The Screengrab : sidney poitier

The Rep Report (October 17-23)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:30:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: The annual "Shock It to Me" horror film festival--or, as its promoters prefer to call it, "a bonafide Horror Convention in a theater setting"--is running at the Castro Theater this weekend, today through Sunday. The special guests scheduled to be in attendance include Sid Haig, a favorite actor of Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie, who co-starred with Lon Chaney, Jr. in Friday night's big feature, Jack Hill's 1964 Spider Baby. The movie itself is an unclassifiable blend of spook show, camp comedy, and homegrown American low-budget weird; it opens with Lon, Jr. singing the title song and just rolls on from there. Also on hand: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Paker, stars of the late-'60s "gothic" daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, which made a sex symbol of Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a lovesick 175-year-old vampire in a Beatles wig that had been through the wash a few too many times. The festival will be showing both the movie spin-offs from the Dark Shadows TV series, as well as the original Night of the Living Dead and the first of Hammer Film's revivals of the classic Universal movie monsters, Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein. Plus the fest's "infamous Zombie-Eating Contest" and the promised giveaway of "a real dead body to a 'lucky' member of the audience each night." We don't know the details, but if this were a movie, it would probably mean that somebody was going to get to drive home with Sid Haig in the trunk of their car.

NORTH CAROLINA: The programmers of the Escapism film festival, running this weekend (today through Sunday) at the Caroline Theater, boldly step up to the challenge of finding a way to make people scared even when they're in Durham, North Carolina, A.K.A. God's country. (Some of you folks who've never been there may think that I'm kidding. I weep for you.) The lineup this year has quite the international flavor, including the fast-becoming-legendary Australian-exploitation-movie doc Not Quite Hollywood, the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, Takashi Miike's self-explanatory Sukiyaki Western: Django, and the French sci-fi film Eden Log. There's also "the U.S. Theatrical premiere of 1989’s [straight-to-video] The Punisher (in an uncut, director’s edition to boot!)" Dolph Lundgren fans will want to line up for that one, though they risk being run over by people who hate Dolph Lundgren's guts and are in an MST3K-kinda mood.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: "Spooky Movie: 2008", the third annual "Washington, D.C. international horror film festival", has begun and runs through October 20, at Cinema Arts Theatre and additional locations. Unlike other Halloween festivals that pile on the fondly remembered scare classics, this one concentrates on the new and the unknown, including lots and lots of independently produced short films. That tends to mean a lot of amateurishness, but it can also mean a lot of fresh ideas from people with their own, deeply personal notions about what's scary--and besides, if you have to see amateurish festival films, amateurish horror films can be more fun to watch than any other kind. There are also documentaries on William Castle and the mythology of the snuff film. Plus, this evening's "Grindhouse Night" festivities will be hosted, live, by "Count Gore de Vol", in a heartening show of confidence that the recent sex scandal will not endanger his bid for re-election.

LOS ANGELES: There actually are a few theaters in the country that aren't showing horror films this weekend. "Spotlight on Miklós Jancsó", from October 17 through October 24 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gives viewers a rare chance to see four films by the Hungarian master in all their CinemaScope glory. The program opens with the director's first international success, 1965's The Round-Up, and includes 1967's The Red and the White, 1968's Silence and Cry, and the 1971 Red Psalm, rated by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as perhaps the greatest Hungarian movie of all time.

CHICAGO: Last but not least, the 44th Annual Chicago International Film Festival opens today and runs through October 29. Things kick off tonight with The Brothers Bloom, writer-director Rian Johnson's follow-up to his Dashiell-Hammett-High-School first feature, Brick; it stars Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel Weisz. It's followed tomorrow by a "Black Perspectives Tribute" event honoring Sidney Poitier and Jennifer Hudson.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

10. SIDNEY POITIER (1927 - )

Poitier's breakthrough as the first African-American actor fully recognized as a leading man and star secured him a permanent place in the cultural history of the movies, but his status as a major actor and one of the great talents of his day may have eroded a little. In part this is because a lot of the movies he starred in were high-minded tosh that have dated very badly, not least because of the perceived need to present Poitier's characters as being superhuman and even morally superior to whites, the thinking being that a black man wouldn't be worth building a movie around if he were merely human. But just as Jackie Robinson had to play baseball extraordinarily well to earn his place on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Poitier's enormous talent that made most of his movies watchable at all. Even in something like To Sir, With Love, his powerful presence and banked fires seems informed by the mixture of intelligence and anger that made him stand out as the student worth saving in the juvenile-delinquency melodrama The Blackboard Jungle. It would be nice to report that, as the sixties gave way to the seventies and opportunities began to open up for black artists, Poitier was able to drop the black messiah act and take more challenging, morally complicated parts, but instead, he seemed to accept the idea that "Sidney Poitier" was a fixed concept that had no place in the era of Super Fly and Shaft. (In one of his 1971 movies, Brother John, his mistreated black Southerner character turned out to really be Jesus.) Poitier withdrew from the center of the film world, concentrating on directing and appearing in light comedies, aimed at the underserved African-American family audience, in which he played tightass straight man to such co-stars as Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby. Them after a long layoff, he turned up acting again in such movies as Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, and Sneakers. He didn't look as if he'd aged much and he could still command the screen, but the new scripts sucked about as much as the old ones had. He appears to have been effectively retired for the last decade or so.

9. DENZEL WASHINGTON (1954 - )

For a long time, Denzel Washington seemed content to play it safe. He looked good in a military uniform (Glory, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire) or a detective's plain clothes (Devil in a Blue Dress, Fallen, The Bone Collector), and his career strategy appeared to be "If Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it," which is admirable in the sense that he clearly never wanted to be pigeonholed as The Black Guy in Hollywood's eyes. There are limitations to this approach, though, and eventually folks start to notice that, for example, in Philadelphia you're the lawyer, not the guy dying of AIDS, and they start to wonder if your career is just going to be one tailored suit after another. (To be sure, many a leading man has built a career on just that.) Of course, you run the risk of upsetting a whole other contingent of your fans when you finally say what the hell, I'm gonna have some fun playing the baddest cop in Los Angeles – especially when that's the role that finally wins you the Best Actor award on Oscar night. All these complaints seem petty now; Washington blew the roof off the joint in Training Day and ever since then, he's been livelier in his straight roles (Inside Man, Deja Vu) and more willing to sprinkle the occasional bad dude (American Gangster) in with the noble characters (The Great Debaters). So hey, maybe he knew he was doing all along.

8. JAMES DEAN (1931-1955)

It’s inconceivable that a career like James Dean’s could happen again. History and circumstance prohibit it; the mere fact of his existence proscribes it. When the blazingly handsome Indiana farmboy blazed out of existence so spectacularly on Route 466, he took with him the possibility of anyone ever repeating his singular, spectacular career. It was not merely the circumstance of his death that made him a legend; plenty of actors had died young before, and plenty would die young after. But so stunning was his rise to the top, and so distinct was his personality both on and off the screen, that no one since would carry into death the legendary quality that makes his a name to conjure with, a shorthand for infinite possibility fatefully snuffed. The closest modern-day analogue, for example, is Heath Ledger – but the young Australian was four years older than Dean at the time of his own death, and had an astonishing sixteen more screen roles. That’s one of the qualities that makes Dean such a towering figure in Hollywood: even ignoring his brooding personality, his smoldering good looks, his pioneering, emotional Method performances, his controversial personal life, and his restless and rebellious off-screen persona, it is staggering to consider that James Dean, as iconic an actor as can be imagined, made only three films in his entire life. Of course, had he lived, he likely would have been instrumental in tarnishing his own fiery purity, but…well, he didn’t live, did he?

7. SEAN CONNERY (1930 - )

Connery became a star because, at a point where his animal presence was enough to hold the camera but his acting was still at the beginner's stage, he became James Bond. What's amazing is that he's still so strongly associated with the role even though he's long since developed not just a strong body of work but a strong screen image that's pretty far from the over-accessorized pretty boy stud of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. In fact, by the time of his last "real" Bond movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever (not counting the 1983 rehash Never Say Never Again), his Bond was starting to look more human and fleshy and fallible, never more comfortably in his skin than in a throwaway moment where he gets to apologize to a rat for his body odor. By then, he had given impressive, full-bodied performances in such mid-60s films as The Hill and A Fine Madness, and was known to delight in opportunities to strip off his hair pieces and indulge in his taste for extravagant and weird facial hair choices. One thing that never changed much, whether he was playing an Irish-American cop in The Untouchables or a beefcake messiah assassin circa 2400 A.D. in the visually opulent, brain-damaged Zardoz, was his voice, and that was probably a right call: after purring his way through his first couple of appearancs as 007, Connery had developed one of those voices that makes almost any line seem worth hearing at least once. The Scottish music machine that he calls a larynx may have as much as his strapping form and experienced manliness to do with his status as probably the longest-reigning A-list sex symbol in the history of movies, an iconic musk dispenser who was able to convincingly get younger actresses ranging from Tia Carrere to Catherine Zeta Jones to respond to his first call at an age where most former Mr. Universe contestants have to ring three times just to get the nurse. The odd bit of voice work aside, he has been officially retired since 2003, having cited his experiences during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with having convinced him that he'd gotten too old for that shit.

6. JIMMY STEWART (1908-1997)

Over the years, there have been as many "young Jimmy Stewarts" in movies as there have been "new Dylans" in music. That alone would probably be enough to qualify the real deal for this list, but what's most interesting about Stewart the actor is how far off the mark most such comparisons are. They're usually intended to evoke an aw-shucks, American as apple pie appeal, and certainly that's part of the story with Stewart -- the stand-up, virtuous hero of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Glenn Miller Story and The Spirit of St. Louis, the man of decency who would age into the stammering sentimentalist reading weepy odes to his dead dog on The Tonight Show -- but such shorthand doesn't take into account the disturbed, obsessive Stewart of Vertigo and the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, notably The Naked Spur. (And despite its status as a perennial holiday favorite, he's not exactly a ray of sunshine in It's a Wonderful Life, either.) His Boy Scout qualities made him an icon, but like David Lynch – the man Mel Brooks called "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" – it's his darker impulses that made him an artist.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

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

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

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

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

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

Ivan Dixon, 1931 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:00:00 GMT

The actor-director Ivan Dixon has died at the age of 76. As an actor, Dixon appeared in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway and served as Sidney Poitier's stunt double in The Defiant Ones; he also starred in the 1964 Nothing but a Man, an early example of an indie drama with a predominantly African-American cast, which was to become one of the first films selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry. He probably became best known, though, as a regular cast member of the wacky-antics-in-a-World-War-II-P.O.W.-camp sitcom, Hogan's Heroes. That series ran from 1965 to 1970; after it went off the air, Dixon continued to act — he was especially impressive in the 1976 ensemble comedy Car Wash — but he mostly concentrated on directing. His first film as a director was the 1972 blaxsploitation movie Trouble Man, a Shaft knockoff starring Robert Hooks that's best remembered for its theme song, a hit for its composer-singer Marvin Gaye.

But Dixon's second theatrical feature was something else: The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a 1973 adaptation of Sam Greenlee's novel about a token black CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) who, having mastered the counter-insurgency tactics of guerrilla warfare and other violent skills he learns from the Company, proceeds to apply them to street warfare aimed at toppling the racist white Establishment. Ragged in places, partly because Dixon clearly had to work around an inadequate budget, the movie has a crazy charge to it that it marks it as an engaged movie of the early '70s. Dixon would charge that the studio that financed it, United Artists, freaked out when it belatedly realized what it had on its hands, and buried the picture, as much out of political concerns as lack of faith in its box office potential. The Spook would be Dixon's last movie as a director; he spent the rest of his career working in TV. But The Spook developed a fervent cult following over the years, even among people who hadn't seen it, in part because of rumors that it had been "suppressed" for its revolutionary message. It finally got dusted off and released on DVD in 2004.

The Spirit of '67

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Pictures at a Revolution, a new book by Entertainment Weekly staffer Mark Harris, zeroes in on a signal moment in popular culture — 1967, a time when the old Hollywood studios were losing their grip on mass taste and hip young American filmmakers were beginning to be influenced by the European New Wave directors — by examining the making of each of the five films nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. The list consists of In the Heat of the Night, the eventual winner, and the four also-rans, Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Dolittle. The films themselves go a long way towards making Harris's point that Hollywood was cracking apart at the time from confusion, internal conflict, and dry rot; it's hard to believe that they were all made in the same year, let alone that an industry would have chosen all of them to point to with pride as the best of which they were capable.

The ones that seem most clearly of their time are Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. The latter was a crowd-pleasing zeitgeist movie, a time-stamped movie of the moment, but Bonnie & Clyde was a genuinely revolutionary film at the time — the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had originally hoped to attract Francois Truffaut to direct — and a certified classic. It was also a movie that, had it won the Oscar, would have set off a chain of massive coronaries through three-quarters of the executive suites in Hollywood. As for In the Heat of the Night, it was recently re-issued on a new DVD, which set off a fresh round of condescending notices pointing up its flaws. It is in fact an entertaining little murder melodrama with a number of strong virtues — notably the dazzling cinematographer by Haskell Wexler and Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — but it is the kind of movie that was overrated in its day and is now fated to be underrated, as punishment for being a good movie that won an award that should have gone to a great movie. It looks even better if compared to the other big racial-tolerance message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is where most of the dry rot settled.

In its general outlines, this will be familiar territory to many readers of film books; the Bonnie & Clyde story has been especially thoroughly covered already, but even the ringer, the expensive and unwatchable Dr. Dolittle, has already been dealt with at some length in a well-known book: John Gregory Dunne's 1969 The Studio, a first-hand journalistic account of how thoroughly that movie's tortured production bollixed Twentieth-Century Fox at the time. But Harris is a good writer and has managed to wring fresh material from such interview subjects as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Towne, and Buck Henry, while plugging the gaps with well-chosen insights drawn from such sources as Sidney Poitier's memoirs. Overblown title and all, Harris's book is a fascinating, five-sided snapshot of a remarkable moment in movie history.