The Screengrab : steve mcqueen

That Guy! Joe Don Baker

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It's possible that Joe Don Baker's name is as well known as his face, which sort of goes against the grain of those featured in the "That Guy!" franchise. However, one reason the name is well-known is that, in the last several years, it's picked up some currency as a punch line. Any name that starts out "Joe Don" and keeps going for another couple of syllables is apt to strike some people as that of a thuggish redneck hick, and that's how Baker was caricatured by the wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 when they ran a couple of his tackier starring vehicles in the 1990s. Is it out of deference to the fine tastes and sensibilities of the robot critical community that Joe Don has yet to appear on Inside the Actors Studio? This is one thing that sets him apart from, say, Billy Joel and Ricky Gervais. Another is that Joe Don actually attended the Actors Studio.

There is always cause to be wary whenever a white male claims to have suffered from discrimination based on his physical appearance. Usually there is cause to be openly derisive. Still, back in the 1980s, Joe Don Baker told an interviewer that it was very hard for him to get Hollywood to see him as anything other than a violent cracker with a pea-sized brain, and he told the interviewer this in response to a question about why he had taken to spending so much of his time working in England. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the '60s, Baker appeared in movies and on TV, in Westerns (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Wild Rovers) and working-guy parts (Adam at 6 A.M.). He got a boost from the 1971 TV film Mongo's Back in Town, which served notice that he could bring a compelling degree of sensitivity to a tough-guy part, and also served notice that he might have to spend a certain amount of his career playing guys with names like "Mongo." He got a bigger boost the next year, playing Steve McQueen's brother in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, although he would later assure interviewers that he and Peckinpah were not the best thing that had ever happpened in each other's lives.

The success of his next film, Walking Tall, made him a star of a specialized, B-movie sort, and led to him taking pre-emptive measures against all many of unsavory types in a string of films, including Phil Karlson's Framed and the notorious Mitchell. His fling as a leading man burned out with the TV film To Kill a Cop and the short-lived TV series spun off from it, Eischied. After that, he settled into the familiar That Guy! routine of long patches of honest labor with the occasional stretch of lying in clover. He played a fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa in the TV film Power (1980), threatened Chevy Chase in Fletch, jousted with James Bond in License to Kill, got throttled by De Niro while attempting to enjoy a midnight snack in Cape Fear, had a high old time playing Joseph McCarthy to James Woods's Roy Cohn in Citizen Kane, stood viciously accused of being Winona Ryder's father in Reality Bites, did the dirty work for the man in Panther, took seeing his son get killed by evil white gorillas really well in Congo, kissed and made up with James Bond in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, and showed, in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, that he could make fun of his trailer-park image as well as any robot. For TV, he played Governor "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in the biopic George Wallace and buckskinned superlawyer Gerry Spence in The Siege of Ruby Ridge.

Where to see Joe Don Baker at his best:

WALKING TALL & CHARLEY VARRICK (1973)

Like it or not, the role of Buford Pusser, scary Tennessee lawman extraordinaire, will always be the first thing that leaps to most people's minds when Baker's name comes up. There are reasons enough to like that fine: Baker gives a strong star performance that endows the club-swinging sheriff considerable dignity. Like Dirty Harry, Pusser has to be portrayed as self-righteous, but Baker also gives him a quality that would be unthinkable in an Eastwood character: a longing for a peaceful life, a desire to just settle down and raise his family and tend to his own back yard, which the villains, by the sheer spreading force of their wickedness, have made an untenable option. (The movie opens with Buford bringing his wife and kids back to their country home, presumably to escape the corruption of the cities. If someone doesn't step up, the small-town corruption may make the country culture just as dangerous and unlivable.) Walking Tall is a primitive, pro-head-cracking movie, but Baker gives it its human dimension: he's the hero partly because he suffers for his actions, never because he happens to be the one who looks coolest when blowing people's heads off.

Even in the wake of the film's success, there were signs that Baker might not be looking to retire from acting and get into the more profitable business of Charles Bronson imitations. One was that he followed up Walking Tall with the supporting role of the Mafis enforcer Molly in Don Siegel's The title character is played by Walter Matthau; he's a bank robber who has chosen his bank recklessly and wound up with several hundred thousand dollars that Molly's employers very much want back. Baker swaggers through the role with a vast grin on his face, as if he never quite got over the kick of seeing his character's name in the script. The film is one of those twist-upon-twist capers in which the omniscient hero is always at least a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, which could easily become tiresome. It benefits greatly from Baker's way of making it clear that, as far as he's concerned, Molly is very much the undefeatable star of the movie playing out in his head. His confidence almost makes you think that he might just turn out to hold the winning hand after all, whereas the glee with which he looks forward to indulging in his full capacity for sadism when he dispatches the hero makes you glad that he doesn't.

THE NATURAL (1984)

In the early '80s, Baker had dropped far enough off the radar screen that his cameo here as "the Whammer"--i.e., Babe Ruth--amounted to a juicy comeback. The movie is a travesty of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel, but Baker does full justice to his end of it: he tears into the role of parodying the Babe as if he were playing a contemporary figure who had seized control of the globe's supply of penicillin. He gives the Whammer a magnified version of Molly's gloating self-satisfaction in what a hot shit he thinks he is, and some of Molly's sadism, too: engaging the green kid Roy Hobbs in a contest, batter versus pitcher, in order to impress a mystery woman (Barbara Hershey), he sums Hobbs up, wrongly, as an innocent hick, and still licks his chops at the prospect of humiliating him. Yet you can't help rooting, or at least feeling for him a little. He lives up to the descriptions of Babe Ruth as the ultimate Jazz Age celebrity, a one-man parade through Times Square.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (1985)

This six-hour British TV miniseries is the proudest accomplishment of Baker's time across the pond. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who later made Goldeneye, as well as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and the Antonio Banderas Zorro pictures, and who is now readying a big-screen remake of Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone. For the love of God, try and get your hands on the original so that when you see the remake, you can better appreciate all the ways in which they're certain to fuck it up. The TV series is a Thatcher-era paranoid thriller about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The late Bob Peck plays a Yorkshire police detective who witnesses the murder of his daughter (Joanne Whalley), which he and his colleagues assume must have been a botched attempt on his own life; it turns out that she was active in anti-nuclear politics and involved in what the government considered to be terrorist activities.

Baker enters the picture playing Darius Jedburgh, a CIA agent stationed in the country who is aware of some sort of skulduggery that might be connected to the daughter's murder. Baker, who took a cut in his usual salary for the chance to be a part of this, took full advantage of the opportunities that acting in a miniseries can provide for fleshing out the odd little corners of a character's range of personality. The memory of his big climactic moments, bawling out the assembled guests at a NATO conference while disintegrating from radiation poisoning and brandishing a pair of plutonium bars, stays fresh in the mind, but so does the image of him sitting in front of the TV in his house in London, cradling a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap and watching the ballroom dancing competitions, marveling, "How do they move like that?"

View the Right Thing: Steve McQueen on "Hunger"

billy84 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:45:00 GMT

View the Right Thing: Nerve intern Billy Gray reports on New York film happenings.

Hunger is about the body, its waste and torments. Excrement smears the IRA inmates' walls in director Steve McQueen's debut film about the 1981 Irish hunger strike led by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). Piss is funneled under cellblock doors to flood the hall. Nightsticks rain down on naked flesh. Food is refused to the point of fatal emaciation.

But McQueen (no relation) bristled when an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q& A called it violent. "Show me a summer blockbuster whose death toll and wasted bullets don't outnumber Hunger's," he reasoned. But Hunger's unflinching portrayal of corporal punishment, self-inflicted or not, sears the retinas more than any comic book adaptation's could. It's a testament to McQueen that his debut film will likely force you to avert your eyes.

Such an aversion might make viewers complicit with the British government that McQueen renders through a grave, dismissive Margaret Thatcher voiceover. It's a fitting decision for the director who said the movie is "about the power of the mouth more than anything else. When nothing was going in, volumes were coming out," he explained. Thatcher's interjections are the only times Hunger refers to the ethnic and religious struggles behind the IRA imprisonments and hunger strike.

Shying away from the political, conflict initially revolves around guards and prisoners in Her Majesty's Prison Maze, and brutally so. Inmates are pushed, dragged and clubbed down the block's narrow halls, dunked in ice-cold water and anally probed during contraband searches. It's in one of these sequences that we first meet Sands. Beaten to a pulp, lying naked and supine with his glazed eyes staring at the camera, the audience wonders what further debasement could possibly await him.

Physical abuse gives way to intellectual and spiritual debate in the film's crackling centerpiece. Sands summons a priest to announce his plans for the strike. Over twenty minutes (interrupted by only two cuts) the pair veers between the mundane ("Better than smoking the Bible, ay," the priest asks while Sands enjoys a rare tobacco cigarette instead of his usual substitute, a shredded page from the Book of Lamentations) and the profound. Father Moran points out the futility of the plan and the damage, including Sands' son, it will leave in its wake, but stubborn Irish resolve prevails. "I don't think I'll be seeing you again, Bobby," he concedes.

McQueen saves his most devastating work for the film's final third, which witnesses Bobby's prolonged disintegration. The director said he envisioned Hunger as a silent movie; this act is largely free of dialogue. Instead the viewer observes Bobby's oozing sores, protruding ribs and bloody bowel movements in blue-toned, almost clinical close-up. The intimate, sustained portrayal of Bobby's decline (he died after 66 days; ten fellow strikers followed) avoids fetishism only because of the profound context of dehumanization the films has established—witness a split screen shot of a lone guard sobbing as his peers partake in savage beatings for proof that degradation extends beyond the prisoners.

Hunger's bleak themes and solemn imagery, coupled with the director's video-artist background, distinguish it from standard cinematic fare. But McQueen corrected an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q&A who called it "a work of art." "I want everyone to look at this as a feature film," he said. Veering between lyrical beauty (flashbacks of a young Bobby running through a meadow punctuate his deathbed scenes) and stark decay, Hunger qualifies as both.

Screengrab Review: "Hunger"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The first thing that may strike you as you watch Hunger, British director Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 "dirty strike" and subsequent hunger strikes by IRA members locked up in Maze Prison that ended with ten deaths by starvation, is how aware you of the physicality of the bodies onscreen. You don't have to see a hell of a lot of movies before you become accustomed to the people on screen lacking the weight and gravity of real human beings, and stop thinking of them as being composed of flesh and blood and having nerve endings. That's just a natural consequence of seeing so many films where the people are basically props, and where the heroes can stoically bounce back from any amount of punishment. Somehow McQueen, a gallery artist with extensive filmmaking experience who's making his debut here as a director of features meant for theatrical release, rights the balance, keeping you conscious of the characters' physical powers and limitations, and the effect is disorienting and not a little subversive. It's also harrowing, because Hunger is a movie in which just about everything those bodies experience is unpleasant.

The long, mostly wordless first section of the movie is a visceral evocation of prison conditions, made all the worse by the strikers' decision to try to punish their captors by making their day-to-day existence as bestial as possible. Refusing to wear prison uniforms because they reject being classified as criminals rather than prisoners of war, the IRA men are herded into their cells naked, where they store up their urine to pour under the doors of their cells; one man paints his wall with feces. The movie's nominal hero, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), has his biggest scene in this section when he resists the guards who are out to cut his shaggy hair and beard and gets into an altercation with a guard (Stuart Graham) who responds in kind after Sands throws a punch at him. It all builds to a scene in which the prison is invaded by the riot squad, who stir up a hellish cacophony banging on their shields with their batons and then use the batons to bang on the prisoners as the prisoners are pulled from their cells and made to run the gauntlet. This is a brilliant, radical piece of filmmaking, and it probably goes on for just about as long as most viewers would be able to take it. ("Most" does not mean the same as "all", and there were a few walkouts during the first half hour when I saw the movie.)

In the brief second act, McQueen shifts gears. This section is a conversation between Fassbender's Bobby Sands and a priest, played by Liam Cunningham, that begins with a single seventeen-make take as the to men lob misdirection and ethical arguments across a table. Whatever this scene introduces into the movie, it's not the feel of real life. Just the opposite: it's a theatrically heightened exchange that may have grown all the more actorish as the Fassbender and Cunningham worked together to make sure they had their lines down so as not to blow the take. (The two of them reportedly moved in together for a while so they could rehearse a dozen times a day.) But after the lack of dialogue in the first act, one latches onto it gratefully. It's there to give Sands a chance to explain his strategy--the hunger strikers begin fasting days apart from each other, so that instead of one big splash in the newspapers, there'll be a steady chain of new martyrs--and argue about the morality of what they're doing. The priest argues that what Sands and his comrades are planning is suicide, plain and simple; he doesn't make much of an effort to argue that, as IRA soldiers, they're already part of an organization devoted to immoral terrorist activity, or that by turning themselves into poster children for the cause they're encouraging more violence, which may have be a key to what makes the film as problematic as it is remarkable, especially when (to my mind) it goes off the rails in the final act.

The last part of the movie is, basically, a death watch. Words dry up again and the csmera looks on as Sands slowly wastes away. He lies in bed looking emaciated, rises and struggles to bathe himself, is visited by a doctor who apparently confirms that he's healthy for a dying man, and goes back to silently wasting away. Fassbender lost forty pounds for this section, and it's painful to watch him here, as it was to watch Christian Bale after he'd starved himself to a skeletal condition in The Machinist. He doesn't have to go through the exertions that Bale did, but once again, McQueen's special focus on the limitations and vulnerabilities of the suffering human body makes you intensely aware of the effort it takes for him just to climb into a tub. I'm never entirely comfortable with this sort of self-mutilation passing for acting, and it's all the more queasy-making here for the way that the movie seems to be nominating Sands for sainthood. The light he's bathed in signals "religious experience"; the near-death flashback to his childhood links his final moments to a story about how, as a boy, he took on the role of scapegoat for those he saw as his brothers. In a recent New York Times interview, McQueen specifically dismissed the idea that the sequence turns Sands into a Jesus figure, saying that " “It’s a naked skinny guy dying — sort of unavoidable. People mythologize it because that’s easier to digest.”

Such statements seem disingenuous, and so does the film's claim to be apolitical. It's an open question whether it's a good idea to make an apolitical film about the death of a terrorist, but for much of Hunger's running time, McQueen succeeds in making it so strong an evocation of pure, painful experience that it can't be easily shrugged off. But are these entirely aesthetic choices, or are they to some extent politically motivated? Are the dialogue sections that deal with Sands's choices about how he's lived his life and fought for what he believes in limited to the argument of whether he has the right to kill himself because audiences might find him less appealing, in a non-threatening rebel way, if he also explained why he thinks his organization has the right to carry out bombings and assassinations? The guard who bloodies Sands up while in the course of barbering him is killed by IRA gunmen while paying a visit to his senile mother in a rest home; maybe this scene is meant to be appalling, but in context, it looks a little like a bullying cop getting what's coming to him. One of the few voices we hear in the opening section is that of Margaret Thatcher, droning on in her sneer of a voice about her refusal to negotiate with the striking prisoners. It's hard to believe that McQueen thinks that playing that voice on the soundtrack, and contrasting it with the prisoners' noble silence, won't automatically get a lot of people on the prisoners' side.

Much of Hunger counts as an extraordinary experience. In its totality, it stands as a warning about the limits of reducing complicated moral and political issues to "experience": whether McQueen admits it or not, his omission of a fuller historical context turns this into a story about men punishing themselves for what they believe in. You may have to be quite the abstractionist to buy into the idea that what they believe in isn't important, and you'd have to be more naive than McQueen might plausibly be not to see that it's almost implicit in the scheme of things that the cowering, naked prisoners must be right and the baton-waving officers who represent the government led by the woman with the Wicked Witch voice must be wrong. It's not the movie's choice of sides that bothers me; it's the way that it presents itself as being above taking sides while it's clearly doing just that. And it punishes the audience (and trashes the issues it raises) in the last section; the transmutation of Bobby Sands into a plaster saint is a conceit unworthy of the artist that McQueen shows himself capable of being earlier in the movie. In a movie culture starved for real daring, Hunger is a real achievement and not to be missed. But it's also not to be swallowed whole.

Related: Trailer Review: Hunger

Unwatchable Recap: 81-90

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Welcome back to the Unwatchable Halftime Report. We’re getting ready to tackle the 50 worst movies the Internet Movie Database has to offer, but before we get there, let’s take a little breather and survey the wreckage we’ve left in our path. Yesterday we checked out Unwatchables 91-100, so let’s move on up to the next ten.

90. The Bat People. “If The Bat People is notable at all (hint: it’s not), it’s as one of makeup guru Stan Winston’s earliest efforts, though I suspect he’d leave it off his resume if the IMDb didn’t exist. When we finally get a full view of the transformed John, he looks less like a bat than an extra who stole a mask from the set of the Planet of the Apes TV series.”

89. Bloodlust! “The exclamation point means extra thrills! At least, I wish it did.”

88. College Road Trip. “Fathers, it’s not a good idea to sneak into the sorority house where your daughter is staying and hide under her bed. In fact, it’s a good way to get tazed. And young ladies, if your dad hides under your bed, that just means he loves you. But not in a creepy way. Really.”

87. The Sidehackers. “Vince Rommel (gravel-throated biker movie stalwart Ross Hagen, a poor man’s Steve McQueen) is the king of the sidehacking, “a new and exciting sport filled with thrills and spills you’ve never seen before.” And after you’ve watched The Sidehackers, you still haven’t seen them, despite the copious footage on display. Many minutes of sidehacking are presented for our consideration, none of them exciting in any way.”

86. Hobgoblins. “We’ve all heard of doing more with less, but somehow Sloane has managed to do less with less; if he spent any more on Hobgoblins than I spent on lunch today, he didn’t get his money’s worth.”

85. Battlefield Earth. “For a while, we were all so happy for Travolta and his big screen comeback. By the time Battlefield Earth rolled out, there probably wasn’t a person left on the planet who was still happy for him besides his agent.”

84. It’s Pat. “The premise was so thin that the true joke of the sketch quickly became: Can you believe we’re doing this fucking Pat sketch again? So it’s no wonder that the 1994 feature film version became a punch line long before it was given its belated, limited…I hate to even call it a ‘release.’ More of a parole, really.”

83. First Sunday. “The only point of interest is the flamboyant choir director played by Katt Williams, who walks a fine line between mincing gay stereotype and recently arrived space alien.”

82. American Soldiers. “Your old-timey war movies may have been cliché-ridden, but at least you could count on some reliable caricatures like Brooklyn, Country, Mad Dog, Four Eyes, Mama’s Boy and Sarge to help you tell the members of the unit apart. Here you have Sarge, and I think there’s another Sarge, and definitely a medic called Doc and then a bunch of beefy guys with very few acting credits among them. One of the Sarges spends most of the movie in a stretcher, so I was able to keep track of him pretty well.”

81. Soccer Dog: The Movie. “There’s a million family flicks like this – in fact, there’s a whole subgenre of “dogs playing sports” movies like Air Bud and its sequels, and even a Soccer Dog sequel, European Cup. (There’s also the baseball-playing monkey movie Ed, but I have a feeling we’ll be getting to that eventually.)”

91-100

Trailer Review: Hunger

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Steve McQueen’s debut feature has been getting raves ever since it first premiered at Cannes last year, where it took home the Camera d’Or. Since then, the film has built up sizable word of mouth among serious critical types, not only for its unflinching portrayal of the 1981 hunger strike by imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands (which would surely explain why Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions is distributing), but also for the artistic rigor which McQueen brings to the film. Visual-artists-turned-directors have a somewhat spotty record, but word is that McQueen’s work is closer, quality-wise, to Julian Schnabel than, say, David Salle. Overall, I’m pretty taken with this trailer, not only for its imagery but likewise for its minimalist score, perhaps the best example I’ve seen since Eyes Wide Shut. I’ll finally have the chance to see the film later this spring, but this trailer has racheted up my anticipation for the movie itself.

Morning Deal Report: The A-Team and Lara Croft Report For Duty

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

So there I was getting all worked up over the notion of a Bonnie and Clyde remake starring Hilary Duff, and right behind my back Joe Carnahan and Ridley Scott were putting together a big-screen version of The A-Team. “Fox has struggled to find a way to exploit the branded TV show while avoiding the series' campy tone,” Variety reports, and if that doesn’t get your hopes up, nothing will. “Carnahan and the Scott brothers say they will use the original premise of the series as the template for an action film. In the original, four Vietnam vets convicted of armed robbery escape from military prison and became do-gooder mercenaries. The Middle East will replace Vietnam as the place the four did their tour of duty, but Carnahan said the origin story is the jumping-off point.” Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about that – I’m waiting for Dirk Benedict to tell me.

I guess the only thing that would top that would be another Lara Croft movie. But that will never happen, right? Right? “Warners Bros. and producer Dan Lin are in early development on a a reboot of Tomb Raider, the popular video game action franchise,” per The Hollywood Report. “The new project, however, is expected to revamp the character and her mission and bear little resemblance to the original pictures. It will reimagine the origins of the character, her love interest and the main villain.” That means no Angelina Jolie, kiddies.

What do Truman Capote and Steve McQueen have in common? Dueling biopics, of course. We already told you about this one, but now “producer David Foster (The Mask of Zorro) unveiled plans that he is spearheading a project based on a memoir penned by McQueen's first wife, Neile McQueen Toffel,” Variety reports.

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Morning Deal Report: Jackie Chan Kicks Around “Karate Kid”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We already knew a Karate Kid remake was in the works, with Will Smith’s son Jaden set for the lead role. Now it looks as if the new Kid has his Mr. Miyagi – and, really, could it be anyone other than Jackie Chan? The Hollywood Reporter confirms that Chan is in negotiations to take on the role “made famous by Pat Morita in the original franchise…Like the original, which starred Morita and Ralph Macchio, the movie will examine the relationship between a martial arts expert and a boy who is picked on by bullies.”

Speaking of remakes, here’s one of the more bizarre Variety stories in a while. It’s not that I’m surprised to read that “Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer have set John Adams helmer Tom Hooper to direct and Christopher Hampton to write East of Eden, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel.” No, what surprises me is that nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a rather famous adaptation of this novel already exists. James Dean? Elia Kazan? Do these names ring a bell? Instead, Variety notes that “U and Imagine first optioned Steinbeck's book in 2004, when it shot to the top of the bestseller lists right after Oprah Winfrey chose it as the first selection when she revived her book club.” OK, so it took Oprah to bring this obscure work to their attention. Gotcha.

A Steve McQueen biopic is on the way, based on the book Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, which “delves into McQueen's offscreen penchant for motorcycles, fast cars and drugs. Project will examine his three marriages, including his stormy relationship with Ali McGraw, as well as his battle against lung cancer,” Variety reports.

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Robert Mulligan, 1925-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

The Hollywood director Robert Mulligan died yesterday at the age of 83. After attending Fordham University and serving with the Marines in World War II, Mulligan broke into directing for television, working his way up from a job as messenger boy. During the era of live TV plays, he directed such notable broadcasts as Gore Vidal's 1954 adaptation of William Faulkner's Barn Burning; Vidal's The Death of Billy the Kid starring Paul Newman, which would provide the basis for the Arthur Penn movie The Left-Handed Gun, also with Newman; the 1955 A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, starring Sidney Poitier; and, in 1959, The Moon and Sixpence, which marked the first of Laurence Olivier's rare appearances on American TV. (Both Mulligan and Olivier won Emmys for it.) By then, Mulligan had already made the leap to feature films with the 1957 Fear Strikes Out, a biopic starring Anthony Perkins as the emotionally troubled baseball player player Jimmy Piersall. That success helped established his reputation as a gifted director with actors who could apply a delicate hand to sensitive material.

Those virtues would come in handy with Mulligan's best-remembered film, the 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird. Staging Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Mulligan had to deal not only with the racially charged material but with then challenges presented by using child actors at the center of the production and trying to convey that the story was unfolding as filtered through the eyes and memories of the six-year-old Scout (played by Mary Badham). The project could have easily ended in disaster, but instead it wound up as one of those movies now seems to have been made for the express purpose of showing up on AFI lists: it made it to #25 on the Institute's list of greatest American movies, and to #1 on their list of courtroom dramas. The movie's star, Gregory Peck, won the Academy Award for playing a character, Atticus Finch, was selected by the AFI as "the greatest hero of American film." The performance, which inspired Harper Lee (who based the character of Atticus on her father) to say of Peck that ""Atticus Finch gave him an opportunity to play himself," gave the actor a Lincolnesque aura for the rest of his life and career. The movie is also notable for including the screen debut of Robert Duvall as the brain-damaged redneck boogeyman Boo Radley, a character that Duvall, lucky for him, was able to step away from in later roles.

Nothing else Mulligan did would loom as large in film culture, He made Love with the Proper Stranger and Baby the Rain Must Fall with Steve McQueen, who he had directed for TV in the Studio One drama The Defenders; the high-pitched Hollywood expose Inside Daisy Clover, with Natalie Wood; Up the Down Staircase, starring Sandy Dennis as a young teacher in a violent New York high school; and the 1969 Western thriller The Stalking Moon, which reunited him with Gregory Peck. He had a big, unexpected hit with the nostalgic Summer of '42, a big make-out movie in the spring of '71. But his other work in the '70s and '80s mostly left the impression that material suited to his gentle touch was getting harder and harder to find. He retired after 1991's The Man in the Moon, one more love story about coming of age in an earlier, presumably simpler time and place, noteworthy as the film debut of Reese Witherspoon.

Set Your DVR!: November 17 - 24, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

My infant daughter has been sick this weekend, and I'm not feeling too great myself. So this may be the most slapdashed, pithy-free column yet. Keep those expectations low! Adam Christ asked last week about setting up an online movie discussion based on one of the flicks I mention in this column. I don't have an answer for him, but I promise to figure it out soon. Anyway, here's what I like this week. As always, be sure to mention any glaring omissions in the comments thread and I'll edit the column to add your recommendation.

Mon, Nov 17:

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am). By god, what a great movie.

Tues, Nov 18:

3:30/4:30 am: The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit on AMC. Quite a contrast from Mad Men, but it should provide a little something to help tide us over.

5:05/6:05 am: Incident at Loch Ness on IFC (repeat at 10:15/11:15 am and 3:25/4:25 pm). This is not a great or even good movie. But it is rather fun to watch Werner Herzog parody himself.

5:15/6:15 pm: Ride The High Country on TCM. One of my all-time favorite films, this is the first movie Sam Peckinpah directed that's really a Peckinpah movie. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, two actors a little past their sell-by date, are perfectly cast as Old West gunfighters in a similar autumnal period of their lives. There's a fascinating shift in tone about halfway into the movie. I don't mean to detract from the first half when I say that it has that slight remove from reality that's not too unfamiliar to fans of earlier Westerns, especially those of John Ford and Anthony Mann. The cowboys may be tough, but they're pretty clean and well-spoken. At the halfway point, the action moves to a rough mining camp, which shepherds a more realistic look at the past: grimy, ugly, amoral. Westerns would never be the same.

7/8 pm: To Have And Have Not on TCM. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone loves Bogey & Bacall.

10:30/11:30 pm: Top Hat on TCM. Astaire. Rogers. You know the score.

Wed, Nov 19:

5/6 am Burden of Dreams on IFC (repeat at 12:35/1:35 pm). Brilliant documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo.

9:15/10:15 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 3:45/4:45 pm).

5:35/6:35 pm: Ride With The Devil on IFC (repeat 11/20 at 4/5 am).

10:05/11:05 pm: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat on 11/20 at 2:05/3:05 am).

Thurs, Nov 20:

12:45/1:45 am: Sunrise on TCM. One of the greatest film of the silent era. I was fortunate enough a few weeks ago to catch a showing of this in a friend's film class with a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20s. I was a little worried that some of the kookier silent movie tropes would lose the audience, but I was dead wrong. They loved it. It's a loveable movie.

8/9 am: Duel on CHILLER (repeat on 11/21 at 2/3 am). Spielberg's first film.

9:45/10:45 am: The Cars That Ate Paris (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). An oddball film from early in Peter Weir's career about a town that bolsters its income by causing horrendous car accidents.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. This is the Lon Chaney version.

Fri, Nov 21:

1/2 am: Citizen Kane on TCM. I don't know if you've ever heard of this film, but it apparently has some sort of reputation.

3:15/4:15 am: The Stranger on TCM. Orson Welles' most conventionally-directed movie.

8:45/9:45 am: High and Low on IFC (repeat at 3/4 pm). Kurosawa and Mifune do crime drama. Their best movie that doesn't involve samurais.

11 am/12 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC.

Sat, Nov 22:

3:45/4:45 am: Die, Monster, Die! on TCM. In Germany, this is The Monster, The!

7/8 am: The Sword of Doom on IFC. One of the finest samurai movies that wasn't directed by Akira Kurosawa.

4:45/5:45 pm: Vertigo on TCM. I'm breaking my no-Hitchcock rule again. But no matter however long it's been since you last saw this, it's been too long.

Sun, Nov 23:

5/6 am: Bend of the River on AMC. Mann/Stewart Western.

5/6 am: A Night In Casablanca on TCM. Marx Brothers.

1/2 pm: The Thomas Crown Affair on TCM. Steve McQueen!

Mon, Nov 24:

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat 11/25 at 12/1 am). John Hillcoat's Aussie Western.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

BURT REYNOLDS (1936 - )

It may be hard for you young whippersnappers to believe, but 30 years ago, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. He'd be the first to admit that his career management skills were never a match for his good ol' boy charisma and winking, bubblegum-popping likability – in fact, he's practically made a second career out of admitting it. His forgettable early career in television and B-movies (Navajo Joe, anyone?) isn't what convinced John Boorman to cast Reynolds in his breakthrough role in Deliverance; rather, it was his easy command of the Carson panel as a guest host of The Tonight Show that led to his star-making turn as Lewis Medlock. His Southern charm and Marlboro Man looks led to a series of redneck roles, from White Lightning to Smokey and the Bandit, which became the second-highest grossing movie of 1977, behind only Star Wars. Reynolds went to that well a few times too many, famously turning down Terms of Endearment to reteam with hick flickster Hal Needham for Stroker Ace. His career never came close to returning to the heights of Smokey, but he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Boogie Nights. True to form, he fired his agent after seeing the rough cut, fearing his career was ruined…and then when the movie instead revived his career, he squandered the comeback opportunity by going right back to making crap again.

STEVE McQUEEN (1930-1980)

Steve McQueen's best-known roles didn't require him to do much other than be Steve McQueen, but really, who cares? A lot of leading men coast by on personal charm; that's sorta what people like about them. And the thing that made Steve McQueen popular had nothing to do with his acting chops and everything to do with how fucking cool Steve McQueen was. He was so cool that just typing his name over and over again makes me feel cooler. So he made himself a star by stealing The Magnificent Seven from bigger-name actors, just by being cool. He convinced John Sturges to put a motorcycle chase into The Great Escape, because motorcycle chases were cool, and he was Steve McQueen, dammit. He effortlessly makes The Thomas Crown Affair a fun movie to watch. And Bullitt, man! There's nothing even approaching acting in that movie, but McQueen just kills. I think people were surprised when it turned out that McQueen could act after all. His roles in Junior Bonner and Papillon called on him to do something with all that legendary cool, and McQueen delivered in spades. He wasn't so great in The Getaway, and no one got out of The Towering Inferno without some stink. He made only a few more movies before his all-too-early death in 1980. But he left a legacy of untouchable cool backed by unsuspected competence that's unique among actors too fucking cool to break a sweat while making something as inconsequential as a movie.

HARRISON FORD (1942 - )

For a lesson in the importance of Leading Man star power, one need look no further than the disparity between the first Star Wars trilogy and the second. Sure, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith had shinier special effects, and Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and even Hayden Christensen have all been known to deliver fine acting performances (albeit in non-green screen environments)...but Ford managed to bring a recognizably human heart to his half of the trilogy despite the hokey dialogue and distracting special effects, and then he went on to prove his Leading Man status in all the Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan and other ‘80s and ‘90s tentpole action flicks that followed. For some, none of Ford’s films matter as much as the cult classic Blade Runner, and his female fan base may have a particular soft spot for Witness or Working Girl...but Ford’s inability to expand his range much beyond the action genre (despite interesting against-type anomalies like The Mosquito Coast, What Lies Beneath and “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck”) keeps him batting clean-up the Honorable Mention list rather than enshrined in our Top 25.

WILLIAM POWELL (1892-1984)

In the days when Americans still dreamed of embodying classy sophistication, before we all started hating elitists and shooting wolves from helicopters, Powell was as classy as you could get without actually turning English. Of all the homegrown American stars of his day, he may be the one who it's hardest to imagine doing time in a Western between trips to Manhattan. He was built to swill cocktails and trade wisecracks, but his eyelids, which he kept permanently at half-mast, signaled that he was dangerously close to becoming jaded. The only solution was for him to find the perfect woman and verbal sparring partner -- you didn't want him turning cold and becoming one of those rich rotters, but you also didn't want him coming after your girlfriend or sister. So when Powell met Myrna Loy for the first time on-screen, the nation must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. He had co-starred with other actresses, notably Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, and he also had a well-known off-screen connection to Jean Harlow before she died, but his partnership with Loy struck so many people as so ineffably perfect (like picking up the paper to see if your favorite wastrel buddy from college had been forced into rehab yet and discovering instead that he'd married the first duchess to be crowned Playmate of the Year) that they wound up doing fourteen pictures together, including six installments of the Thin Man series. (Their first co-starring gig, which was released the same year as The Thin Man, was Manhattan Melodrama, in which Powell, as a politically ambitious D.A., marries Loy after Clark Gable, who plays a gangster, has had his fun with her; at the end, Gable winds up happily going to the electric chair after whacking Powell's crooked rival, because he isn't about to stand by and see his beloved New York denied having such a handsome-looking couple make it to the Governor's mansion. Manhattan Melodrama now has its place in history as the movie that John Dillinger was watching just before G-men mowed him down as he was leaving the theater. I'll bet he had a good time.) After supporting Henry Fonda in the 1955 Mister Roberts, Powell retired and stayed that way, for almost thirty years, until his death at 91.

CHOW YUN-FAT (1955 - )

Chow was being called things like "the most photogenic man alive" and "the coolest actor in the world" when his movies were still available only to American movie fans who lived in cities with significant Chinatown districts. As it is, the pull of his image had a awful lot to do with the craze for Hong Kong movies that started among Western film geeks in the late 1980s and would lead to Hollywood trying to buy up most of the hottest Chinese directors. But John Woo, who made Chow a star with the 1986 A Better Tomorrow and then made him the sort of figure for whom words such as "star" seem inadequate with The Killer, Once a Thief, and Hard-Boiled, has yet to do anything as good in Hollywood as his early work, and while there are many factors that might help explain this, the failure of his American films to include footage of Chow's face is one that should not be underestimated. Chow himself has taken to focusing on the great dream of cracking the American market, haltingly and with some very strange results: his role in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie was scissored by officials in his home country who felt that the characterization was "in line with Hollywood’s old tradition of demonizing the Chinese." At 55, Chow could probably benefit from finding a new stage to sustain his career a while longer. If he does, some of us won't care if it means that he's doing his acting while speaking phonetically-learned Portuguese.

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI (1924-1996)

For most of his long career, and even now, years after his death, Mastroianni was probably the best-known internationally of all Italian movie stars, and indeed, he did seem to have the field pretty well covered. He achieved great popular success in comedies such as Big Deal on Madonna Street and Divorce, Italian Style, but he also happened to arrive in time to embody the tortured-artist/modern man figure that was so important to such directors as Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2), Antonioni (La Notte), and Visconti (The Stranger). Though he gave handsome bearing and weight to these iconic roles, he usually seemed happiest playing ordinary men cast into remarkable circumstances that throw their frailties and limitations into sharp relief. At the very end of his career, when he was in his seventies, he worked with such veteran avant-garde directors as Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death) and the ninety-ish Manoel de Oliveira (Voyage to the Beginning of the World), as if he were still hoping to learn from those odder and even older than himself. His experiences in English-language pictures -- John Boorman's Leo the Last, Robert Altman's Ready to Wear -- were few and far between and not particularly successful, but he did once send a shout-out to his American fans by appearing on an episode of Laugh-In and giving the camera his best soulful, romantic look while ripping off his toupee.

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

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Summer of ’78: “The Driver”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Driver

Release Date: July 28, 1978*

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley

The Buzz: It’s Barry Lyndon going really fast!

Keywords: Car Chase, Parking Garage, Existentialism, Pursuit, Neo Noir

The Plot: Ryan O’Neal is the titular Driver, the consummate wheelman. Bruce Dern is the Detective determined to bring him down. Isabelle Adjani is the Player, a gambler who sees the Driver’s face after a casino robbery and is brought in for questioning by the Detective. She has been paid off, however, and refuses to identify the Driver. Since he’s played by Bruce Dern, the Detective is not a by-the-book kind of guy. He sets up his own bank robbery, using two lowlifes (Glasses and Teeth) facing 10 years in prison as bait. Although he knows the Detective is onto him, the Driver wants to beat him at his own game. Car chases result. Lots of car chases. In the end, it appears the Detective has caught the Driver holding the bag, but it turns out that both men have been duped by a low-level money launderer. This is perhaps what makes the film existential, in addition to the fact that none of the characters have names and nobody besides Dern talks much.

The Test of Time: I’m surprised at myself. As a fan of car movies, '70s cinema and Walter Hill’s pre-Streets of Fire oeuvre, I really should have seen The Driver long before now. Forget about the so-called “existential” stuff; it was all cribbed from Two Lane Blacktop anyway. Walter Hill is a man of action, and he delivers some top-notch car chases here. The first one, in which the steel-nerved Driver manages to plow half a dozen cop cars into walls or over embankments, may be the best. The camera is placed right up front, either on the hood or in the front seat, and the chase unfolds in long takes – you know, so you can actually see what’s going on. (Hello, Michael Bay and company? Hello? Is this on?) My favorite scene, however (which you can watch in the clip below), is O’Neal’s “audition” for the lowlifes, in which he chauffeurs them around a parking garage, reducing their car to scrap metal in the process – then tells them he’s not going to work for them anyway. Hill uses O’Neal’s blankness to his advantage, but I couldn’t help but think as I watched it that this was a movie made for Steve McQueen. (Sure enough, checking Wikipedia this morning I see that was the plan.) Dern is very Dern, and Adjani is eye-catching, although in her first English-speaking role she matches O’Neal in the monotone department. The only real groaner comes near the end, when Dern and about 20 cops somehow materialize behind the ever-cautious and prepared O’Neal in a bus terminal, but The Driver is still a worthy entry in the annals of four-wheeled cinema.

Quotable Quote: “That's a real sad song. Only trouble is, sad songs ain't selling this year.”

2008 Equivalent: The best bet for automotive mayhem is, unfortunately, Death Race.

*Perhaps you are wondering why we’re still in July of 1978. Go check the IMDb for August 1978 releases and you’ll learn, as I have, that there aren’t many. You may think late summer is a cinematic dead zone now, but compared to ’78, it’s an embarrassment of riches. I did have plans to do Interiors (released August 2, 1978), but it was covered in last week’s 15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed by Someone Else list. (That’s fine by me, as I was spared having to sit through Interiors again.) But rest easy, for next week we’ll have a genuine August release to enjoy.

Previously on Summer of '78: Hooper

Unwatchable #87: "The Sidehackers"

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

The eagle-eyed and mathematically inclined among you may have noticed that we’ve skipped from #89 to #87 in our little survey of the shittiest. The reason is simple: #88 on the list is the 2008 Martin Lawrence comedy College Road Trip, which will not be released on DVD until next month. Since I somehow managed to miss its theatrical run, we'll catch up with it later. For now we’ll move on to 1969’s The Sidehackers, which proves to be a change of pace from the mutant insects and quicksand-ridden islands we’ve been dealing with lately.

What, you may ask, is a sidehacker? Well, silly, a sidehacker is one who sidehacks! And what is sidehacking? Apparently it’s a form of motorcycle racing that may or may not have actually existed at one point. It involves a metal bar and platform extending from the right side of a motorcycle, upon which a passenger rides. This passenger is responsible for leaning into turns and providing extra torque, if I am using the turn correctly. And if I’m not, who gives a crap, since I’m still not convinced sidehacking is or ever was a real thing. Granted, the opening credits give special thanks to the Southern California Side-Hack Association, but that group appears to be defunct at best, if my rudimentary research is any indication. If any current or former members of the Association would like to dispel my skepticism, feel free to post a comment. Anyway, Vince Rommel (gravel-throated biker movie stalwart Ross Hagen, a poor man’s Steve McQueen) is the king of the sidehacking, “a new and exciting sport filled with thrills and spills you’ve never seen before.” And after you’ve watched The Sidehackers, you still haven’t seen them, despite the copious footage on display. Many minutes of sidehacking are presented for our consideration, none of them exciting in any way.

It doesn’t matter much, because sidehacking virtually disappears from the movie once the plot machinations kick into gear. It seems that J.C. (Michael Pataki, who diligent Unwatchable fans may remember as Sgt. Ward from The Bat People and culture mavens everywhere will recall as George Liquor from Ren and Stimpy), a mincing, shiny-shirted biker, would like to recruit Rommel for his touring motorcycle act. Rommel isn’t interested in J.C.’s offer, nor does he comply with J.C.’s girlfriend Paisley’s desire for a roll in the hay. The jilted Paisley gets back at him by making J.C. believe that Rommel raped her. J.C. responds by raping and killing Rommel’s girl Rita. So I gather, anyway; I didn’t see this happen because The Sidehackers is one of those movies I couldn’t find in any form other than its Mystery Science Theater 3000 incarnation, which omits the crucial scene. Now, I can sort of understand this; it’s hard to have robots cracking wise over a rape-murder scene, although they don’t seem to have any problem later in the film when J.C. strangles Paisley to death. Again, though, the purity of the Unwatchable experiment has been tainted by these friggin’ robots.

The movie ends with a very 1969 showdown, in which Rommel shows mercy and lets J.C. live, and J.C. thanks him by shooting him in the back. Bummer, man.

Previously on Unwatchable:
89. Bloodlust!
90. The Bat People
91. Horrors of Spider Island
92. I Accuse My Parents
93. Howling III: The Marsupials

Cannes Rundown- The Winners!

Paul Clark — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:24:00 GMT

Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les Murs) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, an award that was bestowed on the film earlier today. A last-minute addition to this year’s Competition lineup, Cantet’s film took home the top prize in a year that saw a number of notable titles but no clear frontrunner. The Class was announced as a unanimous Palme winner, and was praised by jury president Sean Penn for its “generosity.”

Due to Penn’s political leanings, many predicted Steven Soderbergh’s Che to be a contender for the Palme, but the film had to make do with a Best Actor award for star Benicio Del Toro. Taking home Best Actress was Sandra Corveloni for Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ Linha de Passe.

Here’s the complete list of winners:

Palme d'Or: Entre Les Murs (The Class), directed by Laurent Cantet
Grand Prix (runner-up): Gomorra, directed by Matteo Garrone
Prix de la Mise en Scene (best director): Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys
Prix du Scenario (best screenplay): Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne for Le Silence de Lorna
Camera d'Or (best first feature): Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen
special mention: Ils mourront tous sauf moi, directed by Valeria Gai Guermanika
Prix du Jury (jury prize): Il Divo, directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Prix d'interpretation feminine (best actress): Sandra Corveloni for Linha de Passe
Prix d'interpretation masculine (best actor): Benicio del Toro for Che
Prix de 61st Festival de Cannes: Catherine Deneuve (Un Conte de noel) and Clint Eastwood (The Exchange)
Palme d'Or (short film): Metron, directed by Marian Crisan
special mention: Jerrycan, directed by Julius Avery

Two Controversial Homecomings

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Americans are often so wrapped up in the kind of navelgazing prompted by our own entertainment industry that we forget how foreign countries are more than just markets to which we can ship our films for extra box office juice. The history, culture and politics of every nation has a powerful effect on how they react to cinema, and two stories in the Guardian illustrate the continuing ability of film to heal old wounds -- or open them up again.

Polish director Andrzej Wadja already had built up a stellar reputation, and at age 80, seemed likely for a future when he would simply be remembered as one of the last of a well-regarded generation of Polish filmmakers. Wadja, however, isn't ready to bow out gracefully, and indeed, has very likely made the film that will be remembered as his greatest. Katyn, which tells the story of the massacre of over 20,000 Polish soldiers slaughtered by Soviet troops in the eary days of the Second World War, has already been hailed as a great cinematic acheivement, scoring an Oscar nomination and heaps of praise for its skill, emotion and uncompromising approach wherever it's played; but for Wadja, it was more than just an artistic endeavor. His father was one of an astonishing eight thousand Polish officers killed at Katyn, with an eye towards permanently crippling Poland's military class in order to preemptively shatter resistance to Soviet rule. The massacre has been hugely controversial since it first happened; the Nazis exploited it in order to portray themselves as an acceptable alternative to the Russians, the Russians themselves attempted to blame it on the Nazis and obfuscated its details for decades; and the Americans and British helped cover it up in order to preserve their wartime alliance with Russia. All of which begs the question, will Katyn play in Russia? Andrzek Wadja vows that it will, saying that while he has yet to find a distrubutor there, "the film is not against the Russian people. It is about the horrors of the Stalin regime. It is enormously important for this film to be shown in Russia if Polish-Russian relations in the 21st century are to be based in truth, not lies."

Closer to the Guardian's home, visual artist, Turner Prize winner, and no-relation-to-the-Great-Escape-star Steve McQueen is debuting Hunger, his dramatization of the death of notorious IRA political prisoner Bobby Sands during a hunger strike. Although early reports are that it's well-acted (with 300's Michael Fassbender as Sands) and inventively directed, the production -- partially funded by Channel 4 -- is already drawing detractors from all sides, many of whom haven't had a chance to see the film. Some IRA members, like Richard O'Rawe, the organization's press officer at the time, worry that the film doesn't show Sands' struggle in a greater contrast (Sands was a dedicated liberal who wanted to see a socialist Ireland). Others, like Jeffrey Donaldson, an Ulster Unionist MP, decries the whole notion of making such a film about the IRA, worrying that it's little more than glorifying terrorism. While it seems likely that the film is going to draw criticism from all sides of the issue, McQueen says there's no better time than now to make the film: when he begane working on it "at the beginning of 2003 there was no Iraq War, no Guantanamo Bay, no Abu Ghraib prison, but as time's gone by the parallels have become apparent. History repeats itself, lots of people have short memories and we need to remember that these kinds of things have happened in Britain."

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 3-9, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This was the week that was at the Screengrab:

We offered free career advice to the 21st century Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds.

We watched Nicolas Cage, Michael J. Fox and Bruce Willis debase themselves in the Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials.

We compared two versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, two versions of Lolita, and the two faces of Aaron Eckhart.

We climbed The Towering Inferno and floated down the Apocalypse Now river.

We saw a naked Bo Derek drenched in honey and milk in Bolero, the latest entry in the Unwatchable series of 100 worst movies ever.

We expressed concern for Christina Ricci, hailed Jonathan Pryce and looked forward to seeing Bardot’s ass in high definition.

We told you about the 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows and you told us we forgot about Serenity. Sorry about that.

And finally, we got sweet, sweet revenge.

What a week, no?

Yesterday's Hits: The Towering Inferno (1974, John Guillermin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For most movie lovers today, the idea of 1970s Hollywood conjures up an image of maverick filmmakers being given the keys to the castle. It was the era memorialized in histories like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when young turks like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg did some of their greatest and most famous work. But the truth was more complicated than that. Certainly, movies like The Godfather and Jaws were huge hits, but films of that caliber striking gold at the box office were the exception rather than the rule. Then as now, Hollywood has always been first and foremost in the business of churning out big, mindless spectacles, and the blockbuster of choice for many studios in the early 1970s was the disaster film. The biggest of them all was the highest-grossing film of 1974, The Towering Inferno.

What made The Towering Inferno a hit?: In the 1950s, a journalist named Irwin Allen decided to turn his lifelong love for movies into a career. After producing several documentaries and modest features, he turned his attentions to television throughout most of the 1960s, producing hit series like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Following the success of 1970’s Airport, Allen jumped on the disaster movie bandwagon by making the 1972 smash The Poseidon Adventure. Poseidon Adventure didn’t invent its genre, but it stood in contrast to other films of its kind by moving its central disaster closer to the beginning of the story and focusing instead on how its characters reacted to the disaster.

Allen rarely directed movies himself- The Towering Inferno was credited to John Guillermin, with Allen credited as the director of action sequences- but there was little doubt who was running the show. With The Towering Inferno, Allen more or less perfected the disaster movie formula- impressive effects, gigantic sets, and a sappy romantic ballad often performed by cheeseball chanteuse Maureen McGovern. Likewise, as with all of the most successful disaster movies, Allen gave The Towering Inferno the most stellar cast he could manage, top-lined by three of the era’s biggest stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway. In addition, he cast the key older characters in the film with old-guard Hollywood stars like William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. And what would a big-budget film of the period without such quintessentially seventies names as Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Susan Blakely, and Robert Vaughn? The formula worked- The Towering Inferno was produced for a then-outrageous sum of $14 million dollars, but it ended up grossing more than eight times that amount in America alone, and much more than that overseas.

What happened?: If history teaches us anything about genre moviemaking, it’s that moviegoers are a fickle bunch. The disaster movie was at its peak at the time of The Towering Inferno’s release, but that was about to change. Within the next few years, movies like Jaws and Star Wars gave audiences a new kind of thrill ride at the movies. In light of the lean, efficient nature of these movies, suddenly old-school disaster movies were a thing of the past, and The Towering Inferno, with its galaxy of stars and nearly three-hour run time, seemed stately by comparison. Allen himself couldn’t even resurrect the genre, closing out the decade with three consecutive flops (The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and When Time Ran Out) that pretty much closed the book on disaster movies for years.

Does The Towering Inferno still work?: Not really. If the movie was quaint in comparison to blockbusters made only a few years later, it’s practically a fossil by today’s standards. One of the most distracting elements of the movie is Allen’s tendency to focus on small and fairly cliché bits of character business. At the time, the sight of one or two big-name stars dying onscreen was something of a shock, but from the beginning it’s pretty clear which ones are destined not to survive until the end. Allen pretty clearly divides his principal cast into three groups- the good, the bad, and the doomed. While some people are resourceful enough to survive the tragedy, others clearly exist to be victims or to get their comeuppance in the end. So not only does the story feel safe and comfortable, but it also takes on an element of kitsch as we wait to see how certain characters will meet their ends.

Another problem with the film was its bloated 165-minute running time. You’d think that a movie about people escaping from a fire would be fairly simple narratively-speaking, but there’s so much incident in The Towering Inferno that it overwhelms everything else. The film had its origins in two similar skyscraper-on-fire novels, The Tower and The Glass Inferno, and rather than judiciously cherry-picking elements from both books, Allen had Sterling Silliphant combine the stories of the two books and take the seven principal characters from each. As a result, the movie feels needlessly busy, forever cross-cutting between groups of characters as they attempt to escape the blaze. Some of the actors make an impression- Newman has an effortless authority in his scenes, and Fred Astaire gets a few nice moments- but most of them are lost in the shuffle.

And then there’s Steve McQueen. Arguably the biggest action star of the day, McQueen was cast early in the production and then proceeded to throw his weight around. After being cast as the heroic architect Doug, he decided that he preferred to play fire chief O’Hallorhan. Then, after Newman was cast as Doug, McQueen insisted his role be given equal weight as Newman’s. McQueen was to have exactly the same number of lines as Newman, and their roughly equal star stature necessitated the pioneering use of what was called “diagonal billing.” All of these headaches might have been worth it if McQueen was on top of his game, but he’s mostly on autopilot throughout the film, giving one of his laziest performances. The point of casting a star of McQueen’s caliber is for the audience to care about his character, but whenever he’s onscreen, I was mostly just anxious for Newman and Dunaway (then at the peak of her gorgeousness) to show up again.

Ever since Allen’s reign as the “Master of Disaster”, Hollywood has made several attempts to resurrect the disaster genre. But despite the best efforts of filmmakers like Roland Emmerich, the genre hasn’t caught on. CGI has made effects cheaper and easier to create than ever before, but just as key to The Towering Inferno’s popularity was its all-star cast, and the cost of such a cast today would be astronomical, and a huge gamble at a time when the importance of movie stars seems particularly questionable. The heyday for movies like The Towering Inferno has long since passed, and it looks like audiences will never love a movie like this again.

Original vs. Remake: The Thomas Crown Affair

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:30:00 GMT

So, a few months ago, my wife rearranged our Netflix queue in chronological order, from the dawn of cinema (circa Intolerance) to the present. And, despite the regrettable consequence that it will now be many, many weeks before Bubba Ho-Tep arrives on our doorstep, the experiment has resulted in a fairly interesting history of filmmaking, from silents to the French New Wave and beyond.

We’ve only just reached Norman Jewison’s 1968 hipster heist flick The Thomas Crown Affair, setting the stage for a little mano-a-mano tag-team compare-and-contrast between the original (starring Steve McQueen as the titular playboy thief and Faye Dunaway as a sexy insurance investigator) and the 1999 John McTiernan remake starring Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo.

So which version takes "the crown"? Let’s check the scorecard!

POINTS FOR STYLE

Glossy 1990s production values are no match for the split-screens, miniskirts and go-go glamour of 1968. Plus, the Original was filmed on location in Boston, as opposed to (yawn) Manhattan. Advantage: Original.

SOUNDTRACK

The Original swings with groovy cocktail music and xylophones, though both versions are saddled with the dopey, annoying theme song, “The Windmills of Your Mind” (performed by Sting in the ‘90s and Anthony Newley wannabe Noel Harrison in the ‘60s)...but the Pierce Brosnan version features a final heist scored to Nina Simone’s insanely awesome “Sinnerman,” so there’s really no contest. Advantage: Remake.

HERO

Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown is considerably more likeable than his 1968 counterpart, and Steve McQueen’s performance is marred by repeated spasms of unnerving fake laughter, but c’mon. He’s friggin’ Steve McQueen. Advantage: Original.

EYE CANDY

Faye Dunaway is certainly an iconic presence, with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, but does she dance a bra-less tango in a sparkly see-through dress? No...she just fondles chess pieces and licks her flesh-colored nails. Which is also kinda hot, at least until I remember Mommie Dearest. Advantage: Remake.

PLOT

For all the style, there’s not a lot of substance or suspense in the 1968 edition: even the central heist boils down to little more than a bunch of guys in hats pointing guns, grabbing bags of loot and hightailing it out of the city in an ugly wood-paneled station wagon. Not that depth and memorable thematic resonance is one of the Remake’s strong suits, but it does feature a twisty caper that’s unpredictable, prankish and fun. Advantage: Remake.

Thus, in my first Original vs. Remake smackdown, the winner is...REMAKE!

(And stay tuned for the upcoming super-heavyweight steel cage grudge match between 1930s King Kong, fake 1930s remake Kong and 1970s remake Kong, with a very special guest appearance by The Dude.)

Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds: 2 B 2-Together 4-Ever!

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

Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds are getting hitched, and we here at the Screengrab haven't been this proud and excited since our guppies mated! These are two of our favorite people: Reynolds, because he's a likable fellow who's shown himself to be a reliable, capable actor whether he's flexing his chops in bad comedies (Van Wilder), bad action movies (Smokin' Aces), bad horror movies (The Amityville Horror), or bad unintentionally comic action horror movies (Blade : Trinity); Johansson, because she was once in a good movie (Ghost World) without doing it much harm, because Tom Waits isn't too proud to cash the royalty checks, and because every time we run a picture of her, such as this computer-generated simulation of what she'll look like in her wedding outfit, our page numbers go up for some reason. (Also, her name is Scarlett, but she's a blonde! How trippy is that!?) Interestingly, though both of them keep very busy, the 23-year-old Johansson and the 31-year-old cradle-robbing bastard Reynolds have never worked together before. (IMDB lists their only shared credit as 101 Sexiest Celebrity Bodies on TV, which we haven't seen--we're waiting for the opera---but we have a hunch it would stretch the definition of "working together.") But if this marriage is going to work, and I think we can all agree that the thought of it failing is just too morbid to contemplate, then they're going to want to explore the possibility of co-starring vehicles to increase their volume of quality time together. (It worked for Julia and Kiefer, right?) Because the kids must have their hands full with wedding plans--registering at Sears, negotiating to rent out a bowling alley for the bachelor party, trying to get Survivor's Boston Robb on the phone to ask if he'd still lobby for the surf and turf buffet--they might not have a lot of time to flip through scripts, so we've taken the liberty of offering a few suggestions:

THE GETAWAY: Scarlett and Ryan have to co-star in a remake of the married-bank-robbers-on-the-lam thriller The Getaway, based on the Jim Thompson novel. This isn't our favorite choice for them, but after the Steve McQueen-Ali McGraw and Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger versions, we're pretty sure that federal law demands it, so they might as well get it over with quick, like ripping off a band-aid or meeting the in-laws. (Personal to Ryan: just ignore Mr. Johnansson when he demands that you pull his finger.) After watching Ryan's steely gunplay in Smokin' Aces, we suspect that he'll actually be a solid, impressive Doc McCoy, and as for Scarlett, well, we're sure that she'll look shiny and immaculate even while camping out in a rat-infested dumpster. Since the movie will almost certainly blow, the newlyweds can't be judged too harshly for it, which means that the real suspense will be in seeing who gets to play the slimy killer nutjob chasing them and the lovable old goober who gives them a lift at the very end. We propose that the casting director go wide and unexpected with Steve Zahn as the psycho and pluck the viewers' nostalgic heartstrings by hiring Bob Newhart to play the sweet, gabby old thing. Or, if Newhart is unavailable, Robert De Niro.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: After the scathing reviews The Getaway is sure to earn, Scarlett in particular will be eager to jump in the deep end and show off her acting chops. That's a problem for her, because she can't act, but she can probably hollar, and that's really all you need to do to impress most critics with your range after they've sat through twenty pictures where you pretty much just stood there reflecting light. Playing Martha, the rampaging gorgon at the center of Edward Albee's marital slugfest, gave Elizabeth Taylor the chance to pick up an Academy Award for Best Hollaring by a One-Time Candidate for Most Beautiful Person in the World, so there's a ready-made tradition for Scarlett to tap into here. The husband, George, is supposed to be a prototypical middle-aged American wimp, but since most people's memories of the play are based on the movie starring Taylor and Richard Burton, they think George is English, which means that Reynolds too will have the chance to stretch by breaking out his best Monty Python accent to go with his prop eyeglasses. Throw in Elijah Wood and Bijou Phillipa as the goggle-eyed witnesses to this house of horrors and I think we've got a winner. Don't talk about the boy, Scarlett!

GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY: Tradition and awards are all well and good, but for full mutual career satisfaction, our little Lunt and Fontaine are also going to need to bring home that box-office gold. The ideal thing would be to sign them up for a franchise as crime-fighting superheroes. It isn't until you start trying to come up with possibilities that you realize just how few great man-and-woman superhero combos there have been, especially since Reed Richards and Sue Storm have already been spoken for. But we think that these two will make for a fine fit. Swear to God, we think there's always been something about Ryan Reynolds that's whispered, "Goatee! Robin Hood costume! Bow and arrows!" As for Scarlett, she's sure to rock the black leather slinkywear. The only problem is that there have been rumors of a Green Arrow movie in the works going back to when Kevin Smith was regarded as promising, and the property may be tied up. If it can't be pried free, then we propose going old-school and reviving Nick and Nora, the wisecracking alcoholic marrieds of the Thin Man series, "rebooting" the franchise to give it commercial potential for these sophisticated modern times. As Nick and Nora, Ryan and Scarlett will make wisecracks--or, to better keep with the nature of their talents, Ryan will make them while Scarlett stares at him blankly--chug martinis, and solve crimes. While wearing jet packs!

RYAN & SCARLETT'S XXX HONEYMOON SEX TAPE: A surefire career booster! With an IMAX 3-D sequence to be directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring Christopher Walken and Zac Efron in the musical numbers. To be released in conjunction with the premiere of their new reality series. "It's just called 'Chicken of the Sea' because people like chicken, Scarlett!"

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

Forgotten Films: "This World, Then the Fireworks" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This past week marked the thirty-first anniversary of the death of Jim Thompson, the cult-object writer who worked on the scripts of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but whose real gift to film history was a shelf's worth of pulp novels (The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway, The Grifters) so intense and obsessive in their seaminess that they amount to a double-dog-dare to the movies: You think you're the repository of forbidden daydreams? Put this on the big screen! Two versions of The Getaway, including one with Sam Peckinpah's name in the credits, softened the relationship between the husband and wife bank robbers on the lam (the star of the Peckipah version, Steve McQueen, having objected to the less cheerful elements of a screenplay treatment turned in by Thompson himself); Coup de Torchon, directed by Bertrand Tavernier and based on Pop. 1280, is in motherfucking French! Even the best of all Thompson adaptations, Stephen Frears's The Grifters, is handsomely mounted and has a good vicious streak but keeps it distance from the vortex of Thompson's deeply felt hatefulness; it maps the dragon's lair down to the last molted scale but resists the urge to fling you in there by your feet and nail the door shut behind you.

To see what Thompson's special, sweaty brand of nihilistic dementia looks like uncensored, flashy but not polished, your best bet might be the 1997 This World, Then the Fireworks, based on a posthumously published Thompson fever dream. Directed by a music-video veteran named Michael Oblowitz, the movie lets you know right from its opening moments that it's not going to play coy and try to impress you with its subtle touch. The antihero and narrator, Marty, has a twin sister, Carol, and the movie opens with a little backstory interlude set on their fifth birthday. Entertainment at the party includes a shootout between their father and the wife of a woman dad's been screwing. "The man on the floor didn't have any head, hardly any head at all," Marty says, by way of explaining why he and sis got such a kick out of the festivities. Oblowitz shoots this bloody-trauma sequence in over-the-top funhouse mode, breaking out the fish-eye lenses and dousing the screen with surreally bright colors and contorted faces leaning into the camera. He doesn't pull back much when the action shifts to the "present"--which is supposed to be 1956 but looks more like some perpetual Noirville, U.S.A.--and Marty and his sister, who's become his fuck buddy, are played by Billy Zane and Gina Gershon, both looking as if they'd immigrated to our world from the covers of old paperback thrillers.

It might be a stretch to call This World a good movie, but it's true to its overheated vision in a way that's amazing to watch, partly because it makes you aware of how watered-down down pulp movies really are. Zane and Gershon thrive in this atmosphere. She's never been as eerily adorable as when she describes having suckered a couple of thugs who thought they could threaten her into staying out of their territory ("I do believe they'd never heard of chloral nitrate!"), and he looks unusually at home whether he's resigning from his job as a newspaper reporter by physically assaulting his editor (because the man has said nice things about his work, which bothers him because it makes him worry that the man might have the capacity to understand him) or romancing a masochistic woman cop (Sheryl Lee) by asking, "Are you blonde all over, or just where it shows?" If there's any real art mixed in with the cheap thrills and dazzling hype of This World, it comes from Sheryl Lee; as in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, she demonstrates a rare, brave talent for acting her character's sexual degradation that sensitizes you to the pain inside the pulp fantasy. She conveys the unhealthy attractions of Jim Thompson's cruel fantasy life even as she transcends the mindset that it grew out of.

Bullitt: The Greatest Car Chase Ever Google Mapped

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The high-speed automotive pursuit from 1968’s Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt has long been regarded one of the three greatest car chases in movie history, along with The French Connection and, of course, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. But you’ve probably never heard anyone describe it as the most accurate car chase ever filmed. Mention the scene to anyone from San Francisco and they’ll jump at the chance to explain in excruciating detail how the chase defies the laws of space and time.

Now you can see it for yourself. Some enterprising soul, using intel gathered from Ray Smith’s comprehensive account of the chase, has detailed every impossible twist and turn on Google Maps. If you were already impressed with McQueen’s driving skills, wait until you get a load of this. Impressive as it is, though, what we’d really like to see is the Google Maps version of The Cannonball Run.

While we’re waiting for that, here’s the scene from Bullitt. See if your newfound knowledge of the inaccuracies detracts from your enjoyment.

The Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray, KINGPIN (1996)

Bowling is enjoyed by millions of Americans of all ages, but in the Farrelly brothers' second film Kingpin, the professional bowling circuit is portrayed as being forever trapped in the seventies. Professional bowlers are seen as sleazeball would-be lounge lizards, dressing in garish clothes, doing cock-of-the-walk victory dances, and relentlessly chasing women when they're not bowling. But in Kingpin, the most telling remnant of their faded vocation is almost certainly the hairdos they sport. In the seventies, Harrelson's Roy Munson and Murray's Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken were well-coiffed slicksters. Two decades hence, they try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their youthful appearance by engaging in that age-old solution practiced by creepy old men the world over — the comb over. True to their characters, Big Ern is better at maintaining the façade — his 'do looks like a woodland creature parked itself atop his pate, but at least it doesn't reflect the light. But once the rivals take to the lanes for the climactic showdown, Big Ern shows his true colors. Usually a cool customer, he lets the stress get the better of his hair, and it gradually begins to detach from his head, until it resembles the world's largest ripped seam. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet's Clementine speaks of having mood hair, but we'd like to think that, as with so many great things in cinema, Bill Murray got there first.

The Leningrad Cowboys, LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA

Rock'n'roll has a history of some pretty questionable hairdos, but none like those worn by the Leningrad Cowboys. Almost surely the most rockin' band to get their start north of the Arctic Circle, the Cowboys first entered the scene as the brainchild of director Aki Kaurismäki, who assembled some of his rocker pals for his 1989 stone-faced mockumentary, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. In the film, the Cowboys, tired of playing in Siberia, mount an American tour, despite their uncertain grasp of the English language. But if their songs mark them as foreigners, their hair is positively alien, with all members sporting uniform black pompadours, each with a large, unicorn-like forelock pointing out into the distance. As the film progresses, we discover that this hairdo is actually a congenital signifier of musical skill — the musically-challenged cousin who stalks the combo has but a tiny tuft to his name. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the U.S. tour is mostly a washout, but they'd find more enduring success at home following the fall of the Iron Curtain. They appeared in two more features, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert film Total Balalaika Show, in which they teamed up with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, as well as over half a dozen music videos directed by Kaurismäki. Finally, the Cowboys made their triumphant return to the American stage for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All the while, the band remained true to their roots, never touching so much as a strand of those terrible, awesome hairdos.

Demi Moore, STRIPTEASE

Some might think the obvious choice here would be G.I. Jane, but somehow even a number-one blade on a pair of clippers only revealed that Demi Moore had a perfectly shaped head, and didn't diminish her hotness in the least. The same cannot be said for the bangs-and-blow-dry look of Striptease. Yeah, we know she's supposed to be playing a stripper, but those are clearly hair extensions, and not very flattering ones at that. Most people at the time were probably distracted by the reveal of Moore's surgically enhanced breasts (we liked the originals just fine, thank you) and there are certainly many places the finger of blame can be pointed in this nuclear stinkbomb of a movie — but you shouldn't underestimate just how bad a haircut had to be back then to make Demi Moore look unattractive.

Kevin Costner, THE BODYGUARD (1992)

The story behind one of Sir Kevin's more laughable haircuts (and, if you've seen his mullet in Robin Hood, that's really saying something) is actually kinda touching: The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard was originally conceived as a vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen way back during the 1970s. When the film was finally made in 1992, starring Costner and Whitney Houston, the star decided to try and channel McQueen; to do so he adopted the legendary icon of cool's trademark close-cropped haircut, which looked fantastic on McQueen but downright surreal on Costner. That said, Costner did have the last laugh: The Bodyguard was one of his worst films, and a stain on screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's career (it had been his first script — turns out he made up for it with The Empire Strikes Back), but it wound up being a huge hit. Indeed, we're not unconvinced that Costner's follicular follies in this film didn't lead indirectly to the George-Clooney-and-his-Caesar-haircut craze a couple of years later. There you go, folks — one more societal ill you can blame on Kevin Costner.

Nicolas Cage, NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)

Full disclosure: For weeks the spot for this entry stood empty on this list, with simply the words "Nicolas Cage, FILM TO BE DETERMINED LATER" holding its place. Because let's face it, any number of films starring Nicolas Cage from the past few years could go here — from the god-awful toupee he sported in Ghost Rider to the goofy balding curls he fretted over in Adaptation (of course, we don't hold that last one against him, not only because his bad hair was a plot point in that film, but also because we have this disturbing suspicion that, had nature been allowed to take its course, that's what Nicolas Cage's real hair might actually look like today). But we're going with National Treasure, for the simple fact that we spent the whole film staring at the slug-like patch of weave at the very tip of the actor's forehead. Seriously, this isn't hair, it's a lid. In these later years, Cage and Kevin Costner have switched places, but if you'd asked us fifteen years ago which of the two would allow himself to go bald gracefully while the other kept trying new ways to make himself look like he had something resembling a "full" "head" of "hair," the answer might have been different.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 1!

Suzanne Pleshette, 1937 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Suzanne Pleshette died this past week, at the age of seventy, after a long bout with cancer. The husky-voiced Brooklyn-born actress, who James Wolcott once likened to "a beautiful black swan", made her stage debut in 1957 in Ira Levin's Compulsion and would go on to successfully replace Anne Bancroft in the original Broadway production of The Miracle Worker. She made her film debut in 1958 in Jerry Lewis's The Geisha Boy , and would go on to give affecting supporting performances in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Nevada Smith with Steve McQueen, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and the minor camp classic Youngblood Hawke, in which, as the editor of the title character, the great novelist (author of Alms for Oblivion) played by James Franciscus, she got to adjust her eyeglasses while staring at his manly form and ask, "Should I call you Youngy or Bloody?" Perhaps fearing that anything else Hollywood had to offer would seem anticlimactic after a beaut like that, Pleshette spent more and more of her time acting on television; eventually, of course, she would become most closely associated with her role on one of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, The Bob Newhart Show, where for five seasons she pulled off the neat trick of being stylish and funny while making it seem plausible that her potato-like co-star was a sexual being.

Most of the rest of her career was spent on TV: she played inappropriately loving mother of young Tom Berenger in the controversial 1979 TV film Flesh & Blood, glued black caterpillars to her eyebrows for the title role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990), and had recurring, motherly roles on such comedies as Good Morning, Miami, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and Will & Grace. She also made the occasional return trip to the movie screen; most of her film roles were forgettable, but she did get a piece of one great movie towards the end of her career when she voiced the characters of Yubaba and Zeniba in the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated masterpiece, Spirited Away. That same year, she married the actor Tom Poston, with whom she had appeared more than forty years earlier in the Broadway play Golden Fleecing (and who would be a regular on Newhart's second long-running sitcom,Newhart). Poston himself died last year. Suzanne Pleshette will posthumously receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on January 31, which would have been her seventy-first birthday.