The Screengrab : sam raimi

“Drag Me to Hell” (Scott’s Take)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Judging from last night’s screening of Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi’s long-awaited return to the horror genre gets the sort of reaction you’d imagine the director was after: screams of terror dissolving almost instantly into self-mocking laughter at having fallen for the director’s tricks yet again. This is a movie that goes bump in the night – if you want your date jumping into your lap, it’s the perfect choice for a night out. But let’s not get carried away equating its modest charms with the demented energy and deranged inventiveness of Raimi’s early work, most notably Evil Dead 2.

Actually, “charms” is not a great word choice, unless you find the prospect of a wizened Gypsy removing her rotting dentures in extreme close-up charming. (The Hungarian-American community is probably not going to be thrilled with the presentation of their culture on display here.) Said toothless crone is about to be thrown out of her house after missing several mortgage payments, unless she can convince loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) to extend her deadline. Normally, the kind-hearted Christine would do just that, but she happens to be up for a big promotion, and bank manager Mr. Jacks (David Paymer) would like to see her exhibit a little backbone.

So Christine turns the old woman down, and is rewarded for her fortitude with a Gypsy curse. She will be tormented by demons for three days, at the end of which she will be, yes, dragged into Hell, unless she can find some way of breaking the curse or passing it on to someone else. This makes for some rocky moments in her relationship with boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), particularly when she experiences a serious freak-out in the midst of dinner with his stodgy parents. Can the psychic Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) help her ward off the forces of evil..and win that big promotion at the bank?

Raimi relies heavily on (admittedly well-executed) shock effects; he’s not shy about slathering his jump-out-of-the-shadows moments with over-the-top musical stingers, all the better to get the whole theater hopping at once. He gets a lot of mileage out of bodily fluids and gooey innards, too, most notably when a Gypsy wake goes horribly awry. You can’t blame him for going to his bag of tricks so often if his only other choice was relying on Lohman’s acting chops to carry the movie. You’ll wait in vain for any sparks between her and Long, who reprises his usual lightweight “I’m a Mac” persona. No, Drag Me to Hell isn’t a compelling character study, but it’s entertaining enough in its squishy-squirmy way, and the payoff (which had me slapping my forehead wondering why I didn’t see it coming) delivers a little jolt of that old time Raimi magic.

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Screengrab Review: "Drag Me to Hell"

Nick Schager — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi gets back to basics with Drag Me to Hell, serving up the type of comic-horror mayhem that defined his career-making Evil Dead trilogy, and which is here infused with a shrewd, gleeful strain of current-events topicality. Though equipped with the PG-13 rating that inevitably makes horror fans wary, Raimi’s film pulls few punches in the nastiness department, its action coated in spurting bodily fluids emanating from nasty orifices, and dressed up with plenty of rotten skin, fetid corpses, and demonic insanity to satisfy genre purists. It’s not the quantity of ickiness that makes Drag Me to Hell a madcap, go-for-broke entertainment, however, but the energy Raimi brings to his material, the director orchestrating his over-the-top gruesomeness with such joy that it proves infectious, each subsequent jolt-scare (replete with accompanying turned-to-eleven sound effect) and gross-out maneuver perfectly pitched to be both frightening and hilarious. That balance is considerably tricky to achieve, and unlike in his leaden, overstuffed Spider-Man 3, Raimi effortlessly pulls it off, with his swift pacing, whip-smart edits, and hyper-goofy cinematographic zooms, pans and twirls transforming the proceedings into a delirious haunted house carnival ride.

Without a second wasted, Drag Me to Hell establishes both its premise and its social commentary. Christine (Alison Lohman, alternately sweet, flustered and frightened) is a considerate loan officer at a California bank where she hopes to be promoted to assistant manager, a position that her boss (David Paymer) says requires a person who can “make the tough decisions.” When Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), an elderly gypsy woman with scraggly fingernails, sharp teeth and one milky white eye, shows up asking for an extension on her mortgage payment, Christine reluctantly makes her boss proud by denying the request. This rejection quickly leads to public humiliation for Mrs. Ganush, who in turn attacks Christine in a dark parking lot, a gonzo car-set skirmish involving staplers, cinder blocks and one hilariously disgusting mouth-chin bite that concludes with the gypsy hag uttering ominous incantations. The next day, Christine has the promotion wrapped up (much to her co-worker competitor’s chagrin), but she’s soon beset by strange voices and visions, leading her – despite the protestations of loyal psychology professor boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) – to seek out the advice of a psychic (Dileep Rao), who breaks the bad news: she’s cursed, and in three days time, will take a one-way trip to the netherworld courtesy of a malevolent goat-demon.

The ensuing madness is of a feverish sort, with Raimi assuredly barreling from one creepy-amusing scenario to the next, whether it be animal-lover Christine’s attempts to ward off her unholy pursuer with a live-feline sacrifice (right after we spy a poster of a hanging kitty with the tagline “Baby, Hang On!”), a dinner-gone-awry with Clay’s rich, snooty parents, or Christine’s face serving as the recurring target for projectile vomiting. Raimi draws his characters in sharp, confident lines – notably with regards to his heroine’s past weight-related issues – while unwaveringly maintaining the focus on horror thrills. Drag Me to Hell has a swiftness that keeps anxiety and anticipation high. And by pivoting the story around mortgage loans, fiscal solvency, and the greed and selfishness that drives the financial industry, he jolts the film with a measure of hot-button relevance that complicates sympathy for his protagonist, who’s at once a nice, generous girl damned by a misguided decision, as well as a stand-in for the profit-over-all-else cretins who helped nearly tank the global economy. Raimi may take the easy way out with his conclusion, preferring a traditional gotcha finale to a more twisted, greed-run-amok available alternative, but as far as smart, scintillating genre efforts go, his Hades-bound trip is well-worth taking.

Sam Raimi Gets Back to Basics with "Drag Me to Hell"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi earned the love and devotion of geeks everywhere with the Evil Dead pictures and the original comic book movie Darkman, then rolled up his sleeves and proved to the industry that he could suck it up and direct Kevin Costner (in the sensitive Crash-Davis-at-midlife picture For Love of the Game) if that's what it took to get them to trust him with Spider-Man. Three web-slinger movies later, Raimi has finally gotten in a position where he can make another horror flick, this time with a budget and a highly regarded young actress, Alison Lohman, in the Bruce Campbell part. James Rocchi stopped by the set of Drag Me to Hell to observe. "It's a long-standing piece of trivia," he writes, "that Raimi wears a suit to the set every day, in the mold of Alfred Hitchcock, so I made sure I put on an appropriate suit-and-tie combo for our visit. When Raimi came over to meet us, though, he was wearing a T-shirt and blazer, unshaven, relaxed and happy. Looking me up and down, he laughs: 'I see one member of the press dressed appropriately.'"

The script, which Raimi co-wrote with his brother Ted, who could cure cancer tomorrow and still remain best known to most of the world as Joxer the Mighty from Xena: Warrior Princess, casts Lohman as a loan officer at a bank who chooses to deny an old woman the loan she needs to keep from losing her home because Lohman is angling for a promotion and wants to impress her boss with her ruthlessness. It turns out that the old woman is a witch who retaliates by cursing Lohman with an evil spirit. It's torn from today's headlines, though it's not immediately clear who we're supposed to root for. Raimi says that "my brother and I wanted to write a story about a woman who, like in a lot of morality tales, has a choice to do good or evil, makes a sinful decision, and ends up paying the price for it -- or not, if she can escape."

Raimi also believes that Drag Me to Hell "is a little more complex in some ways than the Evil Dead movies, but the Evil Dead movies were suspense and scares and gross-outs and trying to be fun and funny. This is trying to do the same thing, but we're also trying to base how it kicks off in a way that's ... I don't want to say 'a little more real-world', because, at the time, believe it or not, I was trying to make the beginning of those movies 'real.' All I can say is this is a PG-13 picture, so it's a little less assaultive than the Evil Dead movies, which were unrated films." For those of us with fond memories of Bruce Campbell pulling a demon's dick off and the infamous sexual assault by forest in the first Evil Dead picture, that PG-13 business is ominous; the greatest suspense element connected to the movie may be waiting to see whether Raimi can still do this shit, or whether his acceptance by the industry will inhibit his grisly creativity. There may be signs of hope in the words of special effects chief Greg Nicotero, who recalls that Raimi brought him on board with a pep talk: "Listen, this is back to traditional stuff ... I want to use animatronics and puppets and dummy heads. None of that CG stuff. Get that crazy crap out of here!" Instead, Nicotero says, "We were designing rotted corpses and demon makeup and possession makeup," adding, "In this instance Sam wanted to stick with the traditional prosthetics, like puppets." No crazy stuff there, for sure.

Set Your DVR!: May 1 - May 3

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback is a documentary that puts a new spin on the concept of "world music." The Monks consisted of five American GIs who began playing together when they were all stationed in Germany in 1964. It was after they were discharged from the service that they fell in with Walther Niemann and Karl-H. Remy, a couple of artsy types who repackaged them as "the Monks", complete with Friar Tuck haircuts, black clothes, and nooses worn as neckties. The look made it a lot harder to confuse them with the Dave Clark 5, but the Monks already stood apart from the '60s pack for their lack of interest in lush and catchy melodies in favor of a focus on minimalist rhythmic experimentation. Heard today, it's easy to take them for a likely influence on the Velvet Underground and such post-punk giants as Wire and Gang of Four. Both well-informed and worshipful towards its subject, the doc achieves a tone somewhere between a 33 1/3 book and a raving fan who acts as if he's been up for three days, which is kind of appropriate. It makes its cable debut on The Sundance Channel on Friday, May 1, 11:00 PM central/midnight eastern, four days before its release on DVD, and four months after founding member Dave Day died of a heart attack.

This week's "TCM Underground" premiere on Turner Classic Movies is Sam Raimi's 1987 Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn [late Friday night, 1:00 AM central/2:00 AM eastern]. In addition to coming in handy for anyone who just can't wait until the June return of Burn Notice to get their Bruce Campbell fix, it may serve as a reminder to those working on the Farrelly brothers' Three Stooges revival that Raimi and Campbell already did it best, and with just the one actor. TCM Underground has been supplementing its cult beauties with vintage documentary shorts that are apparently chosen for their camp value, but they're following Evil Dead 2 with Changing [2:30 AM central/3:30 AM eastern], a 28-minute, 1971 film, sponsored by "the National Institute of Mental Health", that profiles a working-class family man who's been letting his beard grow out and developing what some around him clearly see as unsettling, radical attitudes; they include treating his wife as an equal partner in their marriage and refusing to work extra shifts because he needs the time to connect with his children. (He also wants to be able to pass a joint around when he's relaxing with his friends but also wants to reserve the right to worry about his kids learning to sniff glue.) The central figure, who today looks like three-quarters of the young male adult population of red state America, expresses disdain about being called a "hippie", and with good reason: he's just an average working stiff who's found that, by adopting some of the healthier changing social attitudes going on around him, he's been able to improve his life, though he's baffled and a little hurt that some people, such as his workplace "family", feel the need to react as if he'd betrayed them and the American Way of Life. If somebody today were to make a fiction film about someone in a similar situation in that place and time, it's hard to imagine it coming out as free of smugness and condescension.

In the mornings to come, TCM is running a few pictures worth seeing that don't happen to be (currently, legally, readily, whatever) available on DVD. The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) [Saturday, May 2: 5:00 AM central/6 AM eastern] is the prize jewel from Budd Boetticher's career that got left out of last year's box set containing all the director's Westerns with Randolph Scott. Compared to those highly functional, economical B-movies, Bullfighter is a lusher, visually colorful, melodramatic work starring Robert Stack as an American who persuades a celebrated matador (Gilbert Roland) to tutor him as a bullfighter. TCM 's version is a good half hour longer than the version released by the studio, and is an often stirring testimony to the photogenic star power of Gilbert Roland and Mexico itself. Then on Sunday, May 3: 7:00 AM central/8:00 AM eastern, TCM runs Bombshell (1933), with Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy, Frank Morgan, and Franchot Tone, one of the earliest, and funniest, of Hollywood's self-satires.

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: The Toss-Ups (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

So, now that you’ve seen our consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits & the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009, here are the films that we didn’t know quite what to do with...

Andrew:

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (August 21)

This one hits theaters closer to Labor Day (and the start of the “quality” awards-bait season) than Memorial Day -- assuming QT actually finishes his grindhouse WW2 epic on time -- and the theaters it hits will probably be art houses rather than multiplexes, where nobody will be expecting the confusingly titled Basterds to rack up Pulp Fiction-esque "national sensation" numbers...but Tarantino’s latest seems like quite the odd duck nonetheless, with a promised ultra-violence sensibility that may have trouble finding its artsy splatter audience even WITH all the ass-kicking Jews and Brad Pitt’s funny southern accent.

BRÜNO (June 10)

Oh, sure...Borat was a national sensation, and the annoying guy in your office still says, “Niiice!” on a daily basis. But I’m guessing it was a lot easier for most Americans to feel “in” on the joke when Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of them funny furriners than it will be to laugh at their own homophobic prejudices or their own knee-jerk PC responses to the heterosexual Cohen’s flouncing, mincing gay character. But then again, you know what they say about that whole “no such thing as bad publicity” thing...

Nick:

1) Public Enemies, because Michael Mann has yet to make an out-and-out summer blockbuster.

2) UP, because eagerness for Pixar’s latest has been especially muted.

3) Angels & Demons, because The Da Vinci Code craze seems to have subsided.

4) Julie & Julia, because its August release date implies that the studio thinks it has more limited appeal than Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada or Mamma Mia!

5) The Ugly Truth, because even though it’s the summer’s chief rom-com, it’s hard to imagine Katherine Heigl continuing to be a serious box-office draw.

Paul:

Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi fans are pumped for his return to horror, but will anyone else care? Will this be the film that finally lifts the box-office curse on summer horror movies?

Terminator Salvation- is there life for Terminator after Arnold? Will people pay to see the movie when they can just as easily watch the Terminator TV series at home? And can Christian Bale still reel in audiences now that his profanity-filled tirade has been heard by millions?

The Taking of Pelham 123- in a summer full of epic effects-driven movies, can audiences be bothered with an old-school hostage-negotiation thriller? And will MGM release a super-sweet new DVD edition of the original film just in time for the remake? Because they really should.

Year One- will a high-concept caveman comedy, even one starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, play in this age of improvisational laffers? And will there be zug-zug like in Caveman?

Public Enemies- is Johnny Depp really the box office draw Hollywood thinks he is after the Pirates trilogy? Can Michael Mann become bankable again after the subpar returns for Miami Vice? And in this era of Grand Theft Auto, will ticket buyers get excited for a fedoras-and-tommy-guns gangster shoot’em’up?

Bruno- can the least funny character from Da Ali G Show actually carry a film? Will people flock to laugh at the strange misadventures of a flamingly gay Austrian, or will they be scared off by the homosexuality factor?

Bandslam- is Vanessa Anne Hudgens still a draw even when she isn’t starring in High School Musicals? Will tween-friendly fare still do solid box office even during the summer movie season?

Taking Woodstock- is the August 14 release date occasioned by the 40th anniversary of Woodstock simply a symbolic gesture, or will nostalgia for the Summer of Love turn this into an unexpected late-summer hit?

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Trailer Review: Drag Me to Hell

Paul Clark — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Can the director of one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing trilogies of all time return to his roots? This is the question that faces longtime fans of Sam Raimi, who began his career with gonzo horror-comedies before becoming one of Hollywood’s big-ticket filmmakers with the Spider-Man franchise. And while Drag Me to Hell looks to be slicker than his classic Evil Dead movies, it’s nonetheless a heartening development in Raimi’s career, a sign that despite the mainstream fare he’s made in the ensuring years, he’s not ashamed of his beginnings. As for the trailer itself, I think it looks pretty promising. The movie appears to have the same moral underpinnings as much of the best horror films- in this case, punishing the heroine (played by Alison Lohman) for trying to further her career at the expense of others. It’s a little hard to get a read on the horror stuff due to the jackhammer editing, but based on what I could make out, Raimi hasn’t lost his ability to go for broke in the interest of scaring the audience. In other words, I’m there. Only one question remains: where’s Bruce Campbell?

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

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

The Best:

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

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

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

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

The Worst:

THE PUNISHER (2004)

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

SUPERMAN III (1983)

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

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Ed Brubaker: From Comic Book Lowlife to Hollywood Player

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

All the excitement over movies like Watchmen is likely to create an opening for younger writers working in comics; after all, somebody's got to provide the raw materials that Hollywood will pounce on after it runs out of classic comics series to turn into movies. At least, that's the hope of people like Ed Brubaker, who recently shared his hopes and dreams with Los Angeles Times blogger Greg Braxton. "Last summer changed everything, you could feel it," says Brubaker, who had no credit on The Dark Knight but ended up getting a payday out of it anyway: "I even got money for the Batman movie because DC felt like there were fingerprints of stories I had written in the movie." In a comics universe where "mainstream" superhero creators and "alternative" creators are generally assumed to have limited interest in each other's work and, in their grumpier moments, to wish each other dead, Brubaker is unusual in having started out in the grungiest of "alternative" circles and wound up writing about costumed crimefighters. In the early '90s, Brubaker was part of the autobiographical comics scene with his Lowlife series, which featured thrilling, two-fisted tales of ripping off his employer, having his artwork compared unfavorably to that of Chester Brown, and needed a haircut. (He also edited the superb, single-issue comics anthology Monkey Wrench.) Brubaker began to edge towards the mainstream, and away from illustrating his own scripts, with the story An Accidental Death, which was drawn by Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) and serialized in Dark Horse Presents in 1992, before being reprinted as a stand-alone volume by Fantagraphics. (That must have been sweet, given that it was the rejection by Fantagraphics' Kim Thompson that inspired the Lowlife story "You're a Good Man, Chester Brown.")

Brubaker had done work for DC Comics starting in the mid-90s, but he didn't start writing superhero comics until 2000, when he first started writing Batman. He's currently writing both Captain America and Daredevil for Marvel. But his real interest, from An Accidental Death to his Marvel Icon series Criminal, is in crime fiction, and much of his most interesting work, including his series Sleeper and the new Incognito (which is about a super-powered villain in the Witness Protection Program) has one foot in the world of superheroes and the other in hard-boiled fiction. Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise are reportedly interested in making a movie version of Sleeper, but in the meantime, Brubaker is testing the waters of live action with Angel of Death, a new web series he's created for Crackle.com, Sony's bid for your on-line entertainment fix. The series, which premieres this week and will consist of ten weekly installments, stars stunt woman and Death Proof star Zoe Bell as a hired killer who turns on her employers after suffering a traumatic head injury. (The cast also includes Doug Jones and Lucy Lawless, which must have made for quite an on-set reunion; Bell used to work as Lawless's stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess. Brubaker says that Sony "green-lit it before I even wrote it, and they started filming two weeks after the final draft. I guess that's the world we're living in right now." You can watch episode one below:

From Crackle: Angel of Death Ep 1 "Edge" starring Zoe Bell

Morning Deal Report: Giamatti and Witherspoon Are Downsizing

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Alexander Payne has finished his latest script, a “social satire” (aren’t they all?) called Downsizing. Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon and Sacha Baron Cohen are all attached, and it’s clear from the plot description that Payne is taking the title quite literally. Giamatti plays “a man low on money who decides he can have a much nicer life if he undergoes a process to shrink himself,” Variety reports.

Atom Egoyan is remaking the French thriller Nathalie…, and naturally he’s calling it Chloe. The story “centers on a married woman (Julianne Moore) who hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to find out whether her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her. The prostitute, however, cons her about the nature of her husband's fidelity, a move that puts the family in jeopardy,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Sam Raimi and Jonathan Demme have been added to the upcoming SXSW roster. Raimi’s work-in-progress Drag Me to Hell will screen in the midnight slot at the Paramount Theater on March 15, while Demme will premiere his latest documentary, Neil Young Trunk Show. Yes, Jonathan Demme has made another Neil Young performance film. I can’t stop him.

Related:
No Venom for Sam Raimi
Scorsese Passes the Baton to Demme on Bob Marley Documentary

He's Burned, You'll Notice: Bruce Campbell Says He's All Evil Deaded Out

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Speaking to Damon Wise of the Guardian, Bruce Campbell has some advice for fans of the Evil Dead trilogy that made him a household name, at least in houses with a heavy geek peopulation: don't hold your breath. "I just finished a 22-city tour of the States and that question would come up all the time. I'd say, 'OK, who wanted Indiana Jones 4?' I did this at 10 different cities and maybe two hands would go up. I'd go, 'There's your answer, right there.'" Campbell, who can currently seen giving disspipation a good name on the cable TV series Burn Notice, warmed to his theme: "Harrison Ford can't even hold the whip any more! Look, if you think it through, those Evil Dead movies were very difficult to make. Every single one was a nightmare. Physically, mentally, financially - just difficult, troubled shoots. So what would make us want to go back into that world again, go through all that pain and agony as middle-aged men? The last time we made one was 18 years ago. Army Of Darkness was made 18 years ago! No one seems to do that math. Am I going to be in a wheelchair by the time we do it? My greatest fear is that we go through all that time and effort, make this part four, and people will go, 'Oh, it's OK. But it's not as good as Army Of Darkness.' Which is what will happen! It's a guarantee!"

Campbell, who seems like the kind of guy who's more likely to shrug than to trash his hotel room when he sees that Wise described him as "strangely handsome", began production on the first Evil Dead movie thirty years ago, when Campbell was twenty years old and director Sam Raimi was nineteen. Shooting would drag on for more than a year, which is a long time to spend hanging out in the woods getting drenched in karo syrup. (It wouldn't be until 1982 before the finished product starting creeping into theaters.) The two had been making little amateur movies together while in high school; from the start, their preferred specialty was slapstick comedy. When they "actually decided to make a movie for real, and we were actually taking people's money out of their pockets to do it, we knew it had to be something they could get their money back on. So we chose horror, which was a completely different genre for us. And I'm still trying to get back to where I was. I'm making horror movies that are not horror movies." The more Raimi and Campbell went back to the well with the Evil Dead sequels, the more they indulged their Three Stooges side, and the head-splitting mixture of gore and whiplash physical comedy left fans happily freaked out. That road eventually took Raimi to the promised land of the Spider-man franchise, but somewhere along the line, Campbell turned into one of those guys who plays supporting roles in big movies and starring roles in small pictures, such as the bizarre horror comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, in which he gave a remarkable performance as a geriatric Elvis Presley turned monster hunter. "I've had my years of getting annoyed with Evil Dead questions," Campbell says, "but now I really do realize, in retrospect, that people only ask about what they're interested in. And if they only see horror movies, they're only gonna see me in the eight or so horror movies I've done. I haven't actually done that many, less than 50%. But Evil Dead was pretty notorious and it was very popular, so it's guilt by association: I'm the horror guy. But there are people who've watched TV shows that I've done who don't even know I've been in the Evil Dead movies. If you stick around long enough you can just move on."

Campbell is in England promoting My Name Is Bruce, the comedy in which he plays a libelous version of himself who is obliged to do real-life battle with a Chinese war god. (The movie was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. last week.) A BBC interviewer actually compared the film to JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme's recent visit to a metatextual reality, and while the connection may strike Campbell fans as a little off the wall--Campbell has been parodying himself so enthusiastically and for so long that he's practically the pre-AARP version of Leslie Nielson--it is fun just to see these two guys mentioned in the same sentence. Although the project didn't originate wirth Campbell, he embraced it with sufficient enthusiasm that he poured his own money into it and even opened up his own property to serve as a back lot. "Any time you make a movie that's under $200 million, you're going to put some of your own money into it. It got to a point where the composer would say, 'Y'know Bruce, let's get some real strings here because it'll sound great'. And I'd be like, 'Really, do we really need them... well [mimes signing a check]...okay'."

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Road Trip

Take Five: We Love the '80s

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

14. CARRIE (1976)

Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.

13. AUDITION (1999)

Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.

12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.

11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.

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

Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

REAL GENIUS (1985)

If there’s one thing America hates, it’s smart people. Brainy elitists like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and that pencil-neck geek we used to beat up in gym class make us nervous, inspiring vague feelings of inadequacy that can usually be doused by voting for down-to-earth “real” people like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, who don’t know how to pronounce “nuclear” (and really couldn’t give a shit). But Martha Coolidge’s ensemble comedy about fledgling scientists at a fictionalized CalTech depicts a world where mental, not physical, strength is prized and knowledge (in the form of Val Kilmer’s fast-talking, wisecracking Chris Knight and Michelle Meyrink’s official Screengrab Sexy Nerd Jordan) is hot. The story’s teen prodigy protagonist Mitch Taylor (Gabriel Jarrett...largely MIA in recent years but reappearing soon in Frost/Nixon) and aging burnout Laslo (Jon Gries) embody the double-edged sword of intellectual aptitude, where intimate knowledge of chemical laser technology is no guarantee of success, happiness or intimacy with actual humans, while the surprisingly charming Kilmer offers a hopeful balance of “real” and “genius,” with the wherewithal to understand that light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation can also be used to blow off steam by pointing the way to the occasional pool party blow-out.

SCHOOL DAZE (1988)

Oh, college...where politics, drinking and date rape are never more than a quad away. This Spike Lee joint takes us to the Mission College campus, a historically black alma mater back in the "divest from South Africa, support ANC" days. It stars Giancarlo Esposito as a fascistoid fraternity leader, Laurence Fishburne as Dap, a righteous, wet-behind-the ears campus radical and Spike Lee as his vertically challenged cousin Half-Pint. Half-Pint is not so much into the politics, being more given to Greek life. The movie follows Dap's quest to get the college to divest and Half-Pint's quest to pledge with the Gamma-Phi-Gammas and get laid. Like any self-respecting college movie, School Daze, takes us through pledge week, a homecoming parade and a dance scene in which half-naked coeds get down to a band. All that plus musical numbers and parachute pants.

KICKING AND SCREAMING (1995)

I don't know about you folks, but my college experience was not a nonstop bacchanal of toga parties and panty raids (although that description accurately applies to the typical day at Screengrab headquarters), so the average college movie doesn't really speak to me. My memories of those days mostly involve bantering about matters great and small over a pitcher of beer with good friends, neurotic fretting about dysfunctional relationships and, towards the end, a sort of heart-freezing paralysis at the prospect of "life" awaiting me. That's probably why I've always loved Noah Baumbach's debut Kicking and Screaming, one of the few "Gen X" movies (along with Linklater's Slacker) that didn't make me want to set fire to the movie theater. (Let us not even speak of Reality Bites.) Baumbach's film covers the final day of college and the aimless months that follow for a group of friends finding it hard to move on from their routine of trivia contests, verbal jousting and picking up undergrads at the local pub. The ensemble includes Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton and the scene-stealing Carlos Jacott, all of whom clearly relish Baumbach's literate, martini-dry dialogue, as well as Eric Stolz in one of his best roles, a sort of intellectual doppelganger of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused ("Why would I ever leave? I am a student and that's what I chose.") Have fun with those slobs at Delta House – I'll be over here thinking up eight movies where monkeys play key roles.

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986)

Innumerable horror movies have taken place on college campuses or featured college students as the protagonists, but more often than not, this is just so the producers can film the movie on the cheap and have an excuse to put nubile twenty-somethings in front of the camera. The highly enjoyable 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps, on the other hand, not only makes full use of its campus setting (having the alien menace begin its rampage in a menacing corner of the biology lab), but with its campy tone, hilariously quotable dialogue, nerdy outcast protagonists, delightfully lo-fi approach, and innumerable film student in-jokes, it actually plays like a movie that was made by college students. Writer/director Fred Dekker wasn’t exactly that when he made Night of the Creeps, but he wasn’t far from it; he was only 26, and, having been rejected by both UCLA and USC’s film schools, he had something to prove. His later efforts didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but his debut remains one of the most enjoyable horror flicks of the 1980s – a movie that plays more like an admiring postmodern salute to the old B-movie fare of yesteryear than the grim misogynist slasher flicks that dominated the decade. (For those who are, ahem, of a certain age, the movie’s fashions and music will also bring back memories of college that may not be altogether pleasant.) The whole movie is sustained with its terrific sense of humor, much of which is dryly delivered by inimitable character actor Tom Atkins.

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

Sam Raimi’s second installment of the Spider-Man franchise isn’t just one of the best super-hero movies ever made; it’s a good solid college movie as well, that speaks to any busy student with or without radioactive arachnid powers. Think about it: Marvel Comics has always prided itself on mixing real-world angst with its crimefighting action; that’s the factor that made the Spider-Man comic such a success in the first place. And that kind of storytelling is very much on display here: Peter Parker, fresh out of high school and entering his first semester at Empire State (an institution of higher learning that, as a child, I was determined I would one day attend until I found out it wasn’t real), and the turmoil that so thoroughly futzes with his state of mind both in and out of costume all throughout Spider-Man 2 are familiar ones to anyone who’s ever been in college. He’s on a full ride, but his family’s not doing so well; he’s got to work a low-paying, demeaning job to help out, and that cuts into his study time. His girlfriend has eschewed college to pursue a successful career, and he’s not only barely got time to see her, but he’s even a little jealous. He’s drifting away from his only high school friend. His precocious genius isn’t as impressive to his college professors as it was to his high school teachers. And his educational mentor undergoes a horrible accident and rampages all over New York with the robotic limbs fused to his torso. Okay, maybe that last one’s a stretch, but still – you get the idea.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Coen Brothers Get Serious

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I have misled you once again. The Coens’ follow-up to Burn After Reading is actually described as a black comedy in this Variety report, but it is titled A Serious Man. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg and former Spin City regular Richard Kind will star. (I know, not exactly Pitt and Clooney, right?) “Set in 1967, story centers on Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a Midwestern professor whose life begins to unravel when his wife sets out to leave him and his socially inept brother (Kind) won't move out of the house. Shooting is set to start at the beginning of next month in Minneapolis.”

Here’s a sentence from the Hollywood Reporter that shouldn’t exactly shock anyone: “As Tom Cruise goes about writing the next chapter in his career, he's developing an interest in comic book movies.” Cruise is teaming up with Spider-Man maven Sam Raimi for an adaptation of Sleeper, and we can all be thankful it’s not a remake of the Woody Allen comedy. “Written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, Sleeper, which ran from 2003-05, centers on an operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain and allows him to pass it on to others through skin contact. He is placed undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency and falls for a member of the group, named Miss Misery.” I smell Cruise’s Battlefield Earth.

Yet another graphic novel headed for the big screen is Julius, to be directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job). Sadly, it’s not a biopic about the founder of Orange Julius, but rather an urban crime thriller based on Julius Caesar. Per Variety, Gray “has a vision for this adaptation that will satirize obsessive consumerism while providing a thrilling ride for audiences.” Good luck with that.

Related:
"Freaky Little People": The Coens Burn On
Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

3 WOMEN (1977), Not Directed By David Lynch

Like any number of David Lynch films, 3 Women starts in one genre, telling one story about a certain group of characters, then at some point the acid kicks in, reality shifts, and if you went out to get popcorn or go to the bathroom, you’d be forgiven for coming back in and thinking you’d wandered into the wrong theater (or living room) given the batshit craziness that’s replaced whatever movie you'd previously been watching. In this Altman phantasmagoria, inspired, like many if not all of Lynch’s films, by a dream, Shelley Duvall plays a chirpy sanitarium worker who makes the mistake of taking in spooky, Carrie-era co-worker Sissy Spacek as a roommate, only to see her previously unexamined life unravel as she and Spacek swap personalities with each other (and maybe even a few other people, possibly including the third of the 3 Women, a mysterious desert mural artist played by Janice Rule). Things get trippier in the final twenty minutes than Quintet and Popeye combined (or, for that matter, any other Altman film I can think of), and if none of it seems to make a lick of sense, well, Altman didn’t entirely understand the ending either, though apparently he had a “theory,” possibly involving all the film's recurring twins and triplets, the red lampshade, the Cowboy, the homeless man behind the Winkie’s, the family of rabbits, the creepy, white-faced specter of Robert Blake and...wait...what was I talking about? Oh no...it...is...happening...again...

CHOOSE ME (1984), Not Directed By Robert Altman

After a beginner's period in the early 1970s directing low-budget horror pictures with titles such as Barn of the Screaming Dead, Alan Rudolph was born again working as assistant director to Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville. After working on the screenplay for Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Rudolph resumed his career as a writer-director with 1977's Welcome to L.A., a movie made very much in the shadow of Altman. (The script was spun off from a "suite" of rock songs by Richard Baskin, who worked on the songs in Nashville and had a small role in that movie.) Since then, Rudolph has worked prettily steadily, sometimes writing his own material and sometimes not, often proudly displaying his Altman influence and not infrequently tripped up by it. This sex comedy, which uses Teddy Pendergrass (a big, big improvement on Richard Baskin) on the soundtrack and joins the visual lyricism of 3 Women to a fairly bouncy romantic-entanglement plot, is most likely his proudest achievement -- except for the less Altmanesque Songwriter, a beautifully directed movie which had the advantage of being written by somebody else. Both films were completed and shown in certain parts of the country in 1984, but didn't branch out distribution-wise until 1985...which means that 1985 was definitely Rudolph's year, especially considering that the Altman movie made by Altman himself that year was O. C. and Stiggs.

CRIMEWAVE (1985), Not Directed by The Coen Brothers

A pair of marginally competent criminals. A minor crime that balloons into a bloody, out-of-control mess. Cartoonish, overblown physical gags balanced by cerebral filmmaking and hilarious, quotable dialogue. Loopy, incongruous accents. Characters named Helene Trend, Arthur Coddish and Renaldo the Heel. The presence of cult and character actors like Paul Smith, Brion James, Edward Pressman, Antonio Fargas and – of course – Bruce Campbell. This has to be a Coen Brothers movie, right? Well, yes and no. Made in 1985, just after Joel and Ethan Coen wrapped Blood Simple and just before they started working on Raising Arizona, the underrated and hard-to-find Crimewave was actually directed by their good friend, frequent collaborator and college buddy Sam Raimi. The Coens wrote the screenplay, but despite the presence of some highly explosive camerawork (by Robert Primes) and the presence in the cast of a number of future Coen Brothers regulars (including Frances McDormand and Ted Raimi, Sam's brother), the direction is all Sam Raimi, who at one point seemed like an anarchic offshoot of the Coen sensibility more than the middle-of-the-road blockbuster director he later became. If nothing else, the movie stands as a unique curiosity: the only movie written by the Coen Brothers that they didn't also direct.

FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Not Directed by Douglas Sirk or Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Douglas Sirk was born to direct Far from Heaven. Its combination of lush, stylish visuals, soap-opera-style emotional fireworks, and ever-present societal pressure was right in his wheelhouse – it was the sort of movie he'd built his reputation upon making. Unfortunately for the movie's producers, Sirk was unavailable to make the movie, having unfortunately died fifteen years prior. The next logical step would be to hire a fellow German director who was, in many ways, Sirk's inheritor, both in terms of high drama, visual flair, and expertise at making tangible the invisible pressures exerted by society. In a further bit of bad luck, it turned out that Ranier Werner Fassbinder was also dead, having perished some twenty years before. In the end, they had to go with the guy who had written the movie in the first place: the pioneering queercore director Todd Haynes, who, even since his first student films, had seemed like an exceptionally talented amalgam of both Sirk and Fassbinder. For years, he had talked about how the two German filmmakers had influenced him, from their elegant visual styles to their focus on the taboo, but it wasn't until he did the positively retro Far from Heaven (which was dedicated to the memory of Douglas Sirk) that the influence turned into an outright homage. Setting its story of repressed homosexuality and interracial love smack dab in the middle of Sirk's 1950s, and infusing Sirk's forbidden romantic obsessions with Fassbinder's much more explicit treatments of racism and homophobia, Todd Haynes managed to create something that comes across as exactly the movie Sirk or Fassbinder would have made, were they able to escape death and the tenor of their times.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: No Venom for Sam Raimi

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Have we learned nothing from the Catwoman movie? Sony is hoping to have better luck spinning off a super-villain from their flagship superhero franchise – in this case, Spider-Man’s “gooey nemesis” Venom. Per the Hollywood Reporter, the studio “is hoping the character could serve as an antidote to the aging Spider-Man franchise in the way that Fox has used Wolverine to add longevity to its X-Men franchise…The studio had commissioned a draft of the script from Jacob Estes, a writer of the specialty film Mean Creek, released several years ago by Paramount Classics.” Topher Grace played Venom in Spider-Man 3, but that’s no guarantee he’ll headline the spinoff.

It’s also a long shot that Spidey director Sam Raimi will be behind the camera, especially now that he’s got a new project set up at Disney. It’s called The Transplants, and – brace yourselves – it’s described as “a four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The inspiration comes from screenwriters Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson, best known for Not Another Teen Movie. Getting excited yet?

If not, here’s some big news for all of you eagerly anticipating Howard Stern’s Porky’s. It’s…Howard Stern’s Rock and Roll High School. The shock jock is producing a remake of the 1979 comedy, to be scripted by Bill and Ted co-star Alex Winter. In case you’ve forgotten, Variety reminds us that the original “was about a group of rebellious students who, with the help of punk rock band the Ramones, thwarted a repressive, rock-music-hating principal.” I guess the only real surprise, given the current superhero mania, is that Stern has not yet resurrected that long-dormant Fartman movie. Surely it’s only a matter of time.

Related:
Raimi Runs Out of Ellen Page, Gets Some Lohman Instead
Vanishing Act: Savage Steve Holland

Morning Deal Report Returns

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Please, people, stop with the telegrams and picket lines and frivolous lawsuits already! We get it! You can’t live without the Screengrab’s daily roundup of the latest wheeling and dealing out of Hollywood. You need to know which superheroes, videogames and misguided horror remakes may or may not ever make it someday to a theater near you. Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear, and we’re pleased to present the return of the Morning Deal Report.

Speaking of videogames, the Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on Gears of War, to be directed by Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard) for the “reconfigured” New Line. “Set on the planet Sera, the game thrusts players into a battle for survival between humans and a race of creatures that surface from the bowels of the planet known as the Locust Horde. Players assume identities of soldiers on Delta Squad as they fight to save Sera's inhabitants.” The game’s designer, Cliff Bleszinski, says, “Disney made a great movie out of a theme park ride, and somebody is sooner or later going to make a great one out of a video game.” And by that logic, sooner or later someone will make a great movie out of stereo instructions.

Variety reports that Sam Raimi will helm the latest Dennis Lehane adaptation, this one of a book that hasn’t even been released yet. The Given Day, due in September, revisits Lehane’s Boston turf, this time in 1919 “with the city in turmoil as soldiers are returning home from WWI, having brought back an epidemic of Spanish influenza. Attempts to unionize the police department have set the stage for a historic strike and two cops take center stage.” The same report notes that Raimi is “also aligned to reinvent the Jack Ryan franchise at Paramount,” presumably without either Harrison Ford or fellow Lehane adapter Ben Affleck.

And some news that’s either out of Variety or one of my deepest, darkest nightmares: Kevin Spacey will star in Shrink as a psychiatrist to the stars whose clients include Robin Williams. Stock up on scenery, because there won’t be any left once these two are finished chewing it.

Watching "The Watchman": An Interview with Kent M. Beeson

Paul Clark — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In case you’ve slept through this past weekend, the summer movie season got off to a roaring start with the big-budget adaptation of Iron Man. With many more comic book movies in store this summer, and even more after that, I figured it was about time to catch up with former Screengrab contributor and all around good dude Kent M. Beeson. As a comic-book fan and movie buff of long standing, Kent recently secured a position with the Web site comiXology, writing a bi-weekly column entitled The Watchman. Kent was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule- which also includes numerous freelance jobs as well as a wife and 14-month-old daughter- to conduct this interview via e-Mail.

How did you get your position with Comixology?

Dumb luck, if you ask me! Peter Jaffe, the Online Content Editor for Comixology, asked former ScreenGrab editor Bilge Ebiri to recommend someone to cover film and TV for Comixology, and he named me. I'd done some writing for ScreenGrab, including several on comic books, so I suppose that's why name came up. if I had to guess, I'd say that my ScreenGrab posts on the Watchmen and Shazam! movies had something to do with it, but really, I have no idea.

Why do you suppose Hollywood has made so many comic book movies in the past few years?

I suppose the standard reasons are that the executives greenlighting these movies are the ones that grew up in the 70s and 80s, and grew up reading these comics, coupled with CGI that lets filmmakers show just about anything they can imagine. When those two moments in history coincided, it was bound to be a fertile period. What's really interesting to me, though, isn't that so many comic book movies are being made, but just how important fidelity to the source material has become. It still boggles my mind that Zack Snyder is keeping Watchmen in the 80s -- that never would have happened just a few years ago. We've come a long way from the aborted Tim Burton Superman with Nicolas Cage in a freaky black suit. But even this is a bit of a quirk of history -- I don't think we'd be seeing so many faithful adaptations if it weren't for Bryan Singer's X-Men showing it could be done and Raimi's Spider-Man showing just how friggin' huge it could be.

What are your favorite comic books?

Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, comic or otherwise. Paul Smith's run on X-Men -- I think I might prefer it to Byrne's, actually. Ambush Bug was way ahead of its time. One I loved back in the day, that seems to have been forgotten, was an horror anthology called Wasteland. It was written by John Ostrander and, of all people, improv pioneer Del Close. Some really twisted shit -- I can still remember one story called "R.Ab" that is just... soul-crushingly dark. Like Idiocracy without the safety of the comedy. I always thought this is what reading the E.C. comics back in the day must've been like.

Favorite comic book movies?

The stupidly-titled X2 is, fortunately, stupidly awesome. Spider-Man, I can watch over and over. Akira is great, but it's animated, so maybe that shouldn't count. I have a soft spot for Batman Returns, but the unfortunate practice of overloading a film with villains can be laid squarely at its feet.

Best adaptation?

Spider-Man is the best, I think, but it's adapting a character and his world and not so much a single story (other than the origin), so if you eliminate those, I guess that leaves me with Sin City. Visually, it's breath-taking and kind of addictive -- it's hard to look away from it when it's on. More importantly, though, it turned a series of borderline-unreadable books into something pleasing.

Most underappreciated/overappreciated comic book movies?

Let me go ahead and catch hell from two different camps. The first Superman movie is pretty terrific for about forty minutes when dealing with his origin, but once Luthor enters the picture, it gets too jokey and lame. Reeve and Kidder are impeccable, however. And Ghost World is pretty much ruined by Zwigoff's cheap misanthropy. I mean, Clowes isn't exactly Mr. Positive, but it's clear from the book that he's trying to find some kind of hope. Zwigoff buries it under shots of pregnant women smoking and Blockbuster gags that would never have made it past the Mad TV writing room. There's a reason Bad Santa works -- it's all misanthropy.

I think Hellboy is a bit underappreciated. Considering that the comic isn't very well-written and has one of the most non-sensical origin stories ever -- Mignola came up with the look of the character first and made up everything after, and it shows -- it holds together pretty well. Del Toro's really coming into his own, he's starting to find just what he's capable of, so I'm looking forward to Hellboy II.

When a comic book movie doesn't remain true to its source, how difficult is it for you to turn off your comic book side and simply appreciate it as a movie?

Well, my attack plan for the stuff I'm unfamiliar with -- like Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, or the upcoming Wanted -- is to watch the movie first. I want to be able to enjoy the movie -- or not -- as a movie first, without any baggage, which is how most viewers are going to see these things anyway. And then I go back to the comic. The comic is usually going to have more information anyway, and I don't need to bring that into the movie. I actually started watching Persepolis after reading the first 20 pages or so of the comic, and it totally fucked it up for me -- I had to go back and see it again to fully appreciate how well the filmmakers were able to streamline the story for the movie. Luckily, most comic movies are adapting characters and not specific stories, so it's pretty easy to turn off the preconceptions.

Obviously, with something like Watchmen, that's not going to be possible. I'm not sure how that's going to work. I might have to conk myself on the head and induce amnesia just before I walk into the theater.

What big-screen comic book adaptations have actually improved on their sources?

I just finished the original A History of Violence, and wow, what a stinker. The movie pretty much repudiates the source, which, admittedly, is an interesting way to go about adapting something. Sin City -- well, my loathing of Frank Miller runs pretty deep, so it was great to see such a tiring and self-important comic turned into high camp by simply giving the thing motion. Whenever I see Clive Owen float down to the street in his red shoes, I crack up.

In your opinion, what are the keys to making a successful comic book adaptation?

Jesus, I really have no idea. The first thing that comes to mind is balance -- knowing when to be faithful to the source, and when to realize, hey, this has to work as a movie first and foremost, and just go off. A History of Violence is pretty faithful for the first 1/3 of the book, then it jettisons the rest, to its credit. I don't think the adaptation of The New Frontier went far enough -- there were small changes here and there that indicated that they knew the story wasn't going to work as is, but they really should have rethought the whole thing from top to bottom. But, saying that, I bet we'll see (if we haven't already) a movie that either is completely faithful or totally throws everything out but the title and works perfectly well.

Now that Watchmen is being made, what are some of your other dream adaptations?

I want to say FLCL, but the comic came later. Does Cowboy Bebop count? It was a serialized manga first. I could totally see an adaptation with, say, Ryan Gosling as Spike, Selma Blair as Faye and The Rock as Jet. I think The Rock is underrated as a performer -- for someone who was supposed to be Schwarzenegger's heir apparent, he displays more genuine warmth and a sense of humor about himself than Arnold ever did. While Jet is a badass, he's still essentially the mother of the group, and it'd be interesting to see him in a movie where his physicality is in strict contrast to his role. Matthew Vaughn is doing Thor, but I'd kill for a Gilliam version -- nobody does giants better, and I'd love to see them get their ass kicked by a blonde dude with a hammer.

The Watchman runs every other Wednesday on comiXology. Kent’s piece on Iron Man will run this week.

When Good Directors Go Bad: For Love of the Game (1999, Sam Raimi)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of his career, Sam Raimi has been a hero to genre lovers everywhere. It was his debut feature The Evil Dead that first brought Raimi to the attention of gorehounds, and his subsequent films further endeared him to his fans. With their outrageous camera movements, “splat-stick” comic violence, and the larger-than-life presence of Bruce Campbell, the Evil Dead trilogy gained Raimi a rabid cult following. However, he soon found himself confined in the horror genre. At first, he attempted to transfer his trademark style to other genres- crime story, comic book movie, Western- with varying degrees of success.

Finally, with 1998’s A Simple Plan, Raimi decided to keep his more gonzo impulses in check, and in doing so created his first “mature” work, and his most critically-acclaimed film to date. Having finally tasted mainstream acceptance, Raimi craved more, and decided to make a real stab at Hollywood respectability with his next project, an adaptation of Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game. After all, what’s more mainstream than a baseball movie starring Kevin Costner? Unfortunately for Raimi, For Love of the Game turned out to be his worst- and not coincidentally, his least Raimi-esque- film to date.

For about half its running time, the film is a decent, fairly entertaining baseball movie. Its hero, Billy Chapel (played by Costner), is a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher who suddenly finds himself throwing a perfect game in what may be the last start of his career. It’s been said that a perfect game is both the rarest and the most boring achievement in baseball, but Raimi keeps us involved by concentrating on Chapel- not only his actions and dialogue but also the thoughts that occur to him while he’s on the mound. It’s a neat touch whenever Chapel tunes out the hostile Yankee Stadium crowd with the mantra, “clear the mechanism.” By the time the game reaches its last few innings, we can more or less predict what the outcome will be, but Raimi has nonetheless done a pretty good job getting us to root for Chapel to finish the perfect game.

However, For Love of the Game isn’t content simply to be a baseball movie, and almost none of the scenes that take place off the baseball field are any good. Faring worst is the movie’s principal non-baseball storyline, which traces the trajectory of a relationship between Chapel and New York single mother Jane, played by Kelly Preston. Despite taking up nearly half the movie, the relationship between the two is ill-defined. As a result, there’s a highlight-reel to the storyline, amounting to little more than a series of flirtations, breakups, reconciliations, as well as a whole lot of grief from Jane.

A big part of the problem in these scenes is Preston’s performance. Preston, never a particularly good actress, is out of her element as a leading lady. Clearly overmatched and nervous opposite Costner (who’s pretty good here), she gives an overly fussy performance that seesaws constantly between the two notes she knows how to play- beaming and neurotic. Consequently, Jane comes off more as a pill than as the complicated, conflicted adult she’s meant to be.

It would be one thing if the film realized or even acknowledged what a prickly character Jane is, but instead it paints her as the foundation in Billy’s emotional life. Throughout his perfect game, Billy flashes back to his life with Jane- who just left him that morning- and it’s clear that we’re meant to care about whether these two lovers end up together in the end. Instead, all I wanted to do was to keep watching the game. After all, everyone falls in love sooner or later, but only seventeen major league pitchers have ever pitched a perfect game. Talk about burying the lead.

After For Love of the Game met with a critical drubbing and large-scale audience indifference, Raimi decided it was time to re-examine his career path again. First he rebounded with the flawed but interesting Southern Gothic thriller The Gift, after which he made his most popular films to date, the Spider-Man trilogy. With the Spider-Man films, Raimi finally found mainstream success without sacrificing any of his inimitable style, which helped all three of the Spidey films become the highest-grossing superhero movies ever made. And all of them- yes, even the third one- were better than For Love of the Game.

Raimi Runs Out of Ellen Page, Gets Some Lohman Instead

John Constantine — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:16:00 GMT

The news that Ellen Page was dropping out of Sam Raimi’s long overdue return to horror, Drag Me to Hell, was perturbing when it hit last Sunday. Would they be able to start production before the looming SAG strike starts. What would Sam do without the hook of new-it-thang Page? Looks like he didn’t waste time worrying about it. Word came out today that Alison Lohman of Matchstick Men fame will be picking up the slack. The Screengrab endorses this choice as Lohman’s a talented young lady. However, we’re still disappointed that Bruce Campbell wasn’t cast instead.

Morning Deal Report: To Hell With Ellen Page

Peter Smith — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:15:00 GMT

It girl Ellen Page will star in Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. Drag Me to Hell sounds kind of cool — it's said to be Raimi's return to his budget-horror roots after a decade of blockbuster work.

Stephen Frears's next film is Cheri, an adaptation of the French novel. It'll star Michelle Pfeiffer, reteaming Frears with his Dangerous Liaisons star.

The writers' strike could end Wednesday, depending how its members vote on a possible settlement tomorrow night. No settlement probably means no Oscars at this point — a possibility that has a certain appeal. But let's hope it's over, for the sake of the writers and their coworkers.

Ten Movies for a Snow Day

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It’s that time of the year when Screengrab readers in certain parts of the country can pretty much count on an unexpected day off or two thanks to Mother Nature’s fury. In my part of the country (Austin, TX), said fury usually comes in the form of about a half-inch of freezing drizzle, but having grown up in the Northeast, I am certainly well acquainted with the concept of the Snow Day. And what could be better on a day when you can’t leave the house than a pile of movies featuring a veritable blizzard’s worth of snow?

Herewith, then, the Screengrab’s list of the ten snowiest movies. Please note that we have not included the Chevy Chase/Chris Elliott movie Snow Day. We wouldn’t do that to you.

Ice Station Zebra

Sure, for much of its running time, this much-maligned Rock Hudson vehicle is a submarine movie, but the climactic scenes are set at the Arctic Circle, where the crew has been sent to track down some important Cold War whatsis. In his 1969 review, Roger Ebert describes the action thusly: “Hudson and his men start out with parkas, mufflers, goggles and the whole works. But by the time of the confrontation with the Russian commander, all the leading actors are shown bareheaded and barefaced. At Arctic temperatures, their noses would freeze, crack and fall off before they got their argument well launched. Another funny thing: When the actors talk, their breath doesn't freeze.”

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

There are several Bond movies that explore the action-packed possibilities of snow, notably For Your Eyes Only, but when in doubt we always opt for the golden age of Lazenby. Here 007 puts his skis to work both on the slopes (dig that nighttime rear-screen projection) and as weapons of strangulation and defenestration. Always a multi-tasker, our man Bond.

Quintet

I’ve written about Robert Altman’s frostbitten foray into post-apocalyptic sci-fi before, so to quote myself: “Set in a future Ice Age, Quintet is so white with snow and glare, you will notice streaks of dust on your television screen that were hitherto imperceptible. To give it that extra ‘futuristic’ edge, Altman has smeared his camera lens with enough lube to fuel a three-day orgy at Elliott Gould’s place.” Stare at it long enough and you will go blind, one way or another.

The Shining

Sure, a snow day sounds like all fun and games. But then you realize you’re trapped in the house with your family for who knows how long, and it’s only a matter of time before someone gets a bad case of cabin fever and starts chasing you around with an axe. Our advice? Lead them outside into the hedge maze. This works best if they’re drunk and/or completely insane.

Fargo

Forget the compelling argument about whether or not the Coens have contempt for their heroine Marge Gunderson. What we really want to know is – what do they think of this guy?

Alive

This is an especially good one to watch from the safety of your couch on your unplanned day off. See what leaving the house gets you? Before you know it, you’ve crash-landed in the snow-capped Andes and the seatmate you bummed a magazine from early in the flight is now gnawing on your elbow. Better take an extra day off tomorrow just to be on the safe side.

A Simple Plan

From the golden age of snow noir (approx. Feburary 1996 to December 1998) comes Sam Raimi’s adaptation of the Scott Smith novel about earflapped yokels squabbling over a sack o’ cash rescued from another crashed plane. If you’re only familiar with the recent work of Billy Bob Thornton, it might surprise you to learn he once played characters who weren’t hard-assed authority figures. To wit:

Dreamcatcher

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this list contains two movies based on Stephen King books, since the horrormeister is a native of Maine and therefore no stranger to the perils of wintry weather. Of course, in Dreamcatcher those perils include ass-weasels from outer space and Morgan Freeman’s equally extraterrestrial eyebrows, so this one doesn’t qualify as the most naturalistic look at snowbound life on this list.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Honestly, you can skip Quintet if you want. McCabe is the Altman masterpiece you must move to the head of your Netflix queue immediately. And if you’ve never seen it, do not – repeat DO NOT – watch the clip below.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow

It’s been a while, but as best we can recall, this movie did not make a lick of sense. Julia Ormond is a scientist investigating a conspiracy using her unique, uh, sense of snow. Save this one for last, when you’re really tired.

The Screengrab Q&A: TEETH's Jess Weixler Talks Vagina Dentata

John Constantine — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:48:00 GMT

Teeth is a confounding movie, as the Screengrab learned for itself when it caught a late fall screening. The movie is notable for its premise alone. As Ken Mondschein puts it in his History of Single Life essay “A Legend With Teeth” up on Nerve today, it’s no wonder that vagina dentata is a universal motif. It handily embodies sexual anxiety, and that subject is always a crowd pleaser on screen. Part Sam Raimi inspired schlock horror and part feminist-hero fantasy, Mitchell Lichtenstein’s filmic debut doesn’t wholly succeed thanks to some wonky pacing and an even wonkier script. Newcomer Jess Weixler’s star turn as Dawn is easily the best part of the film.

How’d you get involved with Teeth?

I auditioned for the best friend but they wanted me to read for Dawn. I got the part but said, no, I’m not going to do it. I was initially freaked out because there were a lot of sex scenes, and I’d never done sex scenes. I had to really have a good conversation with myself about whether I was ready for it. Mitchell met with me and talked to me about it. I realized he wasn’t trying to make a bad B-horror movie. He was trying to make a good dark comedy. I took it because it’s an awesome part that’s never been played before. It’s kind of a superhero role. She has an anatomical uniqueness. She has to discover it and learn how to use it for good.

How did you get yourself prepped for the role? How did you get into Dawn?

I was fortunate enough to have a month to prepare. I don’t know how people are given a script and are supposed to shoot in a few days. I had a month to think about where she starts and where she ends. She changes so much through the course of the movie. She goes from being a shut down, innocent little girl to being a sexual beast and a woman. I think she thinks she’s sexy by the end of the movie. Whereas before she didn’t want anything to do with her body.

What did you pull from your own life experience as a teenager and your first experiences with sex when approaching Dawn?

I think that it’s overwhelming for a young girl to think of herself as a sexual body. I think guys come into it much faster. Guys are quicker to make the most of it. So I saw myself through a male’s eyes to find myself pretty. Like ‘do they think I’m pretty?’ instead of finding myself pretty. Something important for anybody, not just a woman, is to think they are beautiful, sexy, and strong. Then you give that to somebody instead of just trying to please them. I relate to learning how to be sexual in a way that I enjoy, you know, not just trying to make someone else happy.

Outside of Dawn’s father in the movie, you have four, arguably five different males in the story and all of them are predatory.

This isn’t a realistic movie on any level. Mitchell created a world filled with archetypes for this situation and he put Dawn in circumstances that would help her on the journey of discovering what she and how to use it. I think he set it up to aid Dawn’s story, not because he thinks all guys are bad.

All guys are bad. You should know that.

Everybody’s a little rotten, I guess, right? Not everybody deserves to be dismembered.

They don’t deserve to be eaten?

Much better term.

What do you make of Dawn’s sexual empowerment coming out of her having a drug experience?

Well she wakes up enough while drugged to realize she likes the guy. She doesn’t, I think, know how drugged she is. She likes the guy at the time, has a good time, likes having sex. She’s enjoying it. When it comes out he was being predatory though, he gets it.

That’s what you would call it, getting it?

He gets it. He gets it taken. He gets eaten, you said it right. And spit back out.

When you hear the premise of Teeth, you have to think going in, ‘Well, that’s bound to happen.’

Yeah, you can imagine what may be going on. I know a lot of people, when they saw it at Sundance, didn’t know that she could even have sex. When she did have sex and nothing bad happened, everybody clapped. It’s an important moment.

What do you think Dawn is going off to do at the end of the movie? Is she going to become a superhero, a vigilante? Where is she headed?

I think she’s just going to get away from it all. I don’t think she’s going to go hunt down guys. I think she’s going to try to live her life and if she needs to protect herself she will.

What do you think Teeth is? What would you classify it as?

I would classify it as a dark comedy. It’s being marketed a little as a horror film. It has horror aspects to it but I wouldn’t say it’s a horror movie. I understand it’s going to be complicated for people to understand what it is they’re about to see because we send it up. It’s definitely larger than life.

That’s an understatement.

Morning Deal Report: Tell Me Bruce Campbell's In It

Peter Smith — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi returns to his roots, with a movie called Drag Me to Hell, cowritten with his brother Ivan. Now that is awesome. Key quote: "The appeal to Sam. . . was returning to what he had once done and loved doing, which was entertaining a very specific group of fans and providing a roller coaster ride for them." I think I hear a very specific group of fans salivating already.

Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah and Sophie Okonedo have joined Fox Searchlight's adaptation of the bestseller The Secret Life of Bees. Improbably, it's about "an eccentric trio of beekeeping sisters," not a quirky regional spelling competition. Dakota Fanning may also be involved.

Here come the big guns: now the Vatican itself has spoken out against The Golden Compass, instead of just letting William Donahue sputter about it on Fox News. Guys, chill — it's not even that good.