The Screengrab : scott caan

The Brett Ratner Book Club

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

We indulge in our share of Ratner-bashing here at the Screengrab, and why not? It’s not our fault he’s the director of Rush Hour 3. But we’ll give credit where credit is due: Brett Ratner has launched his own literary imprint, Rat Press. For the moment, try to ignore the fact that the crown jewel of the collection appears to be a collection of Scott Caan photographs. Scroll down and you’ll see a few more interesting entries, including Conversations with Marlon Brando by Lawrence Grobel and a book with the perfectly James Tobackian title Jim: The Author’s Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown.

“For me, part of my film education was reading these types of books that talked about life experiences in Hollywood,” Ratner tells Movieline – and who knew Movieline still existed in any form? “I have the most incredible book collection; they’re just a big part of stuff I love to collect. But the Brando book is one that I’ve always loved, and when I met Lawrence Grobel, I told him: ‘I love your Capote book! I love your Brando book!’ And he said, “You know, the Brando book is available.” I said, “What? I want to publish it! Will you write a new outro for it?”

The Grobel book does sound like a find, if a little pricey at $25 a pop. “For ten truly remarkable days in July 1978, Lawrence Grobel spent every waking minute with legendary actor Marlon Brando and his family on Brando’s Tahitian island, Tetiaroa. It was the first time in twenty-five years that Brando, notorious for his reclusive, reticent lifestyle had granted an extended interview to anyone.”

Let’s hope the Rat Press series is a success and Ratner devotes as much time and energy to it as possible. Anything to keep him out of the director’s chair.

Related:
Brett Ratner Drinks Youngblood
Mike Tyson Speaks: Lend Him an Ear

Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

DANNY OCEAN

I vividly remember the day when my esteemed Screengrab colleague, Scott Von Doviak, told me I had to drop whatever I was doing and go check out Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. “You mean the movie with that guy from E.R.?” I replied, incredulous, thinking perhaps I’d misunderstood. "The guy from One Fine Day? Batman & Robin? That guy?” “Yes,” Mr. Von Doviak replied. “I’m afraid we have to start liking George Clooney now.” And, in fact, the statement was prescient, because soon The Cloon had established himself as the Sexiest Man Alive, the Last True Movie Star, the eternal bachelor, the guy with the pot-bellied pig, the sensible humanitarian do-gooder, and the guy my wife has informed me she’d run off with in a heartbeat...and I wouldn’t even blame her, because he’s just that fucking cool. But you know what? He’s still not as cool as Frank Sinatra in 1960. Advantage: Original.

THE ELEVEN

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Carl Reiner, Bernie Mac...these are all fairly cool people. Sammy and Dino? They're so cool I don’t even need to mention their last names (though I suppose it’s a toss-up whether Joey Bishop is cooler than Scott Caan or vice-versa). The big problem is that no matter how cool Sammy and Dino are, and as well as they wear suits and swill cocktails, they’re part of a gang that just doesn’t have many good scenes, good lines, or all that much to do. Advantage: Remake.

THE DAME

Not that she had all that much to work with in an underwritten role, but the best part of Julia Robert’s performance (as the art curator at the Bellagio?) is the meta gag of “introducing” her in the credits like a dewy fresh unknown. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better, despite an arguably better wardrobe, and this category would probably be a draw if not for the mitigating factor of Shirley Maclaine’s great cameo as “Tipsy Girl” in the original, giving what noted Rat Packologist John Mitchell calls “the only actual performance in the movie,” cementing her as “any reasonable drunk’s pin-up girl.” Advantage: Original.

THE HEIST

The original scores big points for its highball concept, cooked up by five writers, including Billy Wilder(!). Meanwhile, by plotting a heist where Sammy Davis, Jr.’s character masquerades as a tap-dancing garbage man, the film either criticizes 1960s racism or embodies it (depending who you ask). But the heist in the remake (scripted by Ted Griffin) is faster paced, requires more costumes and gadgets, and wraps up with a nice, lyrical moment by the Bellagio’s dancing waters (as opposed to the original’s surprisingly downbeat buzzkill pall of failure and mortality). Advantage: Remake.

THE SCORE

Even without the groovy remix of Elvis Presley’s lost classic “A Little Less Conversation,” the soundtrack to the 2001 edition of Ocean’s is worth a listen for the space age bachelor pad rhythms of David Holmes’ swingin’ retro score and classic cuts from Perry Como, Percy Faith, Quincy Jones and Claude DeBussy. But the original featured Sammy’s aforementioned sanitation song and dance “Ee-O-Leven” and Dean Martin performing a vibe-tastic version of “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”...and you really can’t argue with vibes. Advantage: Original

THE SEQUELS

This one is pretty close to a draw, but Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were marginally less dreadful than the original’s quasi-sequels Sergeants 3, 4 For Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods, so... Advantage: Remake.

And thus, in a tight race between style and substance, the winner is...REMAKE!

(Coming up next: the dueling Dawns of the Dead!)

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.