The Screengrab : sylvester stallone

Now Playing Live: "Rambo Solo"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Good news for completists of live theater events derived from bad movies or people's obsessions with same: Soho Rep has extended the run of Rambo Solo to April 19, in response to the sell-out success of the engagement that began March 19. Conceived and directed by Pavol Liska & Kelly Copper, the show, which originated at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, stars Zachary Oberzan as an actor named Zachary Oberzan, who saw the 1982 Sylvester Stallone movie First Blood when he was nine years old, and who has apparently spent the past quarter century of his life punishing his parents for not having taken him to see E.T. instead like normal people. In the one-man show, Oberzan lectures the audience about the importance of Rambo's story, then sets about re-enacting it. Oberzan performs his monologue in a homey intimate space strewn with pillows for audience members to sit on, and since he probably doesn't get many chances to bring girls back to his apartment to admire his mastery of the principles of feng shui, while he acts out the story onstage, the makeshift screen behind him shows home movies showing him strenuously acting out the story in his home.

Oberzan is fascinated not just by the movie but by the original novel by David Morrell, which was first published in 1972, ten years before the movie came out; although Morrell created the character of Rambo in that book, he then laid him aside until the movie began to spawn sequels, and he would write the novelizations of both 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II and the mathematically confusing Rambo III. More recently, Morrell wrote the comic book series Captain America: The Chosen; his extensive literary credits also include the 1976 critical study John Barth: An Introduction, which he wrote just to mess with my head. Oberzan, who according to Charles Isherwood's review in The New York Times, performs "with the wandering focus of somebody relating a long story casually", with "lots of 'ums' and dead spots when the thread of the plot is briefly lost, and [Oberzan] often stares dumbly for a moment or two, trying to ferret out from the jumble of memory a particular nugget of dialogue or a turn of the story", says that the show grew out of his fascination with "the various versions of a story and what actually is indeed the original story, and when do you begin to argue about what is the original story?" Unfortunately, whenever I come across First Blood I invariably change the channel before that argument can begin.

Schwarzenegger to Make Cameo Appearance in New Stallone Movie; Old Action Rivals to Bury Freakishly Large, Bursting-Veined Hatchet

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

When Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for governor of California in the wake of the disappointed reaction to the third Terminator movie, a lot of people were quick to make the obvious joke that turning to politics might be a good career move for him; running a state the size of California had to be easier for a guy who was then in his mid-fifties than trying to continue holding up his end in the action-icon game. In fact, his last movie appearance before taking office was a cameo at the start of 2003's The Rundown, in which he seemed to be graciously passing the baton to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The news that Schwarzenegger has agreed to do another cameo, as himself, in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, should probably not be taken as a sign how just bad things have gotten for those who are supposed to be holding the reins out West. The Gov contributed a cameo to the 2004 Around the World in 80 Days, directed by Frank Coraci, a movie that was seen by approximately one-hundred thousandth of the number of people who recently saw Coraci and his leading man, Steve Coogan, making cruel sport of Joaquin Phoenix and Christian Bale. And he can also be seen, briefly and as himself, in a forthcoming Indian film, Kambakkht Ishq, which has an inside-Hollywood story and includes a cameo by...Sylvester Stallone.

Personally, we applaud the Governor's efforts to help cover the school budget by taking part time jobs. It's not as if he could sign up for a shift at Mickey D's--there's no way they make those hats big enough that head. And while some might worry that a state leader should not put his dignity in peril, in Schwarzenegger's case, that ship probably sailed somewhere around the time of Hercules in New York. (When you're making your movie debut alongside Arnold Stang, and you're the one whose voice they decide to redub, dignity is not a product that you're ever going to be asked to endorse.) Still, for those of us who remember the '80s, it's a little funny to see him doing Stallone a favor, and even funnier to see Stallone asking him for one. I don't suppose they were ever Spider-man and Doc Ock in the heated-feuds department, but from at least the mid-80s, when Schwarzenegger began to overtake Stallone in the steroid-idol sweepstakes just when Sly had impressed himself mightily by proving, with the success of Rambo, that he had it in him to embody more than one franchise meathead character with a five-letter name beginning with "R", there's always been an undercurrent of competitive tension between them, made all the more savory by Stallone's spectacular job at failing to hold up his end. One critic detected a "fear of Schwarzenegger" theme running through many of Stallone's mid-80s films--not just Rambo but also Rocky IV and Cobra--in which he was roughed up but not bested by huge, muscleheaded figures who often came with scary accents. Stallone even tried to duplicate Schwarzenegger's career-expanding success in turning to comedy, but while it not for us to say that Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot did not compare to Twins or Kindergarten Cop in the laugh riot department, they didn't do nearly as well at the box office. But the fact remains that last year's Rambo, and its predecessor, Rocky XXXVII, did a lot better than a great many thoughtful observers--feel free to take that as a synonym for "me"--expected them to. That means that Stallone has had two geriatric hits while Arnold has been off running some dumb ol' state. If Schwarzenegger misses his old job, being on the set of The Expendables should make him feel right at home: in addition to Stallone, who's also on board as writer-director, the cast includes Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, and Roberts's new P.R. man, Mickey Rourke, making the set a virtual watering hole for has-beens and comeback kids. It's been reported that Schwarzenegger has been preparing for his cameo by telling people that Stallone is "a a terrific director and writer, and a great actor." If he's really been doing that, without crossing his eyes to keep a straight face, he's both a master politician and a better actor than we remember.

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)

In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1971)

The Italian horror director Mario Bava is associated with the atmospheric diabolism and haunted crypts of such films as Black Sunday (1960), but with this contemporary murder mystery he, too, helped to create the slasher genre. This in itself is not the kind of accomplishment that gets you a Congressional Medal of Honor, but Bava's film (which is also known under the title Bay of Blood, among many others) shows just how stylish and entertaining a body count movie can be. It also demonstrates how impossibly convoluted the plot of a gory carny ride can get. But the sick joke ending is worth all the confusion experienced on the way there.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

Movies are a collaborative art. That's worth keeping in mind even with regard to movies that don't often get mentioned in the same breath as the "A"-word, such as this Roger Corman production, a cheeky, low-budget variation on the violent-sports-as-metaphor-for-a-disintegrating-society idea that was treated with bloated solemnity in the big-budget Rollerball. Much of the cheekiness comes from the director Paul Bartel, whose other films (Eating Raoul, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) showed him to be a man with an eccentric, campy wit. They also showed that he had a tendency to concentrate more on keeping himself amused on the set than delivering a movie that could actually hold someone's attention from beginning to end. Bartel thought that Corman ruined this sci-fi satire, about a futuristic, government-sponsored auto race in which the contestants rack up points for the number of people they run over, by filling it with reshot bloody inserts to make it more violent, but Corman apparently thought that Bartel's cut was too toothlessly whimsical for its intended audience. Given the track records of both men, Corman's viewpoint must be respected, but the fact is that Bartel's goofy sense of humor helps to account for this movie's standing as one of the more enduringly enjoyable products ever to roll off the Corman assembly line. It also captures David Carradine, who plays the star racer Frankenstein, in his charismatic B-movie star prime, and Sylvester Stallone, as his thuggish, clam sauce-smeared rival, in the closest thing he ever had to a prime.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

One of the most persistent fictions about grade-Z exploitation cheapies like this deranged Phil Tucker anti-classic is that they’re exciting. Sure, they may not be artsy like some fancy-pants European auteur crap, goes the argument, but at least they give you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, if you were foolish enough to pay a buck for Robot Monster, you would find it entirely bangless. For a story that involves a sinister alien menace – well, okay, a lumbering extra in a diving helmet and an ape suit – eradicating the entire human race except for one family, the movie contains exactly zero thrills and chills. Ro-Man spends around 43 minutes blundering around the San Fernando Valley chasing after a handful of people who don’t seem all that concerned with having to rebuild the human race, and puts the lie to the notion that these movies could at least do action right. So who cares? Well, you will, sort of. Robot Monster is one of those movies that manages to rise below its incompetence, coming across as so much worse than it has any right to be, even with its fifty-dollar budget: it clearly would have been awful with ten million to spend. Like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, its appeal comes not from being good on any level, but from being so bad that you can’t believe it was actually made. Once Ro-Man starts blabbering about the existential crisis he’s having for no particular reason after having killed three billion people, asking at what point on the graph must and cannot meet, you just shrug and let yourself go along for the ride. You sure as hell aren’t in the presence of greatness, but you’re in the presence of a sort of transcendent badness, and, well, that’s something.

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho might seem to be an odd fit for a list like this, what with its being an acknowledged classic by a major Hollywood director. Obviously, it's very different from the run of exploitation films. Except that it's conceived as a choice specimen of the form, right down to its toes. Hitchcock was just coming off the lavish production North by Northwest, and the idea of doing a quick, down-and-dirty low budget movie must have appealed to him on a number of levels. But he had also been reading Variety and examining the box office returns of the new independent thriller producers such as William Castle and Roger Corman, and some perverse streak of vanity in him might have compelled him to show that, even though he'd become rich and world famous, he could still grab an audience by the short hairs as well as any punk with a Bolex. After he began to explore the idea of adapting Robert Bloch's novel about a killer based on Ed Gein, his studio, Paramount, helped point him in the right direction by refusing to make the movie because it judged the material to be "repulsive." So Hitchcock funded it through his own company and made it on the Universal lot using the regular crew from his TV series. Hitchcock had also used his TV show to develop a public image as a poker-faced ghoulish comedian, and when the movie was ready for market, he extended that role into a performance as a Castle-like showman, which enabled him to signal to his audience what kind of movie to expect while mostly avoiding spelling out plot points that would have killed the movie's surprises. The movie itself features details, such as the opening scene with Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging around their motel room in their underwear, that for audiences marked it as part of the exploitation genre, which served the dual purpose of making it seem more "modern" that Hitchcock's lavish, color, big-studio implausibilities and making viewers feel that they knew where they were, the better for Hitchcock to pull the rug out from under them. For Hitchcock, making his version of a cutthroat horror film on the (relative) cheap must have been a kind of intellectual experiment, like making a movie within the confines of a lifeboat or filming Rope in a series of continuous ten-minute shots. Hitchcock would later toy with the idea of making a movie in the streets with hand-held cameras, in imitation of the French New Wave, but instead, for the rest of his career he kept to his big-studio, big-budget methods, with mostly diminishing returns.

SEE! the psychedelic frenzy of Part One! FEEL! the erotic madness of Part Two! TOUCH! the tantalizing terror of Part Three! TASTE! the demonic broth of Part Four! SMELL! the far-out funk of Part Five!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Reviews By Request x2: Reprise (2006, Joachim Trier) and Son of Rambow (2007, Garth Jennings)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I asked you folks to vote on my next three Reviews By Request columns a few weeks ago, one thing I hadn’t anticipated was that there’d be a tie for third place. Under other circumstances, I might simply have chosen one film to write about over the other, but I’m more or less a man of my word. I briefly toyed with the idea of running a poll to determine which I’d write about, but when I realized that both of the films- Joachim Trier’s Reprise and Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow- deal with creative sorts, I figured that the best way to solve my problem would simply be to write a tandem review of the films.

The act of creation can be tricky to portray cinematically. When someone is inspired to create a work of art, it can be the most exciting feeling in the world for that person. But it’s much more difficult to convey this excitement to others in the form of a film. Moreover, some media are better-suited to a cinematic treatment than others. While the making of a movie consists not only of a series of creative decisions but also the logistics and politics of collaboration with others, writing is essentially an inward, self-absorbed act. In this sense, Reprise begins at somewhat of a disadvantage compared to Son of Rambow. Does Trier’s film transcend this disadvantage to become a more memorable finished product than Jennings’? Not quite.

There’s an old writers’ joke that says that because young writers are told to “write what they know,” this explains why there are so many books and movies about writers. Reprise doubles up the usual beginning-writer-on-the-make storyline by focusing on two budding authors, a pair of friends who we first see mailing off their manuscripts at the same time. Of course, not all writers are created equal, and while Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) finds literary success almost overnight, Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) gets turned down by the publisher. From that point forward, the film cuts back and forth between the two, with Phillip suffering a nervous breakdown, Erik finding his own measure of success, and each of them trying to find their ways in life.

Unless they’re especially well-written, I find that educated twentysomethings can make for some of the least interesting and most insufferable characters in films, partly because their intelligence has yet to be tempered with maturity, humility, and the wisdom that gets born from actual real-world experience. The protagonists of Reprise harbor some lofty ideas both about life and literature (Erik’s first novel is entitled Prosopopeia, fer chrissakes), but when they give voice to them, they come out mostly in writerly clichés, like when Erik decides to dump his girlfriend in order to live the stereotypical writer’s life of booze and cheap sex. If the film had shown any real self-awareness about its characters in the manner of Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life…, this might have worked. But it doesn’t.

And that’s a shame, since Trier’s film has plenty of interesting ideas that would have been worth exploring. In one subplot, we see Phillip, recently released from a mental hospital, trying to re-connect with his ex-girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge). Phillip’s mother has gotten rid of his photographs of Kari, fearing they might trigger another mental collapse. So Phillip decides to take Kari to Paris, where they vacationed shortly after they met, in order to re-take the photos and, consequently, re-live the memories. There are a number of other compelling ideas in Reprise that mark Trier as a talent to watch. Even if this feels very much like a first film, there’s real potential here.

~~~

Compared to Reprise, Son of Rambow is a relatively modest work, one with little more than a desire to entertain. Yet it succeeds in this sense in a way that Trier’s film can’t quite manage to fulfill its loftier ambitions. I’m not a huge fan of the sorts of festival darlings that are routinely labeled “crowd-pleasers”- I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid™ on Slumdog Millionaire, for example- so I was a little surprised by how well Son of Rambow worked on me.

Like Reprise, Son of Rambow tells the story of two young friends, although the heroes of Jennings’ film are preteen boys, which tends to cut down quite a bit on the navel-gazing. The unlikely friends are Lee (Will Poulter), a troublemaker who spends his free time working on elaborate home movies, and Will (Bill Milner), a pint-sized boy from a staunchly religious family who Lee cons into working for him as a stunt man. Inspired by a bootleg of First Blood that he sees at Lee’s house, Will gets the inspiration to turn Lee’s movie into a kind of sequel to the Stallone opus- one that stars himself.

In its story of DIY movie-making against a small-community backdrop, Son of Rambow bears a casual resemblance to Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. However, I think Son is the more successful film, in part because the story works better with kids in the lead roles instead of adults, even if one of those adults happens to a man-child like Jack Black. What’s more, the visual flights of fancy Jennings brings to the story- inventive production design, flashes of hand-drawn animation- are more effective than Gondry’s, since Jennings’ touch is lighter and the whimsy never wears out its welcome.

Son of Rambow flags a bit in its second half, after other characters (led by a Culture Club-ready French exchange student) are brought in to collaborate on Will and Lee’s movie. Thankfully, Jennings recognizes this, and acknowledges it when he has Lee confront Will to tell him as much. But for much of its duration, Son of Rambow is fun and occasionally even enchanting, as in the scene when Will’s drawings come to life. And it’s hard to resist a movie that manages to combine Lee’s anarchic spirit with Will’s wide-eyed innocence without making us decide on one over the other. Son of Rambow isn’t perfect, but it’s a real charmer.

Morning Deal Report: 2009! Much Like 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Marley took another bite out of the box office (Bad Marley! Bad dog!) over the weekend, running away with another $24 million for a total of $106.5. Before you start thinking sequel, a certain spoiler I heard would seem to put the kibosh on that notion. Bedtime Stories retained the second spot with $20.3 million, while Benjamin Button and Valkyrie continued to do surprisingly robust business. Really, the only stinker of the holiday season is The Spirit, which plummeted to a weekend take of $3.3 million. The Shadow and The Phantom sympathize.

Can The Night Projectionist succeed where The Spirit failed? The latest comic-to-screen adaptation “takes place on Halloween Eve in a small-town movie theater, where an all-night Draculathon draws throngs of moviegoers who suddenly find themselves locked inside the theater, which is slowly filling with vampires,” Variety reports. I’ve been to that theater, and I could have sworn they closed it down.

Forest Whitaker may be expendable. The actor is in talks to join Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li and Jason Statham as “the CIA liaison for a group of mercenaries who are clandestinely sent to South America to overthrow a dictator” in The Expendables, per The Hollywood Reporter. Stallone is also writing and directing.

Related:
I'm a Sexy Vampire
Stallone Is Expendable

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Valkyrie doesn't open until the end of the week, but the movie has already been taking a pasting, much of it in the form of open mockery of its star, Tom Cruise, so scathing that the question of just what has gone wrong with the wonder boy's career, and how might it be righted, is likely to continue for quite some time. Some people may have problems remembering that, for a very long time--we're talking decades here--it was as hard to find someone in the mainstream entertainment press or the industry itself who was prepared to question Tom's magnificence as it's been, since around mid-2005, to find someone not eager to question both his appeal and his sanity. How did it come to this? Stephen Metcalf at Slate thinks he has it figured out. He has a theory that involves a close read of the movie that made Cruise a star, Risky Business (1983), and how it played its part in saddling the now 46-year-old Cruise with an image that leaves him no room to mature as an actor. Recognizing Cruise's movie-star image as "the '80s incarnate" (and accurately summing up his acting range in four words: "bark, glare, seethe, repeat"), Metcalf recalls how Risky Business's "distinctive pathos derives from its first half, from the nocturnal weirdscape emanating out of Joel's jumbled libido. As this Joel, Cruise allowed himself to be everything the publicity team has tried to convince us, for 25 years, he isn't: insecure, sexually confused, and as Brickman's camerawork takes no pains to hide, physically small. We are meant to dislike—or at least, feel queasy—in the presence of the strutting superabundant charmer of the second half of the film, as he bursts forth from, and destroys, the chrysalis of Joel Goodsen. When Joel's parents go on vacation, he teams up with Lana to bring his horny friends together with her scheming colleagues, and in Joel's transformation (into a pimp, but also into Tom Cruise), we see the emergence of the '80s as the '80s."

"The '80s," writes Metcalf, "did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying 'what the fuck' and thereby securing your 'future,' is simply no longer tenable." What this has to do with the Tomcat and his present situation, is that "The Cruise persona, like a junk bond, was never meant to reach maturity." It is possible to agree with the broad outlines of this and still find a way to argue with many of the specifics. I think that Metcalf, perhaps infatuated with the notion that something "beautiful and authentic" was lost when Cruise found his path to public super-success, is way too inclined to give Risky Business credit for being what its writer-director, Paul Brickman, has always claimed he wanted it to be. Brickman, who at the time was best known as the writer of Jonathan Demme's Citizens Band (and who in the quarter-century since, has directed only one other movie, the 1990 dud Men Don't Leave), has made no secret of the fact that he thought he was making a movie about the power of corruption, and that the Geffen Company pressured him into changing his original, downbeat ending, in which Joel emerged less than triumphant. Working from a blueprint of one of Brickman's interviews, one can now make out what a dark, troubling piece of work it was supposed to be.

But the millions of people who loved it because they thought it was the kick-ass party movie of the '80s weren't missing anything; Brickman did agree to the changed ending, and from the evidence onscreen, whatever he felt before and after making the movie, during the all-important shooting schedule, he was less interested in realizing his cruel vision than in showing that he had the slickest, most hyped-up visual style this side of a month of MTV. No one in the summer of 1983 was wrong for thinking the movie was just what it looked and felt like: the Flashdance of suburban pimp movies. As for the sexually inexperienced, awkward, not-yet-cocky Cruise of the first half of the movie, it may be that this was not the "authentic" acting of a talented young actor playing a human being but rather the way that a cunning self-promoter knew he had to come on before he could win the audience over and make his transformation into a strutting cocksman asshole seem like a happy ending rather than a sad comment on all humanity. It's true that in every other performance Cruise would give in his golden age, he would pick up where he left off at the end of Risky Business, playing the asshole from frame one, and never looking back. It could be argued that, since the point of Top Gun and Cocktail and all the rest was to give Cruise a chance to play the asshole, it showed a kind of respect for the audience that, once he had "evolved" once and turned from sweet boy to asshole in one movie, he never really had to do it again, just as Clint Eastwood didn't pretend to be Destry and act as if his characters were reluctant to draw their guns. (For Cruise, a "prestige" acting job was something like Born on the Fourth of July, where he started out as a cocky, swaggering, pro-war asshole and then got to chance into a different kind of self-dramatizing, anti-war asshole.)

In the go-go '80s, movie heroes in Hollywood blockbusters were defined as winners. It's not just that they were different from heroes of other movie eras, who were defined by their rebelliousness or their romantic charm or their inclination to question society or whatever, but that, at their purest, they had no characteristics besides their winningness. The Reagan years at their ripest were defined by a shiny, Crest toothpaste grin that seemed to be doing its best to hold up under tremendous, unacknowledged stress, and the biggest movie stars in those years were those who seemed dumb enough or sufficiently full of themselves to sell this. Cruise was the biggest movie star of the '80s because he was the one who best typefied the image of the Winner. He wasn't alone: Stallone was the winner with the big muscles, and Eddie Murphy, the big "comedy" star of the time, had his biggest successes in what were essentially action movies in which Murphy, when he wasn't winning by shooting people, killed time by insulting and otherwise lording it over bit players who hadn't been provided by the writers with any comebacks. (To remind you that you were watching a comedy, Murphy would frequently double over with hysterical laughter at how hilarious the movie was, meeting the audience halfway by serving as his own laugh track.)

If Cruise was bigger than his competition, it was partly because he seemed to embody these pictures more than his white-bread competition, maybe because he needed his success more than any man alive, and partly because he had no special talents or peculiarities like Murphy or the steroid freaks Stallone and his usurper Schwarzenegger. For the young dudes who bought movie tickets for themselves and their dates, he was as easy to project onto as Sarah Palin was for some trailer park mom with her hair in curlers and with two kids in her arms and one in the sink. He had no special qualities to distract the half-buzzed frat rat looking to pretend that was him up there on that screen drivin' that plane. There was a memorable moment in The Color of Money where Paul Newman tells him that he's "a natural character" and then has a good chuckle at the expense of his ignorant young sensei, who, misunderstanding, thinks that he's being paid the compliment of being told that he has character. The double-edged joke of this exchange is that Cruise wasn't even an unusual enough actor to successfully play a "character." But by then, the audience, knowing what to expect from him and what not to bother hoping for, understood that he was meant to seem like more of a live wire than usual because his hair looked weirder.

The real question is how Cruise managed to stick around so long, maintaining a pretty steady top-of-the-line career for so long that both Murphy and Stallone and flamed out and had comebacks, and Schwarzenegger went into politics, in the time it took him to experience his first real signs of career turbulence. Let alone how he earned all those good reviews--at least one critic, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice, actually got indignant back in 1990 when Daniel Day-Lewis won a critics' award instead of Cruise for having sat in that wheelchair in Born on the Fourth of July. The widespread incredulity in the face of his even having taken the role in Valkyrie is probably must greater than it would have been if Cruise's pretensions to being seen as a real actor hadn't been tolerated for so long. It's as if the world had just woken up from a collective fever, one made all the more confounding for just what they found themselves in bed with when sanity returned and the beer goggles came off. On a personal note, it kind of puts me in a funny place, because I could never stand Cruise when I was one of those college guys buying the tickets but have sort of warmed up to him since he went publicly batshit. (The movie in theaters when people started jumping off Cruise's bullet train was The War of the Worlds, and his performance in that was a lot better than some of the roles he's racked up raves and award nominations for. It was perfectly in his best range: he had to express resentment, run like hell, and convince you that he'd prefer not to be incinerated by alien death rays. And he got to share the screen with Tim Robbins, always a good choice if you want to remind people that sometimes, a "real" actor can be a hundred times more annoying than a movie star.) What next for Cruise? It may be a learning game, finding out what he can and cannot get away with now. As of 2008, the stats seem to be: Fat suit and bald wig yes, Nazi uniform and eyepatch, check please!

Yesterday's Hits: Home Alone (1990, Chris Columbus)

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The 1990 holiday movie slate boasted a number of sure-fire hits from many of Hollywood’s most bankable names. Arnold Schwarzenegger was getting pushed around by a classroom full of kids, Sylvester Stallone was revisiting his most iconic character once again, Tim Burton was debuting his first project after Batman made him Hollywood’s hottest young director, and Kevin Costner premiered his debut behind the camera, an epic Western that went on to win several Oscars. Heck, there was even a new Godfather movie. Yet none of these movies went on to become the year’s top grossing blockbuster. No, the reigning king of 1990’s box office boasted little more than a precocious child star, a kid-friendly concept, and a memorable scream.

That movie, of course, was Home Alone, directed by Chris Columbus. Sold to moviegoers with the tagline, “a family comedy… without the family,” the movie’s premise encompassed every kid’s dream- having the run of the house with no adult supervision- and many parents’ nightmare- accidentally leaving their child behind when they leave on vacation. At the center of the action was Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin, for whom producer/screenwriter John Hughes specifically wrote the role after previously working with him on the previous year’s Uncle Buck. Expectations for Home Alone were relatively low, but good word of mouth about the film and its young star made it the runaway hit of the season, and its overwhelming success led to two sequels.

Alas, Home Alone doesn’t hold up very well, in part because of the mountain of contrivances the movie asks us to accept in order to make the storyline work. To begin with, although I’m sure that children have been accidentally left behind by their parents, it’s hard to believe that it would happen the way it does in the movie- surely one of the adults in the house was an early riser, no? Likewise, a repeated gag involving characters being fooled into thinking that a violent-sounding movie scene is really happening in the house is kind of a forehead-slapper- like any reasonably intelligent adult couldn’t tell the difference between real gunshots to those playing on a television?

But then, intelligence seems to be in short supply among the characters. One of my cinematic pet peeves is when a movie requires that its characters be idiots and Home Alone has some real doozies. Chief among the movie’s morons are Harry and Marv, a pair of bumbling burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Here’s a pair so thickheaded that they get all manner of indignities vested upon them by a little kid, yet never think that, hey, maybe it’d be best to just cut their losses and run rather than risk incurring still more pain and suffering. Of course, it helps that Kevin is preternaturally at jerry-rigging booby traps all over the house with relatively little preparation, and placing them just where the crooks will strike.

This is indicative of the movie’s biggest problem, then Kevin is almost never convincing as a real kid. Oh sure, Culkin bugs his eyes out real cute and delivers the wiseassed one-liners almost like he means them. But it’s just hard to believe that Kevin would be capable of most of what he does or says, whether he’s delivering a monologue in the bathroom mirror or faking out the baddies. Part of the blame must fall on Culkin himself. Like most child actors, Culkin has self-assurance in spades but can’t sell the dialogue as his own, especially not when he’s given lines like “Bless this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale. Amen.” Culkin was the biggest child star of his day, making $8 million a movie at the peak of his popularity, but it’s easy to see why he hasn’t been able to make the leap to grown-up roles with the same success that contemporaries like Elijah Wood have.

Time and again, I’ve bemoaned the tendency of many adults to forgive family movies their faults and manipulations on the grounds that they’re “just for kids.” While I realize that children aren’t particularly discerning movie watchers, it doesn’t seem right to use this as an excuse to foist subpar entertainment upon them. Home Alone might have been a hit in its day, but it’s also manipulative and often stupid, and making children watch movies like this is practically an insult to their budding intelligence. With all the high-quality family movies now available on DVD, there’s really no reason to show your kids Home Alone.

Morning Deal Report: Stallone Is Expendable

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:45:00 GMT

We’ve seen warring volcano movies, giant meteor flicks and Capote biopics, but nothing can prepare you for the drama of Gods vs. Titans! War of the Gods is set to start shooting in February for Relativity, while Clash of the Titans is slated for a April launch at Warner Bros. “Both are sub-$100 million projects, though the budget for Gods, at approximately $85 million, is believed to be higher than Titans, which is closer to the $70 million range. The studios have been in a fierce battle to get their product to market first, in a battle echoing the scramble between competing studio projects Troy and Alexander in 2004,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Sylvester Stallone has written and will star in The Expendables, which “follows a team of mercenaries on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator,” per Variety. Jason Statham is also aboard and Jet Li is in negotiations to join the action picture for Nu Image/Millennium Films.

Antonio Banderas is in discussions to play Salvador Dali in a biopic for director Simon West. “Film will blend music with CGI sequences in an effort to capture the inventiveness and color of the painter. Story will explore how Dali conquered America and the world with sex, sin and surrealism only to succumb later to worldwide scandal and misfortune,” Variety reports.

Related:
Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again
Woody Harrelson Eats Your Brains

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

America The Dissonant: Seven Movies That Send Mixed Messages About U.S.

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Last week, because it was the 4th of July and because we’re such red-blooded, flag-lapel-pin-wearing patriots, we here at the Screengrab celebrated some of our all-time favorite Pro-America movies. And the week before that, because we’re also dirty rotten elitist commie pinkos, we focused on movies that dared to criticize the American Empire. And now, to complete our nationalist trifecta, we examine a third type of film: movies that are designed to make the U.S. look kick-ass, but actually wind up making us look kinda lame-ass.

THE PATRIOT (2000)

That great American Roland Emmerich first treated us to his overblown brand of Fourth of July fireworks in Independence Day, but that little-seen arthouse curiosity is covered later in the list. In The Patriot, Emmerich jumps back in time a couple hundred years to show us the true meaning of Independence Day. Which is, of course, the kicking of major British ass. Mel Gibson plays a wealthy southern landowner with no slaves who goes all Mad Max 1776 when the redcoats burn down his house and kill various members of his family. Arming his two youngest boys with rifles and himself with as many guns, knives and hatchets as he can carry, Gibson sets out to liberate his oldest son from the Brits who have seized him. The ensuing slaughter is shockingly savage for a summer popcorn flick, and for a moment you think the movie might actually be interested in exploring some areas of moral ambiguity. The moment passes. Emmerich isn't interested in any of the actual root causes of the Revolution; this world-changing event serves as mere window-dressing for a routine revenge thriller – an excuse for some flag-waving rah-rah to jack up the stakes and make The Patriot seem like it's about something.

COBRA (1986)

A perennial plank in every political campaign is law & order; no matter how low the statistics actually get, voters rank crime as one of their top concerns in every public opinion poll. Unfortunately, the law & order platform usually has an ugly side, and this movie couldn’t have been a more jaw-dropping cautionary tale about the dangers of a brutally empowered police force if it was actually trying to be. In 1986, post-Rambo and at the peak of his popularity, Sylvester Stallone starred in and wrote the screenplay to Cobra, in which he played the black-clad, submachinegun-toting police officer Marion Cobretti, opposing a shadowy outfit called the New Order, who you might think wanted to play gloomy, depressing post-punk songs at everyone in America, but in fact were even worse: they wanted to overthrow democracy and institute the rule of the strong over the weak. Deciding to beat them at their own game, Cobretti simply cruises around Los Angeles, dressed like a gay Nazi biker and, dispensing with democratic fripperies like due process and prohibitions against cruelty, simply massacres every criminal unlucky enough to wander into his sights. Torturing, burning, gutting, and gunning down dozens of people throughout the course of the movie, Stallone managed to alienate even some of his die-hard fans: while the movie made decent money and temporarily knocked Top Gun out of the #1 slot, a decent number of filmgoers as well as critics found its vision of law & order America as a place where the cops acted as little more than roving death squads pretty repugnant.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola, debuting Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival, famously said, “My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam.” And like Vietnam, it is something too sprawling, too massive, too chaotic and complicated to be assessed in a few simple sentences. At turns it seems heartily pro-war and virulently anti-war; it conveys the insanity of the entire interventionist approach while still seeming to lay the blame on soft, coddled grunts and incompetent civilians. This inherent contradiction isn’t just circumstantial: it arises from the fundamental clash of worldviews between the director and the screenwriter. John Milius, the writer of the original script, meant it to be simultaneously a rebuke to what he perceived as the weakness and unrealistic expectations of anti-war protestors and a celebration of the virtues of the warrior spirit. Much of this approach survives in the finished film, especially in the diffident portrayal of Colonel Kurtz, who at times seems more heroic than insane. Meanwhile, director Francis Ford Coppola meant for Apocalypse Now to be a straightforward adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, with American anti-Communism taking the place of Belgian colonialism and Kurtz portrayed as a murderous madman. In the end, the movie, meant by one of its creators to be a celebration of the American intervention in Vietnam and another to be a condemnation of same, attains a terrifyingly uneasy balance between the two. After the torturous production of the movie had finished, Coppola said, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” Much the same could be said about America in Vietnam.

RED DAWN (1984)

And speaking of John Milius...the aforementioned screenwriter directed this Reagan-era blood-wet dream (based on a story co-written with Kevin Reynolds) about a Russian invasion of Middle America (or, as many conservatives prefer to think of it, America), complete with terrifying imagery of the Golden Arches obscured by Soviet paratroopers...oh, the humanity! How evil are Milius’ commies? So evil that, shortly after landing in a field outside a high school in Calumet, Colorado, their very first order of business is to machine-gun an unarmed black teacher (nice touch, John) who wanders outside to see what’s going on. Because, y’know, that’s how commies roll: no algebra for you, capitalist pig-dogs! Forget attacking military bases or other strategic targets: this U.S.S.R. knows the best way to cripple Yankee morale is to cut off our access to fast food and varsity sports! Fortunately, the popular jocks of Calumet High know where to find guns and ammo in bulk, and before you can say “Second Amendment,” their one-time football team, the Wolverines, has transformed into a crack guerilla group of...um...insurgents, willing to engage in extreme acts of ultra-violence to drive the foreign superpower from their land. Probably best not to think too deeply about how the story would be different if the town under siege were, say, Tikrit, or if the Colorado teenagers with easy access to automatic weapons were nerds instead of jocks and the high school was in neighboring Columbine. In Milius’ world, the good guys are joyless, soulless killing machines, the bad guys are joyless, soulless killing machines in different uniforms (and, thus, bad) and violence is the only answer. WOLVERINES!!!!!!

THE CAINE MUTINY (1954)

The film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s wildly popular 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny was a mess. Wouk had been contracted to write the screenplay himself, but was fired after turning in a script that was over four hours long; difficulties in casting plagued the production, which also went highly overbudget; and director Edward Dmytryk felt that Columbia Pictures kept too tight a rein on him and didn’t let him make the movie he wanted to make. In addition, there was a great deal of political pressure on the production; in order to secure the Navy’s cooperation in making the picture, the studio had given all sorts of assurances that no one would be made to look bad, and with anti-Communist fever sweeping Hollywood and the American public much less certain about the Korean War than it had been about WWII, everyone was walking on glass to make sure the story, about a mutiny aboard a minesweeping ship commanded by the unstable, paranoid Captain Queeg, didn’t come across as too anti-military. All of these factors and more contributed to the uncomfortable ending of the film: after the mutineers are acquitted by a court-martial tribunal following a dramatic meltdown on the stand by Queeg himself, their defense attorney turns on them, calling them goldbrickers, cowards and gutless wonders. He saves most of his rancor for the cynical intellectual Lt. Keefer, who he accuses of having masterminded the entire situation just because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. The whole thing ends up ringing rather hollow, both dramatically and philosophically, and defuses the rest of the movie’s far more interesting conflict (one’s duty in wartime balanced against the malfeasance of one’s commanding officer) for a simple-minded pasty, sneaky egghead vs. upstanding macho man one. For a movie that sets itself the task of questioning the meaning of honor and duty to end up claiming it’s better to follow a deranged lunatic into battle than listen to some smart-ass college boy does no service to the military tradition it goes to such lengths to protect.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Appropriately enough, I first saw this movie on July 4th weekend, in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was killing time waiting for the Olympic Village to be finished. There wasn't much to do, so to get out of the heat until the Braves game started, I ducked into a theater that was screening this Roland Emmerich atrocity. What stuck with me over the years isn't so much its incompetence or its bombast – it's really no worse than any number of other alien-invasion flicks, and it's been outdone dozens of times since then in sheer alienating volume – but its coldhearted determination to ruthlessly exploit every noxious Hollywood stereotype in existence. In a movie which purports to be patriotic, from its name right down to its 'fightin' president' character, it instead turns out to be jingoistic, as the nations of the world are helpless to do a thing against marauding extraterrestrials until the good-hearted Yanks do what they've done since the Great War: pull their foreign fat out of the fire. Aside from the horrendous stereotypes embodied in the main cast (including Will Smith as a wisecracking fighter pilot, Randy Quaid as a crazy kook no one believes, Vivica Fox as a hooker with a heart of gold, Margaret Colin as a bitchy career woman, Brent Spiner as a misguided intellectual, Harvey Fierstein as a mincing queen, and Judd Hirsch as a Jewish caricature so odiferous its only competition comes from Julius Streicher cartoons), there's also the astonishing montages that occur when the alien motherships are disabled: African tribesmen hoot and holler, waving spears (!) around and looking as if they accidentally left home without the bones in their noses, and gibberish-spouting, kaffiyeh-clad Arabs ululating mindlessly, unable to even make themselves understood until a helpful white man gets on the blower to explain the situation to his American brethren. What purports to be a feel-good action blockbuster, more than ten years later, now plays like a cartoon of the invincible ignorance of American foreign policy.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

In the Year of Our Lord 1994, there was no middle ground in America: you were either Pro-Gump or Pulp-ist. You either looked at life as a box of chocolates or as an overpriced Martin & Lewis milkshake. And if you were the kind of gal who dressed as Mrs. Mia Wallace with a hypo full of adrenalin sticking out of your breastplate or the kind of guy who dressed like Jules or Vincent in a skinny tie and black suit jacket that year for Halloween, then you probably weren’t all that surprised when the groundbreaking instant classic Pulp Fiction lost the Best Picture Oscar to the revisionist history of the sixties and seventies where all the peace-loving hippies were fools and dupes who never accomplished anything but their own self-destruction and the good-natured dimwit who accepts the status quo at face value is rewarded with happiness and, of course, obscene wealth. Unlike Being There, which used Peter Sellers’ blank-slate gardener, Chance, to satirize the willful, self-reflexive gullibility of the American people, Robert Zemeckis’ insidiously reactionary comedy pretends to celebrate simple American values while actually championing the type of anti-intellectual, head-in-the-sand, cross-your-fingers-and-hope-you-win-the-lottery malaise that led to eight years of the recent Voldemort administration and (egad) the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Related Stories: America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S., America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's Right With U.S.

Morning Deal Report: Spielberg Gets a Clue

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Actually, Steven Spielberg gets The 39 Clues, or at least the screen rights to the “multiplatform adventure series to be launched in the fall by Scholastic Media,” Variety reports. A planned 10-book series with additional elements including an online game and collectible cards, Clues is about “the most powerful family in the world, the Cahills, who count Napoleon and Houdini among their relatives. Readers will be challenged to discover the source of the family's powers, revealed through 39 clubs that are hidden around the world and scattered throughout history.” Spielberg already has a full plate, including an adaptation of Tintin and a Lincoln biopic starring Liam Neeson, but anything that keeps him away from another Indiana Jones movie is fine by us.

The Hollywood Reporter uncovers a secret conspiracy headed by X-Files mastermind Chris Carter. Carter is in the middle of shooting Fencewalker, “a coming-of-age semiautobiographical character piece with no supernatural elements…Carter wrote the script for what is thought to be his passion project some time ago and raised the financing himself. The film has a modest budget and no distributor at this point.” The truth is out there, even if no one is talking.

Finally, you may have heard that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are set to make their Bollywood debuts. It turns out that this story is only half-true. The U.K. Telegraph claims that “Stallone has signed up for a cameo role in Kambakht Ishq, a big budget blockbuster starring Indian heart-throb Akshay Kumar. Schwarzenegger has also been approached - and it would be the first time the two action heroes have shared the big screen.” But in a Reuters U.K. report, the California governor’s spokesman dismissed the rumors. Stallone’s participation is confirmed in the story of an Indian stuntman in Hollywood, which will set a Bollywood record with its $21 million budget.

Related:
Steven Spielberg: Teacher's Pet
Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again

The Albert Popwell Collection

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The release this week of all five "Dirty Harry" movies starring Clint Eastwood on DVD and Blu-ray gives fans the chance to settle in for a long weekend spent admiring the charismatic intensity and skillful range of a familiar but sometimes underappreciated American actor--Albert Popwell. Popwell, who died in 1999, goes way back in the Dirty Harry franchise: he has a small role as a hippie in the movie that many see as a precursor to the Harry Callahan character (as it was molded by Eastwood and director Don Siegel in the 1971 Dirty Harry) and TV's McCloud to boot: the 1968 Coogan's Bluff. In that film, the first collaboration between Siegel and Eastwood--they'd later team up for The Beguiled, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Escape from Acatraz--Eastwood plays a shitkicker cop from Arizona who hits New York City at the height of the counterculture era to track down an escaped hood and inspires everyone's reluctant admiration for the effectiveness of his uncivilized approach enforcement. Popwell would go on to appear in a small but key role in Dirty Harry and return, in a different role each time, in the first three of its four sequels. Grady Hendrix recently noted that Popwell "twice the actor Mr. Eastwood is in the series;" his repeat appearances also serve as a handy guide to what possibilities were open--and closed--to talented African-American character actors in movies of the period. (I don't necessarily mean to imply that things have changed a whole hell of a lot.)

In Dirty Harry, Popwell has perhaps the movie's most memorable scene, albeit one that he has to spend lying on the sidewalk with a gun in his face. He plays the survivor of a bank robbery that interrupts Harry's lunch. A crackerjack action set piece peerlessly directed by Siegel in his knuckle-cracking prime, it establishes Harry's unearthly cool and mastery of the violent approach to crime-solving; he figures out what's going from one look at the getaway car and proceeds to foil the robbers by shooting their car. He then proceeds to fake out Popwell, who's lying within reach of his gun, by taunting him with the famous speech about just what Harry's gun could do to him if he had any bullets left, which he may or may not--"Do you feel lucky?" After backing down, Popwell calls out to the departing Harry in raspy-voiced desperation--"I gots to know" he says, with as much dignity as imaginable under the circumstances--and Harry points the gun in his face, pulls the trigger--click!--then walks away chuckling. The audience is meant to cheer Harry for not only defeating the fallen criminal but messing with his head and rubbing his face in it, and most of them do cheer, but Siegel's inclusion of a small grace note--a close-up of Popwell muttering, "Son of a bitch" as Harry walks away--can perhaps be taken as the director's covert acknowledgment that, for all his bitching and moaning about the things he's forced to do to compensate for the ineffectual lily-livered politicians and other liberals who would shackle the lawgiver, there's a big part of Harry that enjoys his job way too much.

There are no such grace notes in Popwell's flashy, repulsive scene in 1973's Magnum Force; he plays a pimp who brutally murders a hooker. But by then, grace notes in the "Dirty Harry" franchise were already getting to be few and far between. (Magnum Force is itself conceived as a raised middle finger to those who criticized the first film as a reactionary endorsement of vigilante police power. It pits craggy old Harry against a secret police death squad consisting of fresh-faced young up-and-comers--Robert Urich, Tim Matheson, David Soul--and their fearless leader, Hal Holbrook.) In 1976's The Enforcer, made in the wake of the SLA kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and other manifestions of the last insane, dying ripples of "revolutionary" counterculture politics, Popwell turns up as "Mustapha", a troubled-looking black militant who slips Harry some information that will help him bring down the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force", a bunch of pimps and hookers posing as a terrorist cell. (Like the Mothers of Invention, they're only in it for the money.) However we're meant to view his character, he does again manage to suggest a much deeper and more complicated range of thought and emotion than Harry. Popwell made the full jump to good guy in 1983's Sudden Impact, the only film in the series directed by Eastwood himself. By now, the tensions of the sixties are fully submerged and the movie is in total action-cartoon mode. There isn't much Popwell can do to leaven it, but he does get more screen time than ever before. He plays Harry's partner, which is the series equivalent to being the drummer in Spinal Tap. It is a role traditionally assigned to representatives of "minority groups", such as the Hispanic rookie detective played by Reni Santoni in Dirty Harry and the woman cop played by Tyne Daly in The Enforcer, so that Harry can show that for all his angry-white-male bluster, he can respect and work with the unwhite and the unmale when they prove to him that they have the right stuff. Paradoxically, they invariably prove it by getting taken out of the action by getting injured or killed, so that Harry can also show that only he is tough enough to single-handedly prevail in the end. Popwell's role does not break the cycle.

Popwell's career was hardly limited to his association with Clint Eastwood. He was a very active presence in TV, appeared in Siegel's Charley Varrick, and left a fond impression among fans of family-blacksploitation films with his role as Matthew Johnson, who, with his brother Melvin (Caro Kenyatta), lent their martial-arts skills to the efforts to keep heroin out of the neighborhood in two films starring the late Tamara Dobson as the amazon avenger Cleopatra Jones. But he deserves to be remembered for being to Dirty Harry what Frankie Faisan has been to Hannibal Lector. Faison, it will be remembered, appeared in all the movies featuring everyone's favorite cannibal psychiatrist--Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon--up until the more recent and less successful Hannibal Rising. It would be nice to surmise that Popwell's absence from the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, was closely connected to that film's disappointing returns, but it did have, mmmmmmmmmmm, other problems. Eastwood himself was 58 at the time, and the appearance of this box set, twenty years later, can probably be taken as a declaration, should anyone have been in doubt about it before now, that we have indeed seen the last of Harry Callahan and his big phallic killing device. Eastwood may not be the master filmmaker and great actor that a number of critics have insisted on taking him for in his dotage, but, give him a little credit: he's less shameless than Sylvester Stallone.

DVD Digest for May 27, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

This week, Criterion continues its ongoing commitment to the films of Michael Powell, and an aging icon shoots his way onto DVD and Blu-Ray.

DVD of the Week: What else could it be but Criterion’s The Thief of Bagdad? This is probably the closest thing to a must-buy that’s coming along in months, and for so many reasons. As one of the great examples of forties-era Technicolor, Thief is a natural for DVD, especially once the wizards at Criterion are done sprucing it up for this release. But there’s a raft full of special features to enjoy as well- two commentaries (including one from a couple of obscure movie nerds named Scorsese and Coppola), a documentary about the film’s award-winning effects, a propaganda film commissioned by producer Alexander Korda on behalf of the British War effort, and much more besides. In other words, I know exactly what I’ll be spending my money on come Tuesday

Also of note is the crush of Rambo DVDs hitting shelves this week. Not only will there be two different standard-DVD versions of Stallone’s latest Rambo adventure (Lionsgate), but also a Blu-Ray edition, along with box-sets of the previous Rambo films in both standard and Blu-Ray. So if you like Rambo, there will be plenty of goodies for you to enjoy.

Pretty slow week for DVD releases otherwise, with new titles including Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream (Genius Productions), Renny Harlin’s barely-released Cleaner (Sony), Nina Hartley’s Guide to Great Sex During Pregnancy (Pacific Media), and a DVD edition of Marguerite Duras’ 1972 film Nathalie Granger (Facets- ugh). And that’s about it, sadly.

Finally, look who’s back! That’s right, it’s your old pal David Huddleston, ready to bemoan the release of two new HD-DVDs from Warner Home Video. What are they, you ask? Why, they’re P.S.: I Love You (Warner) and Twister (Warner). Are you as excited as I am? Because if you are then it must be you I hear snoring. Seriously, could you knock that off? I'm trying to sleep here.

Hollywood "P.I. to the Stars" Sent Up the River

Phil Nugent — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano has been found guilty of 77 out of 78 charges including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft. (He was acquitted of a single count of unauthorized computer access. He still has a racketeering-related charge yet to be decided.) The case attracted much in show business circle because of the high-profile nature of some of Pellicano's clients, and also some of his victims. Among those who hired him included Brad Grey of Paramount Pictures and Michael Ovitz. Pellicano's downfall began with Ovitz hired him to "handle" a reporter named Anita Busch, who contacted the FBI after she "walked out to her Audi outside her home to find a dead fish under a pan, a hole in the windshield, and a note saying 'STOP.'" Pellicano also placed taps on Busch's phone, as well as on the telephones of Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine (the last at the behest of Carradine's ex-wife, who Pellicano was dating) and conducted a smear campaign against Garry Shandling in response to Shandling filing suit against his own former agent.

Prosecutor Daniel Sanders told the jury that "This case is not about Hollywood", and as Carla Hall notes in the Los Angeles Times, the government did its best to see to it that it wouldn't be about Hollywood by not charging or investigating Pellicano's rich, powerful employers, whose knowledge of just what he was up to remains shrouded in mystery. A few notables, such as Die Hard (and, more recently, Basic and The 13th Warrior) director John McTiernan, who thought it would be at least as good idea to lie to feds about the case as it was to remake Rollerball, were scooped up and convicted of charges related to Pellicano months ago, but most of the big names dragged into the case managed to steer clear of legal involvement. Charged alongside Pellicano were his associates and co-defendents Mark Arneson, a former member of the LAPD; retired telephone company field technician Ray Turner; computer expert Kevin Kachikian; and a former Las Vegas businessman, Abner Nicherie. As Carla Hall dryly puts it, "No one in the group was likely to be spotted dining at the Ivy or skiing in Aspen."

Werner Herzog’s Very Bad Idea

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Werner Herzog is remaking The Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. I can’t stop him.

According to Variety, “Nicolas Cage will star in an updated version of 1992's Bad Lieutenant with Werner Herzog directing, Edward R. Pressman producing and Avi Lerner's Nu Image/Millennium Films financing.” How many red flags can you possibly cram into one sentence? First and foremost, Lerner is the schlockmeister behind the recent Al Pacino fiasco 88 Minutes and Pacino’s upcoming re-teaming with Robert De Niro, Righteous Kill, as well as the latest Rambo reboot. His slate of upcoming productions is crammed with remakes and sequels, including yet another Rambo, re-launchings of both Conan and Red Sonja, Undisputed 3 (there was an Undisputed 2?) and the long-anticipated-by-someone Poe biopic written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

He also produced The Wicker Man remake, which presumably is where Nicolas Cage comes into this. Well, I already knew Cage was shameless. I just want to know how Herzog got roped into the project. As described by Variety, the original 1992 Bad Lieutenant “followed the depraved New York police officer of the title, who was heavily involved in drugs, gambling, sex and stealing; the pic received an NC-17 rating.” That’s sort of putting it mildly. Love it or hate it, Lieutenant was an intensely personal vision from writer/director Abel Ferrera, with a truly out-on-a-limb performance from Harvey Keitel. It would hardly seem to be remake fodder, anymore than say, Eraserhead or Herzog’s own Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Would Herzog really be okay with Abel Ferrara remaking that? For all I know this project may have Ferrara’s blessing, and it’s not that I’m such a huge fan of his anyway, but something about this just reeks of crossing a line that ought not be crossed. This doesn’t help: “The new script's penned by Billy Finkelstein, a TV writer with credits on Murder One, Law & Order and NYPD Blue.”

Hopefully Herzog will have an announcement of his own soon. I’d love to know what he’s thinking.

Screengrab Q&A: Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, Directors of Son of Rambow

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith made their production company's name — "Hammer & Tongs" — on their inventive music videos for Blur, Pulp and R.E.M. With their debut feature film, an adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they showed off a sweet sensibility that belied the metallurgical toughness of that name, and with the just-released Son of Rambow, they go one step further. Rambow follows schoolboy Will (newcomer Bill Milner, an instantly endearing tangle of scrawny limbs), raised by his mother in a conservative religious sect, the Plymouth Brethren. His upbringing has kept him away from all media, so when his troublemaking classmate Lee Carter shows him a bootleg copy of Sylvester Stallone's First Blood, his world is forever changed, and he and Lee Carter set off to make their own First Blood sequel — "Son of Rambow."

This is a great comedic premise, but what Jennings and Goldsmith could've played as broad farce, they instead use as a startlingly tender look at childhood friendship and loss. It's warm and nostalgic without ever getting cloying, and it has a compassion and fellow-feeling that should make it a family classic. I spoke to the duo about how they shaped their ode to filmic summers past. — Peter Smith

There's a very bittersweet undertone to the film. Both characters are missing their fathers.
GJ: Both of us have our fathers intact, but my dad lost his dad when he was about nine, and one of my best friends had almost exactly the same experience. But it wasn't the starting point. We didn't know where to start originally. We knew we were trying to capture how great it was to be that age and not have any fear of consequences. But when you're trying to capture a feeling, rather than make a documentary of how things really were, you've got to sort of start using storytelling techniques. And one of those is to take things away from the character. For example, the next-door neighbors of mine when I was growing up were Plymouth Brethren. By making Will a Brethren, you understand the impact movies had. Whereas it would be really hard to do that with a regular kid, like we were.

It makes seeing First Blood so much more of a mind-blowing experience for Will.
NG: Exactly — it's very difficult to convey it without having to verbalize it. And the last thing we wanted to do was just tell the audience.

GJ: The kid would be going, "Hey, have you got any more movies like that? Wow, that was cool! My mind's blown wide open!" And at that point the audience would've left the cinema.

The kids who play the leads are wonderful.
NG: Well, we had them made by a really good specialist. [laughs] They'll never grow old, and they'll be in shops by Christmas.

GJ: Really, the success of the film is down to the fact that we found the right kids. Because they're the hardest thing to find, and if you get it wrong they're the most unpleasant, uncomfortable thing to watch.

Neither had acted before. How did you prepare them for the shooting?
NG: First off we went and made a short film in my mom and dad's backyard, which basically involved Garth and me making them watch us have fun. But then we did some rehearsals with them, and they got it. So it was actually all about trying to keep that as innocent as possible, and not do too many rehearsals. And then on set, to create an environment that would allow them to blossom. We didn't have any video monitors, so they couldn't see themselves and get self-conscious.

What let you to frame the film with the arrival and departure of the French exchange students?
GJ: Again, it's a heightened memory, but when that coach would turn up, those kids would get off, and they were so exotic, just by comparison — their clothes, their attitudes… Even physically, the boys already had their little mustaches. Maybe that only interested me because I was a late developer and wanted a mustache so badly.

You depict the French teenager, Didier, as this sort of alien rock star, but at the end there's this sweet moment of empathy when you realize he's —
GJ: Going back to nothing. [laughs]

Yeah — and you could see that as comeuppance, but I just found it kind of poignant.
GJ: That's right — there's hopefully no actual bad guy. Even the ones you think are bad, they're just not right for that relationship. There's Joshua, coming in to try to become the head of the family, and he's just got it wrong. He's just not the right guy. Again, it's all based on memories, and how when you look back, you realize that cool jock probably wasn't as happy as you thought he was. There was always more to it than you realize. You've got to love your characters.

The movie has been in the works since before you made Hitchhiker's. How did making that change your conception of this?
NG: We were told going into Hitchhiker's by many different people that making a film was very different from doing music videos. And what we realized in making Hitchhiker's was, actually, we've had a really good film school in making videos, and it's not really any different. So the main thing that we took from Hitchhiker's was a confidence to make Son of Rambow the way we wanted it.

There's a melancholic tone in Douglas Adams' work that's somehow very English.
GJ: You're never allowed to get too happy. [laughs]

But there's something very sweet and resigned about his whole worldview. You're never going to get the right cup of tea. I actually thought Son of Rambow captured more of that than Hitchhiker's did.
GJ: Douglas Adams had written Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy more than twenty years before we became involved, so our job was to try to not get in the way, really. But with Son of Rambow, really before we had the plot, it was that feeling we were after. And we're quite emotional little sappy people, really. [laughs] We like to have our buttons pushed by films. To do that properly, there needs to be a balance. You need to be up and down, not just one thing. Otherwise you start to react against it.

The movies or books or music that move you the most are usually the ones that push to the edge of sentimentality, but not over into it.
NG: It's a fine line, and it's very easy to fall over the edge. And I'm sure some people will go see Son of Rambow and think it's one way or the other. If you get it right, it's brilliant, and the film works incredibly well for that person. Like Garth says, there's a sense of manipulation sometimes. But often when you go into the cinema, you want to be manipulated a bit.

This film pays tribute to VHS films you made as a kid in the '80s. Do you still have copies of those films?
GJ: Yes, definitely. In fact, we're using them to inspire the next generation, allowing people to enter their own films into a film competition. We set up on sonoframbow.com a competition, so that the winning home movie, no more than five minutes in length, would get its own special slot on our DVD. And in order to inspire people I put up my first home movie that I made as a kid, having just seen Rambo, which is called Aaron, Part 1. And it's a good one to put up, mainly because it's bad enough for people to think, "Well, I could do this."

Pacino and De Niro Punch the Clock

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

We’ve all had a good time picking on Al Pacino for his shameless stroll through the critically reviled 88 Minutes, but the L.A. Times isn’t going to let his partner-in-crime Robert De Niro off the hook. Both Godfathers stand accused of making mockeries of their careers in pursuit of fat paychecks. (Disclaimer: I’m prepared to do the same. Somebody make me an offer.)

“The two icons of '70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves,” writes Patrick Goldstein, “making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.” As Goldstein notes, this isn’t exactly news to capo di tutti capi Francis Ford Coppola, who blew the whistle on his former golden boys in a GQ interview last year.

“I met Pacino and De Niro both when they were really on the come,” said Coppola. “They were really young and insecure. Now, Pacino is very rich, maybe because he never spends any money; he just puts it in his mattress. De Niro, kind of, was very inspired by Zoetrope and created an empire and is very wealthy and powerful….You know, even in those days, after The Godfather, I mean, I wanted—I didn't feel that those actors were ready to, ‘Let's do something else really ambitious.’ ” The director of Jack, ladies and gentlemen.

As we’ve mentioned, Pacino and De Niro are re-teaming later this year for the police thriller Righteous Kill. It will perhaps help you keep a lid on your expectations to know that the film is brought to you by the same producer and director as 88 Minutes, Avi Lerner and Jon Avnet. Lerner is described as a “colorful Israeli producer who has made hundreds of B movies over the last 20 years, having recently stepped up in budget class -- thanks to an influx of money from German film investment funds -- from direct-to-video thrillers with Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal and horror fare like Shark Attack to star vehicles with Sly Stallone (Rambo) and Bruce Willis (16 Blocks).” It’s as if the golden age of Cannon Films is upon us again. Goldstein says it best: “With Avnet at the helm again, expectations for quality are low -- it has the get-out-your-checkbooks feel of the latest Eagles tour.”

Geek Love: The Unmanliness of the New Action Heroes

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

"Now the geek is god in Hollywood." That's emerging conventional wisdom as expressed by publicist Tony Angellotti. emerging declares the veteran publicist and Oscar campaigner Tony Angellotti. "Every generation redefines its heroes and the heroes of today are slight of stature and geeky." The emergence, not just in starring roles but in action hero roles, of such as Shia LaBeof (Disturbia, Transformers, and now Indiana Jones's kid), James McAvoy (Wanted), and Emile Hirsch (Speed Racer) is apparently setting off a wave of soul-searching in Hollywood, where it seems somehow significant that these are the fellows stepping up to "replace" the likes of Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone. If this were, say, 1968, there'd probably be think pieces appearing analyzing this development in terms of a political shift in the zeitgeist; the Iraq war and other setbacks to our great national ego trip have tarnished the steroid-addled heroes who emerged full-bore in the 1980s and made audiences quicker to look for heroes who seem more thoughtful and capable of self-doubt. But nobody talks like that anymore, and today's self-appointed experts are more likely to speak the language of the pop psychologist. Angellotti, who seems personally affronted by some of the newer success stories ("Do these kids even shave?"), has this theory: "For decades, we wanted our heroes to be who we could never be, but this generation of filmgoers wants heroes they can relate to, who are similar to them. They see themselves in these somewhat awkward, geeky, hairless-faced guys. They can relate to them. Stars like Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis were men; these are boys, and they're appealing to younger audiences."

Others, such as Peter Safran, a man so smart that he freely admits to having produced Meet the Spartans, thinks it's a supply-and-demand issue. "I don't think it's happening because it's what the audience is demanding; it's happening because the old-style action hero isn't emerging. These are the people who are emerging now and clearly audiences respond to seeing themselves up on the screen. Shia LaBeouf's audience grew up with him - they are very familiar with him and he's a legitimate star today." Some of these deep thinkers may be getting a bit ahead of themselves. Whatever he can or can't bench-press, Shia LaBeouf is a talented guy with tremendous reserves of audience rapport; whatever his future holds, he's much more plausible star material than a lot of the people who've been hyped as alleged up-and-comers since Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson were figuring out which end of the razor you held to your face. (Judd's still working it out.) More to the point, some of the "men" that these guys (who, let's face it, may have their own deep-seated personal reasons for preferring heroes with hairline issues and calorie-intake counselors) love so much had their own callow periods when they first appeared on film. There were a few years there, between the point where Moonlighting started to turn brown and Die Hard's opening weekend, where it wasn't clear that Bruce Willis would ever wipe the smirk off his face and evolve into something more durable than an overage frat rat, and Mel Gibson's early success as the stone-faced pain merchant Mad Max was something he had to grow past on his way to becoming an assured, emotionally expressive leading man. (Then space worms ate his brain. But that's another story.)

In the end, the overmuscled, inaccessible terminators of the last couple of decades may be the ones who look like an aberration in the history of Hollywood stardom. Pauline Kael once defined the recipe for success as a male movie star as having the strength "to be one's own man" while still expressing "the sensitivity that is attractive to women." Stallone conveyed some of that sensitivity in the movie that made him a star, Rocky, then lost it when he pumped himself into a cartoon killing machine, a move that proved to have only short-term dividends at the box-office. And Schwarzenegger never became enough of an actor to express it even if he had access to it; if his political career continues to prosper, it'll enhance the likelihood that he'll ultimately be seen as an all-around celebrity success story whose movie career was just a stepping stone to bigger things. These guys were big, the biggest stars in the world at a time when testosterone overload was what the world seemed to want, but when the world moved on, they were painted in a corner, and left behind no progeny above the level of, say, Dolph Lundgren. (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who Arnold more or less officially designated as his rightful heir in a cameo in The Rundown, has shown himself more interested in developing as a character actor than in making a quick payday from walking away from explosions in slow motion.) The Shias and the Emiles may actually be closer to the true face of Hollywood tradition.

Tom Cruise Parodies Somebody Else for a Change

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Some good news, finally, for Tom Cruise: his cameo in Tropic Thunder brought down the house at an industry screening of the summer comedy. It's a time-honored show business tradition for stars who have encountered image problems to get back in their fans' good graces by showing that they have a sense of humor about themselves, though it doesn't always work, as Sylvester Stallone found out with Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. Cruise's deep-inside turn, in which he dons a fat suit to play "a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools" apparently works like gangbusters, especially among those who recognize it as a bitch slap at Sumner Redstone, the Paramount executive who cut his studio's ties to Cruise after speculation began building in Hollywood that the star's increasing reputation as a geek show on wheels might be killing his box office appeal. It also sounds as if the cameo might be enough of a live wire to entertain viewers in the heartland who managed to enjoy Shrek without knowing that the sort-statured, bullying royal villain was widely seen as Jeffrey Katzenberg's way of telling Michael Eisner, thanks for the memories.

As for the movie's director-star, Ben Stiller, he was reportedly unhappy when pictures of Cruise in costume made it onto the Internet and spoiled the surprise, but by now he may welcome the buzz about Cruise for giving people something to write about his movie that doesn't involve Robert Downey, Jr.'s appearance in blackface. (One more time, he's not playing a black man, he's playing numbskull actor who thinks he can give a straight dramatic performance as a black man in blackface. I think it sounds like a promising joke myself, but I often get these things wrong. For what it's worth, the New York Times reports that the consensus after the screening was that, between the two of them, Downey and Cruise are easily the best things in the movie.) Cruise and Redstone are said to have recently patched up their differences. It remains to be seen whether this latest development will compel Redstone to demand his records back, but if Cruise is doing favors for Ben Stiller, he must find it hard to stay mad at anybody, given the ruthless impression of him that Stiller used to do on Saturday Night Live and his own sketch comedy TV show. In fact, this isn't the first time the two have worked together; witness this clip, which dates from a time (oh, it seems so long ago) when Cruise's image was still so straight-laced and boringly normal that he could get away with calling somebody else a weirdo--though if you watch it all the way to the end, you can see a sign of the emergence of the scary freak we've come to know and love, maniacal laugh and all.

Trailer Review: Son of Rambow

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, Screengrab's own Phil Nugent wrote a column on the phenomenon of "fan remakes." But the truth is that fan remakes have been around for years. The most famous example of the genre, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, dates to the late 1980s, and indeed my friends and I got into the act with a short remake of Pulp Fiction, with the twist of turning all the characters into morons. But with such high-profile films as Be Kind Rewind and this film, fan remakes — or, as Gondry calls it, "Sweding" — are more ubiquitous than ever. While Gondry's film appears to be one of his trademark lo-fi flights of fancy, Son of Rambow looks to be taking another path, that of the twee Brit-com. Personally, my patience for films like this ran out in roughly 1999, but it should at least be interesting to see how a cute film in which children mount a remake of First Blood plays in the wake of Stallone's latest ultra-violent installment in his other signature series.

In addition, here's a link to Mike D'Angelo's review of the film from last year's Sundance.

Stallone: What You Choose to Call Self-Serving Gibberish, He Calls an Interview

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

How does Sylvester Stallone answer charges that Rambo is excessively violent? With great indignation, which is of course the only way that his screen characters ever answer anything. "I don't think this film is horrific and bloody, because that's what war is. It's not gratuitous violence. Gratuitous violence is a guy dressed up in a fright wig with a meat cleaver, chasing teenagers around the woods for ten hours. This is war, and it's a civil war — which, as you know, is by far the most vicious of all wars." To hear Stallone tell it, he actually expects people to respect the fact — or at least, not fall down laughing hysterically at the idea — that he made this movie in order to call attention to how bad things are in Burma. "We did tons and tons of research. There's an unbelievable amount of material out there, literally hour by hour. It's almost a teletype of the horrendous things that are going on there. And it's hard to believe that it's publicised and nobody does anything about it." Far be it from us to suggest that one reason Stallone may have selected Burma, out of all the world's trouble spots, to turn Rambo loose in is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of widespread public awareness of the atrocities being committed there, which means that he's not going to alienate a huge percentage of the international movie market by painting half the population as a bunch of wilde-eyed sadists hoping that the next plane in will bring them a blonde missionary to ravage. (And it goes without saying that, what with everyone running around decaptitating each other, Burma itself is not considered a prime movie market.) Twelve years ago, another movie about a Westerner who gets caught up trying to help the people of Burma, John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon, got little notice from audiences. (Slipping into pitchman's mode, Stallone has called Rambo "sort of like Beyond Rangoon, but with rocket launchers.")

It's optimistic to expect Stallone to realize that tying his self-glorifying action fantasies to an actual political situation actually makes his movie more offensive than it would be if he were fighting nameless killers in a made-up country, or gladiators from outer space, or some other deserving adversaries. It's not the gore that makes the Rambo movies so disgusting — you can like it or not like it, you can lap it up or hide your eyes, but in the end, it's only a movie. What's always made these movies splash down harder than most flicks of their ilk is the way that Stallone mixes cartoon heroics with "contemporary issues" in a way that touches real nerves. 1985's Rambo: First Blood, Part II would have just been a feature-length G. I. Joe toy commercial on steroids if Stallone hadn't had the instinct to exploit national guilt about having "abandoned" Vietnam vets and the desire to believe that M.I.A. soldiers were still over there, waiting to be rescued. What's debatable is Stallone's contention that this level of manipulation makes his movies more serious, and less sleazy, than the Friday the 13th pictures. It's trickier than it looks, I'll grant you that. When Stallone was kicking around the idea of making a fourth Rambo movie back in the early 1990s, before Rocky V bombed, he was reportedly thinking of making it about "the environment." That was before Republican politicians chose to make global warming not a scientific matter for serious study but an issue to be mocked and used to beat people like Al Gore over the head with; though it's a more pressing issue now than it was then, to have Rambo take it up would have meant possibly alienating a huge percentage of the audience that goes to the movies to see stuff get blown up. It stands to figure that Stallone wouldn't want to be burned again, after the disappointing reception to the 1988 Rambo III. The 1985 movie had ridden the wave of Reagan-era anti-Communist machismo; President Reagan had invoked Rambo's name in response to everything from a terrorist hijacking to tax reform, and in popular culture, the two figures became deeply connected people's minds. But Stallone now says that the third Rambo film, set in Afghanistan, died on the vine because Ronnie stabbed him in the back by letting the Cold War end ahead of schedule: "Two weeks before the film comes out Gorbachev comes over and gives Reagan a hug, kisses Nancy on the cheek and now I'm a Red-baiter!"

The Rambow Connection

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Rambo may not have defeated Hannah Montana at the box office, but in racking up a respectable $30 million so far, there’s already talk that this may not be the mush-mouthed muscleman’s final go-round. While Sylvester Stallone claims he’s hanging up the headband, Harvey Weinstein is enthusiastic enough to start formulating story ideas, and a newly inked two-film deal may have the Italian Stallion scrambling for a new HGH prescription soon enough.

Meanwhile, Rambo’s reemergence into the pop culture may give a boost to a "quirky little British movie" that might have otherwise been sunk by its association with the character. Son of Rambow is set for release in May, after clearing some legal hurdles caused by its inclusion of footage from the original Rambo vehicle. Directed by Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Rambow is a coming-of-age tale about a sheltered young British boy whose life is changed when he views a bootleg tape of First Blood. Thus inspired, he and a friend set about making their own homemade sequel to the movie, which we’re guessing turns out better than Rambo III, at least.

First Blood was released by the long-defunct Carolco, and its rights are now held by StudioCanal, which purchased the Carolco library after the company was deep-sixed by the failure of its final high-profile releases, Showgirls and Cutthroat Island. Paramount Vantage acquired Son of Rambow after its debut at Sundance a year ago, but has been unable to release it until now. According to Variety, a deal was struck with StudioCanal, which will release the movie in the U.K. in April.

If the plot of Rambow sounds vaguely familiar, you might be thinking of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, the video remake of the original Indiana Jones adventure. Produced over seven years in the 1980s, this labor of love received Steven Spielberg’s seal of approval, and — surprise! — a movie about the boys who made it is now in the works. Ah, the ’80s: the decade that just keeps on giving.

Roger Clemens: A Complete Cinematic History

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Since being named as a steroid user in the Mitchell Report, 7-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens has mounted an aggressive defense, if not an especially convincing one. He issued a denial via YouTube, sat down with 137-year-old Mike Wallace for light grilling on 60 Minutes, held a press conference at which he played a taped conversation between himself and his accuser that sounded like a bad David Mamet play, and earlier this week issued a statistical report meant to clear his name in some way nobody has been able to figure out yet. Clearly, the Rocket is intent on preserving his baseball legacy. But what of his motion picture legacy?

Now, it's true that the Screen Actors Guild has yet to adopt a formal policy on the use of performance enhancing substances (as Sylvester Stallone will be happy to attest). But certainly these accusations cast a shadow upon the Clemens filmography. In his earliest screen appearance in 1994's Cobb, Clemens showed tremendous range as "Opposing pitcher," a snarling, burly righthander. After giving up a hit to Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones), Clemens grows ever more agitated as Cobb torments him on the basepaths, at one point threatening that the next pitch "will be in your ear." Of course, there are many who consider Cobb to have been a dirty player, if not a downright cheater, but nonetheless he is in the Hall of Fame. Look for Clemens to present his scene from Cobb before Congress on February 13th.

Clemens next took on the challenging role of "Skidmark" in the Farrelly Brothers' bowling epic Kingpin, near the end of his time with the Boston Red Sox. (Conspiracy alert: several years later, Clemens was in Yankee pinstripes. The Farrellys went on to make Fever Pitch, featuring Red Sox cult hero Johnny Damon, who himself became a Yankee shortly thereafter. Coincidence?) Watch this scene, and I think you'll agree Clemens displays some distinct signs of 'roid rage:

Clemens' final screen appearance to date was a cameo as himself in — you guessed it — Anger Management. Need we say more? Folks, the man is a ticking timebomb. But we would be remiss if we didn't mention that his greatest performance came not on the mound, nor even the silver screen, but on The Simpsons. And it's especially poignant now that we know one of the side effects of HGH is compulsive chicken-clucking. Truly this is a modern American tragedy, but for now, let's just try to remember the good times.

Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In an interview with Time magazine, Sylvester Stallone has admitted to taking human growth hormone (HGH) as part of the regimen that made it possible for him to once again play the mush-mouthed super-warrior John Rambo for a fourth time. Actually, "admitted" doesn't really capture the tone of Sly's remarks. The 61-year-old "actor", who has to do something to kill time for the next three and a half years while waiting for his big chance to be profiled in cover stories for the AARP magazine, balks at the notion that taking HGH is comparable to taking steroids, says that "Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older," and offers this unsolicited testimonial: "Everyone over 40 years old would be wise to investigate it because it increases the quality of your life. Mark my words. In 10 years it will be over the counter." (It goes without saying that Stallone is something of an authority on the future, having starred in both Demolition Man and Death Race 2000.)

Stallone's dependence on HGH isn't exactly news: a year ago, while he was touring to promote his previous exercise in career necrophilia, Rocky Balboa, he was arrested after Australian customs officials found forty-eight vials of Jintropin in his luggage. (It has been reported that when Stallone was asked why he was traveling with HGH in his suitcase, he answered, with a sideways nod to his shooting schedule, "Where do you think I am going to get this stuff in Burma?") Incidentally, Rambo, which opened last Friday and was widely expected to dominate the box office in its first week, ended up coming in second — behind Meet the Spartans. One can only hope that Stallone doesn't decide take that as a sign that he didn't juice up enough for his latest comeback. If he ups his dosage enough, he might inflate and wind up floating off into the ozone like Yaphet Kotto at the end of Live and Let Die. Actually, now that you mention it...

Take Five: We Love The '80s

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

American moviegoers can't get enough of the 1980s, apparently. Those of us who had to live through it the first time remember it primarily as a time of bad metal, worse sitcoms, and waiting around to see what dumb-ass thing Ronald Reagan would say next, but to the generations that followed, it is a time for richly veined cultural nostalgia. From what we can recollect through the haze of drugs and alcohol that coat our memories of the decade, the hallmark of 1980s cinema was very loud explosions punctuated by the occasional car chase or wise-cracking black transvestite. It's not something we thought anyone would be eager to repeat, and yet there have been, in recent memory, new installments of the Die Hard and Rocky franchises; a new TV series based on The Terminator; an upcoming Indiana Jones picture; and, opening all across the country this Friday, a new Rambo movie. Even the Screengrab is getting into the act, with Gabriel Mckee posting his top ten action heroes who deserve a comeback, many of whom hail from the Decade That Time Refuses To Forget. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: so says Take Five as we present a fistful of '80s action movies that we. . . well, we don't love, exactly, but we at least look back on with something less than severe brain trauma.

ROCKY III (1982)

Sure, the first movie had heart and soul. And the second movie had a ruthless determination to capitalize on the first movie's heart and soul. But do you know what they didn't have? Do you know what they lacked, which made the third installment unquestionably the best of all the Rocky movies? That's right: MR. T. They didn't have Mr. T, and as such, they suffered, as do all artistic projects not involving Mr. T. Here's a little secret they don't teach you at film school: sure, Citizen Kane might have been the greatest movie of all time — but it would have been even better if it had been able to feature Mr. T yelling at people. And Rocky III, whatever its other faults — and it had hundreds, from its hamhanded TV-movie direction (by Sly himself) to its predictable storyline — at least gave us Mr. T yelling at people in abundance. When his Clubber Lang (a savage, media-loathing brute allegedly inspired by young George Foreman) wasn't yelling at people, he was beating people up, and Rocky III brings us the double pleasure of seeing Sylvester Stallone clobbered by Clubber and Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips". Just turn it off halfway through.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

If it wasn't the most exciting or accomplished action movie of the 1980s, it was at least probably the most enjoyable: Big Trouble in Little China was brought to us by an uncharacteristically light-hearted John Carpenter, and worked both as a straight-up pseudo-mystical punch-'em-out and as a loopy parody of same. Carried largely on the back of Kurt Russell's endearing performance as antihero "ol' Jack Burton", a trucker who's chock full of bogus wisdom delivered in a ridiculously over-the-top John Wayne accent. Part of the reason it plays so well as both sincere action and goofy action send-up is because the script was written by W.D. Richter, who originally conceived it as a sequel to his own The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension from two years earlier. Legal and financial issues kept the sequel from being made, but Big Trouble features some of its characteristic touches and clever bits of dialogue. It also features swell performances from a young Kim Cattrall and James Hong, everyone's favorite inscrutable Asian. Besides, how can you not love a movie featuring a wizard named Egg Shen?

ACTION JACKSON (1988)
Where is the love for Sgt. Jericho Jackson, we ask you? Where? This compelling saga of America's forgotten black action hero was released in the same month as Bloodsport, making 1988 — which also brought us Die Hard, Above the Law, Red Heat and They Live — a banner year from cheesy guilty-pleasure action movies. This one had it all: a post-Rocky, pre-Arrested Development Carl Weathers playing a tough Detroit cop who was also an all-American track star and a Harvard-educated attorney; former Prince plaything Vanity making hay while the sun shone as a sex kitten; Sharon Stone, doing the thing that she was best known for doing before everyone all of the sudden decided to take her seriously; and villains Craig T. Nelson and Robert Davi overacting like there was no tomorrow. (Which, for Robert Davi at least, there probably wasn't.) Action Jackson had everything you could have wanted out of a 1980s action flick: a wisecracking tough guy hero, naked dead chicks, tons of explosions, people dying in extremely creative ways, egregious use of narcotics, and a protagonist whose name rhymed! Come back, Carl Weathers, all is forgiven.

BLOODSPORT (1988)

Before Jean-Claude Van Damme was a full-time crazy person, he was America's next big martial arts star. Bloodsport was the movie that put the rubber-groined Belgian on the map, portraying real-life martial arts semi-star Frank Dux. The plot of Bloodsport — well, it's giving it a lot more credit than it deserves to even call it a plot, involving (as does every other martial arts movie ever made) a bunch of well-toned Asians out to kick each other in the face. It's not much for memorable acting, either; Van Damme had already, in his first starring role, perfected the self-satisfied smirk that would carry him through the rest of his career, and while the movie does feature a young Forest Whitaker as a federal agent tasked to stand around looking exasperated, it also features Leah Ayres failing to become America's sweetheart, Donald Gibb trying to make the transition from hooligan to lummox, and Bolo Yeung (the former Bruce Lee nemesis known as Yang Tse) putting in the kind of performance only a trunk full of steroids can deliver. But it does feature some stunning martial arts battles, which is really all you can hope for in a movie like this.

ROAD HOUSE (1989)

In all the calls for a revival of action movie heroes like Rocky, Rambo, Ryan, and Indy, where are the legions of fans clamoring for a return of James Dalton? Patrick Swayze desperately needs something to do, people. Believe it or not, there was once a time when women would line up around the block to get a load of this chunk-headed 'King of the Sleepers' with his shirt off, and nowhere was he more chunk-headed or shirtless than in this deleriously zany action flick about a Zen-influenced tough guy ("Pain don't hurt") who is hired, despite his small stature and philosophy degree from NYU, to act as the bouncer at an out-of-control bar. Directed by a former electrician named Rowdy and co-starring Kelly Lynch at the height of her blondeness, Road House transcends its shortcomings by being so completely indifferent to its own craziness that it chugs along on its own energy with nary a look back. Ben Gazzara is the bad guy in this thing, clearly bombed out of his coconut, and it features the immortal line "I used to fuck guys like you in prison".

Take Five: Days of the Week

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Opening wide this Friday is David E. Talbert's First Sunday, which should represent the final nail in a coffin which contains the mouldering remains of Ice Cube's reputation as an American nightmare. Younger Screengrab readers may not realize this, but Cube was once a rapper who so terrified white America that they put him on the cover of national news magazines, where he sneered and scowled his way right into your scaredy-bones. Now he just makes comedies that Steve Martin is too busy to bother with. Anyway, Talbert is being claimed as the new Tyler Perry, which, depending on your inclinations, is either a refreshing change or a dire threat. We were sort of hoping that First Sunday would function as a pseudo-sequel to the Friday films and would, at the very least, treat us to the spectacle of Cube and Katt Williams having to sit through a really long, dull sermon while stoned out of their gourds, which is an experience we've all had at one time or another. Unfortunately, it's no such thing, so here's some other movies you can look forward to after this endless Sunday is over.

STORMY MONDAY (1988)

Back before Mike Figgis hit it big, he directed this quirky little neo-noir thriller. It hasn't proven to be one of his lasting legacies as a filmmaker; for everything it does right, it goofs up in some profound way that nearly sinks it — its plot is pretty thin even by the standards of such potboilers, and two fine lead performances by British actors (Sting and a young Sean Bean) are clumsily countered by two dopey ones by American actors (an ultra-hammy Tommy Lee Jones and Melanie Griffith, clearly letting the clock run down on her fifteen minutes of fame). That said, it's worth watching for two reasons: first, it gives you an important stepping point in the development of Figgis' career, should you be interested in pursuing such a thing; and second, it's crazily gorgeous to look at. It features some nearly perfect cinematography by the estimable Roger Deakins, all rain-slicked streets and cheap neon and hazes of cigarette smoke and shadows that people fall into and never emerge. It's all surface; you'll find no depth here no matter how hard you look. But if surface is all you're looking for, you could do a lot worse than Stormy Monday.

IF IT'S TUESDAY THIS MUST BE BELGIUM (1969)

Movies like this must have seemed like such a good idea in the Sixties. Get an all-star cast, or at least as much of an all-star cast as you can afford. Have them rampage around a picturesque collection of back-lot set pieces mixed with stock footage. Stick Norman Fell in there looking pasty and irritated, then stick an unwieldy, ridiculous title on the thing and watch the money roll in. It's not quite clear exactly when Americans lost their patience for this particular brand of witless comedy, but I think it was right around the time this movie came out, which just so happened to coincide with the time at which it became acceptable to talk about smoking marijuana. Still, it's not entirely without its charm; Suzanne Pleshette makes a vivacious lead, Sandy Baron has some amusing scenes, Murray Hamilton reminds us that he once existed, and you get a fun look at what Hollywood thought of Ian McShane before it discovered how good he was at cussing like a sailor who's just had an anchor drop on his foot. It plays even better if you pretend that it was made in 1959 instead of 1969.

BIG WEDNESDAY (1978)

Highly influenced by The Endless Summer and a rash of other surfing documentaries that had hit the screens in the 1960s, Big Wednesday takes a similar visual approach and a comparable 'surfing as metaphor for nascent mystics communing with nature ' storyline, but wraps it all up in a big mushy box of coming-of-age drama by writer/director John Milius, who had not yet discovered that the one thing he loved even more than surfing was killing communists. Based loosely on his own southern California teenhood, Big Wednesday is actually a pretty accomplished film for what it is, but it really soars on the strength of what today seems like an incredibly goofball cast: shirtless, bronzed, toned young beachcombers portrayed by...future acid casualty Gary Busey, future heroin junkie Jan-Michael Vincent, and future Greatest American Hero William Katt. Patti D'Arbanville wanders through there as well, as does a woefully out-of-place Joe Spinnell as Busey's shrink. All in all, not a bad little movie, but one that's highly improved if you're in a Gary Busey state of mind when you watch it.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON (1984)

Right around the time that MTV was robbing us all of our ability to process visual information that didn't come with cuts every fifteen seconds, avant-garde composer, musician, and filmmaker Brian Eno offered a refreshing, if highly unusual, tonic in the form of Thursday Afternoon. Essentially a series of eight nearly motionless "video paintings", Thursday Afternoon was meant to be viewed in a vertical format; the video packaging actually instructed viewers to upend their television sets. Whether anyone actually did that or not, the video was an interesting exercise in changing the video shorthand that accompanies music on screen. Accompanied by music that is highly suggestive of his 'ambient' period circa Music for Airports, the videos bring us nearly static images (of nature scenes, shifting electronic displays, and fashion model Christine Alicino, also the film's cinematographer), and manage to accomplish visually precisely the effect that Eno was going after musically with that ambient work. It may not be the most compelling thing ever set to video, but it's a lot better conversation-starter than your iTunes Visualizer at a party.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)

So iconic is John Badham's 1977 disco document that it's easy to overlook what a colossal impact it made at the time it was released. John Travolta became such a huge star following its box-office-busting run that his fall from grace seemed inevitable and his comeback seemed incredible; with the benefit of hindsight, one might be forgiven for thinking he was the only person in the movie as none of the other actors went on to even remotely the same level of fame. Badham, likewise, never made a film as good as this, or as successful. Endlessly parodied, riffed on and exploited, it's the kind of movie that even if you've never seen it, you feel like you've seen it. It really went off the rails early on; it's impossible to guess from the final product, but it was actually based on an edgy, almost scholarly piece of cultural studies by the brilliant English polymath Nik Cohn called "Tribal Rituals of the New Saturday Night". Still, a few of its dance scenes, its relentless energy, and Tony Manero's slow, arrogant strut through Brooklyn have lost none of their power, and make it clear why this movie meant to its time and place what it did.

Morning Deal Report: Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are writing a Ghostsbusters videogame, and Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson are on board. It's not Ghostsbusters III, but it's something.

John C. Reilly will play a vampire.

As you may have heard, the ever-entertaining Sylvester Stallone has been working on an Edgar Allen Poe biopic. Now rumor suggests Viggo Mortensen may star.

— Peter Smith

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw

Trailer Roundup: Cassandra's Dream, Kung Fu Panda, Rambo

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Cassandra’s Dream

Like Match Point two years ago, Cassandra’s Dream is being sold as a standard-issue British-made thriller, with Woody Allen's name withheld until the very end of the trailer. And like Match Point, this is by all accounts a crime drama steeped in class envy (reports from Toronto were respectful but unenthusiastic). What intrigues me most about this isn’t the crime stuff but the familial issues in play, with working-class brothers Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell (notice the accents) coming to rich uncle Tom Wilkinson to borrow money. At this point, the movie could go either way, but I’d rather see Allen make movies like this than the mostly lame comedies he’s been churning out since Small Time Crooks.

Kung Fu Panda

Not that Dreamworks Animation has ever been especially committed to craft, but now that they’re banging out two movies a year all quality control has more or less been shot to hell. I imagine this pitch sounding like a pot-addled college student’s late-night ramblings: "Dude! You know how there are different kinds of kung fu named after, like, animals? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could, y’know, see all the different animals doing the different kinds of kung fu! And there would be a panda, and he’s all fat and funny and he can’t do kung fu at all; now that would be a great movie. They could get Jack Black to be the panda. . . that would be sweet, right?" In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to think that this isn’t even for real. It’s not, is it? Also, where’s Hamster Style?

Rambo

Years from now, there’s going to be a certain amount of confusion as to which Rambo is which. To wit — First Blood is the first Rambo movie, the second installment is Rambo: First Blood Part II, nobody will bother with Rambo III, and the upcoming fourth movie is simply called Rambo. Complicated enough for you? Anyway, when I first heard that Stallone was making another Rambo movie, my initial reaction was one of eye-rolling disbelief. But that changed when I saw last December’s Rocky Balboa, a movie that was cornball and far-fetched, but as endearing as Rocky’s old dog Butkus. So yes, the image of a sixty year old Stallone taking on guerrillas in the jungles of Myanmar is a little hard to take seriously, but I’m rooting for Rambo to be good, or at least fun. Yeah, I’ll take fun.

— Paul Clark