The Screengrab : sissy spacek

Morning Deal Report: Bill Murray Gets Low

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Bill Murray joins Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek for Get Low, “based on the true story of Felix ‘Bush’ Breazeale, a Tennessee recluse who planned his own funeral in 1938 while he was still alive and could enjoy it,” Variety reports. Murray and Lucas Black will play partners in the funeral home.

“The Ward is the kind of script that I've been looking for: a complex, visceral story, full of suspense and scares.” Who said it? It’s John Carpenter, who will direct the psychological thriller that “follows the disturbing experience of a young woman in an institution who is terrorized by a ghost,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Amber Heard stars.

It wouldn’t be a Morning Deal Report without depressing remake news, so let it be known that Slap Shot is next on the chopping block. Galaxy Quest director Dean Parisot will do the dishonors.

Related:
Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos
Video of the Day: John Carpenter on Lead Vocals

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

According to the famous quote, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

Sadly, Ms. Rogers didn’t make our Top 25 list, but the sentiment holds true for the Leading Ladies who did: after all, like the actors in our recent posting of The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time, the following matinee idols managed to fascinate and captivate over the course of varied careers with astonishing on-screen performances (and off-screen personas)...yet they also achieved their success in a notoriously sexist, looks-obsessed business with a tendency to relegate women to underimagined wife and girlfriend parts...

...or, to quote Goldie Hawn’s actress character in The First Wives’ Club, there are usually three stages to a woman’s Hollywood career: "Ingénue, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.”

But not always, thankfully, as we here at the Screengrab hereby celebrate with our salute to 25 celluloid dames (some of them actual Dames) who defined and redefined our notions of film and femininity...backwards, forwards, up and down, in high heels, cowboy boots and everything in between.

25. NAOMI WATTS (1968 - )

Oh yes, Ms. Watts absolutely kills in the above scene from Mulholland Dr. But she has had a bit of a quality-control problem since, appearing in The Ring and its sequel, 21 Grams, Stay, King Kong, and the unnecessary remake of Funny Games. All of these movies seem risky and high-concept in the abstract, but all of them hedge their bets in some way and fail to deliver on their promise. They’re good enough for what they are, but none of them reach the greatness they suggest. Naomi Watts, however, completely throws herself into her roles. You can see the movie that could have been when she’s on-screen...if you can see anything but her, that is.

24. (TIE) JULIA ROBERTS (1967 - ) & JESSICA LANGE (1949 - )

In The Player, Robert Altman’s poison pen love letter to Hollywood, there’s a running gag about Julia Roberts: every producer pitches every project with her in mind, and even the integrity-bound screenwriter who vows that his “serious” indie film will feature “no stars” eventually gives in, leading to a charmingly self-deprecating film-within-a-film cameo by, yes, Julia Roberts. And though her wattage may have dimmed in recent years (along with the general star power of human actors versus, say, Chihuahuas and Decepticons), she’s still the current reigning champ of modern female movie stars in terms of her career Trifecta of salary (the first female star to crack the $20 million mark), box office clout (over $2 billion + international star power) and industry respect (with multiple awards, nominations and a Best Actress Oscar for her dynamo performance as the titular (get it?) legal clerk of Erin Brockovich). It hasn’t all been hosannas, of course: for all her fame, Roberts hasn’t really given that many memorable performances, and her star turns can range from somnambulant snoozers (The Pelican Brief, Mary Reilly) and romantic comedy fluff (Runaway Bride) to inexplicable appearances in unmitigated disasters like The Mexican and Mona Lisa Smile. But when she’s in the zone, her charisma and presence are formidable: many who loathed Pretty Woman on principle were nevertheless charmed (against their will!) by Roberts’ hooker with a heart of Amex gold, and when she lets herself be likably unlikable (as in her bittersweet chocolate romantic comedies Notting Hill and My Best Friend’s Wedding), she hints at a largely untapped range that may yet blossom in the second half of her already impressive career.

Lange made her movie debut in the 1976 King Kong remake. An actual look at the footage reveals that she was perfectly charming as a sweet but not-too-bright piece of fluff with vague aspirations to stardom, but the movie was used as a piñata by critics, and many of them went so far as to suggest that if Lange was convincing as a dumb blonde, that must mean that she wasn't acting. Badly burned, she didn't appear in another movie until Bob Fosse cast her as some kind of Wilhelmina Agency Angel of Death in 1979's All That Jazz. Her performance there was more kindly treated -- call it the lowered expectations, or Sarah Palin effect -- but it wasn't until she paired off against Jack Nicholson with an unexpectedly fiery performance in 1981's The Postman Always Rings Twice that people began to suspect that they just might have a live one. She followed that up in 1982 with a classic romantic-comedy lead in Tootsie and a performance as the doomed movie actress Frances Farmer (in Frances) that snapped a few necks. Her best work since then has include her performance as Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams, her end-of-the-sisterhood trio in Crimes of the Heart, and her troubled, trouble-making military wife in Tony Richardson's Blue Sky, for which she won an Academy Award. (Sadly, the movie, which was completed in 1991, got caught up in the bankruptcy of its funding studio, Orion, and didn't make it to theaters until 1994, by which time Richardson had died.) Little that she has done since that has been especially worthy of her, though she has appeared onstage in London and on Broadway in Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Glass Menagerie. She is currently set to play the ruined society matriarch "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale (with Drew Barrymore as Little Edie) in a movie based on the Maysles brothers documentary Grey Gardens.

23. (TIE) SISSY SPACEK (1949 - ) & JANE FONDA (1937 - )

Sissy Spacek was the amoral girl-on-the-cusp-of-womanhood in three of the defining films of the '70s: Badlands, Carrie, and 3 Women (yeah, you read that right: I said 3 Women was a defining film of the '70s). She could have quit after that, but she moved on to playing maternal figures in the movies. Her eyes look different now. She’s lost the shock that made her seem so delicate and young and precious back then, but that shock was always hiding something else, something weirder and harder to define. Her only recent movie where she's recaptured the shade of her younger self was The Straight Story, in which she played a woman who was a little slow. The Straight Story is also one of the very few movies she’s made that’s worth a damn since 1977, so go figure.

Fonda's offscreen reputation as a Vietnam-era leftist political scold has largely overshadowed her legacy as an actress. If there's any justice in this, it has less to do with her right to express her opinions, however embarrassingly, in what passes for her private life, than with her misguided decision to waste what might have been her peak years as an artist on half-baked scripts that she seemed to select on the basis of whatever political message they seemed to be editorializing, whether it was the legacy of Vietnam or nuclear power or women's rights in the workplace. In the 1980s, she didn't seem to know what to do with herself, and she basically retired after an unpleasant run-in with Vietnam vets who picketed the set of the awful Stanley & Iris, in which she taught Robert De Niro to read. But if there was only a short window of time in which Fonda was an actress first and at the top of her game, what she did during that time would still qualify her for any Mount Rushmore of American movie actresses. She spent most of her first ten years in movies establishing herself as an exceptionally saucy, cuddly comic actress: she's a hoot, and a turn-on, even in Barabarella, one of the ugliest-looking rip-off jobs that a pretentious French twat ever talked his trusting American wife into starring in. When her tobacco-road inflection on the line "Essence of man?" and the scene where she shorts out the orgasm machine failed to give Henry Fonda a fatal heart attack, she went about any daughter's life's work another way, becoming "radicalized" offscreen while pouring all that angry, room-clearing energy into starring roles in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Klute, two of the least sentimental, most hard-edged, beautifully detailed portraits of doomed women of the New Hollywood era (or anytime). Her Bree Daniels in Klute, the New York prostitute who has total control over her clients and zero control of anything else in her life, remains one of the most perfectly executed and daring star performances in movies.

22. JOAN CRAWFORD (1905-1977)

It’s a testament to the sheer power of Joan Crawford’s personality that the mere act of portraying her can wreck a career: Faye Dunaway, once one of Hollywood’s most promising stars, took on the job in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and she was never the same again. It’s a cliché to say that some famous person is less a human being and more a force of nature, but it’s a cliché that was invented with Joan Crawford in mind: once a drifting youngster who only wanted to be a dancer, she got her hooks into Hollywood at a young age (becoming famous as a flapper even before the sound era made her a superstar), and she never let go for a second. In everything from acting to dancing to business to parenthood to sitting on the board of directors of Pepsi-Cola, Crawford insisted on running the game her way, and woe betide anyone who crossed her. For such a stunning screen presence – named by the AFI as the greatest female star of all time! – Crawford wasn’t the best there was at anything. She was an above-average dancer, but not a great one; she had a unique look – all flashing eyes and floating hair – but she wasn’t one of the screen’s greatest beauties; and she could put in some fine performances (witness Mildred Pierce and Strange Cargo for proof), but she was an unreliable box office draw and never one of the greatest actresses of her day. Indeed, as with her doppelganger Bette Davis, she’s often treasured as much for her bad performances, like Sudden Fear, as for her good ones. But there is probably no one in Hollywood history, male or female, who was so commanding, so arresting, so utterly implacable when she was onscreen: Joan Crawford had more presence than anyone who had come before or has been seen since, and if she wasn’t going to take over the world with her acting, then goddamn it, she at least was not going to be ignored.

21. JULIE CHRISTIE (1948 - )

Julie Christie! The rumors are true! Wait, no. Terry met Julie at Waterloo Station every Friday night. Hold it, she wasn’t just the subject of rock songs? Julie Christie could actually act? Yowza. Actually, even if the only movie she'd ever made was McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Julie Christie would still be one of my favorite actresses. But she’s always great, even when the movie isn’t. And despite the openness in her face (not to mention that incredible perpetual pout), she always brings a sense of mystery and intelligence to her roles, giving them a fully rounded life, though we sometimes only see a snippet.

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

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

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

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

That Guy! Classic: Warren Oates

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As character actors go, they don't come much more iconic than Warren Mercer Oates. A tall Marine Corps vet from rural Kentucky's Muhlenberg County, Oates came west in the 1950s and, after working a number of menial jobs, started to get a string of acting jobs in western movies and televisions shows, thanks largely to his hunched six-foot frame, throwback looks, and thick rustic accent. But it was his acting chops that won him the attention of some of Hollywood's greatest directors; over the years, he worked with, among others, Norman Jewison, Monte Hellman, Stephen Spielberg, John Milius, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, and Philip Kaufman. But it was with Sam Peckinpah that Oates found his greatest success; the two shared a no-nonsense approach to filmmaking and a similiarly straightforward (and sometimes abrasive) personality. After first working together on Ride the High Country, Peckinpah and Oates worked together repeatedly over the years, and Peckinpah even gave Oates one of his few leading man roles in the controversial and underrated Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Extremely prolific during his 25 years in Hollywood, Warren Oates and his sneering, crooked smile became one of the few character actors as immediately recognizable as many lead actors of his day. Sadly for the many fans of this gifted actor and storyteller, he didn't live to enjoy his greatest success: he died unexpectedly of a heart attack just months after completing Stripes. His role as the straight-edge Sgt. Hulka won him legions of new fans and scored him more money than he'd made in any of his previous movies, but he would make only three more films, both of which were released after his death. Since then, a posthumous cult has grown up around Warren Oates, and it's hard not to read various bits of casting without imagining what he'd do with the role. Luckily, he left us with a lot of good work to chew on.

Where to see Warren Oates at his best:

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Outside of Stripes, Warren Oates' best-known, and most beloved, film role is that of the bandit Lyle Gorch in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Gorch combines Oates' two most common roles in western genre pictures — the craven and the brute — into an incredibly memorable, whore-chasing, washer-stealing character. Better still, Oates is paired in the barrier-busting revisionist western with Ben Johnson, another genre great, as his conniving brother Tector. An essential role in an essential film.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Monte Hellman was the director Warren Oates worked with most often outside of Sam Peckinpah (Oates claimed that he would work with either man at any time on any film for any reason). This bizarrely minimalist existential road picture was probably their finest collaboration, though Cockfighter has its partisans: Oates plays "G.T.O", an enigmatic, constantly self-inventing figure who becomes embroiled in a cross-country road race for the same reason men climb Everest: because it's there.

BADLANDS (1973)

Oates has only a minor role in Terrence Malick's stunning retelling of the story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but it's an undeniably effective one. Playing the father of Sissy Spacek's Holly Sargis, Oates' laconic performance contains unexpected depth, and his character, by acting as the barrier between the two callow young lovers, is the one who sets off their oddly casual, affectless killing spree. Proof that even in small parts, Oates could make a huge impact.

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.