The Screengrab : robert downey

"Less Than Zero", Twenty Years Later Equals = What?

Phil Nugent — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

It's been 24 years since Bret Easton Ellis's debut novel Less Than Zero opened a West Coast branch of the '80s Literary Brat Pack franchise, an two years less than that since the movie version, directed by Marek Kanievska. Now, Ellis has written a sequel to the novel, called Imperial Bedrooms--the man does love his Elvis Costello references--and has informed MTV's movie blog that he can already see the movie version. Actually, it sounds as if he may have hatched the idea partly in hopes of reconnecting with the spectacular but unpredictable comet that is the career of Robert Downey, Jr. As one of our most stylish and perceptive voices on the contemporary movie scene noted last year, it was Downey's high-wire performance as Julian, a rich boy caught in a drug-fueled downward spiral, that first hinted that Downey, already a known commodity as a gifted comic actor, might be a performer capable of then-unimaginable levels of depth and daring. “It’s in present-day,” Ellis says of the new book. “You’ll find out where all the characters from the book have now ended up, for better or for worse...When I began to outline the book and figure out who’s going to be around and who’s not – some of the main people are going to be okay. There was some supporting cast that I realized was expendable – you knew something bad was going to happen to them. But the leads? Yeah, they kind of stuck around.” As for Julian, Ellis says that the character is "in the book is sober. Fragile, but sober.”

One clue that Ellis may be trying to hitch a ride on Downey's tail is that, although he has specifically talked up the attractions of the making a sequel to the 1987 movie, noting that "“The cast is still around", Julian died at the end of that movie. In fact, at the time, Ellis loudly disowned the movie, which altered his story and icy emotional tone and turned the material into a strident anti-drug melodrama. (The need to adjust rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and drugs in the late '80s also helped torpedo the movie version of the original East Coast Literary Brat Pack artifact, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, which came out the next year.) Although the MTV blog item stresses the fact that Downey and James Spader were in that movie, the leads were actually Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz, two long-gone candidates for Hollywood stardom who will never be gone far enough away for my liking. As for Kanievska, he didn't get to direct another movie until the forgotten 2002 Paul Newman picture Where the Money Is. Aside from Downey's performance, the Less Than Zero film is probably best remembered for its Rick Rubin-produced soundtrack album, which included two charting singles, L L Cool J's "Going Back to Cali" and the Bangles' cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Hazy Shade of Winter." Ellis has said that in recent years he has grown "sentimental" over the film and now appreciates it as a "snapshot" of its era, though many viewers probably still think that album is a better snapshot to listen to.

It could be that what Ellis is really sentimental about is his place in the Hollywood food chain, which isn't as firm as it might be for a writer whose stock in trade is suntanned, well-financed decadence. Of the movies made from his books--Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and The Rules of Attraction--only Mary Harron's Psycho has had much success or enjoyed much of a post-theatrical afterlife, and it's widely taken for a satirical deconstruction of the book on which it was based. The Informers, a movie based on his 1994 short story collection that is due for release later this month, will mark the first time that Ellis has worked on the screenplay for one of these films. (The script is co-credited to Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, who also both served as executive producers.) But that movie, which features the final performance by the late Brad Renfro, seems unlikely to do much for Ellis's reputation, and in its finished form may bear little resemblance to the author's intentions. "It’s hard to tell now," Ellis has said of the screenplay after the film's director, Gregor Jordan, had edited it, "but it was supposed to be like criminals and vampires and girls and young people. There were things I recognized, and a lot that I missed." The presence of a vampire in the book inspired a fair amount of discussion at the time, and Jordan did cast Brandon Routh in the role, but word has it that Routh's part and the supernatural elements have been completely excised from the finished film.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

NICOLAS CAGE AS H.I. MCDUNNOUGH IN RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

The Coen brothers have turned out some truly amazing fools over time (Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Are Thou? is a standout), but their first full-fisted idiot, H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona, was their best. As the above chase sequence shows, H.I. lives in a world of blasé, gun-happy morons who easily compartmentalize the absurdity of their lives. It's cartoonish in the best way, like a live-action Merrie Melody that features lots and lots of guns and ammo and bizarre double-crossing and for some reason all the men resemble Elmer Fudd. One of the nicest touches is that the baby Nathan Jr. generally has a pacifying effect on the idiotic adults around him: H.I.'s prison buddies Gale and Evelle Snoats, the nightmarish Leonard Smalls, and even Nathan Arizona, Sr., who shows no propensity towards compassion until his baby boy comes back to him. It's ultimately a sweet movie about fools who can make a better world for themselves. Because if there's one thing that is true in every movie directed by the Coen brothers, it's that everyone in the world fools themselves and plays the idiot, and somehow, by the grace of luck and sheer numbers, the human race keeps creeping forward for better or for worse. We're all the punchlines in an elaborate joke, so we have to find some way of enjoying it. That's a very particular type of existential gallows humor, but it's my favorite type. (HC)

PETER O'TOOLE AS ALAN SWAN IN MY FAVORITE YEAR (1982)

Flipping out and in the throes of an attack of stage fright, Alan Swan declares, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" Both terms seem inadequate for whatever the hell he really is. Broken down, bankrupt, and alcoholic, Swan is both a coward who plays heroes and a universal object of adoration who despises himself; he works as hard as he does to live up to people's romantic image of him because he's always disappointed in himself, and he'd hate to have other people feel as bad about how pathetic he is as he does himself. The paradox is that the effort to conceal what a wreck he is really does make him a romantic hero. To see this performance when you're young is to be filled with the desire to be middle-aged and dissolute as quickly as possible, so that you can be worth a damn. (PN)

ANTONIO FARGAS AS THE ARAB IN PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)

Robert Downey, Sr.'s feature-length put-on about a subversively "honest" advertising agency is all over the place, but it has one strong center of focus in Fargas, playing a character so far-out that nobody had the guts to name him: ranting at top speed and top volume in a burnoose, he's just called "the Arab." Everybody in the movie is out for himself, but Fargas is the one who manages to make this seem not just hip but enlightened. Brandishing his cane and alternating haranguing people and reaching out to them by telling them how impressed he is that they have the sense to see things his way, he's funny, threatening, insane, philosophical, and irresistible, all at the same time. If you've ever wondered just what the hell it is that Flavor Flav thinks he's doing, here's what it looks like when somebody actually pulls it off. (PN)

PETER SELLERS AS HRUNDI V. BAKSHI IN THE PARTY (1968)

Of all the subtly anti-establishment movies to come out of Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s, The Party may be one of the best. Why wouldn't you want to watch film extra Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers — in brown-face no less *ahem*) methodically fuck up the glitzy party of a Bizniz hot shot. (With nothing but the best of intentions, of course.) Hrundi ensures that the party becomes infinitely better than it ever would have uninterrupted. By the end of it all, the face-lifted fat-deprived Hollywood wives are dancing with abandon amidst soap suds gone amok while the maid who demurely opened the door in the first scene gets down to the band. Let the revolution begin. (SCS)

ZERO MOSTEL AS MAX BIALYSTOCK IN THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Generally speaking, the best comic performances have at least some element of subtlety to them. When all you have is shouting and playing to the balcony, like as not, you come off as obnoxious instead of funny. Zero Mostel’s gargantuan overacting as failing show producer Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ debut feature puts that generality to its most severe test. From the first moment we see him, putting on outrageous airs to seduce the rich widows who finance his rapidly decaying lifestyle, he’s so far over the top that he’s coming back at it from beneath. When he hatches a scheme to make millions by luring investors to a play (Springtime for Hitler) that he knows will be a flop, he essentially terrorizes nervous accountant Leo Bloom (played by a fragile Gene Wilder) into going along with it – and when Leo isn’t being intimidated by Max’s bellicose bellowing, he’s being seduced by his insanely unrealistic lust for life. Mostel and Brooks apparently didn’t get along well during filming (possibly because they shared a similarly vulgar and explosive sense of showmanship, and there wasn’t room enough on the set for two such rampaging egos), but Brooks didn’t dare fire him – he knew he’d caught pure comedic lightning when he saw what Mostel was capable of. Brooks’ script has such great one-liners that almost anyone could make them funny, but Mostel’s Hindenburg-going-down style lent genius even to shouted throwaway lines like “I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” (LP)

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

Booking Time with Tony Curtis

Phil Nugent — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Nicola Graydon of the Guardian checks in with Tony Curtis on the occasion of his new autobiography American Prince, "a rollercoaster of a book in which he’s brutally frank about his childhood, his affairs, stardom, drug addiction, depression, women and sex. Lots and lots of sex. It’s a romp through Hollywood’s golden age, when Curtis, with his thick, black hair and cerulean eyes, practically invented celebrity as we know it." Today, Tony is 83 and hangs out at his home in a Las Vegas suburb with his wife of ten years, sitting in a wheelchair and concentrating on his painting. It was sixty years ago this year that he signed his first studio contract, his first step in becoming box office catnip. And as one of the enduringly moviestruck of major Hollywood movie stars, he can get misty-eyed about his status as one of the last living links to the final years of the old studio system. “Poor darlings, they’re all dead. Sinatra, Brando, Cary Grant. They’ve all gone.”

In Curtis's studio, reporter finds herself "surrounded by canvases of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in the same pose, head turned away, laughing, in slightly different colours, all with slightly prominent nipples." Curtis, who says that he has "an affinity for women," elaborates on his romantic past: "I was falling in love every day. I am completely in love with women. Every woman. I loved their company and there was always a chance you could kiss them." Some readers of his book will surprised to discover that Marilyn Monroe was one of them--one of the women he kissed, and apparently even one of the women he loved. He kissed her on-screen, of course, in Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder comedy that is generally regarded as his best movie by those who don't know that his best movie was Sweet Smell of Success. But for years, Curtis, who once addressed a British TV interviewer's request for a detailed analytical analysis of Marilyn's personality with the curt diagnosis that she was a "fruitcake," has eaten out for years on his line that having to kiss her for a movie was "like kissing Hitler." But that was about the later superstar and basket case, who screwed up takes and muffed her lines to the point that time stood still. When she and Curtis had their affair, when both were starting out, “She was 19 and didn’t look anything like what she became. She had reddish-brown hair and her figure was not distinguished yet. Her bosoms weren’t what they were later and her legs were a little scrawny, but she was putting it all together. Don’t you see? Once she accepted she was a woman, then, look out, world. There was no guy that was safe." (It would have been nice if Graydon had thought to ask Curtis about the title of his book: is it a slap at Norman Marilyn, who in his book Marilyn wrote of Joe DiMaggio, who was to become her first husband, that he was "an American prince--her first; the others have only been Hollywood princes.") Curtis remains endearing, even when he's cheerfully admitting that he married Janet Leigh form the publicity or brusquely dismissing these new kids they got starring in movies today ("“And that Pitt fellow – whatshisname? He hasn’t got it either. Now, Robert Downey Jr – I think he might have something.”), the star-struck kid who wants to be accepted still comes through. "He shows me a huge portrait of Cary Grant in a gilt frame. There’s a handwritten message on it by his hero, telling him he will be in for a “long, happy and enduring career”. He says: “'Isn’t that amazing? Cary Grant. The movie star of all time.'”

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

Tony Stark (i.e., Robert Downey, Jr.) to Bruce Wayne: "I Got Your Dark Knight Right Here, Pal!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.' I loved [Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan's] The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight. Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so f--king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

The first thing to be said about this is that if anyone finds that their college education helps them to better understand why Jim Gordon didn't dispatch a SWAT team to surround that boat that the Joker was aboard after Eric Roberts tipped him off, then that lucky viewer must have gone to a hell of a school. (Personally, my college education wasn't even enough to keep me from pissing away eleven dollars on a ticket to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Of course, Downey's harsh words for DC Comics will set off little tremors in the minds of comics geeks who remember bitter wars of words on the playground between self-styled DC fanboys and Marvel zombies. However much he means it, it's fun when these companies' star employees pretend to be infected with the virus, as anyone who ever saw Alan Moore take custody of the microphone at a comics convention in the 1980s, before he adopted a "plague on both their houses" attitude. It's kind of like professional wrestling without the folding chairs. Downey himself seems to get a giggle out of his bad-boy act. "You know, you're never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone," he said. "I think I've got a couple more.

On the subject of his other summer hit, Tropic Thunder, Downey has one thing he wants to make very clear: he is not Kirk Lazarus, the looney, Oscar-festooned Method actor he plays, who vows to remain in character until he's recorded the picture's DVD commentary. Speaking of the character, Downey says that "I think his fatal flaw is pretty much any and everyone's who's in entertainment, which is, on a certain level: 'Oh if they believe they're a fraud and that's creating this neurotic state,' when the truth is, you are a fraud because you've gone too far into buying into your own hype and now you're, literally crazy. I think Kirk Lazarus is nuts." Discussing his decision to make Kirk Australian, Downey adds, "I just think that the Australian phenomenon reminds me more of American as with the British invasion from the '60s. But when I was thinking about Kirk Lazarus I was thinking about Colin Farrell, about Daniel Day Lewis and about Russell Crowe and whoever was the most effective tool for whatever my thing was, I would use." When it was pointed out to him that a lot of viewers sure do see a lot of Crowe in there, Downey permitted himself a smile. "Now do you think he would see it as the highest form of flattery or do you think that he would be less than pleased?"

Indiana Does Linguistics: Nuking the Fridge with Professor Jones

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In the overall scheme of the 2008 summer movie season, which began more than a month before summer did and is already entering its winding-down stage, The Dark Knight has established itself as the Movie of the Moment, Sex and the City the stealth smash and favorite subject for op-ed kvetchers, and Robert Downey, Jr. the star who people root for as lustily as any of the characters he plays. By contrast, the fourth Indiana Jones picture performed about the way one might have expected: after months of hype and even some genuine expectations, it opened big, collected its first-weekend money, and moseyed its way out of first-run theaters. But its left something behind: a new phrase in the English language. That would be "nuke the fridge", which the urban dictionary defines thusly:

A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. A reference to one of the opening scenes of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", in which the titular hero manages to avoid death by nuclear explosion by hiding inside a kitchen refrigerator. The film is widely recognised by fans as a major departure from the rest of the series both in terms of content and quality.

Guy 1: "Wow. Did you see the new Indy movie? What the hell was that? It was like I was having some kind of flu induced absurdist nightmare."

Guy 2: "Yep... did or did not that series permanently Nuke the Fridge?"

The obvious reference point is of course to "jump the shark", the phrase for the moment when a TV series has gone south, which was popularized by Jon Hein's website of the same name sometime around the last turn of the millennium. Hein's payday came in 2005, when the site was sold to TV Guide, and since then the phrase, which apparently originated in bull sessions Hein had with his friends back in college, has slipped its leash and entered the mainstream, where it is applied willy-nilly to anyone and anything. (Last week, wild man pundit David Brooks, going far off the reservation of conventional wisdom, opined that, with his tumultuously received speech in Berlin, Barack Obama's "unity act" had "jumped the shark.") Variations on "nuke the fridge" have already started turning up in the names of website, such as nukedthefridge.com. One of the fellows who runs one such site told The New York Times' Noam Cohen that “‘Jump the shark’ is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show.” By contrast, “nuke the fridge” offers a “new, fresh take” on long-running entertainment phenomena that have entered the sucking stages. For his part, Jon Hein is magnanimous towards these youngsters, though he does point out that it's been a while since he's heard anyone use the phrase "jump the couch" (Remember? Tom Cruise on Oprah? Anyone?), so maybe the people trying to cash in on "nuke the fridge" shouldn't jump at the chance to buy any yachts on credit. Leaving aside how weird it is that some people apparently feel that their generation will be ill-served if they don't have their very own snappy three-word on-line phrase for this sort of thing, I suspect that when a replacement for "jump the shark" that will stick does arrive, it won't be one that sort of replicates the rhythm and idea behind "jump the shark." One reason that "jump the shark" caught people's attention was that it wasn't obviously engineered to resemble something that people were already saying.

Morning Deal Report: Borat vs. Iron Man

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

While his wife Madonna continues to dominate the tabloid covers, Guy Ritchie is keeping busy preparing for his Sherlock showdown. As we told you last week, Ritchie’s reboot of Sherlock Holmes is getting some competition from a rival production that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as the elementary Watson. Now Ritchie has landed his Sherlock: Robert Downey, Jr. As Variety reports, “Downey emerged as an action star with Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes also will take advantage of his physical skills as the character displays brawn as well as brains. The basis for the film is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales, but also the comicbook Sherlock Holmes.” The “comicbook” Variety refers to is an upcoming take by Lionel Wigram, not the classic DC version pictured here. Sorry, nerds.

Speaking of comics (and nerds): fans of the Elfquest series by Wendy and Richard Pini, commence sharpening your knives. Or swords. Or whatever it is elves carry. Dodgeball writer/director Rawson Thurber will bring your beloved Wolfriders to the big screen for Warner Bros., per the Hollywood Reporter. “The series -- which at certain points in its history was published by both Marvel and DC Comics -- attracted a more mature audience as it went along, with scenes of battles and sexuality that were intense for that time. Hollywood has long tried to adapt the series, and several attempts at an animated series or feature have been made over the years.” Hey, what could go wrong?

Who says print is dead? It’s not only comic books that are coming to the screen in droves. Remember the New York Times article 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' that was recently optioned by J.J. Abrams? Well, according to Variety, “Miramax Films has closed a deal to develop a movie from ‘This Strange Thing Called Prom,’ a Brooke Hauser article published in the June 22 edition of the New York Times. The article follows the prom adventures of high school seniors who came to Brooklyn from locales like Senegal, Venezuela, Tibet, Haiti, Poland and Gabon (one was a nomadic yak herder until age 12).” You may laugh, but don’t you think yak herding skills would have come in handy at your prom?

Related:
No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes
The Summer of Downey

Mike Tyson Speaks: Lend Him an Ear

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

“I love addicts. I love these guys. That’s the people I want to be around. You know, former users. And I think that’s really crazy.”That's Mike Tyson talking to Tim Arango in The New York Times. Now 41 and, one assumes, or maybe hopes, Tyson still has his own peculiar addictions, and one of them seems to be to the filmmaker James Toback. Tyson supplied Toback with the most memorable scene of his 2000 improvisational jam session Black and White when he turned up as himself in a party scene and gets cruised by Robert Downey, Jr., a scene that ends with the unnerved Tyson ("I'm on parole, brother, please") ringing Downey's bell. (After Downey goes down, Brooke Shields, playing his wife, rushes over to see if he's all right, and then she hits on Tyson. "“They say I raped a woman,” Iron Mike tells her politely. “They put me in the penitentiary. I don’t need no white bitch coming on to me.” At the time, there was some indication that Tyson was unhappy with how he came across onscreen and felt that Toback had set him up--not an unreasonably paranoid reaction to Toback, a self-styled provocateur who likes to surround himself with celebrities and stir up some shit. But Tyson came back for an appearance in Toback's little-seen When a Man Loves a Woman, and now he's the star of Toback's new film, a documentary simply called Tyson, "which interposes interviews of Mr. Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips," and which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.

“I look at it now, and I’m embarrassed I did it,” Tyson, currently trying to keep a low profile in Las Vegas, says about the film. “There’s a lot of information people didn’t need to know.” His claims to feel shame over his past is believable. But Tyson, who spent the first half of his career easily dominating his opponents in the ring (and the second half showing a complete inability to deal with it when he could no longer easily dominate, so that he'd do anything--go down fast, aim below the belt, turn cannibal--to just make it stop) now seems to be a glutton for this kind of punishment. (He's also working on an autobiographer with a professional ghostwriter.) This focus on sifting through his past may not be entirely based on his having nothing else to peddle. He may be hoping to educate himself. “I don’t know who I am,” he told the Times. “That might sound stupid. I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.” Maybe that's why he likes hanging around Toback, who recalls that when they first met back in the 1980s, “somehow the subject got on to madness. I told him about an LSD experience I had as a sophomore at Harvard. We talked about losing the self, and the difference between dread and fear.” (It's too bad that Toback's movies aren't more like his interviews.) Why Toback wants to be around Tyson, in good times and bad, is less mysterious. “I didn’t know how to be any other way," Tyson says now about his free-spending, sometimes lunatic-seeming behavior when things were good, or at lest profitable. "I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire. I was crazy.”

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

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

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

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

Christina Ricci’s Happy Meal

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When last you saw Christina Ricci on the screen, she was either sporting a pig snout (Penelope) or chained to a radiator in her panties (Black Snake Moan). She’s made a career of playing “dark, damaged young women,” but as Robert Downey, Jr. might say, she’s about to have her first opportunity to appear on a Slurpee cup. “What's really funny is that people for years had been saying to me, ‘You know, they're going to make a Speed Racer movie and you should totally play Trixie’,” Ricci says in a revealing interview with The Telegraph. “And I do look a little bit anime when I have dark hair with my white skin.”

Like Downey, she has put some personal darkness behind her as well. “Today she looks fighting fit - her skin is clear, her huge hazel eyes are bright, and she is slender but not scarily so. It's a far cry from the well-publicised extremes of her troubled youth when she cut herself and battled with anorexia. At one point she shrank to six stone and so disliked her appearance that she covered all the mirrors in her house.”

Not that Ricci is entirely without worries. As the interview begins, she frets that the paparazzi may have caught her in a compromising position. “I stopped at the pharmacy on the way here and I wasn't very careful getting out of my car. I just didn't think. But this dress is so short… I'm pretty certain there's going to be some crotch shots. At least,” she sighs, “I was wearing underwear.”

At Least I Was Wearing Underwear – it sounds like the perfect name for Ricci’s autobiography. She wore underwear and not much else for her role in Black Snake Moan, which she considers to be her best work to date, even if she wasn’t crazy about the ad campaign. “I thought I was getting into a part where I could really show the gritty reality of someone who had post-traumatic stress syndrome - what we call rape trauma syndrome…then it's sold in this exploitative, objectifying manner, so that I look like I'm part of some 1970s porn, when I'm making a movie about what happens to a f-ing rape victim.”

Ricci can at least be thankful that the image never appeared on a Slurpee cup.

The Summer of Downey

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

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

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

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

Happy (Almost) Birthday, MAD! (a tribute by Andumb Osboring)

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

According to the recent 286 glossy-page “green” issue of Vanity Fair, E.C. Comics was founded 60 years ago by William M. Gaines, kicking up an important early skirmish in the ongoing American Culture Wars by publishing influential, controversial horror, action, science fiction and fantasy titles like Tales From The Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales and Weird Science.

But Mad magazine, which premiered in 1952, would prove to be the company’s most iconic, longest-surviving contribution. Much has been written about the generations-deep influence of Alfred E. Neuman and “the usual gang of idiots” on American satire and popular culture in general...but, this being the Screengrab, I wanted to pay special tribute to six decades of Mad’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric movie parodies.

According to our old friend Wikipedia, the first film spoof featured in Mad was 1953’s Ping Pong (get it?), followed shortly thereafter by Noon!, Sane!, From Eternity Back To Here!, Wild 1 (correction) Wild ½, Stalag 18 and approximately a zillion others over the subsequent decades, up to and including contemporary jabs like The Da Vinci Coma, Spider-Sham 3 and Harry Plodder & The Torture of the Fan Base.

I became familiar with the older parodies through repackaged, full-color mini-comic inserts in the Mad Super Special editions, but it’s the mid-‘70s Mort Drucker era that I remember most fondly, with its takedowns of movies I knew and loved (Star Roars, The Spy Who Glubbed Me), “grown-up” movies I experienced in Mad long before viewing the actual objects of ridicule (The Ecchorcist, A Crock o’ (Blip!) Now) and countless flicks I never bothered to see (The Eyes of Lurid Mess, The Calamityville Horror) figuring they’d never be as entertaining as the Mad versions.

Was I annoyed when, halfway through reading the gazillion-page Lord of the Rings trilogy Mad blew the ending of the epic for me with 1979’s The Ring and I, a parody of 1978’s animated Lord of the Rings (which only went as far as the Battle of Helm’s Deep)? Yes. Very annoyed.

But I had to give credit to the magazine for brutally savaging its own 1980 celluloid fiasco, Up The Academy (directed, curiously enough, by Robert Downey, Sr.). And, in addition to the laughs, attitude and cinematic sensibility it offered, Mad also provided my pubescent, pre-internet libido with any number of smokin' hot pen-and-ink fantasy girls to ogle (Undressed To Kill’s semi-clad Nancy Allen caricature, in particular) as fondly remembered now as any Playboy centerfold.

Eventually, of course, like an elder sibling cast out of Narnia, I drifted away from Mad in later years, never to return...but as long as there’s Bleccch in my Kaputnik, the usual gang of idiots will live forever in my Portzebie.

Tom Cruise Parodies Somebody Else for a Change

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Some good news, finally, for Tom Cruise: his cameo in Tropic Thunder brought down the house at an industry screening of the summer comedy. It's a time-honored show business tradition for stars who have encountered image problems to get back in their fans' good graces by showing that they have a sense of humor about themselves, though it doesn't always work, as Sylvester Stallone found out with Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. Cruise's deep-inside turn, in which he dons a fat suit to play "a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools" apparently works like gangbusters, especially among those who recognize it as a bitch slap at Sumner Redstone, the Paramount executive who cut his studio's ties to Cruise after speculation began building in Hollywood that the star's increasing reputation as a geek show on wheels might be killing his box office appeal. It also sounds as if the cameo might be enough of a live wire to entertain viewers in the heartland who managed to enjoy Shrek without knowing that the sort-statured, bullying royal villain was widely seen as Jeffrey Katzenberg's way of telling Michael Eisner, thanks for the memories.

As for the movie's director-star, Ben Stiller, he was reportedly unhappy when pictures of Cruise in costume made it onto the Internet and spoiled the surprise, but by now he may welcome the buzz about Cruise for giving people something to write about his movie that doesn't involve Robert Downey, Jr.'s appearance in blackface. (One more time, he's not playing a black man, he's playing numbskull actor who thinks he can give a straight dramatic performance as a black man in blackface. I think it sounds like a promising joke myself, but I often get these things wrong. For what it's worth, the New York Times reports that the consensus after the screening was that, between the two of them, Downey and Cruise are easily the best things in the movie.) Cruise and Redstone are said to have recently patched up their differences. It remains to be seen whether this latest development will compel Redstone to demand his records back, but if Cruise is doing favors for Ben Stiller, he must find it hard to stay mad at anybody, given the ruthless impression of him that Stiller used to do on Saturday Night Live and his own sketch comedy TV show. In fact, this isn't the first time the two have worked together; witness this clip, which dates from a time (oh, it seems so long ago) when Cruise's image was still so straight-laced and boringly normal that he could get away with calling somebody else a weirdo--though if you watch it all the way to the end, you can see a sign of the emergence of the scary freak we've come to know and love, maniacal laugh and all.

New Easter Classics: "Night of the Lepus" (1972)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Like Christmas movies, Easter movies have only so many iconic touchstones to wave to declare their allegiance to the holiday, but it seems as if Christmas gets more mileage out of its storehouse than Easter does out of its two major devotional images: the resurrection of the Christian Messiah, and cute fluffy bunnies. A glance at the TV listings shows that movies that feature crucifixions clearly predominate on the weekend schedule, even as they tend to shut out movies made by Martin Scorsese or Robert Downey, Sr. But a few minutes of most Biblical movies, especially when compared to the work of Chuck Jones, may leave you wondering if the rabbit movies don't really have the inside track. Night of the Lepus may be the perfect Easter movie just because it makes an effort to meet both camps halfway: it depicts the human race buying itself a second chance at life by crucifying (okay, electrocuting) several acres' worth of giant, rampaging bunny rabbits. Inexplicably, TV programmers have yet to seize on it as a holiday perennial, and the chances that this might be the year that changes got even smaller when Turner Classic Movies ran it last weekend as part of its "TCM Underground" series, thus indicating that the network not only has a real counter-instinct for innovative holiday programming, but that somebody over there detects an unsuspected outlaw-cinema vibe in Stuart Whitman.

Whitman plays a do-gooder scientist who, trying to keep rancher Rory Calhoun from spreading poison to rid his fields of rabbits, creates a serum that he hopes will disrupt the bunnies' breeding patterns. Instead, it turns them into jumbo-size monster bunnies that leave burrow holes the size of craters and maul a guy named Jud for implictly mocking their lifestyle by picking the lettuce out of his sandwich. (After Whitman's wife and partner, Janet Leigh, chases Jud's attacker off with a shotgun, she wipes what appears to be ketchup off his face and tries to quiet his whimpering by assuring him, "It's okay, Jud, it's okay. The rabbit's gone.") Night of the Lepus, which also stars Star Trek's DeForrest Kelley in a notably unflattering mustache, is not a good movie — snippets of it appear on a TV set in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and the footage is much stranger and more disturbing when seen for bare seconds at a time, out of context. But it does have its instructive side, especially in the sense that it can be very educational to see how not to do something. To view a sequence in which shots of rabbits hopping through the desert are intercut with scenes of cattle stampeding, and then to realize that you're supposed to get the idea that the cattle are stampeding because giant rabbits are coming their way, is to grasp with special force that there is much more to the editor's art than one is likely to master from a correspondence course and a lot of blind self-confidence. The film is also overly devoted to what I've always thought of as "The Six Million Dollar Man fallacy", a common delusion among editors and production people in the 1970s, probably inspired by desperation, that anything can be made more awesome by running it in slow motion. After the big mass-electrocution scene, the film winds up with a lingering shot of a couple of bunnies eyeballing the camera and spectacularly failing to seem ominous. Most of the movie's attempted thrills were achieved through trick photography, if one can use that term even when the trick doesn't take, though a large stuffed bunny seems to be employed in Jud's big scene, and there is one classic shot, of the kind that could not be fully appreciated until the invention of the freeze-frame button, of a guy in a rabbit suit getting whacked in the face. Whatever he got paid, it wasn't enough. (Of course, if the producers had had enough money to do the movie right, they would have paid somebody to forcibly shave DeForrest Kelley.) It could be that the advent of CGI could now make a truly thrilling Night of the Lepus remake a reality. Are you listening, Richard Kelly?

Car Talk with Val Kilmer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:45:00 GMT

What with the WGA strike, there isn't a lot of TV series news out there right now, but as Spencer Tracy used to say, what's there is cherce. It's been reported that Val Kilmer will be serving as the voice of KITT, the talking car, in the "rebooted" new pilot version of Knight Rider being readied by executive producer Doug Liman, with an eye towards possibly launching a new series. Originally, Will Arnett (Arrested Development, Blades of Glory), the new reigning Mr. Smarmy, was set to play KITT, a bright idea that might have resulted in something that felt closer to Heat Vision and Jack: The Next Generation. In a surreal development, Arnett had to be replaced because the pilot's sponsor, Ford, objected to his casting because he had done voice work in commercials for General Motors, thus denying him the chance to provide the voice of a car because he was already "the voice of GMC Trucks." In a world where nobody seems to understand what constitutes a conflict of interest anymore, it's always good to see somebody deciding where to draw a line in the sand. Anyway, this is sort of movie news because Kilmer is still a movie star. Sort of. (Heck, for that matter, when I saw Wristcutters last year, the revelation that Arnett was playing the movie's mysterious cult leader was greeted by the audience with a reaction comparable to what you might get if Jesus walked out onstage and announced that he was here to introduce the Beatles reunion.) Not that we mean to tease Kilmer about this. Sure, there was a time when we'd have been happy to oblige, but in the last several years the kissy-lipped devil has ripened into one entertaining side of ham, making the most of his flashy roles in such films as Spartan and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the recent TV miniseries Comanche Moon, and giving such co-stars as Robert Downey, Jr. and Steve Zahn — men who do not live dull lives — something to write home to mother about. ("Yeah, then he started hopping, hopping around in place, and he said he thought he was a flea. Oh, it's in the movie. If you look close, you can see his nose twitch at one point. That's where the director shit his pants.") The Knight Rider pilot is slated to air sometime later this month on NBC.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.