The Screengrab : rex harrison

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

PARKER POSEY AS DARLA IN DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

The first time I ever saw Parker Posey on screen, a camera was swooping down on her ‘70s mean girl, Darla, as the dominatrix in bellbottoms screamed, “All right, you little freshman bit-ches!” in the midst of a bizarre Texas hazing ritual in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused...and for me, it was love at first sight, both for the character and the actress portraying her. Darla was the epitome of the smart, formidable high school queen bee nerds like me pretended to hate but secretly wished we were cool (or hot) enough to hang with...the sort of girl that fuels class reunion fantasies of all varieties. And Posey zaps every precious second of the character’s too-brief screen time with megawatt voltage, whether helping Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson keep L-I-V-I-N by grabbing a meaty handful of his aging stoner ass or advising some hapless underclassman to “wipe that face off your head, bitch!” Despite later good roles in the likes of Party Girl, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and the Christopher Guest oeuvre, Posey was never quite this incandescent again...not unlike the real-life Darlas of the world, who eventually graduate and somehow never recapture that brilliant spark of absolute adolescent power. (AO)

SEAN PENN AS JEFF SPICOLI IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

There have been a lot of stoner comedy routines in movies, but nobody has ever acted being toasted with the Method intensity of Penn as Spicoli, while making it funny. Penn is the kind of actor who aims to convince you he's morphed into whoever he's playing, but as Spicoli, who's "been stoned since the third grade", he doesn't just transform himself physically and spiritually, he declares his emancipation from gravity. Sweetly pledging that all he needs in life are tasty waves and a cool buzz, he blurs the line between being out of it and being in a state of grace. (PN)

WALTER MATTHAU AS COACH BUTTERMAKER IN THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Few things are funnier in the movies (though not real life) than adults being mean to children. And, with the possible exception of Billy Bob Thornton’s bad Santa, no adult character has ever gotten more mileage out of behaving unsuitably around kids than Walter Matthau’s Coach Morris Buttermaker in Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears. An ex-minor league ballplayer who takes a job as the coach of a lousy little league squad, Buttermaker is the exact opposite of a role model, showing up to work hungover, endlessly smoking and drinking beer in front of his young charges, and putting them down with droll callousness. Of course, Buttermaker and the Bears’ story is an ultimately redemptive one, a narrative arc which presumably goes some way toward excusing the coach’s early, improper conduct. But people learning and growing isn’t why Ritchie’s film endures as a comedy classic; the sight of the peerlessly cranky Matthau passed out next to the pitching mound, empty beer cans lying nearby, is. (NS)

REX HARRISON AS SIR ALFRED DE CARTER IN UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948)

Who doesn't love a movie where the fool is the pompous highbrow? As pointed out in the excellent commentary in the attached clip (the only clip of this movie on youtube, sadly), Preston Sturges directs this one fairly close to the heart. Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter (the "de" in the middle is an exquisite joke all on its own), a conductor who suspects his younger wife of infidelity. The movie proceeds with a fantastic comic plot: De Carter conducts three orchestral pieces, and in each imagines a different way of murdering his wife. In the final part of the movie, he heads home to put his nefarious plans into action, which is where the movie tips into some first-rate slapstick. That's what you call black comedy! Harrison plays an excellent upper-crust twit, being believably competent in his privileged artistic role but an inept bungler at the fairly simple crime of murder. There's hilariously great screwball dialogue throughout and a kneeslapper of an overwritten slice of purple cheese to cap off the movie. Skip the remake and go straight to the source for the good stuff. (HC)

MICHAEL SIMON AS BOUDU IN BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (1932)

Boudu is the holiest of holy fools, a vagrant who is unexpectedly drawn into a comfortable middle-class existence where he destroys every social rule he faces. It is a testament to the skill of Michel Simon, who played Boudu, that he remains a comic, and mostly sympathetic, force of nature even as his behavior ranges from merely obnoxious to outright felonious. Jean Renoir was a master of ripping asunder the veil of the French class system with the deftest of touches. Consider the scene above, in which Boudu eats sardines with his bare hands. The French public apparently rioted at this. And at the scene where he wiped shoe polish all over a fine bedroom. But the scene where he seduces/rapes his benefactor's wife? That left them unfazed. The movie ends with Boudu finding a way to yet again subvert his benefactor's attempts to give him the Eliza Doolittle treatment in a way that suggests that he never needed to be saved from drowning in the first place. Don't subject yourself to the awful remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills; stick to the original for the real comic masterpiece. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Apocalypse Now and Then: Ten Great End-of-the-World Movie Scenarios, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Neil Marshall's new sci-fi action thriller Doomsday, starring the very hard-to-mind-looking-at Rhona Mitra, opens tomorrow. It is but the latest in a long and hallowed tradition of using the controlled, expensive technology of motion pictures to imagine how things will look as our planet, spinning out of control with its resources depleted, chews through its last nerve and prepares to breathe its last. We don't know for sure how the world will really end of course, but one thing's for sure; if the last person who's there to see it has seen the right movies, he's certain to spend his last minutes experiencing a powerful sensation of deja vu.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

This is actually the second of the three films directed by George Miller and starring Mel Gibson as Mad Max — hence its title outside the United States, Mad Max 2 — but even though it's the one in the middle, it's the one that gets the apocalyptic element just about right. Things are pretty crazy in the original Mad Max, but society hasn't completely flatlined yet. And in Beyond Thunderdome, known to serious film scholars as "the one with Tina Turner", damned if the people don't seem to be having too good a time. (It makes the end of the world look like something that Vince McMahon is staging for a Pay-Per-View.) The Road Warrior gets a real doomsday vibe going by boiling the cutting-edge action movie, circa 1980, down to its essentials: loud motor vehicles, lots of space in which to drive them at high speeds, and plenty of attitude exhibited by people with punk haircuts and Dirty Harry jawlines. It is a hard world where men are men, except for the ones who are more like warthogs who've been hitting the Nautilus machines, and the screenwriter, if he knows what's good for him, isn't getting paid by the spoken word. George Miller has since proven himself to be a director whose talent is varied and many-sided, but he may have had trouble fully shaking this vision off: in his most recent film, Happy Feet, he managed to slip an end-of-days vibe into a story of dancing penguins.

GLEN AND RANDA (1971)

The end of the world as brought to you by hippies. Shaggy-haired Glen (Steve Curry) and Randa (Shelley Plimpton, Martha's mother) are a young couple who have never known civilization; among the last surviving human inhabitants of a world devastated by nuclear war, they have no memory of a pre-apocalyptic world and no knowledge of what has been lost outside of the images Glen sees in some comic books he's scavenged. Childlike and close to nonverbal, they spend their days frisking naked in the grass and among the trees, much as they would if they were rich California trust fund kids before the apocalypse and their parents were out of town for the weekend. They don't even seem to have the instinctive ability to figure out about sex and procreation on their own; after Randa is impregnated by a half-mad old man (Garry Goodrow), Glen, who has led them out on a search to find the wonders he has beheld in his Wonder Woman comic, turns pouty and takes to kicking her in her growing tummy. In the end, Randa dies in childbirth, and Glen sets out to sea in a tiny boat, taking the newborn baby along in case he needs a snack. Glen and Randa had trouble getting released at all, perhaps in part because of its stars' reluctance to put some clothes on, and like some other films by the director Jim McBride, seems to have subsequently vanished from the face of the earth.

BLACK MOON (1975)

The end of the world as brought to you by arty French hippies. Actually, this film was directed by the great Louis Malle, but he was clearly trying to access the counterculture zeitgeist and getting in touch with his inner goofball. Cathryn Harrison, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Rex Harrison, is wandering through what's left of the world; she is first seen posing as a man, because, maybe because the women heard about what happened to poor Randa, relations between the sexes have degenerated into a shooting war. She ends up taking refuge in a huge house occupied by Therese Giehse (German), Alexandra Stewart (French Canadian), and Joe Dallesandro (the jury's still out). None of the people talk much, maybe because, given the language barriers, they'd have trouble understanding each other if they did. The cast also includes a rat and a unicorn (which appears to have a glandular condition), both of which do talk; there are also flowers that, when stepped on, whine about it. Shot by Sven Nykvist, Black Moon looks great, thus confirming any suspicions you may have had that the human race will still be able to take pretty pictures even after we've used up our last collective brain cell.

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)

Charlton Heston's astronaut character Taylor was already a rather nihilistic fellow in the original Planet of the Apes, but in the first sequel of the series he proves he's not just all talk. First he vanishes for about an hour, shortly after the discovery of the Statue of Liberty that ended the first movie, leaving the main action to a mini-Heston, James Franciscus. (Franciscus's meaningful contributions to the series are few, but we'll always have his incredulous reading of the line "My God — it's a city of apes!") Late in the movie, Franciscus discovers that Taylor is being held captive by a band of underground mutants who worship a doomsday bomb that will, if detonated, destroy the entire planet. The gorilla army descends on the mutant lair and all hell breaks loose, in the course of which poor Franciscus takes a bullet to the head. Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen."

LAST NIGHT (1999)

Most movies about apocalypse tie themselves in knots to imagine the unimaginable. They spend millions of dollars on effects and art direction to stage elaborate scenarios of how the world will end, as the filmmakers work out of the question of why. Standing in contrast to films of this kind is Don McKellar's Last Night, a movie with a strictly ground-level approach to an impending apocalypse. In McKellar's world, the end is imminent, and the characters are powerless to stop it, so rather than focusing on the extremes of human behavior, the film attempts to deal more realistically with how characters would spend their final hours on Earth. The tone is set early on when a woman (Sandra Oh) stops at an abandoned grocery store for a bottle of wine, sees two on the shelf, and instead of simply taking both and leaving she carefully chooses one and politely leaves the other for someone else to take. This small gesture says it all — there is looting and rioting in Last Night, but in the face of the unspeakable many people would prefer to end their lives by maintaining all the order and dignity they can. Consider the gas company executive (played by David Cronenberg) who calls all of the company's customers to assure them that the power will stay on until the end. Other people take the end of the world as an opportunity to fulfill their lifelong wishes, from the aspiring pianist who finally gets a gig a hour before the world is scheduled to end to the man who uses it as an excuse to sleep with one of his former teachers. Last Night lacks the visceral thrills of most films about apocalypse, but instead it focuses on the very different reactions people would inevitably have with the end of the world only hours, minutes, even seconds away.

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

Click here for Part 2.

The Rep Report (March 12-19)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the centennial of Rex Harrison. Tall, crisp, and capable of being snide and downright nasty in a way that only enhanced his seductiveness, nobody did sly like sexy Rexy. The programming, which mixes camp giggles such as Cleopatra and King Richard and the Crusaders with prestige bloat-a-thons such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and My Fair Lady, may be too true a picture of how much of this time on movie soundstages was not ideally spent, but the important thing is that it does include his most wonderful film performance in his greatest movie, the beyond-suave superstar conductor whose jealous suspicions towards his young wife (Linda Darnell) turn him into a whirling dervish in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), the director's heh-heh "commercial" movie, returns to the Film Forum for a two-week run, from March 14-27. Produced by Carlo Ponti and the uncredited Joseph E. Levine, with a cast led by Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance (as an overbearing movie producer), and Fritz Lang as his own bad self, working from the base of a best-selling Alberto Moravia novel and with an actual budget, Godard contrived to turn out one of the strangest and orneriest movies of his not exactly self-effacing career. Long considered a weird misfire, the movie inspired a number of Godard-watchers and other movie lovers to reconsider its qualities after it was revived at the Forum back in 1997; maybe this is going to become some kind of once-a-decade revival rituals. Terrence Rafferty recently used this latest engagement to grapple with the picture in the pages of The New York Times.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Infernal Machines: The Films of Kim Ki-Young" (March 12 – 18) tips its hat to a maverick Korean filmmaker whose work made him a inspiration to many of the newer directors who have been behind the current Korean New Wave. Richard Pena describes him as an "instinctual artist" who "always seems ready to abandon correct or tasteful form for a powerful visual or aural effect. The rawness of the emotions on screen is more than matched by the directness of his cinematic style." Kim's audacity as a filmmaker may have been too much for the Korean film industry, which basically drove him out of the business by the mid-1980s. He was rediscovered and even returned to filmmaking in the mid-1990s but died in 1998.

Romantic Comedies: Where's the Love?

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A. O. Scott contemplates the decline of the Hollywood romantic comedy and wonders how it is that so rich and noble a genre, a form used by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch to fully explore the complexities and frustrations of love's pursuit and all its attending derangements, could have degenerated into a way to grind out fodder to fill theaters in the late-winter season and keep Kate Hudson employed. Compared to those earlier great works, "the dry martinis of the past have been sweetened and diluted. We emerge lulled and soothed, but rarely intoxicated." Sure, some of this is the nostalgia talking, but it's not as if the man doesn't have a big ol' point. For some "stars", such as Hudson (and Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in the new Fool's Gold), steady work in such movies as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex and Emma, Raising Helen and Failure to Launch — paper-thin flicks just passing through theaters on their way to steady rotation on cable — is the movie equivalent to being a cast regular on one of those TV series, such as Wings or Coach, that seem to stay on the air for fifteen years even though you've never met anyone who watches it. What's depressing is how the ambition seems to have leaked out of the genre, and not just ambitious filmmaking, but any ambitions regarding serious romance.

In the glittering surface of classic screwball comedy, this ambitiousness was most obviously expressed in torrents of language. In Sturges's The Lady Eve Henry Fonda tells Barbara Stanwyck, "Every time I've looked at you here on the boat it wasn't only here I saw you: you seemed to go way back…I know that isn't clear but I saw you here and at the same time further away and then still further away and then very small…like converging perspective lines… no, that isn't it, more like figures following each other in a forest glade. Only way back there you were a little girl in short dresses with your hair falling on your shoulders, in the middle distance your hair is up but you're still gawky like a colt…then when you get nearer you look more like you do now, except not so pretty…but I've only told you half of it, because way back there a little boy is standing with you, holding your hand, and in the middle distance I'm still with you, not holding your hand anymore because it isn't manly, but wanting to. And then still nearer we look terrible: you with your legs like a colt and mine like a calf…what I'm trying to say, only I'm not a poet I'm an ophiologist, is that I've always loved you. I mean I've never loved anyone but you. I suppose that sounds as dull as a drugstore novel, and what I see inside I'll never be able to cast into words…but that's what I mean. I wish we were married and on our honeymoon." And he's supposed to be one of the inarticulate ones! Then there's Unfaithfully Yours, the conductor hero played by Rex Harrison, upon learning that his brother-in-law has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his wife, lashes out: "No man who employs detectives should ever be disappointed. I hope every time you've engaged these vermin you've discovered you had antlers out to here, that you were the laughing stock of the city, and that you came crawling out of the agency your face aflame, your briefcase stuffed with undeniable evidence of your multiple betrayal, dishonor dripping from your ears like garlands of seaweed," and responds to the man's offer to "forgive your insults" by saying, "I forbid you to forgive me anything on any grounds whatsoever and I may still punch you in the nose at any instant! Now go away and never speak to me again unless it is in some public place where your silence might cause comment and embarrassment to our wives." Given special tutoring and help from a CGI effects team, could Matthew McConaughey say all that? Maybe in a month's time, if you let him take a break every three words to fortify himself with bong hits.

Of course, while a glib tongue may be of great use in courting ladies fair [insert joke here], it's not the only thing. Still, it's sobering how little some of the people in these current movies are willing to settle for. In Fool's Gold, McConaughey is good-looking, dim-witted, lucky, and probably a fun guy to have a beer with. Just because these are the qualities Tim Russert looks for in a president, are they really all you could ask for in a fantasy boyfriend? Hudson is actually chastised for expecting or wanting more — though it's not clear that she wouldn't find all that perfectly satisfactory if it just came yoked to a shitload of money. In the great romantic comedies, the hero and heroine test each other, challenge each other, ultimately prove that each is special enough to deserve the other. For filmmakers who prize niceness above everything else, this may smack of bad sexual politics. But even if there's some hostility in the concept of romance as a challenge, seeing the leads prove themselves worth of the challenge made for a payoff that was worth it. In most of what passes for romantic comedy nowadays, the hero and heroine are resigned to ending up together because they're the best-looking people onscreen, and have nothing to do but yell and bicker and engage in wacky shenanigans to postpone the inevitable until the picture has achieved feature length. The really unsettling thing about this is that there may be something more to it than a worry in Hollywood that making a movie about people who really seem special, and not just special-looking, might irritate the lumpen drones in the audience. Scott singles Juno out as an example of a movie that does have some of that old magic, and Ellen Page is definitely worth slaying a dragon over, but for some of us, the weirdest thing about that picture is how abnormally reluctant the heroine is to simply admit that she kinda likes the best friend who got her pregnant, even though, as Michael Cera plays the part, he's openly yearning for her to give him a sign that his feeling for her is reciprocated. The fact is that when a modern romantic comedy like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does tap into something imaginative and deeply felt, it often ends inconclusively, if not in outright despair. It's as if the few filmmakers left who want to bring their A-game to this kind of material are also the ones who are too wised-up to believe in happy endings.