Your Thursday Afternoon “Twilight” Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You may have noticed that we at the Screengrab have more or less completely ignored Twilight. We are aware that it’s a cultural phenomenon, and that the movie is out in theaters tomorrow, and that it’s predicted to be one of the biggest hits of the year. It’s just that none of us are teenage girls. Believe me, there are some among us who wish they were teenage girls, not that I’m naming any names. (See if you can PIERCE the veil of that cryptic comment, as if you were an arrow from the bow of Ted NUGENT!) But I digress. In the interest of fairness – and page views from the teenage girls who normally avoid the Screengrab like the plague – here is a handy roundup of the latest the Web has to offer in Twilight-mania.

The first reviews are in! Entertainment Weekly gives Twilight a B; critic Owen Gleiberman oozes over Robert Pattinson’s “dreamy, sculpted hunk of a teenage vampire,” who he describes as “Romeo, Heathcliff, James Dean, and Brad Pitt all rolled into one: a scruffy-gorgeous bloodsucker pinup who is really an angelic protector.’ Get a room, Owen! Slate’s Dana Stevens calls it “flawed yet transfixing,” reserving special praise for costume designer Wendy Chuck, who “manages to make weatherproof parkas look Goth.” Claudia Puig of USA Today dissents, citing “questionable casting, wooden acting, laughable dialogue and truly awful makeup.”

The LA Times reports that the Twilight setting of Forks, Washington is getting all the tourist business that used to go to Snoqualmie (aka “the real Twin Peaks”). “Forks High School is often besieged with Twilighters, who pose for pictures in front of the Spartans sign or scan the parking lot for Edward's car, a silver Volvo sedan. Some have even wandered inside to seek out the fictional characters. Still others have requested to be transferred to the school.” That’s okay, I still have my Twin Peaks Phys-Ed Dept. t-shirt somewhere.

Movie Retriever offers Six Excuses Grown-Ups Can Use for Going to See Twilight This Weekend. “Forget about the kid-vampire stuff. You're just a big fan of Twilight's director Catherine Hardwicke, ranging back to her days as a production designer - she designed Tapeheads, I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, and Tombstone! - to her more-recent career as a big-time director, helming movies like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown.”

Of course, there’s the inevitable face-off between Twilight and True Blood: BuddyTV asks “Who's the Better Vampire Boyfriend?”

At Rotten Tomatoes, dreamy Robert Pattinson dishes on his five favorite movies. One of them is Corky Romano. How’s that crush doing now, Owen?

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

A few gags and the “The Inquisition” sequence from HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART 1 (1981)

Mel Brooks’ hit-to-miss ratio was never lower than in this comedic ode to the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and other funny-outfitted periods from humanity’s first dozen or so centuries on Earth. For every short, funny line or gag (i.e., “It’s good to be the king,” “The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen...oy! Ten! Ten commandments” and the Jews In Space coming attractions trailer) there’s some embarrassingly lame poopy and/or booby joke or some interminable exposition about a plot point nobody cares about. But for eight continuous minutes in the middle of the movie, Brooks nearly tops his beloved “Springtime For Hitler” sequence from all the various incarnations of The Producers with his insanely catchy take-down of another of history’s great tragedies, the Spanish Inquisition, thus foreshadowing the iconic funnyman’s welcome focus on Broadway in recent years (which, despite generating the unnecessary 2005 Producers remake, has at least prevented Brooks from tarnishing his legacy with more unfunny late period cinematic dreck like Dracula: Dead and Loving It).

The reveal of the villain from THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

This satirical comedy about the title character (James Coburn) and how he becomes targeted for abduction or assassination by the secret agencies of virtually all the world's governments, including his own, because of what he knows about his most famous patient, was written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, a clever but erratic jokester otherwise best known as the creator of the TV series Barney Miller. The movie has a long-standing cult reputation that it may deserve just on the basis of its brilliant premise, but most of it is actually shrill and underbaked, and Flicker's sweaty determination to make it a swingin' affair leave much of it looking as dated as strobe lights and brown acid. But the climactic revelation of the true villain and the villain's master plan is so choice that it's easy to believe that Flicker forged ahead with the whole thing just because he couldn't bear to throw away that punch line.

The balloon-globe bit and Jack Oakie from THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940)

Charles Chaplin dug in his heels and resisted the coming of sound like a sumbitch, and his satire on Hitler and the Nazis was his first real talkie. (His previous feature, Modern Times, had sound but no actual spoken dialogue.) Some people clung to it gratefully at the time of its release, but time has not been kind to it: it's overlong, with lots of dead spaces, and given what we now know about what the Nazis were doing, the dreamily idealistic ending (in which Chaplin's hero is able to snap the country out of its fascist spell by commandeering a microphone and telling them about "brotherhood") can leave you feeling sad at the inadequacy of well-meaning satire to deal with true evil. And Chaplin was right to worry about sound affecting his career: the cultivated-gentleman speaking voice that he probably took a great deal of pride in having developed off-screen didn't match up with the lowdown comic effects he was best at producing as a performer. The movie's high point is the purely physical routine he does with a balloon-globe: relieved of the necessity of dealing with language, he's enough in control of what he's doing to make it funny, beautiful, and scary all at once, which must have been what he was aiming for with the rest of the film. The other high point is Jack Oakie's guest appearance: his burlesque impersonation of Mussolini packs enough energy to lift the movie to the clouds. Given that Chaplin notoriously took the scissors to Buster Keaton's performance in Limelight after he realized that Keaton had upstaged him, it probably says a lot about Chaplin's hopes for this movie that he was willing to put up with letting Oakie steal every scene they had.

The Roscoe's commercial from TAPEHEADS (1988)

This slapdash attempt at an instant midnight movie classic herniates itself in its attempt to be hip and outrageous, but it does have its glory moment in the TV commercial for Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles -- a real place, don'tcha know -- complete with a rapping King Cotton and a trio of fly girls cooing, "Waffles're just pancakes with little squares on 'em!" Part of the joke -- the part the filmmakers may not have been fully in on -- is that, with its attempt to bathe a banal product in a salable coating of trendy weirdness, the sequence deftly parodies what most of Tapeheads itself embodies. It's also pretty funny that, a decade or so later, Kentucky Fried Chicken actually tried to reach out to the "urban market" with a TV ad campaign in which a cartoon Colonel Sanders danced ("Go, Colonel, go, Colonel!") and jive-talked to the accompaniment of made-for-TV-hip-hop music, thus rendering this scene almost as prescient in its way as Network.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab : tapeheads

Your Thursday Afternoon “Twilight” Roundup

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part Three)