smokin' Aces), bad horror movies (The Amityville Horror), or bad unintentionally comic action horror movies (Blade : Trinity); Johansson, because she was once in a good movie (Ghost World) without doing it much harm, because Tom Waits isn't too proud to cash the royalty checks, and because every time we run a picture of her, such as this computer-generated simulation of what she'll look like in her wedding outfit, our page numbers go up for some reason. (Also, her name is Scarlett, but she's a blonde! How trippy is that!?) Interestingly, though both of them keep very busy, the 23-year-old Johansson and the 31-year-old cradle-robbing bastard Reynolds have never worked together before. (IMDB lists their only shared credit as 101 Sexiest Celebrity Bodies on TV, which we haven't seen--we're waiting for the opera---but we have a hunch it would stretch the definition of "working together.") But if this marriage is going to work, and I think we can all agree that the thought of it failing is just too morbid to contemplate, then they're going to want to explore the possibility of co-starring vehicles to increase their volume of quality time together. (It worked for Julia and Kiefer, right?) Because the kids must have their hands full with wedding plans--registering at Sears, negotiating to rent out a bowling alley for the bachelor party, trying to get Survivor's Boston Robb on the phone to ask if he'd still lobby for the surf and turf buffet--they might not have a lot of time to flip through scripts, so we've taken the liberty of offering a few suggestions:

THE GETAWAY: Scarlett and Ryan have to co-star in a remake of the married-bank-robbers-on-the-lam thriller The Getaway, based on the Jim Thompson novel. This isn't our favorite choice for them, but after the Steve McQueen-Ali McGraw and Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger versions, we're pretty sure that federal law demands it, so they might as well get it over with quick, like ripping off a band-aid or meeting the in-laws. (Personal to Ryan: just ignore Mr. Johnansson when he demands that you pull his finger.) After watching Ryan's steely gunplay in Smokin' Aces, we suspect that he'll actually be a solid, impressive Doc McCoy, and as for Scarlett, well, we're sure that she'll look shiny and immaculate even while camping out in a rat-infested dumpster. Since the movie will almost certainly blow, the newlyweds can't be judged too harshly for it, which means that the real suspense will be in seeing who gets to play the slimy killer nutjob chasing them and the lovable old goober who gives them a lift at the very end. We propose that the casting director go wide and unexpected with Steve Zahn as the psycho and pluck the viewers' nostalgic heartstrings by hiring Bob Newhart to play the sweet, gabby old thing. Or, if Newhart is unavailable, Robert De Niro.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: After the scathing reviews The Getaway is sure to earn, Scarlett in particular will be eager to jump in the deep end and show off her acting chops. That's a problem for her, because she can't act, but she can probably hollar, and that's really all you need to do to impress most critics with your range after they've sat through twenty pictures where you pretty much just stood there reflecting light. Playing Martha, the rampaging gorgon at the center of Edward Albee's marital slugfest, gave Elizabeth Taylor the chance to pick up an Academy Award for Best Hollaring by a One-Time Candidate for Most Beautiful Person in the World, so there's a ready-made tradition for Scarlett to tap into here. The husband, George, is supposed to be a prototypical middle-aged American wimp, but since most people's memories of the play are based on the movie starring Taylor and Richard Burton, they think George is English, which means that Reynolds too will have the chance to stretch by breaking out his best Monty Python accent to go with his prop eyeglasses. Throw in Elijah Wood and Bijou Phillipa as the goggle-eyed witnesses to this house of horrors and I think we've got a winner. Don't talk about the boy, Scarlett!

GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY: Tradition and awards are all well and good, but for full mutual career satisfaction, our little Lunt and Fontaine are also going to need to bring home that box-office gold. The ideal thing would be to sign them up for a franchise as crime-fighting superheroes. It isn't until you start trying to come up with possibilities that you realize just how few great man-and-woman superhero combos there have been, especially since Reed Richards and Sue Storm have already been spoken for. But we think that these two will make for a fine fit. Swear to God, we think there's always been something about Ryan Reynolds that's whispered, "Goatee! Robin Hood costume! Bow and arrows!" As for Scarlett, she's sure to rock the black leather slinkywear. The only problem is that there have been rumors of a Green Arrow movie in the works going back to when Kevin Smith was regarded as promising, and the property may be tied up. If it can't be pried free, then we propose going old-school and reviving Nick and Nora, the wisecracking alcoholic marrieds of the Thin Man series, "rebooting" the franchise to give it commercial potential for these sophisticated modern times. As Nick and Nora, Ryan and Scarlett will make wisecracks--or, to better keep with the nature of their talents, Ryan will make them while Scarlett stares at him blankly--chug martinis, and solve crimes. While wearing jet packs!

RYAN & SCARLETT'S XXX HONEYMOON SEX TAPE: A surefire career booster! With an IMAX 3-D sequence to be directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring Christopher Walken and Zac Efron in the musical numbers. To be released in conjunction with the premiere of their new reality series. "It's just called 'Chicken of the Sea' because people like chicken, Scarlett!"

Dr. No No No: Winehouse and Ronson Bail Out of Race to Write the Next James Bond Song

Phil Nugent — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In the latest chapter of Amy Winehouse's well-oiled sorrows, producer Mark Ronson has publically taken himself and the singer out of the apparently fierce competition to draft a theme song for the next James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It is not clear how close the pair ever were to a firm commitment from the movie's producers; Ronson said that there are "loads more really famous people" in the race, but that they had been "approached" to try their hand at it and had gotten as far as cutting a demo that, Ronson avers, "sounds like a James Bond theme." (Considering that "James Bond themes" run the gamut from swoony ballads performed by Louis Armstrong and Carly Simon to chaotic, weird attempts to rock the house by Duran Duran, that's a categorization that leaves one a lot of wiggle room.) Ronson also blamed the stalemate on Winehouse's well-publicized personal issues, including those with the demon rum, though the BBC reports that a spokesman for the singer insisted that "the decision was taken because she had 'other ideas' about how the song should be developed." (No one was prepared to comment on rumors that the real problem was that neither Winehouse or Ronson could think of any words that rhymed with "solace.")

Ronson has said that he hopes that, should the filmmakers decide to get really crazy and make another James Bond movie after this one, they will give Amy another shot at following in the steps of such rock and roll legends as Shirley Bassey, Sheena Easton, and A-Ha. (The closest thing to rock royalty in the James Bond Songbook is probably Wings, who probably agreed to do the theme for Live and Let Die as Sir Paul's way of letting 007 know that there were no hard feelings about the scene in Goldfinger where he told Shirley Eaton that drinking Dom Perignon at the wrong temperature was one of those things that simply aren't done, "like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs." If all else fails, Winehouse can always develop that demo and then quietly use it as filler on a record she releases thirteen years after the movie comes out. That's what Johnny Cash did with his song, "Thunderball."

Tribeca film Festival Review: "Bitter & Twisted"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Australian film Bitter & Twisted, a first film by the writer-director Christopher Weekes, is about a family that hasn't yet recovered from the suicide, three years ago, of the oldest son, Liam. Jordan (Steve Rodgers), a gentle, morbidly obese salesman as "Carn's Car Yard", spends part of each day eating lunch while visiting Liam's grave. Jordan has shut down sexually, and his wife, Penny (Noni Hazlehurst), is in desperate need of being made to feel that she's still desirable. When her period is late, Penny is flustered at the thought of becoming pregnant at 53, then horrified to learn that she isn't pregnant, she's menopausal. She takes her unhappiness out on her teenage daughter, discovered a childish, scribbled love note in the girl's pocket and barging into her room to ask, "Are you having sex!?" Weekes himself plays the younger son, Ben, who keeps showing up at the doorstep of his dead brother's girlfriend Indigo (Leeanna Walsman) and asking her if she'd like to go for a walk. (The sexually ambiguous Ben is being courted by a male friend who keeps a dead pet in the freezer in a plastic bag and recalls that he froze the animal "at the moment he was dying, just as he was reaching up for the light.") Indigo herself, when not humoring Ben with their walks, has taken refuge in an affair with an older, married man (Gary Sweet) and has just learned that she's pregnant. When she confronts her lover and her tells her how "complicated" things are, she replies, "This is something people say when they want to fuck you over and forgive themselves for it."

Bitter & Twisted feels underdeveloped in places, but it's also elliptical in the right ways: whatever reasons Liam had for his suicide are never made clear, and they don't really matter. The movie is about the people left behind, and about the different degrees to which each of them has chosen to remain paralyzed by grief, nursing it and refusing to move on. Jordan has reached the point where his body seems to be trying to either kill him or shock him back to life, and Penny has just started looking into the mirror and reeling from the discovery that time itself didn't freeze that day three years ago: the world has kept barreling ahead without them. Bitter & Twisted isn't quite a comedy, but despite its subject matter and the throbbing ache at its center, it's never merely a downer, either. The performances are superb, and the movie has a fresh, distinctive way of looking at its characters even when the story ends seem frayed. Weekes, who as an actor has some of the anguished angularity of the young Kyle MacLachlan, could turn out to be something special; his best work here already suggests an Australian Mike Leigh, without a political ax to grind.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.

Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Kassim the Dream"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The central figure of the ESPN documentary Kassim the Dream, directed by Kief Davidson (who co-directed The Devil's Miner), is a light middleweight boxer, Kassim Ouma, who was born in Uganda in 1978 and forced into army service when he was six years old. At eighteen, he escaped and made his way to the United States, where he discovered a gym ans started honing the skills he had developed on the army boxing team, as well as picking up the skills he'd need to get by in America--his new buddies at the gym didn't find out that he was homeless until he'd mastered enough of the English language to tell them. Like some of the other documentaries that ESPN lugged to the festival, it's a movie about a clash of cultures. When Kassim, who has one small son in Uganda and another smaller one in the States, holds the toddler in his arms and asks him, "Are you a Ugandan baby or an American baby?", the kid seems to answer by sticking his Mickey Mouse doll in the camera lens.

Kassim the Dream is fascinating because Kassim himself is fascinating. For most of the film he maintains the open, smiling demeanor of a big, happy kid. (He's no less transparent when he's not so happy. After a long day's workout, his trainer says, "I love it now when Kassim comes by and gives me the mean face," and sure enough, the tired fighter stalks past the camera pouting like someone stole his lollipop.) At one point, he refers in passing to having tortured people when he was a child soldier, adding only that of course it makes sense that if you give a child a weapon and power over others and force him to engage in combat, he's going to enjoy torturing people. What he says is less remarkable than the fact that he's unembarrassed to say it--not because he doesn't show remorse but because he trusts the listeners to extend some understanding to what he must have gone through. His youthful experience seems to have made Kassim someone who lives totally in the moment, which, properly controlled, could be the key to being a good fighter but also can be a disability outside the ring; his manager makes no secret of thinking that Kassim has lost some fights, and the championship belt he won in 2004, because he doesn't know how to turn off the party machine that is always threatening to pick up steam around him. In the last section of the film, he finally manages to make it home to Uganda, after a long process of negotiations with the Ugandan government. (As an army deserter, he had been facing a possible death sentence.) There's a stunning sequence in which he goes from expressing gratitude at being let back into the country to a frenzy of panic in the car as he begins to fantasize that he might not be allowed to leave to even deeper gratitude to the army official who greets him and assures him that there are no hard feelings. Not long after that, he's prostate at the grave of his father (who, we're told, was beaten to death as a reprisal for Kassim's desertion) and declaring that Uganda is his true home and he 's going to stay. But he seems unlikely to entirely get America out of his system: he makes the papers by trying to show his support for Ugandan President Museveni by calling him "my nigga."

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "From Within"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

From Within is a good, nasty little horror picture about a mysterious rash of apparent suicides in a small town setting. The ingeniously twisted script, by Brad Keane, involves an occult spell that is used to punish some judgemental fundamentalists for the consequences of their superstitious paranoia, which is just the kind of logical inconsistency that makes for classic nightmares. The direction, by Phedon Papamichael provides some rude jolts but is more heavily paced than it needs to be and could stand some leavening of humor; Elizabeth Rice is very appealing as the rational-minded teenage heroine, but movie's tone is very much in sync with its young male lead, Thomas Dekker, who (as in the Terminator TV series) is so monotonously, grimly intense that you'd almost pay to see him tickled by professionals. Still, the picture holds you, and its vicious streak is played all the way out to the end, which delivers a surprising kick. From Within will be best appreciated by those who like their horror movies without milk, cream, or sugar.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "The Zen of Bobby V"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:00:00 GMT

The Zen of Bobby V, one of a number of ESPN sports documentaries in this year's festival, stars Bobby Valentine, a former player and manager in major league baseball who's currently well into his second stay in Japan, managing the Chibbe Lotte Marines. Directed by Andrew Jenks, Jonah Quickmore Pettigreu, and Andrew Muscato, the picture is a friendly, puffy profile piece that makes the most of its subject's personable charm and low-pressure style. (Valentine to a player doing badly at batting practice: "It's okay, it's not like you're totally stinking out there." Player: "I am stinking out there!" Valentine: "Yeah, but not totally!") Valentine's wife turns up to tell the camera that when his team is winning, her husband is a pleasure to be around and "all right's with the world." The filmmakers, who kept him company over the course of a full season, stays close to him when he's winning and keeps a respectful distance when he isn't. (One quick montage of Valentine in smashing-rampage-tantrum mode is included, but it isn't made clear how many water coolers he goes through during the average losing streak.)

There is a larger and more interesting story that emerges, about professional baseball's meaning to the Japanese fans and the evolution of the game in that country, where it's in danger of having already evolved as far as it's going to. Japan, as Valentine points out, is the only country now where baseball is the number one sport in terms of fan appreciation. But now major league baseball in America has started poaching the best players who emerge there, and the fact that the Japanese players are apparently unable to resist the siren call from the States, partly because American baseball pays many times better but also because playing in the U.S. is seen as the ultimate proof of having made it, does nothing for the "inferiority complex" that a Japanese baseball executive readily admits most Japanese feel in relation to America. Valentine earns the right to serve as an entrance point for this subject because of his devotion to Japanese baseball. It's suggested at one point that he may have chosen to work in Japan partly because he can't resist a challenge, but the movie makes it clear that both his evangelical promotion of the game in the East and his love of Japan itself are deeply and truly felt. (Assistant talking on his cell phone to the States: "I'm climbing Mt. Fuji with Bobby Valentine. [Pause.] Well, I don't know how I can prove it to you.") Valentine may get his metaphors mangled when he compares the departure of Japanese players to the U.S. to the death of the Negro Leagues, but his ideas for trying to build up Japanese baseball by transplanting as much of the American business model as possible sound plausible, and the devotion he receives from the Japanese fans well-deserved. The filmmakers manage to describe this particular culture-clash without resorting to condescension or cheap shots, give or take the odd reference to the Japanese owners' attempts to beef up attendance with Geisha Night and Petting Zoo Night.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Lioness"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The eye-opening documentary Lioness, directed by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, deals with one of the least-covered aspects of the Iraq war: the role of American women in combat. Technically, there supposedly aren't any, because government policy expressly forbids it. In actual fact, the "nature of this war" has meant that, as one of film's interview subjects puts it, women soldiers in Iraq "have been forced to violate their policy in order to do their jobs," especially if you consider it part of their jobs to not get their heads blown off. (The military has been finessing the matter by playing games with the definition of what officially constitutes a "combat situation.") Lioness, which takes it title from the nickname of a women's unit in Iraq, pinpoints the April, 2004 siege of Ramadi as a turning point in the history of the use of women in combat. That day, Sgt. Ranie Ruthig and Specialist Shannon Morgan were on assignment with a Marine unit that was ambushed by Iraqi gunmen. As an officer tells the camera, there had been no intention to send the women into combat, but "combat found them." At one point, Shannon Morgan, who was standing in the street being fired on, looked around and realized that she was a lone target, the guys who had been standing there with her a moment earlier having retreated to cover without telling her. The officer describes this as "not an ideal situation." Or as Morgan puts it, "I kicked the squad leader right in the nuts."

Should the military be using women soldiers in combat situations? The military thinks so. In 2005, Congressman Duncan Hunter, who for all I know may still be out there running for president somewhere, tried to attach a measure to a defense authorization bill that would have strictly prohibited any women from taking part in combat in Iraq. Not so very long ago, representatives of the U.S. military had reacted to the suggestion that they treat women as regular soldiers by acting as if they needed to clutch their pearls before the very idea just made then swoon. Now, they worked to squash Hunter's legislation because the only way it could have been enforced would have been to pull all women soldiers out of the country, and they had quickly come to regard their contribution as essential. There's a trace of an enlightened attitude mixed in with the desperation in that position. Unfortunately, the consensus at the Pentagon seems to be that it isn't widely shared among the public at large, which they fear would freak if people found out what their sisters and daughters are up to over there, so women's combat activities are not talked about and are actively concealed when possible. (Lioness shows a living-room reunion of some soldiers, including those who were at Ramadi, watching and hooting at a History Channel documentary about the siege that shows only men in its re-enactments.) This means that women soldiers are returning home, sometimes in desperate need of counseling, to a country that has no idea what they've been through.

The most compelling person in the movie is Shannon Morgan, an Arkansas native who's described by her C.O. as "a tough girl" who's good with guns. We see her prowling around the woods idly looking for something shoot, but what toughness she shows the camera seems like a transparent mask concealing some powerful emotions. (We also see her with her uncle, a Vietnam vet who in one breath cautions her against thinking too much about what she's been through and in the next breath is urging her to seek out the help he wishes he'd gotten thirty years ago.) She describes hesitating before killing a man for the first time because she was concerned that it would be a sin and she might go to Hell for it, but then, taking into consideration the fact that her target was already firing at her, she "got him right in my peeps, and he just dropped." She adds, "I don't regret what I did, but I really wish it had never happened."

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Chevolution"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Trisha Zitt and Luis Lopez's documentary Chevolution may be the closest thing you'll ever get to see to an episode of Behind the Music or E! True Hollywood Story about an image. The movie stars the face of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as it was captured in a photograph taken in 1960 that was mass reproduced in poster form on its way to turning into an iconic fashion and advertising image. (One of Guevara's most sympathetic biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, appears in the film sitting at a table with a coffee mug adorned with Che's kisser.) The most fascinating information in the movie is about the man who got this avalanche rolling, Alberto Diaz, popularly known as Korda. Korda had been a high-flying fashion photographer before developing a political conscience during Castro's war against the Batista dictatorship, during which he became a photojournalist vowing to use his skills to serve the revolution. (He wound up serving as Castro's personal photographer.) But he retained the eye and the instincts of a fashion photographer, and that's what made his news photos continue to stand out. They were certainly in evidence in the photo of Che, which was taken when Guevara showed up at the docks after an explosion aboard a Belgian cargo ship delivering a load of munitions. One of Korda's old colleagues says that he doesn't believe that he realized that he'd caught anything special, because he only took two or three shots when he had Guevara in his line of sight, and if he'd thought he had the makings of an important photo, he would have snapped ten or twelve. Maybe so, but Korda must have noticed at some point that he'd gotten a portrait of the camera-shy Guevara looking especially intense and fiery-eyed. Instinctively, he proceeded to crop the other figures out of the shot, leaving something that looks very much like a movie star's head shot.

Korda was unable to sell the picture to the Cuban newspapers in 1960, but years later, it fell into the hands of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian who had recognized the potential of easily reproducible, easily disseminated graphic posters as a political medium and who was not above profiting from this insight. Korda was above it; because of his devotion to the ideals of the socialist revolution, he declined to copyright the image or even make a public show of taking credit for it as it was being widely proliferated around the world. Shortly before he died in 2001, Korda did begin to go after companies that exploited Che's image by associating it with products he deemed inappropriate to the point of being degrading, such as cigarettes and booze, an ongoing battle that is now overseen by his daughter. Among the things they regarded as tarnishing to Che's memory is apparently leftist sludge rock, because they also went after Rage Against the Machine for decorating their drum kit with Che's face. The movie includes a wistful Tom Morello recalling how he and the guys used to think of Che as a fifth member of the band until a squad of lawyers showed up to announce that they were there to audition for the role of Yoko Ono.

Chevolution would be a stronger documentary if it included a meatier picture of who Che himself was and what he did and stood for. Most of the people who speak about him in the movie's first half do so in a tone that's respectful bordering on worshipful. That includes Gael Garcia Bernal and Antonio Banderos, both of who have played Che in movies--I guess Omar Sharif had prior commitments--and who speak of him, not unintelligently, as a fellow celebrity. In the movie's final third, which shows how thoroughly the Che image has entered the advertising culture, we do get to hear from a few young campus-conservative types, one of whom rants bitterly about the shallow ignorance of the radical chic and expostulates that if you want to live in a doctrinaire police state that tells you what to think and what you can say and how to live your life, then you should definitely wear Che's face on your T-shirt. (At the screening I attended, one guy in the audience chose this moment to applaud and hollar, "Yeah!" Ah, New York.) One way or another, the movie does demonstrate that the Che image is now so cut off from actual history as to mean whatever the person who wears it thinks it ought to mean, which is one reason it's had a much longer shelf life than Che himself did.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Seven Days Sunday"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The German film Seven Days Sunday marks the feature directing debut of Niels Laupert, a 33-year-old director of TV commercials and music videos. Laupert seizes on the true story of a couple of sixteen-year-old boys whose alienation and general confusion turns them into thrill killers for a night. One thing you can't accuse Laupert of is glamorizing psychopathic violent behavior. The way he tells this story, the two anti-heroes Adam, (Ludwig Trepte, who looks like Seth Cohen from The O.C. after a personality transplant with a woodchuck) and Tommek (played by Martin Kiefer as a scrawny-legged sweeb with a John Hinckley haircut, a tattoo on the side of his neck, and a pathetic smirk that seems intended to come across as threatening), are driven to kill out of sheer boredom, and to really hammer than point home, Laupert overloads the movie with some of the deadliest, most overextended scenes of just sitting the fuck around ever captured on film. (Seven Days Sunday runs eighty minutes and feels at least twice as long.) Martin Kiefer's performance has to be seen to fully appreciate just how unconvincing an actor playing a supposedly charismatic, dangerous adlescent tempter figure can be. He makes Crispin Glover in River's Edge look like Dr. Mabuse.

Light It Up: Perfecting the "Stoner Protest Comedy" with Harold and Kumar

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It has been suggested that, after the box-office (and, largely, critical and artistic) failure of the big, dramatic "Iraq war" films of yesteryear, the next step at dealing with the great issue of our times in movies will be through satire. But still, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay? It's good to know going in that they escape, but still, is everybody sure that Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg--who created the characters played by John Cho and Kal Penn in their screenplay for the 2004 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and who co-wrote and co-directed the new movie-- can be trusted to address the subject of "post-9/11 paranoia" with the right tone? Speaking to Dennis Lim, Schlossberg was quick to insist, “It’s not that Guantánamo Bay itself is funny.” Okay, that's a good start. Apparently the Gitmo thread was written into the sequel partly as a response to Penn's own difficulties when he was trying to get around to promote the first film. “Once we were with a friend of mine — he’s the same age, same height as me, except he’s white,” Penn says. “I was stopped at security, but he went through even though he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. They were so focused on pulling out the brown guy, they didn’t even notice.” He adds, "“That’s probably one of the only parallels between Kumar and me. We both get pulled out of line at airports.” Did you get that, studio bosses, LAPD, and Fox Network? It's one of the only parallels between them. Kal Penn does not toke up!

As Dennis Lim points out, "Race is at once central and beside the point in the Harold and Kumar movies. Casually integrating nonwhite heroes into a genre that has always been a white male preserve, the films seize on smutty, gross-out humor as the great equalizer. The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience." (Or, as Schlossberg puts it, “If you don’t know that [racism is bad], you’re a moron.") Beyond that, the filmmakers resist being politically pigeonholed--which is in itself a political statement, since it implies that they reject the notion, still prevalent in some quarters, that rejecting racism is a partisan position. James Adomian turns up in the new movie as George W. Bush, an appearance that Lim describes as "while not exactly respectful, it is arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date." “In our minds he isn’t that much different than Kumar in terms of motivation and certain life issues," says Hurwitz. "Both characters have a family trade they’re pushed toward and have a certain attitude of resistance.”

How You Gonna Get 'Em Into the Octoplex After They've Got Netflix?

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

ABC's Gig Stone has a report on the increasingly inventive (i.e., desperate) measures theater owners are taking to try to lure patrons out of their homes and away from their Netflix subscriptions. "In the early 1950s," she rights, while President Eisenhower twirls a hula hoop while listening to Bill Haley in the background, "before televisions were common, the average American went to the movies nearly 20 times a year. Today, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners, it's down to around five times a year." Everyone agrees that the best way to address this problem is to make the movies better. Nah, just kidding. Everyone agrees that the best way to address this problem is to make the movies seem better by getting the customers plowed." The Cinebarre theater in Asheville, North Carolina, which is about to open new theater-cum-eateries in Charleston and Denver, "has a full bar and waiters that will serve patrons a three-course meal and drinks while they're watching a first-run movie. " (This approach is not fool-proof. Back in New Orleans in the 1990s, we used to have this place called Movie Pitchers, which would hand you a generous swill-cup of beer to make your viewing experience that much more interesting as you settled back into one of their comfy couches. Unfortunately, they had rats. I once saw one the size of Lassie casually licking the foam off the top of the refreshing beverage that one patron had set on the floor beside his sneakered feet. I would have leaned over and whispered to him that he'd paid for two drinkers, but waiting to see what would happen if he reached for his beer while the rat was still there was a lot more exciting than watching the movie.)

Other theaters are charging extra for what they don't let inside their four walls. "People do not like the screaming babies," says Cinebarre CEO Terrell Braly, demonstrating the kind of specialized knowledge that makes one an expert. So more and more theaters are banning squawling infants and that other dreaded public scourge, cell phones. (If an infant shows up that's squawling into its own cell phone, they take it out back and kill it with a rock.) At least one theater in Boca Raton has in-house child care. Figures show that, whether this showmanship has anything to do with it, admission numbers are slowly crawling upwards. They might rocket upwards if, instead of coming up with ways to pad the tabs, theaters could agree to level out ticket prices at the ten-dollars-or-less level. But then the terrorists would have won.

The Summer of Downey

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen. The scale of Downey's talent was no secret by the time he starred in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, but the Oscar nomination he got for that performance made it "official." Attenborough has been quoted as referring to Downey as "a little Brat Pack gadfly" with no formal training but a willingness to "work his arse off," a neat way of giving himself credit for his star's performance. With regard to his lack of "formal training," Downey, talking to Rebecca Winters Keegan, recalls "hanging around and smoking weed in the stairways with my friends who had just gotten back from class. They'd tell me the exercises. It seemed like inevitably they wound up screaming and crying—screaming at each other and crying at what was screamed. I would just call that Thanksgiving."

Back in 2001, NPR's All Things Considered set aside two whole minutes of precious airtime to allow something called Stephen Lynch--it wrote for the Orange County Register, and I'm sure it's mama is proud of it--to take note of Downey's then-latest brushes with the law and the rehab centers and insist that Downey's reputation as a tragically misguided bullet of talent was inflated by the supposed glamour of his messy personal life. As an actor, Lynch declared, "He wasn't"--note the use of the past tense--"that good." What had this keen observer been smoking? One of the surprises of the recent interviews with Downey is the unexpected but not illogical connection he now draws between his triumph in Chaplin and the tabloid slide downhill. He tells Winters Keegan that he knew that he had "just knocked one out of the park", a feeling that carried an expectation that everything about his life was about to change. When everything didn't, it led to "this huge anticlimactic thing that basically took on different shades of awe, wonder, acceptance, bitterness or disassociation for the next—-what year is it?—-17 years. There was this kind of lull, and I never really found any momentum to focus my creative energy after that, so pretty expectable things happened." Cut to a few years down the line, and Downey was capable of accepting a recurring role on Ally McBeal for his next comeback, and further capable of getting himself written out of the series when his comeback was followed by more tabloid headlines, this time involving an arrest "in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume". What's striking about Downey's rough patch is that, even with his troubles, he was a dependable hire in terms of getting the role done; there are very few duff performances in his resume--one of them is in U.S. Marshals, a sequel to The Fugitive that he credited with pushing him once more over the edge, because, he once said in an interview with Mike Figgis, he wasn't in the best psychic condition to spend a few weeks running around playing "Johnny Handgun"--and he was assured of some kind of comeback every time he gave a performance that was widely seen. No one less stupid than Stephen Lynch--a select group that includes Mel Gibson and a dog I used to have that was killed trying to shake hands with an eighteen-wheeler--could fail to detect how much talent was there. The problem, in an industry where there are insurance forms to fill out, was getting someone to hire him at all.

Downey has said that he wanted to star in Iron Man in part so that he'd be in the kind of movie he could take his son to, but then, he said the same thing about U.S. Marshals. He's also said that he was tired of making movies that nobody sees, and it's bracing to hear someone intimate that he might regret having been in A Scanner Darkly or Zodiac, or at least that he'd be happier if they'd done better business. Elsewhere, Downey has cited Johnny Depp's success in a series of films based on a Disney theme park ride--"If Depp is on a Slurpee, I want to be on a Slurpee"--in a tone that seems to suggest that they amounted to giving him a kind of permission to headline a franchise for Marvel Comics. The fact is, both Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man point up what it is that, in a world where the media is as obsessed with box-office numbers as the studios, just what a Johnny Depp or a Robert Downey, Jr. might someday find himself being forced to prove. Nobody who's been paying attention can be in doubt about Downey's being a major actor; what he has to show, if he wants to have the power in terms of freedom and the options he must crave, is that he's a movie star. Which doesn't just mean the ability to command the screen or even the additional ability to put asses in seats but the control to show up and do the press junket and repeat the necessary drivel to reporters over and over without throwing a vase at somebody's head. And, yes, to look right on a Slurpee.

This Bud's for Gummo: Harmony Korine Shills for Budweiser UK

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

It's common knowledge that American movie stars who don't want to be thought of as common product shills here at home will pick up a quick check doing TV commercials for the overseas market. Still, it's a little surprising to learn that professional bad boy director Harmony Korine has been hired to shoot commercials for Budweiser that are being aired on British TV. The series of ads, one of which can be viewed above (while others can be found here and here,) feature a passel of Nashville musicians and seem meant to seduce British hipsters by linking the beer brand to a spirit of homey, DIY Americana. Truth be told, they may be the most engaging work that Korine's ever done. Still, when I was saying just the other day that Korine's stuff could drive you to drink, this really isn't what I had in mind...

James Cagney Stands Tall in "Warner Gangsters Collection", Volume 3

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Mark Harris dips into "Volume 3" of Warners' Gangsters Collection DVD box sets and decides that it's all about the minor James Cagney pictures. A taste for Cagney, who who credited by obscure film geek Martin Scorsese with inventing "modern screen acting" when he wasn't dancing like a son of a bitch, is always a mark of superior taste and probably evidence that one's mom was real pretty. The first set in the Gangsters series was stuffed with the movies that chart the evolution of Cagney's gangster persona: The Public Enemy, which made him a star (and where he was originally supposed to play the leading man's best friend, before the director, William Wellman, saw the two men acting side by side and thought, well, that's fucked up); Angels with Dirty Faces, in which he went to the chair like a yellow rat as a favor to his buddy, Father Pat O'Brien, so that the Dead End Kids wouldn't get the wrong idea about a life of crime being glamorous; The Roaring Twenties; and the later, primitive-Freudian White Heat, which closes with a death scene that Rasputin wouldn't want to have followed. They didn't really leave much for Volume 2, but it did include some lively, lesser-known B's, notably G Men, in which Cagney, playing an amoral lawyer, is reformed in the first reel after gangsters whack his pal and immediately joins the feds so he can get revenge on the mob.

The new box mops up various odds and ends starring Cagney, along with the other mainstays of the series, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G, Robinson. Both Bogart and Edward G. are ill-served by the selection here: Robinson at least performs with customary force and humor in the whimsical Brother Orchid, in which he plays a crook who disguises himself as a monk with a green thumb, but Bogart looks paralyzed with boredom by the script for the social-issues drama Black Legion, which actually makes the case against masked secret societies that practice lynching seem almost shaky. Luckily, the B's here starring Cagney--Picture Snatcher, The Mayor of Hell, and Lady Killer (in which Jimbo cons his way into a motion picture contract) serve to demonstrate just how hard it was to get in our boy's way. (So does Smart Money, which offers the dream team pairing of Robinson in the leading role and Cagney as his faithful sidekick.) These movies are scrappy affairs, thrown together with gimmicks and cheap thrills, powered by tabloid fumes and peppered with snappy patter. With all due respect to his A-picture classics, in some ways Cagney never seems more contemporary and alive than when he's at the wheel of movies like these, pushing ahead full throttle as he works simultaneously at keeping the audience entertained and striving to get the picture to the finish line before the budget runs out or his personal assistamt is hauled off by the bunco squad. Harris tends to favor The Mayor of Hell, just on the grounds that it has a title that would improve anything from a Strindberg play to So You Think You Can Dance? As a devotee of old newspaper-room movies, my own favorite is Picture Snatcher, for the way that society recoils in horror when Cagney, fresh out of the jug, announces that he's going to abandon his criminal career for one in photo journalism. (The whole movie is spun off from the incident of an actual tabloid photographer who strapped a camera to his leg and got a shot of the convicted murderer Ruth Snyder in the electric chair, just as the current hit her.)

Harris's Slate article is also worth taking notice of just because it features my favorite appended correction in quite a while, to wit: "The article originally noted that in addition to being racist and sexist, pre-Code gangster movies were also homophobic, citing as evidence a line from Lady Killer, in which cops threaten James Cagney by saying, "We'll run you in as a fag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." In fact, the line is, "We'll run you in as a vag, and that'll mean 30 days in the tank." Sometimes, you quote 1930s movie slang at your own risk.