The Screengrab : richard pryor

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963) & RAT RACE (2001)

I can’t say for sure whether I’ve ever watched It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World all the way from beginning to end in one uninterrupted sitting, but I’ve definitely seen every part of the movie numerous times: mostly during lazy Sundays as a kid, when Stanley Kramer’s three-hour, star-studded tale of random strangers racing for treasure played (thanks to endless commercial breaks) like an all-day Laff-Olympics, featuring generations of comedy all-stars ranging from Buster Keaton to Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by the 1963 edition of the Three Stooges (with Joe DeRita on drums). More than a few strands of Mad, Mad’s chaotic, uneven DNA wound up in the seminal fluids of the far less epic (and epochal) yet funnier than expected Rat Race, featuring another group of random celebrity strangers (including John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Seth Green, Jon Lovitz, Kathy Najimy, Whoopi Goldberg, Dave Thomas, Amy Smart, Breckin Meyer and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) involved in another episodic race against time for treasure...but this time, with original songs by the Baha Men! (AO)

BREWSTER'S MILLIONS (1985)

Walter Hill’s Brewster’s Millions was the seventh big-screen adaptation of George Barr McCutcheon’s 1902 novel and, thanks to the participation of headliner Richard Pryor and co-star John Candy, it remains the most well-known and popular. Taking its basic narrative cue from prior versions, Pryor plays a washed-up minor league pitcher who discovers that he’s the sole remaining heir of a long-lost kooky relative who, from beyond the grave, offers him a stunning deal: if he can spend $30 million in 30 days, he’ll inherit $300 million. It’s a too-good-to-be-true offer that, of course, proves more troublesome than it initially seems, as Pryor’s nobody finds it increasingly difficult to successfully relieve himself of so much money, a predicament from which Hill squeezes mild laughs as well as a predictable money’s-not-everything moral. Pryor’s dynamically profane humor is blunted by the proceedings’ safe PG conventionality, and the film is far less funny than Hill’s prior 48 Hours. Yet in Brewster’s Millions’ defense, its time-tested conceit still manages, over a century after its initial birth, to effectively ignite the imagination. (NS)

JUGGERNAUT (1974)

Richard Lester's there's-a-bomb-on-this-ship thriller brings class and wit to the disaster genre. The plot involves a demolitions wizard who secrets a collection of big-ass bombs on Skipper Omar Sharif's cruise ship, which are set to go off unless he's handed a wad of extortion money. While Lester scans the landscape for signs of the throwaway slapstick bits and eccentric, comic character moments that were his stock in trade, Richard Harris brings it on a rocket sled as the dashing, showboating cynic leading the team of bomb defusers who are flown in and dive down to join the ship in the middle of the ocean during a very photogenic storm. After his best mate is killed, Harris takes a break to get roaring drunk and deliver his Oscar-reel speech before getting back to work. You might think that getting roaring drunk when attempting to defuse a bunch of bombs is next on your to-do list would be be ill-advised, but if you do, what part of "Richard Harris" do you not understand? (PN)

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove is beginning to rival Psycho as one of the movies we can find a reason to cram on to pretty much any list, but we couldn’t very well compile the greatest races against time without including it. After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: if President Muffley and his advisors don’t succeed, the endgame will be the utter annihilation of life on Earth. Stanley Kubrick uses the simplest possible device to remind us of how close the world is coming to Armageddon: the little electric bulbs on the “Big Board” blink ever closer to the interior of a map of Russia. And yet, while everyone in the room knows the importance of what’s going on, no one can seem to focus on the matter at hand: General Turgidson is more concerned with being hoodwinked by the commies, Ambassador DeSadesky wants fresh fish and Cuban cigars, and the President gets into arguments with the Russian premier over who’s more sorry about this turn of events. It’s brilliant because it’s so ridiculously plausible: the end of the world is nigh, and no one can be bothered to pay attention. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...before it's too late!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The Best:

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

An expansive entertainer with a midnight movie background trying to break into the grown-up big-studio world, Sam Raimi was a good boy while directing the first Spider-Man movie; he delivered the origin-story installment of the franchise with as much imagination and style as it could handle, all while maintaining the clear, easy-to-read line of a man trying to get a job done. The sequel gave him more of a chance to cut loose, and good man that he is, he availed himself of it. Tobey Maguire remains a perfect Peter Parker, but the real surprise here is Alfred Molina, who, assigned the role of one of the most repulsive supervillains in the union, renders him scary, understandable, and weirdly likable in about equal measure, a fit character for a tragic opera if tragic operas had chain saws in them. It remains the most successful movie not just in this particular franchise but in the brief history of Marvel Comics movies, and it deserves to be.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

Marjane Satrapi’s alternately charming and harrowing memoir of growing up in Iran after the fundamentalist revolution may have seemed like an odd choice for a successful movie adaptation. But it’s really not that hard to figure out: her simple, descriptive lines and curves proved to be perfect for animation. Persepolis also showed the wisdom of allowing the original author of a comic to take the helm of a film adaptation; Satrapi proved to have excellent instincts as a screenwriter, and as an animator, she knew just when to keep it simple and when to make it more elegant and elaborate. It’s a beautiful-looking movie, considering how little it cost and how simple it comes across on screen. But the story at the heart of it all is what sustains Persepolis; despite its setting at such a grim and tumultuous time, it’s still very much the story of a little girl who grows too quickly into a young woman, with all the pains and pleasures that could happen to such a woman anywhere in the world. Satrapi leavens the story (acted with top-shelf casts in both the English and French versions) with humor and historical perspective, and she nicely embraces sentimentality when remembering her family while refusing it for herself. It must have been quite difficult to pull off all these complex balances in such a short running time, but Satrapi and her collaborator Vincent Parronaud accomplish the feat nicely.

The Worst:

THE PUNISHER (2004)

Movies and comics have long had an incestuous history -- the original Batman comics drew on memories of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Cat and the Canary, and Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs just for its basic character designs -- but few major comics characters have so clearly been the result of the comics companies trying to keep pace with changing standards in movie heroes as the Punisher. First appearing in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1974 -- a time when action stars such as Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were redefining the American tough guy as a remorseless vigilante and blood murderer -- the Punisher doesn't have super powers. Instead, he has an arsenal of weapons, a black muscle shirt with a skull logo on it, and a chip on his shoulder. He's a killer -- which at the time of his debut set him apart from traditional superheroes -- but he only kills gangsters, which is supposed to complicate things. Even so, the powers that be were uncomfortable enough with him that they could never quite make up their minds whether he was supposed to be an edgy good guy or a conflicted villain. (His mere presence on the cover of a comic book guaranteed monster sales, though, so he was assured of many, many opportunities to return and make the bosses uneasy. Even so, it would be a dozen years before the company swallowed deep and gave him his own series.) Starting with the first, direct-to-video version in 1989, starring Dolph Lundgren sans skull T-shirt, there have been three attempts at a Punisher movie, with three different actors playing the Punisher, and they all just look like grade-B killing-machine flicks. As for which of them is the worst, well, there's really not a lot to choose from, but I'm giving the second one, starring Thomas Jane, the nod over the first one and last year's Punisher: War Zone, starring Ray Stevenson (of the HBO series Rome), if only because it probably got seen by the most (unlucky) people and wasted the time of some talented actors. That last category is not one that the colorless lug Thomas Jane belongs in, but even after all these thousands upon thousands of hours spent watching rotten movies and rottener comic books, we're still human enough to blanch at the sight of the late Roy Scheider getting a paycheck for being gunned down at a family picnic or a flailing John Travolta being dragged by a bumper through an exploding car lot.

SUPERMAN III (1983)

This was the third and last of the Superman films produced by the father-and-son team of Ilya and Alexander Salkind; after it was released, the Salkinds unloaded the franchise onto the notorious team of Golan and Globus, which produced a cut-rate entry, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, having obtained Christopher Reeve's continued participation by agreeing to shape the script around a timely anti-nuclear weapons message. That movie is, conceivably, even worse than this one, but at least it's an underfunded, half-assed Superman movie. This is an overblown, ill-conceived Richard Pryor movie with Superman along for the ride. Or maybe it's a Superman movie that was hopelessly twisted out of shape by the effort to shoehorn Pryor into it after he'd agree to do it. (Pryor was just coming off a year where he was listed as the number one box office attraction in America; if he'd agreed to it, he'd have been shoehorned into The French Lieutenant's Woman.) The filmmakers never did figure out how to use Pryor; they might have worried that audiences wouldn't want him to be the bad guy, so they cast him as an employee of the bad guy (Robert Vaughan), and never fully made the leap to having him switch sides and become Superman's friend. Other plot developments and details, such as having Superman turn bad after exposure to near-beer Kryptonite (requiring an intervention by the spirit of Clark Kent), and the jazz singer Annie Ross' role as Vaughan's sister, suggest that the Salkinds tried to economize by hiring the writing staff one morning, firing them at the end of the day, and assembling the script from notes that they'd scribbled down on their lunch wrappers.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls" Director to Collaborate on Richard Pryor Biopic

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

The idea that Eddie Murphy is the best possible fit for the role of Richard Pryor may be one of those ideas that seems so obvious that the first thing that should be done with it is to re-examine it. Even back when the two of them were sharing magazine covers, it was clear that they had little enough in common in terms of presence, image, shared experiences and preferred subject matter that the talk of Murphy as being "the new Richard Pryor" seemed redolent of a bygone era when it was thought that America could only handle one black superstar in any particular medium at a time. Whatever was going on in his personal life, there was always something childlike about Richard Pryor, whereas Murphy could credit his fast rise to the fact that, even when he was barely out of his teens, there seemed to be a forty-year veteran of the Vegas club circuit inside him. In the age of Reagan and Rambo, he had his biggest success in what were essentially action pictures (48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel) in which he functioned as both the gun-waving hero and the wisecracking comic relief; he may have been willing to double as a thief (in 48 Hrs.) or dress down (in the Beverly Hills Cop movies) if it would help audiences relate to him as an "underdog", but he was still an authority figure at heart, compared to Pryor's eternal outsiders. In this week's "Random Roles" feature in The Onion, Margot Kidder says that the key to the much-married Pryor's great appeal was partly his "vulnerability"; that's not a quality that ever turned up much in Murphy's character descriptions.

Pryor himself had a long-cherished, off-and-on plan to star in a bipic about Charlie Parker, who would eventually be portrayed by Forest Whitaker in Clint Eastwood's Bird, which came out in 1988, around the same time that Pryor's movie career wa winding down. (Pryor's last starring role was in the 1991 Another You. He later contributed cameo roles to two movies, Larry Bishop's 1996 Mad Dog Time and David Lynch's 1997 Lost Highway, made after M.S. had him firmly in its grip, which might not have been the greatest idea in show business history.) We'll never know whether Pryor, under ideal laboratory conditions, would have been able to get far enough outside his own very powerful persona to convincingly play Charlie Parker, though another lacerating stand-up comedian, Dick Gregory, gave a performance, as a character based on Parker in the 1967 Sweet Love, Bitter, that compares quite favorably to the one Whitaker gave in Bird. One thing that Pryor, Gregory, and Parker had in common was that they had all spent their young adulthood struggling to make it in a tough business; it's no insult to Murphy's talent or imagination as an actor that, having achieved superstardom at twenty on Saturday Night Live, he may not be able to really imagine what drove someone like Pryor, who worked him way up from performing in strip clubs and neighborhood bars to mainstream success in Vegas and on TV, only to dynamite and rebuild his career from scratch because he felt that his early success was a betrayal of what he really knew. There's also the fact that, at 47, Murphy is already much closer to being the age where Pryor's career began rolling itself up than the point at which he was firing on all cylinders and shooting off sparks. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'd be more interested in seeing him played by someone like Dave Chappelle--someone who's not just funny and talented, but whose concept of show business success has traps and demons in it.

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The problem with biopics, as most cineastes know, is the way they often tend to play like a greatest hits of their subjects’ lives, packed with historical moments and celebrity impersonations rather than realistic character development or any kind of specific story worth telling.

But Gus Van Sant’s Milk vaulted out of the specialty box office charts and into the mainstream top ten largely on the strength of a gripping, inspirational (and, sadly, still timely) story of persecution, triumph and tragedy, featuring a classic protagonist/antagonist duo embodied by Sean Penn’s crusading gay rights activist and Josh Brolin’s conflicted assassin.

And so, with Oscar buzz clinging to Van Sant, Penn and Brolin like...wait for it...yes, milk mustachios, we here at the Screengrab decided now would be the perfect time to Walk Hard through the positively true story of OUR FAVORITE BIOPICS OF ALL TIME!

ED WOOD (1994)

Tim Burton’s tribute to the so-called “worst director of all time” is a two-fer: while Johnny Depp’s relatively obscure title character is the focus, the Oscar-winning main attraction was Martin Landau’s portrayal of a lusty, foul-mouthed, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in the final years of his life, after Hollywood had kicked him to the curb and the once proud actor could only find work rolling around in a lake with a giant rubber octopus. Lugosi’s son, Béla Junior, initially criticized Burton’s film for its inaccuracies with regard to his father (who, for example, was married at the time of his death and rarely used profanity, at least according to friends like Forrest J. Ackerman, Ed Wood’s one-time “illiterary” agent). But what makes the film great is that docu-drama realism was never the point: we don’t necessarily see events as they happened, but rather the way Ed Wood, Jr. (and, to a certain extent, Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and cartoonist/old Hollywood enthusiast Drew Friedman) perceived them: in surreal, melodramatic black & white fantasias where an alcoholic transvestite wannabe could actually transcend death and live forever like his idol, Count Dracula.

I'M NOT THERE (2007)

If ever there was an artist who required no further mythologizing, it would have to be Bob Dylan. A conventional biopic of the Bard might well be unbearable, which is why it's a good thing Todd Haynes, World's Cleverest Film Student, signed on for the task. Haynes takes the well-known Dylan mythos, scrambles it all together and then bounces it off a series of funhouse mirrors, delighting in the ever more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors play six different versions of Dylan, among them Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), an 11-year-old African-American boy who rides the rails with hobos, spinning tall tales of a rambling youth with no direction home; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), an alternate universe troubadour whose Dylanesque career unfolds as scenes from a mockumentary in the mode of A Mighty Wind; and Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who is playing Jack Rollins in a conventional biopic called Grain of Sand. (Sample dialogue: "I'm only a pawn in their game!") The standout is Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for an Oscar for her eerie take on hipster-dandy Jude Quinn, supernova post-Beatles pop star. In appropriating and manipulating various filmmaking styles, Haynes is striving for a cinematic equivalent to the way Dylan adapted and exploded traditional folk forms in his music. The resulting surreal swirl recalls Dylan's most fertile creative period, his mid-60s "thin, wild mercury music" wherein characters ranging from Paul Revere to Jack the Ripper to Cecil B. DeMille could inhabit the same soundscape. Through these methods, Haynes is attempting a biography not so much of a man, but of an artistic sensibility. If I'm Not There is occasionally impenetrable, pretentious or overly impressed with its own cleverness, that only serves to make it a more accurate, warts-and-all portrait, without delving into tabloid trash. You may love it or hate it, but you get the feeling its subject wouldn't want it any other way.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1972)

This soapy treatment of the life of Billie Holiday is not beloved by jazz critics or historical purists, who recoil from its sloppy handling of the facts of the singer's life and gag on Diana Ross' pop stylings when she sings Holiday classics such as "Strange Fruit." But the movie remains highly enjoyable when taken on the terms that it set for itself in 1972: a chance for African-American audiences to wallow in the kind of old-Hollywood melodrama that had been spun from the lives of white celebrities such as Lillian Roth and Ruth Etting, with a dash of blaxploitation attitude for flavor. (It turns out that Billie needed a toxically blond white man to turn her onto heroin. Who knew?) Ross' singing here takes a back seat to her acting, which should have marked the start of a major movie career. She proved she had the talent, but once she'd tasted success in Hollywood, her diva gene ate her common sense alive. Her scenes with her piano man sidekick, Richard Pryor, have a special poignance today, because it's hard to remember that there was a time when Diana Ross and Richard Pryor occupied the same planet.

GENTLEMAN JIM (1942)

This affably sanitized life of heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett (Errol Flynn) is probably the most entertaining example of the boxer-biopic genre that Martin Scorsese was to bury for all time with Raging Bull. It also provided its star, Errol Flynn, with a rare chance to appear onscreen in street clothes instead of leggings or cowboy gear. The premise is that Corbett was the first brainiac who conquered his opponents by means of the "scientific" method, which enables him to whup such swaggering sides of beef as John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond). This allows Flynn to win his fights and still display a glib enough tongue to pitch woo at society gal Alexis Smith. This is also the movie that was in theaters when Flynn was dragged into court on hinky charges of statutory rape, a sideshow that turned out to do the movie not the least bit of harm at the box office.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)

In this updating of Love Me or Leave Me (the 1955 cult classic in which Doris Day, as singer Ruth Etting, was physically abused by James Cagney as her husband-manager), Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne play Ike and Tina Turner, from their days starting out together on the R & B touring circuit and the period when electrifying star performances on-stage alternated with one-sided sparring matches backstage to the day that Tina, having discovered the untapped strength at her core with the help of a chanting regimen, starting punching back. The closest thing to a flaw in Bassett's performance is that she didn't have Turner's legs, a problem that today would probably be corrected with the help of CGI; she compensates with her slugger's arms, which make the scenes of abuse easier to get through, since you can't help but anticipate the moment when this woman realizes that she can take care of herself. Fishburne may be even better, tapping into deep reserves of rage that a lesser actor would have been tempted to take out on the costume designer. This is probably the finest lead performance ever given by an actor who at one point is forced to don hot pants and a Prince Valiant haircut.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Rudy Ray Moore, 1927-2008

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Rudy Ray Moore, the actor, comedian and musician who was perhaps more responsible than anyone for creating the lasting urban archetype of the flamboyant, hustling pimp, has died at the age of 81. The man born Rudolph Frank Moore in Fort Smith, Arkansas passed away yesterday in Akron, Ohio of complications from diabetes, according to a family friend.

Moore, whose own past as a lowlife hustler has always been difficult to trace -- given that he was the only source, and grotesque comic exaggeration was his stock in trade -- came of age putting out so-called "party records" for black audiences. Unapolagetically ribald and wild, often distributed on the gray market and issued at a rapid clip, "party records" were also where Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx saw their first success, but Moore never found a mainstream audience as did those men. His work was always ruder, cruder, and more sexually explicit than even Foxx's blue material -- which made him a natural for the blaxploitation era. His two most famous roles were honed from characters created in his stand-up and party-record days: Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, and the unforgettable super-pimp Dolemite, the role which brought him his greatest fame. So closely was he associated with the role that many fans simply called him "Dolemite" for the rest of his career.

Rudy Ray Moore's persona in Dolemite, The Human Tornado, Petey Wheatstraw, and the ridiculous but unforgettable Disco Godfather -- which friends said was not much of an exaggeration of his real personality, honed from years of, as he put it, "listening to lying drunks outside of liquor stores" -- won him legions of fans when the hip-hop generation came of age, and in his latter days, he supported himself by appearing in projects produced by kids who remembered stealing furtive listens to his comedy records as kids. For an entire generation of black kids -- and a few very lucky white ones -- he was Dolemite, and fucking up motherfuckers was his game.

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In Other Blogs: Festivus!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:30:00 GMT

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir previews the New York Film Festival. “Like any institution closely identified with New York City -- the Yankees, the Times, the Metropolitan Museum, the scum-sucking financial establishment that has ruined all of our lives and our children's as well -- the New York Film Festival makes a pretty easy target for crusading anti-elitists of all stripes…What's far more interesting about the NYFF after all this time is that it remains remarkably successful at its self-assigned mission, anachronistic and undemocratic as that may appear. In programming relatively few features (28 this year) -- most of them drawn from the major European festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Venice -- and in insisting on a pre-pop-culture vision of cinema as an art form, festival director Richard Peña and his staff have, perversely enough, proven to be shrewd table-setters for the fall film marketplace.”

Erstwhile Screengrabber Mike D’Angelo already has a page of NYFF reviews up, and it sounds like you can scratch Tony Manero off your list. “For those not temperamentally inclined to celebrate uncompromising cine-machismo for its own sake, however, this is pretty thin gruel, deeply unpleasant without ever coming within spitting distance of enlightening. Once you've been startled by Raúl assisting an old woman home and then unexpectedly pummeling her to death for her TV set, and then seen him pawn the TV in order to fund a replica of the multicolored Saturday Night Fever dance floor, you're good to go, literally -- everything that follows is more of the same. American Psycho didn't really work as a movie, but at least Bret Easton Ellis had a coherent idea, in that you can readily see the connection between '80s materialism, Bateman's sadistic violence and the transformation of Genesis into a Phil Collins solo act. How exactly does living under Pinochet translate to disco fever? Why are we watching Tony Manero and not, say, Roy Neary or Luke Skywalker?”

Also weighing in on NYFF is Vadim Rizov at The House Next Door, who finds Gomorrah comes up wanting when compared to our favorite TV show. “The problem with Gomorrah is that it could start and end anywhere. The Wire runs full arcs, tying social problems to well-developed characters; the war never ends, but the characters move on. Gomorrah is representative types running through a loop: today's Scarface-emulating young sociopaths are tomorrow's dead meat, but there'll always be someone to replace them. All five stories in Gomorrah's hydra-headed monster have rough conclusions, but anyone expecting a movie about mob life to end in any kind of upbeat fashion a) needs to watch more movies b) needs, indeed, to read up a bit more. Gomorrah is exactly what I thought it would be, which means there's no surprises.”

Dazed and Confused and Waking Life star Wiley Wiggins was a regular fixture around Fantastic Fest, and as this entry at his blog It’s Not For Everyone shows, he’s down with the Ozsploitation. “Brian Trenchard-Smith, fresh from his appearance in Not Quite Hollywood, introduced and answered questions about one of his very early films, The Man From Hong Kong. As one might expect from an Australian Kung Fu movie, the driving sequences are better than the fight sequences, and the main car chase in the. Movie is actually one of the most impressive filmed, mainly for the demolition-derby ferocity with which the cars slam into one another and a sureness in the photography and editing during the chase. The acting and plotting are the most memorable when they flirt with self parody. The movie was a lot of fun, but pales in comparison to some of Trenchard-Smith's crazier films.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Filmbrain features Lost in the Sixties and Seventies: A Dozen I'd Kill to See. At number four is the 1971 obscurity You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat. “Easily the holiest of grails on the list, this is a film I originally heard about back in the early 80s, but only recently confirmed that it does indeed truly exist. Dig this: an anarchic anti-establishment comedy that skewers then-contemporary mores that stars Zalman King (yes, that one) as a young man trying to find his way in New York City. Add to that a cast that includes Allen Garfield, Richard Pryor, and Roz Kelly (Happy Days' Pinky Tuscadero), and features music by Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Oh yes, Wes Craven worked on the film as well. I have never met a single soul who can honestly claim to have seen this film, so if you have, please do speak up!”

The Screengrab Top Ten: The Baseball Movie All-Stars, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Spring is here! Okay, not in my apartment, but I've read that it's here, some places, apparently, and with it, the return of what's left of baseball, the American game. Sports in general, and baseball in particular, have a spotty history in the movies. I think I've been reading that sports movies are box-office poison since before I'd ever seen a sports movie and maybe before I had any clear grasp of the concept of "box-office poison." (Then I saw a trailer for Catwoman.) But anything that inspires the kind of passion, excitement, despair, and apoplexy that baseball inspires in its hardcore adherents has got to inspire some great characters. Here's a bullpen's worth of them.

Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones), COBB (1994)

In this poorly received and actually rather amazing movie, Jones gives a fine, fire-breathing performance as a man who, perhaps more than any other figure in the history of his sport, gives fans cause to weigh the value of his contribution to the game against the less positive effects of having had to share a planet with him. In his prime, Cobb competed as if he thought that the members of the losing team, and the less productive half of the winning team, would be rounded up after the game and beaten to death with sticks; seen in his comfortable, lonely old age, he's still a man who can only relate to the world as something to be fought, but crowds will no longer pay to see him fight on the baseball field and most people would rather not get close enough to fight him off the field, not even for ready money. Most of the movie is set in the early 1960s, when Cobb hired a sportswriter with the sportswriterly name of Al Stump (played here by Robert Wuhl) to ghostwrite his memoir, promised to let him tell the truth, and then bullied him into composing a sanitized version called My Life in Baseball. More than thirty years later, in conjunction with the movie, Stump published a more honest version of his encounter with the monster, Cobb: A Biography. Stump died a year to the month after the movie and book came out. One hopes that during that last year of his life, his dreams were a bit more peaceful.

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), BULL DURHAM (1988)

It's easy to love baseball if you're a hot prospect riding a greased rail to the show. It's another entirely when you're a woman living a going-nowhere life in a minor league town. Most female baseball fans in this position would be content to be groupies, frequenting the games and keeping the players company. But Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon, is another case entirely- a true devotee of the game who has as much passion for baseball as any character (male or female) ever to grace the silver screen. As she states at the beginning of the film, ""I believe in the Church of Baseball." And she takes her faith seriously, singling out a promising player with a chance to make it to the big leagues, and providing him with spiritual guidance- and yes, sex- for an entire season. Her methods (reading poetry in bed, making her men wear women's underwear under their uniforms, and so on) may be unorthodox, but they seem to work. As she says, "there's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career." In the season chronicled in Bull Durham, her man of choice is young pitcher "Nuke" Laloosh (Tim Robbins), an undisciplined kid with a killer fastball, and he gets the full Annie Savoy treatment. Yet despite her monogamous-for-a-season principles, she's thrown for a loop when she comes face to face with her male counterpart, journeyman catcher "Crash" Davis (Kevin Costner), a veteran who's been brought in to teach Nuke some lessons of his own. Crash's experiences have given him a hardened shell, but deep down he's just as much of an idealist about baseball as Annie is, and his presence in the film only underlines how pure Annie's love for the game truly is. At the end of the season, Crash is gone and Annie is still in Durham, but they will always worship at the same altar.

The Whammer (Joe Don Baker), THE NATURAL (1984)

This Robert Redford movie mostly makes a hash of the Bernard Malamud novel on which it's based, but it does have the niftiest film portrait ever of Babe Ruth, a monumental figure whose onscreen portrayers have included John Goodman, William Bendix, and, in the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, Babe Ruth. As in the book, he's called simply "the Whammer", as if it would be a blasphemous insult to refer to this celebrity demigod by the mere name his mama gave him. Joe Don Baker, who may have been the third least likely American actor to be cast as a great baseball player (after John Goodman and William Bendix), tears into the role as if it were what he'd been practicing for when he spent all that time swinging a homemade bat upside the heads of misguided lawbreakers in Walking Tall. Swaggering around the fairgrounds with a crowd of reporters at his heels and a babe in his line of sight, he captures the self-satisfied, bullying entitlement that many have attributed to the actual Babe, along with the magnetic, childlike delight in himself that made them love him anyway. Redford, in the title role, is supposed to be the new kid on the block, a country naif who's so green and self-assured that he doesn't know better than to regard himself as the old pro's equal. Getting a load of this idjit, the Whammer regards him with a sadistic, teasing dismay--as well he might, given that Baker and Redford were actually only born six months apart.

Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS (1976)

For the first half of the twentieth century, America's national pastime had a little problem: most of the nation wasn't allowed to play it. Not professionally, not in the big leagues, where the racial barriers overseen by the first Commissioner of Baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, held so firm that they didn't budge even during World War II, when crowds turned out to watch the short-lived women's leagues play. (For more, see A League of Their Own, or rather don't, because it sucks.) Bingo Long, which stars Billy Dee Williams as a pitcher-manager of a barnstorming all-black team during the pre-segregation period, is perhaps the only Hollywood movie to take as its subject the baseball of the Negro Leagues, and the mixed feelings experienced by those stars who had the chance to delight audiences with their superb play and showmanship but sometimes felt degraded both by being excluded from white baseball and by the clowning that their fans came to expect. (It also captures the mixed feelings experienced by the Negro Leaguers when the color bar dropped and the all-black teams died off.) Pryor has one of his better movie parts in the supporting role of Charlie, a player who schemes to break into the big leagues by posing as a Cuban (named "Carlos Nevada") and then, after that doesn't pan out, as a Native American. For his later hustle, he adopts a Mohawk haircut, just like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, which was released a few months earlier. We would further explore the long-hidden connections between this engaging light period comedy and Scorsese's febrile urban masterpiece, except that there aren't any.

Ring Lardner (John Sayles), EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

John Sayles has often allowed as how he takes acting roles in the movies he writes and directs because that makes for one less actor he has to pay, but in the right role, his cameos are sometimes the best thing in his movies. Here he found the role of his lifetime in the saturnine, long-faced sportswriter, casually wisecracking his way to a permanent place in American letters. Though it's the Chicago newspaperman Hugh Fullerton (played here by Studs Terkel) who actually breaks the story of the Black Sox scandal, it's his sidekick Lardner, glumly observing the chicanery and nodding in recognition of the crass absurdity of it all, who gives the proceedings a carefully judged moral weight that modern-day observers of the baseball scene will look for in their sports pages in vain. In his show-stopping big number, he entertains the crooked, self-hating ballplayers by performing, a capella and to tune of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", a little song of his own composition that begins, "I'm forever blowing ball games..." and ends with the (inaccurate) line, "And the gamblers treat me fair." All the while, the players can only sit there in self-incriminating silence, though there's no mistaking how much they wish they could kill him, or maybe kill themselves. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B.

--Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2!

Trailer Review: The Strangers

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Most of today's horror movies feel like they're trying to one-up each other, either with clever displays of violence and gore or with wacked-out plot gimmicks. So it's pretty refreshing to see Hollywood make an old-fashioned domestic thriller. Like last year's Vacancy, The Strangers places two mid-level stars (in this case Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) in a confined space to do battle with mostly faceless baddies, although The Strangers carries the added charge of taking place in the protagonists' home. As dicey a proposition as summer-release horror films can be, I'm actually curious about this one — the trailer suggests a classically-styled thriller, which is okay by me. Two quibbles: (1) I can't remember the last time a big-budget thriller featured an actual record player and didn't eventually have an LP skipping for spooky effect, and (2) didn't the trailer's final exchange come from an old Richard Pryor standup routine?

I'm A Sexy Vampire

Peter Smith — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

"Bela Lugosi!" Richard Pryor used to exclaim during his stand-up act. "I bet that guy got some weird fan mail." Indeed he did, but there's now a popular, if arguable, point of faith among some horror fans that nobody thought vampires were sexy until Christopher Lee first draped a cape around his six-foot-five-inch frame and started sinking his teeth into his demure co-stars' necks in the the 1958 Horror of Dracula. (It was his first time playing the Count but his second job for the British horror factory Hammer Studios; a year earlier, he played the monster opposite his frequent co-star Peter Cushing's mad scientist in The Curse of Frankenstein.) In the Guardian, Matthew Sweet discusses Lee, Hammer, and how their version of the classic bloodsucker fits into the vampire filmography. "Lee's performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires." I'm not sure that it can't be a book about both, but Lee definitely put his stamp on the character; he went on the play him in six other Hammer films, as well as sending the character up in a cameo in the 1970 The Magic Christian. By the end, in the 1974 The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the studio, "looking for new ways to revive flagging public interest in fanged Transylvanians, had transplanted Dracula to the fag end of swinging London, where he hung out with a gang of hippie bikers — slaves of the dark side, of pot and of their taste in afghan casualwear." — Phil Nugent