The Screengrab : rob lowe

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

The Best:

THE SPECIALS (2000)

Okay, I’ll admit, this one might be cheating since there’s never really been a Specials comic book...but there’s no question Craig Mazin’s criminally underseen comedy is, indeed, a comic book classic. The film (starring national treasure Thomas Haden Church as The Strobe, Judy Greer as best-Goth-girlfriend-ever Deadly Girl and Rob Lowe’s finest hour and a half as The Weevil) hit theaters for about five minutes in L.A. before sinking into undeserved obscurity, and I only saw it because The New Times and the L.A. Weekly raved about it. They were both right for once, and so now I'm spreading the love in case you ever spot this in a video store (or trust me enough to add it to your Netflix queue). The premise is similar to Mystery Men (if, as one IMDb commenter quipped, Mystery Men had been directed by Eric Rohmer) -- i.e., an ensemble comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes -- but The Specials is less a genre parody than a look at the group dynamics of co-workers who only HAPPEN to be superheroes (although for most of the movie, they could just as easily be doctors, musicians or real estate salesmen). Kitchen-sink indie filmmaking at its best, the movie features sharp, funny dialogue, about 90 seconds of special effects and a terrible coming attractions trailer that makes it look like a “wacky” Hollywood yuk-fest instead of the endearingly goofy gem that it really is...which is why I included the (admittedly censored) scene above instead.

SIN CITY (2005)

All green screens and no sets make Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City a deliriously hyper-stylized cinematic interpretation of Frank Miller's celebrated graphic novel series. Generating virtually every non-human element of his film noir with a computer, Rodriguez creates an adaptation nearly identical, in visual terms, to its source material. Fidelity, however, only gets one so far. And what makes the sumptuously black-and-white Sin City truly thrum with grungy, brutal life is not only its all-star cast’s fittingly outrageous, archetypes-on-mescaline performances (notably those by Rosario Dawson and Benicio Del Toro) and Rodriguez’s expert reproduction of Miller’s hand-drawn comic panels, but the director’s approximation of the brisk movement implied by those illustrations. Rodriguez brings Miller’s images to life with dynamic verve, a feat almost as thrilling as the performance of Mickey Rourke as battle-scarred tough guy Marv, a granite bulldozer whom the actor – even under pounds of facial prosthetics – embodies with a burning-red heart and soul.

BLADE 2 (2002)

After several stuttering attempts to follow DC in leasing its characters to the big screen, Marvel Comics had its first real success with the 1998 Blade, a horror-action hybrid based on one of the lesser supporting characters from its back pages: Blade, the African-American vampire hunter who himself possesses the advantages of vampirism (super strength, extended lifespan) and none of the disadvantages (can withstand sunlight, is not Eurotrashy), was born in the pages of Tomb of Dracula during the blaxploitation movie era. (Artist Gene Colan based his look partly on that of Jim Brown.) The first Blade movie, directed by Stephen Norrington (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and written by David S. Goyer, was unapologetic cheeseball fun, with a choice selection of bits from the comic and energetic, unhinged performances by Wesley Snipes in the title role and Stephen Dorff at his man-you-love-to-hate best as the villainous Deacon Frost. The sequel, though, is real gourmet trash, with the sensationally gifted director Guillermo del Toro brought in to take Goyer's nonsense about warring vampire tribes, give it a high polish, and set it all to a thumping hip-hop-meets-electronica score. The result is one of the most improbably gorgeous mindless thrill rides of the last several years, though the franchise keepers erred badly in permitting Goyer to not only write but direct the subsequent Blade Trinity, which plowed into a wall with all hands lost.

HELLBOY (2004)

Coming off Blade 2, Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to get himself an annuity by taking over the Harry Potter franchise in favor of hatching a movie around writer-artist Mike Mignola's unlikely hero -- a gargoyle-shaped paranormal investigator with a back story related to World War II who operates in an environment that calls up memories of H. P. Lovecraft's squishy horror fantasies. Del Toro captures the look and feel of Hellboy's world to a degree that marks the film as clearly a labor of love, and Ron Perlman, who plays the title character, reaches through the layers of makeup to give the enterprise some soul. He's more skittishly adolescent than the gruff loner of the comics, which pays off major comic dividends in the scenes involving the poor red bastard's crush on a moody firestarter played by Selma Blair: she'd make King Kong look down and shuffle his feet awkwardly.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Though often dismissed as merely an early, cheesy vehicle for then-fledgling actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Milius’ swords-and-sandals saga Conan the Barbarian is pure mythic pulp, its epic action and fantasy proving faithful to the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s violent legends. Milius’ macho persona forcefully informs this testosterone-laced Conan tale, in which an orphaned child becomes a slave, then becomes a warrior, and then finally a king, a path paved with equal measures of bloodshed, sly humor and pseudo-profound pronouncements about honor and glory. Still something of an amateurish actor, the muscle-bound Schwarzenegger is nonetheless an ideal Conan, and despite the proceedings’ one-dimensionality, the director’s majestic widescreen compositions lend the film a striking classicism. It’s the opening centerpiece, however, that’s truly unforgettable, in which Milius’ camera lingers, for what seems like an eternity, on the cold, motionless face of Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) just before the evil warlord beheads Conan’s mother in front of the lad’s eyes.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the not so good...

A CHORUS LINE (1985)

I’m a theater geek from way back, and so I’ve always had a special place in my heart for A Chorus Line, that old warhorse musical tribute to the nameless show biz gypsies who sing and dance their hearts out not for money or fame but (to paraphrase the show’s unabashedly sincere lump-in-the-throat anthem) simply for the love of their art. And, really, what better way to pay tribute to that altruistic, egalitarian spirit than...um...a cynical vehicle for a non-singing, non-dancing movie star which pretty much banishes the musical’s main characters to, well, the chorus. Michael Douglas hogs the spotlight in a role played by an offstage voice in the stage version, while Sir Richard Attenborough (a director hardly known for intimate chamber dramas) eschews the original's claustrophobic stage door setting in favor of “opening up” the action, restlessly tracking Douglas around Manhattan while the songs and stories of the rest of the characters -- the people the show's about -- somehow keep winding up offscreen and ignored.

OLEANNA (1994)

I've had some disastrous first dates in my day, but it's hard to know what I was thinking when I chose the May 1992 premiere of David Mamet's incendiary exploration of sexual politics Oleanna at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. as a means of wooing the cute blonde of my affections. In my defense, I hadn't heard much about the play when I bought the tickets; I think I was under the mistaken impression that it was about pirates. In fact, it's a calculated but highly effective outrage about a smug college professor who is stunned to be accused of sexual improprieties by a young female student he claims he was only trying to help with her studies. The play is designed to start arguments – it's either about sexual harassment or political correctness run wild, depending on your point of view – so it's not exactly primo first date fodder. (As it happens, it wasn't even my least successful date with this young lady, but let's not even go there.) It was undeniably riveting as a theatrical experience, however – William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, certainly the Mamet-est pairing imaginable, tore the house down. Two years later Mamet turned Oleanna into a movie, in the process giving no indication that he had any idea how or why it had worked in the first place. Pidgeon was gone, replaced by some nonentity named Debra Eisenstadt. Macy was still aboard, but given such a dull, flat adversary, his professor character now tilted too far to the monstrous side. Everything elliptical and ambiguous in the play had become blunt and obvious; there was no longer anything to argue about. Incidentally, Doubt shares these same problems, but at least it has a striking Meryl Streep performance. That's not to say I'm recommending it as a date movie.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT... (1986)

David Mamet's first big stage success, the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago -- a hilariously cold-eyed and profane take on the mating rituals of young urban types in the age of singles bars, porno chic, and "serial monogamy" -- was a one-act that needed to be expanded on (i.e., padded out) to make its weight as a feature film, and by the time it was green-lighted, America was in the post-sexual revolution "age of AIDS" and newspapers, nervous about legal reprisals from the Reagan-Meese Department of Justice, were reluctant to even run ads with the original title. All of which would have presented a problem for filmmakers with a little integrity, as opposed to the makers of this Rob Lowe-Demi Moore vehicle, which bears less resemblance to any Mamet ever produced than a scaled-down, MTV-friendly St. Elmo's Fire II. The only one of the four main characters who retains some detectable link to his stage version is Lowe's male-chauvinist sidekick Bernie, who, as regrettably incarnated by Jim Belushi, is reduced to bellowing in the background of what's now a conventional young-spuds-in-love movie.

EQUUS (1977)

The British playwright Peter Schaffer is the Maxwell Anderson of our day, a mediocre dramatist who dresses up fancy, fraudulent conceits in fake-poetic language and palms it off as high theatrical art by invoking historical giants and Greek deities. The success of the current Broadway revival of his horse-god bullshit play Equus (starring Harry Potter and his naked pudder) is sad evidence that people can still be suckers for this stuff, though the work fared less well in its movie incarnation, which had the misfortune to be directed by a man -- that famous tough customer Sidney Lumet -- who actually seemed to think it was the literary masterpiece that it keeps screaming that it is. If Lumet had seen through this hunk of junk, he might have been so disrespectful as to try to turn it into a movie, the way John Huston did with Key Largo, the only film based on an Anderson text that remains watchable today. Instead, he was content to stick Richard Burton, fresh from his career-crowning performance in Exorcist II: The Heretic, facing the camera from within a sea of black, and have him hurtle through his monologues as if daring us not to be awed. The ideas he has come to set before us, poor Burton declaims, are "less than worthless; they are in fact subversive." Got it right the first time.

FOOL FOR LOVE (1985)

Burned out on Hollywood, Robert Altman spent most of the 1980s working on filmed plays. Some of these worked out a lot less well than others, but this mounting of what, at the time, was widely held as Sam Shepard's masterpiece as a playwright stands out partly for how perfect it sounds in theory and how thoroughly it goes splat in the execution. Altman employed Shepard to both do the screenplay and star as Eddie, the cowpoke who's meant to have an untamed, fiery, yet sporadic relationship with May (Kim Basinger), who may be his half-sister. But in altering the text of his play (which takes place entirely in a motel room) so that the action rolls all around the motel complex and adjoining highway, Shepard inadvertently revealed how silly the material could be made to seem without the tension produced by two actors going head to head in a tight, enclosed space. And by casting Shepard in the difficult leading role, Altman inadvertently revealed his limitations as a film actor: the poor guy wrote his own part, yet he has trouble keeping up with Kim Basinger.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1959)

After A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams was understandably eager to write another role for Marlon Brando, and he was also keen to see Brando paired with Anna Magnani, the Italian powerhouse who had enjoyed a great success in the movie version of Williams' play The Rose Tattoo. Sadly, the only time that Brando and Williams did team up again was for this version of Williams' play Orpheus Descending, which all too perfectly captures the playwright's florid, self-parodic side. The opening, with Brando, as Val Xavier (Williams' notion of a modern Orpheus as a tortured blues-playing Adonis with a guitar and a snakeskin jacket) seen alone on screen as he faces the bar of justice hits the wall as soon as it opens out into a grotesque and unbelievable world -- and as Brando has his first scenes with Magnani: not until Godzilla met Megalon would the screen see such chemistry in action. Also doing their reputations no favors are Joanne Woodward in a misguided attempt by a likably grounded, naturalistic actress to enter the pantheon of the movies' all-time great weirdos, and Victor Jory as a rich cracker so rotten that Cape Fear's Max Cady would report him to the Neighborhood Watch Program.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

So, we’ve just survived a teeth-grindingly suspenseful presidential election, and now we’re entering the prestigious “serious film” season of Academy Award predictions and Best of 2008 lists...but in between all the high-minded political rhetoric and contemplations of quality cinema, Screengrab’s chief pollster and trailer-meister Paul Clark thought it might be a good idea for us to get down off our high horses for a week and reveal the movies we’re REALLY watching on our laptops when we SHOULD be dissecting the eschatological subtext of Synecdoche, New York.

Yes, I’m talking about Guilty Pleasures...NOT the overlooked indie gems we totally “get” because we’re smarter than everyone else, NOT the films that were unfairly maligned by the philistines in the mainstream media, but rather the truly flawed and disreputable movies we’re downright embarrassed to admit we kinda like.

So, c'mon, fess up...I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, as we here at the Screengrab reluctantly reveal our ALL-TIME GUILTIEST PLEASURES!

ANDREW OSBORNE’S GUILTY PLEASURES:

Okay, so to get this shame spiral spinning, I figured I’d go ahead and rank my unmentionables from least embarrassing to most indefensible, starting with...

5. MEATBALLS (1979)

So, okay, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Sure, the Animal House-lite Bill Murray vehicle doesn’t really try very hard (while at the same time occasionally trying too hard)...but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s painfully sincere in its sweetness, and not as remotely hep or ironically detached as, say, Wet, Hot, American Summer...but it just doesn’t matter! Sure, it’s not as highly regarded a “slobs vs. snobs” comedy as Caddyshack (which I never really dug as much as my friends anyway), and, true, it spawned a series of truly horrible sequels...but it just doesn’t matter! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!!! Indeed, that rousing Camp North Star "doesn't matter" chant became my very own motivational Geek Creed throughout high school and college, and while my classmates were rockin’ out to Foreigner, Rush and Zeppelin, I was singing along to the Meatballs soundtrack LP (featuring the “hit” single “Makin’ It”), and to this day I still know all the words to the “Counselor in Training” campfire song (“We are the CITs so pity us...”) -- but for me, the most embarrassing thing about this particular guilty pleasure was how much I yearned (and still yearn) for the simple niceness and camaraderie of its summer camp world (as opposed to the mean, boring streets of reality), and also the extent to which I subsequently modeled my adolescent behavior on Murray’s cool jerk class clown self-assurance in a desperate attempt to hide the full extent of my own breathtaking dorkiness.

4. GUMMO (1997)

There’s a lot of guilt (and guilt-by-association) just being a Harmony Korine fan in the first place. Admit to liking Kids, for example, and people automatically assume you’re some kind of disgusting pervert who actually thinks sexy teenage girls are sexy. Whereas liking Gummo just makes you look crazy: many critics and viewers reacted to Korine’s ugly, plotless, mess of a movie with boredom, confusion or flat-out hostility, and according to Wikipedia, during the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.” And, honestly, I can’t blame them. In many ways, Gummo is completely indefensible: it’s not exactly entertaining, it’s not really about anything and it’s hard to argue with people who find it pretentious or, in the words of film critic Ken Hanke, “the vilest waste of two hours of my life.” It’s not a movie I’d normally recommend to anyone...unless you’re the kind of person who's spent a little time in the kind of aimless trailer park wonderland where beating the everlovin’ shit out of a helpless chair makes for a good-time Saturday night. As for myself, I was only ever a dilettante visitor to the type of world Gummo portrays in its artily artless depiction of a fictionalized Xenia, Ohio – a town where the “Pets or Meat” lady from Roger & Me or the “Coven” crew from American Movie might feel right at home – and like those films, it’s easy for viewers to find themselves wondering if Korine is depicting offbeat humanity for its own sake or merely exploiting his subjects (a combination of real people and slumming actors like Chloë Sevigny) as “white trash” art objects (or both). Yet just by questioning whether you are or should be judging, say, the feral kid in the pink bunny ears or the widowed mother tap-dancing in her disaster area basement to get a smile out of her grim-faced son, you’ve instantly become more self-conscious than any of the characters you’re watching...hence the guilt.

3. THE BROWN BUNNY (2004)

And speaking of pretentious art films starring Chloë Sevigny...this one’s a major source of guilt, and I haven’t even SEEN it yet. The Brown Bunny’s been lingering on my Netflix queue for two years now, partly because I’m too embarrassed to just move it to the top and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong: though I’m perfectly willing to believe Vincent Gallo lives up to his reputation as an arrogant pain in the ass, I also thought his auteurial debut Buffalo ’66 was flat-out brilliant, and so I’m willing to believe there’s some merit in his follow-up effort, even though most reviewers (including, famously, Roger Ebert) have condemned The Brown Bunny as 93-118 minutes (depending on the cut) of shameless, tedious navel-gazing with all the entertainment value of, well, a long, boring road trip with Vincent Gallo (though Ebert did later amend his original harsh review after seeing the shorter cut). I suppose the potential boredom factor is the main reason I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the movie...yet it nevertheless remains in my queue month after month, year after year for pretty much the only reason most people have ever heard of The Brown Bunny: the infamous scene near the end where Sevigny blows Gallo on camera. Never mind my wife’s perfectly good question about why on earth I would ever want to see Gallo’s icky gnarled penis. Never mind reports I’ve had from reliable sources that the fellatio is totally faux anyway, and real or not it’s one of the least erotic sex scenes in the history of cinema...I just can’t help it: when it comes to the perverse American fascination with celebrities engaged in real (or even simulated) sex acts, I’m guilty as charged.

2. CAMP (2003)

And now things get really embarrassing. Like the teen drama geeks of its titular summer theater retreat, Camp is homely, dorky, amateurish and way too earnest for its own good...but also sweetly charming and downright irresistible to a fellow drama geek like me. Despite increasingly hostile and exasperated reactions from my loved ones, the "Turkey Lurkey" production number from the movie's super-peppy soundtrack was my holiday theme song for 2003...and, as if it’s not embarrassing enough to own the Camp soundtrack (including a musical theater version of Todd Rundgren’s “The Want of A Nail” you’ll often see me belting at the top of my lungs in traffic whenever my wife’s not in the car...yes, that’s right, I said wife...I am, indeed, a closeted heterosexual), I actually went back for a second dose of inexcusable pep and summer camp geekery (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) when Alexandra Shiva directed a documentary called Stagedoor about the real Catskills inspiration for the Camp camp, featuring a counselor named Jeff Murphy who just so happens to be one of the stars of my own “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” indie film directorial debut (and fantastic stocking stuffer!), Apocalypse Bop (featuring the Screengrab’s very own Scott Von Doviak)!!!

And finally, my deepest shame...

1. ST. ELMO’S FIRE (1985)

Good Lord. What can I say? There’s so much to hate about Joel Schumacher’s 1985 Brat Pack circle jerk I don’t even know where to begin. Leonard Pierce has gone on record with his belief that Andie Macdowell is just about the worst actress ever committed to celluloid, and she’s just a co-star here, sharing the screen with the quivering lips of Andrew McCarthy, the flaring nostrils of Judd Nelson and Demi Moore in full effect. For those who could barely stomach Friends, St. Elmo’s Fire is a thousand times worse, chronicling as it does the loves and lives of six bland white yuppies as they struggle to become even more rich and privileged. Oh, wait, except for Rob Lowe, who’s the sax-playing pretty boy “rebel,” who’s saddled with all the very worst of the film’s terrible, terrible frat-douche dialogue (“It ain’t a party ‘til something gets broken,” “I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,” etc.). Even as a teenager, I cringed at Demi Moore’s gay stereotype buddy and the fact that the only black character in a movie full of smug whites is an icky black streetwalker (who McCarthy’s struggling writer character raps with ‘cuz he’s such a man of, y’know, “the people”). Yet despite all the movie’s glaring flaws, it remains my Guiltiest Pleasure. I even like the godawful John Parr title song (a.k.a. “Man In Motion”). Why? I can only plead nostalgia on this one. I was and remain a sucker for movies like The Big Chill or Dazed and Confused that feature romanticized groups of witty friends hanging around and kvetching about their problems...and St. Elmo’s Fire featured Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in a mini-reunion from one of the all-time classics of the genre, The Breakfast Club (released earlier the same year), coinciding, as it happened, with my own transition from high school to college (and all the attendant coming-of-age melodrama thus implied), when lines like, “We're all going through this, it's our time at the edge,” were a soothing balm to my sheltered teenage soul. Aaaahhh-booogeda-booogeda-booogeda, ha, ha, ha!

Click Here For More Guilt From Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You know how there’s usually nothing good on TV, and then finally there are TWO shows you want to watch and they’re both on at the same time? That’s what this election has been like for me. After a a lifetime of troubled Democratic administrations and doomed Democratic candidates from McGovern to Kerry (and don’t even get me started on the disastrous Gore/Lieberman campaign, Nader haters), we finally get two really strong contenders...IN THE SAME FREAKIN’ ELECTION YEAR. And they just spent the past few months beating the shit out of each other.

But that's all behind us now: according to media scuttlebutt, Hillary will officially concede the Democratic nomination on Saturday and become America’s #1 Obama Girl, while Barack moves one step closer to becoming our nation’s first real black president, after many years of fake black presidents on TV and the big screen.

And so, in honor of Senator Barack Obama’s historic achievement, Screengrab decided to look back at some of the African Americans who occupied the Oval Office in fiction before reality finally caught up:

Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact (1998)

After playing God in Bruce & Evan Almighty, President of the United States was actually a step down for Morgan Freeman...but America was lucky to have his wisdom, authority and soothing, inspirational baritone during a crisis involving a potential Extinction Level Event, a.k.a. a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. Rather than farming out the whole thing to Haliburton, President Beck freezes wages and prices to prevent an economic disaster and dispatches Robert Duvall’s Capt. Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner and a multinational crew of astronauts, who sacrifice themselves to destroy the big rock, thus saving (most of) humanity. Heckuva job, Fishie.

Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer on 24 (2002-2004)

After surviving assassins in a truly harrowing California primary, Haysbert’s resilient, basso profundo commander-in-chief is faced with nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as attempts by corrupt American businessmen to manufacture war in the Middle East in order to drive up oil prices and...uh...hey, isn’t this a Fox show with a big conservative fan base? Must be all the torture...so much torture, in fact, that West Point Academy worried cadets were starting to view such behavior as acceptable interrogation procedure, and I’ve personally heard talk radio guys condone extreme neo-con interrogation policies because, heck, they always work for Jack Bauer. Yet isn’t it also possible, given the show’s impact, that Haysbert’s performance as the indomitable President Palmer in some way helped Middle America get used to the idea of a handsome young African American Democrat in the White House?

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

While not technically African American, Bill Clinton received an honorary designation as the nation’s first black president (until the real thing comes along) from a plurality of U.S. comedians. And while not technically a cast member of Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s tale of Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Clinton nevertheless received more screen time than Rob Lowe or Angela Bassett thanks to a presidential speech about rocks found on Mars that was repurposed (controversially) as a fictional proclamation about alien transmissions received by astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Ironically, the only reason Clinton got to portray the president in the movie was because Sidney Poitier passed on the role.

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Idiocracy (2006)

Of course, some presidents are better than others, though given the average IQ of the dumbed-down populace of Mike Judge’s little-seen, depressingly spot-on social satire, Idiocracy, Crews’ President Camacho doesn’t really do that bad a job. Sure, he almost executes the smartest man in the world (Luke Wilson’s cryogenically-preserved average Joe, whose 21st century common sense reads as genius in 2505 America). But he does have leadership skills, and when Joe’s brilliant plan to water crops with, y’know, water instead of corporate sports beverages helps to end a crippling food shortage, Camacho has the wisdom to actually listen to expert opinion rather than (ahem) stubbornly staying the course.

Tommy “Tiny” Lister as President Lindberg in The Fifth Element (1997)

Forget the Axis of Evil...Lister’s science-fictional administration has to deal with The Great Evil, a sentient flaming asteroid intent on, yes, wiping out all life on Earth. While Bruce Willis’ cab driver and Milla Jovovich’s supernatural supermodel do most of the heavy lifting in the fight against Evil (and its chief henchman Zorg, played by Gary Oldman in a peculiar plastic hat), President Lindberg nevertheless doesn’t ask and Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod doesn’t tell when his ultra-flamboyant radio host joins the mission, and the intergalactic commander-in-chief even supports his troops by preventing a naggy mother from cock-blocking Willis’ eventual clone chamber tryst with Jovovich...talk about advocating stem cell research!

Truth or Dare with Ricky Gervais

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

We’ve seen writer-directors and even writer-director-actors before, but it may be time to add a new hyphenate to the filmmaking glossary: writer-director-actor-blogger. Ricky Gervais is sharing the writing and directing duties on his debut feature film This Side of the Truth, and his co-stars include Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Lowe and Jennifer Garner. But he’s handling the blogging himself at his own website, rickygervais.com.

Plotwise, the movie sounds rather high concept in comparison to Gervais’s brilliantly squirmy television work in The Office and Extras. “It's a contemporary world rather like our own, but in which the human race has never evolved the ability to lie,” blogs Gervais. “I play a loser who discovers one day that he, and only he has the ability to lie. In a world where no one even understands the concept of lying, everyone totally believes, without question anything I tell them. I can say anything at all and they accept this as the gospel truth. I can get anything I want. Or can I?”

Gervais has already posted a number of pre-production videos, including his close inspection of the detailed testicle work on a scale model boar, and he offers a preview of a future project: “In the film I'm writing with Steve Merchant I'm playing a man with a bad back who sits in an arm chair all day. If I can hide a toilet in the armchair I will have created the perfect acting job for myself.”