The Screengrab : the big chill

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS MICHAEL IN THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Following an especially painful round of orthodonture during my junior year of high school, my father brought me to The Big Chill to cheer me up, and I immediately fell in love with the movie, which celebrated the type of close-knit friendship that had sustained me through the many dateless nights of my adolescence. On the verge of young adulthood and the dissolution of those (mostly platonic) hometown relationships, I was also drawn to the film’s evocation of the big, chilly world I’d be facing after graduation, far from kith and kin, and started imagining myself as a cool, mordant loner not unlike William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet, Nick (except without the war injury impotence) -- the type of guy likely to attract weirdly sexy free spirits like Meg Tilly’s Chloe in droves once I got to college. Yet, in truth (as my friends were always happy to remind me), I was never really the Nick in our little group, but rather the Michael: i.e., Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy, needy motormouth, the guy with the painfully obvious motives and the total lack of game with the ladies -- but then again, at least he wound up with most of the best lines (and a pair of functioning testicles)! (AO)

STEVE MARTIN AS NAVIN JOHNSON IN THE JERK (1979)

The title is a misnomer. Navin Johnson isn't really a jerk. Jerks screw you over just for the pleasure. Jerks have intent. Jerks drive Hummers, talk during movies, and buy Carlos Mencia DVDs. Navin is more of a well-meaning idiot, which is the type of role that Steve Martin does best. He heads out to make his way in the world, but chance makes him rich before chance takes it away. Don't try to read too much into it. The search for larger meanings is admirable and all, but sometimes the gunman just hates cans. (HC)

JACQUE TATI AS M. HULOT IN MON ONCLE (1958)

The French had a way with fools. Like Boudu in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Jacques Tati's Hulot is less an idiot than an anarchic force of nature sweeping through the modern world and blowing away all of the little lies people tell themselves to maintain a sense of order. In the sequence above, the movie visits Hulot in the bustling corner of Paris where he lives. Ignore the Italian subtitles. You don't need to know the exact words to know what is being said. Hulot's sister lives with her family in a sterile ultramodernist nightmare, presumably in a far more affluent area of Paris. Consider the awful gurgling fountain:

It's no wonder that Hulot's nephew idolizes his goofy, absent-minded, and absolutely free uncle. Unlike Boudu, Hulot is making an effort to get along in the modern world, but it's clear that everything about it leaves him befuddled and bemused. And one of the best roles of the fool is to show his or her audience why their world is confusing and ridiculous. (HC)

CARY GRANT AS WALTER BURNS IN HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

The Cockney hustler that was inside the handsome gent called Cary Grant never made his presence more strongly felt than in this version of the great American theatrical comedy, His Girl Friday, in which Grant played the ultimate comic monster, the self-centered, bulldozing newspaper editor Walter Burns -- a role that gave him the chance to break the land speed dialogue record while demonstrating his ability to make it seem charming that he was pushing everybody around and giving the thumbs-up to the occasional felony. Burns is a man who'll do anything to get what he wants, and he could be played as a man the audience loves to hate; letting Grant run with the role turns the character into the amoral, ruthless son of a bitch that audience members suddenly realize they wish they could be. The performance may be the closest that a mortal man of woman born has come to approximating the movies' ultimate embodiment of the can-do spirit, Bugs Bunny. (PN)

W.C. FIELDS IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

If you look up "curmudgeon" in the dictionary, you may not see a picture of W.C. Fields’ glowering mug staring back at you, but you probably should. Fields made a career out of playing slight variations on his signature persona -- a guy whose disdain for women, children, animals, and other races and ethnicities was merely a subset of his overall drunken misanthropy. If Fields’ movies consisted only of him belittling those around him, they wouldn’t be funny. Thankfully, Fields realized that there was no better butt of his jokes than himself, both because it made the other characters feel less like victims of his barbs, and because getting picked on by others further fueled his misanthropy. Look at the way the henpecked Harold Bissonette rails against his wife when he’s alone only to clam up whenever she’s around. What’s more, nobody could deliver a joke quite like Fields -- beginning in his trademark nasal whine, he would often passive-aggressively swallow the end of the line, as if the people to whom it was addressed were suddenly unworthy of hearing it. And Fields was peerless when it came to the non sequitur, never more so than in his classic two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer, perhaps the purest distillation of his genius. Hard to say what makes it so brilliant- is it the sight of Fields in mittens and mukluks playing the dulcimer and singing, or such quintessential Fields lines as "My Uncle Ichabod said, when speakin’ of the city, ‘it ain’t no place for a woman, gal, but pretty men go thar’." And if the repeated "it ain’t a fit night out for man or beast" gag doesn’t make you laugh, well, there’s just no hope for you. (PC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Screengrab Review: "Reunion"

Nick Schager — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Writer/director Alan Hruska doesn’t hold back on melodrama with Reunion, the story of a group of Yale alumni and members of a secret undergrad society of would-be world-changers who get back together on the tenth anniversary of a friend’s passing to bare their souls and air their grievances in the shiny conference room of NYC lawyer Jake (Brett Cullen). Overflowing with self-serious Big Ideas, Hruska’s ensemble film tackles, via its characters’ confessions and bickering, issues of love, faith, happiness, success, aspirations, self-worth, and the feasibility of change, a Big Chill-ish enterprise whose serious intentions aren’t enough to compensate for the two-dimensionality of its stock archetypes, nor for the fact that their discussions about these topics – all of which are laced with regret, jealousy and longing – generally amount to a lot of hot air. Hruska intends for his material to be insightful but undercuts his grave tone with hoary, histrionic situations and revelations at far too many turns, the only respite from the proceedings’ distinct Psychology 101 feel coming via corniness such as an angry confrontation that devolves into a food fight.

The reunion revolves, at least in part, around a Maguffin: a mysterious letter written by Jake’s deceased wife Janie, who at the time of her death wanted her old friends to reconnect, and with whom everyone slept at one point or another. Sexual tensions consequently run high, though once these Yalies sit down to partake in the secret society’s “course” – which involves a day spent going over bios, and another spent ripping each other to shreds – the participants’ various, equally mundane hang-ups and gripes prove just as contentious. Eamon (Christopher McDonald) is a womanizing reporter angry over having lost Janie to Jake. Emily (Cynthia Stevenson) is an author bitter about her lack of financial success and her faltering marriage to alcoholic Barnaby (Jamey Sheridan), whose addiction has prevented him from living up to expectations. Sadie (Amy Pietz) is a Hollywood agent who loves Jake. Lloyd (David Thornton) is a Trump-esque billionaire who loves power. And Saul (Josh Pais) is a do-gooder doctor who clings to his Jewish faith, does charity work, and once had a torrid affair with Emily. They’re all, to a tee, dull as dirt.

Hruska’s actors try to make the most of these thinly conceived characters, yet Reunion never feels like more than a rough sketch, a template for real psychoanalytic drama in which talking points are raised but never remotely investigated, much less resolved. The writer/director makes sure to provide some measure of closure to each of his intellectuals’ plights, but it’s of a shallow sort, in large part because their dilemmas aren’t substantially conceived. Why, specifically, do all of these people romantically idealize Janie? Why did Emily cheat on Barnaby, and why did he turn to the bottle? Why did Jake choose to nurture Janie when everyone else so eagerly used her and then cast her aside? These and a multitude of further questions plague Reunion to the point that its end-game bombshells and reconciliations seems only slightly more thought-out than your average soap opera plotline – though, unlike most those daytime stories, at least Hruska’s film has the benefit of featuring a truly accomplished scene-stealer, Christopher McDonald, to lay the ham on thick.

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I grew up right next door to Thanksgiving Town, USA: Plymouth, Massachusetts, former home of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and future home of Plymouth Rock Studios and a nice big casino.

My next door neighbors used to work at Plimoth Plantation, where docent actors dress up in 17th century drag and mosey up and down the streets of a life-size replica Pilgrim settlement, discussing crops and Calvinism, while modern Native Americans in traditional buckskin attire give their side of the story in a nearby encampment.

So I like to think I know a thing or two about Thanksgiving. And let me tell you: it’s not all about the yams.

In fact, before the Macy’s Day Parade and the advent of that delicious Brundlefly monstrosity known as Turducken, the fourth Thursday of November was all about chowing down eel and corn and celebrating a bountiful harvest. In fact, as I learned on a recent visit to Plimoth Plantation, the name for the annual kick-off to the Christmas shopping season is actually a compound word that literally means “giving thanks”!

And so, as we here at the Screengrab prepare our traditional Turkey Day feast of pretzel sticks, jelly beans, two slices of toast and a handful of popcorn, we’d like to just take a few moments to express our gratitude for the people, places and movies that made us the full-on film geeks we are today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE SCREENGRAB!

ANDREW OSBORNE IS THANKFUL FOR:

WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1950 & 1972)

Forget Mickey Mouse: Bugs Bunny was there from the start, teaching me the importance of carrots, proper directions to Albuquerque and a wised-up appreciation of life (for all its feathered frenemies, megalomaniacal Martians and gun-toting Fudds). So I was a bit disappointed when I realized What’s Up, Doc? (the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater) wasn’t a cartoon...but Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap screwball homage soon won me over with its igneous rocks and silly accents and, especially, that endless, blissful car chase through the streets, alleys and staircases of San Francisco (and, eventually, San Francisco Bay). All that (plus a gratifying act three cameo by Mr. Bunny himself!) made this goofy-smart romantic comedy my first favorite movie, and it only got better with time as I grew up and came to appreciate the chemistry of Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand (both at their cinematic finest) and the comedic brilliance of the irreplaceable Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton and Kenneth Mars. But the real reason this movie’s on the list is so I can say thank you to my film geek parents for always bringing me to whatever movie they went to go see on a Saturday night (even when it scared the bejesus out of me), thus instilling a life-long love of pop culture that’s guided my cinematic view of the world ever since. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

STAR WARS (1977)

I’ve already written an embarrassing number of posts about the life-changing religious experience of seeing this movie as an excitable, impressionable ten year old nerd, but looking back on it now, I can only say...George Lucas, all is forgiven. (And besides, what’s Thanksgiving without the Star Wars Holiday Special?)

THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Given the embarrassing Baby Boomer reverence for Lawrence Kasdan’s self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Love Generation touchstone of growing up and selling out (not to mention the way the film pretty much ruined all the songs on its mega-hit Motown soundtrack by making them go-to clichés for every subsequent entry in the “Diane Keaton dancing around a living room” genre), this one almost wound up on last week’s Guilty Pleasures list. But despite all the people who deride the film as just a shallow rip-off of John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven, I have no guilt and nothing but love for The Big Chill. I first saw it after a particularly painful orthodontist’s appointment in my junior year of high school, and though I may not have been the intended target audience, I took the movie instantly to heart, partly for its evocation of the sixties (an era I romanticized desperately in the Just Say No Reagan eighties), but mostly for its celebration of the enduring power of friendship.

JOHN WATERS & DIVINE

Then, after high school, I stopped Saying No and dove headfirst into the psychedelic wonderland of college, that freaky, institutionalized Rumspringa when America’s sons and daughters move away from home and go batshit crazy for a year or three. After spending the first eighteen years of my life as an upright goody two-shoes, I was itching to break bad and take a walk on the trashy side...and when it comes to desperate living, I quickly discovered there was no better tour guide than John Waters and his large and lovely muse, Divine. From Mondo Trasho to Hairspray, Baltimore’s favorite son and fake daughter warped my young adult mind with their glorious bad taste, healthy disrespect for convention and pre-punk aesthetic, while also serving as self-made role models of DIY ingenuity for those determined to live a life less ordinary.

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

In 1993, my then-girlfriend and I attended an L.A. cast and crew screening of Dazed and Confused (with, if memory serves, my future Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak). We didn’t know any of the soon-to-be-famous actors in the stellar ensemble cast (including Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck) when the lights went down, but when the lights came up, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by characters we’d only just met but felt like we’d known forever: hey, look! It’s O’Bannion and Darla! And over there! It’s Wooderson! (All right, all right, all right!) A few months later, I got dumped by the aforementioned girlfriend, but numerous subsequent screenings of Dazed and Confused helped to ease the pain, and today I remember Richard Linklater’s last day of school and first night of summer vacation at least as fondly as my actual high school experience.

PULP FICTION (1994)

Some movies you see and forget just as soon as the lights come up. Pulp Fiction was not one of those movies. In 1994, I spent every last dime I had (and a lot of dimes that I didn’t have) attempting to surf the Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes indie renaissance with my own no-budget 16mm production, Apocalypse Bop (starring the indomitable Mr. Von Doviak), which I’d spent the summer directing back in my home town near Thanksgiving Town, USA. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and so when the movie wrapped, I decided to road trip back to the West Coast with a couple of friends from the Bop shoot. Stopping for breakfast in Austin, Texas, one of those friends met a girl and couldn’t stop thinking about her, so when we finally reached California, he called her up and asked if she wanted to go see Pulp Fiction with him on opening night. She said yes, and so he turned around and flew right back to Austin. Meanwhile, my return to L.A. woke me up from my filmmaking fandango to the cold, hard reality that I was unemployed, with no prospects and no money to pay my rent. I had exactly twenty dollars to my name. And I’m happy to say I spent that twenty dollars on popcorn and a ticket to go see the opening night of Pulp Fiction with my pals in the San Fernando Valley, while my other friend was watching the same movie on the same night on his cross-country date in The Lone Star State. He wound up staying in Austin for the next several years, and days after watching Jules and Vincent Vega strut across the screen to the strains of “Misirlou,” my own bacon got snatched from the brink of disaster by an out-of-the-blue offer to go work on a war movie in the Philippines. And so I’m eternally grateful to have once been young and foolish enough to have those kinds of adventures, living in extremis at exactly the right time and with exactly the right people the night Quentin Tarantino got medieval on our ass.

SXSW, THE PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL & THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS (2009)

And speaking of Austin, the city of Slacker has been, at different times, my literal and spiritual home away from home for years now, and never is it more glamorous (or crowded) than the middle of March, when the capitol of Texas plays host to the South-By-Southwest music and film festival, a fantastic collision of pop culture, booze and barbecue that makes Thanksgiving look like Arbor Day. Every spring, it renews my faith in the vaunted “indie film” spirit (even though I’m old enough to know better), and then every summer, I take another, mellower sip of the indie Kool-Aid (not to mention the world’s best Bloody Marys) at the Provincetown Film Festival, with John Waters presiding as patron saint in the same way Richard Linklater is the Mayor of South-By...and with all that friggin’ indie spirit washing over me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed once again to its siren song, so I’ll just wrap up this list with thanks to my collaborators on The Meat City Beatniks, an indie film musical (co-written by me, Scott Von Doviak, Eric Jacobson and Jim Dryden) and starring Elliot Dort, Ben Gallant, Sheree Bass, Matthew Woodward, Rob McKim, Ms. Amar, Joe Gallo, Michael Sesling, Kellianne MacFarlane, Bill Christensen and Amy Jeglinski-Osborne...a production which (thankfully) I mostly managed to wrap in 2008 and which will (hopefully) premiere in 2009...so stay tuned! (And have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Click Here For More Thanks From Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Insufficently Forgotten Films: "The Big Fix" (1978)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This post-counterculture private eye movie stars Richard Dreyfuss, who also served as co-producer, as thirtysomething West Coast shamus Moses Wine. Back in the glory days of the '60s student protests of which the young Moses was a part, he had a thing going on with a blonde rad-lib played by Susan Anspach. Now, she's working for a California gubernatorial candidate who is being targeted by a smear campaign; someone is seeking to tar him by claiming that he's associated with supposedly scary figures from that period, including fictionalized stand-ins for Abbie Hoffman ("Howard Eppis", played by F. Murray Abraham) and Cesar Chavez. Wine, a recent divorcee who makes wisecracks while his heart is breaking, investigates the smears while reflecting on how neither adulthood nor America has turned out quite the way he envisioned. In the course of his investigation, he discovers that the "violent radical" and fugitive from justice Eppis is hiding in plain sight with a wife and kids in a tract house, having settled down under a false name and joined the rush to collect all the "goodies" he can from the System.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It's a pitiful mess. The director, Jeremy Paul Kagen, came up through directing for TV, and after a brief spree making such feature films as The Chosen, The Sting II (the one where the roles originated by Paul Newman and Robert Redford are passed to the obvious second choices, Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis), and Big Man on Campus (also known as The Hunchback Hairball of L.A.--when you've got two potential titles as charming as these, how can you decide?), it was to directing for TV that he scuttled back. For a while there, Kagen seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting the sixties out of his system: one of his TV films was the 1975 Katherine, in which a pre-Carrie Sissy Spacek played a rich girl who developed a social conscience and became a member of the radical underground, and his first theatrical feature, 1977's Heroes, starred Henry Winkler, in a failed bid to be recognized as something other than Fonzie, as a (get this) Vietnam vet (got that?) who, having been made lovably wacky by his traumatizing war experiences, travels cross country to reconnect with his old war buddies and start a worm farm. (He chatters baby talk while his heart is breaking. And while the audience is puking.) A decade later, Kagen would restage the Chicago 8 trial for a 1987 TV film called Conspiracy.

The Big Fix was one of the first Hollywood films pitched at an audience of people who'd grown up during the '60s and who thought they were changing the world at the time but now found themselves entering their thirties with kids and mortgages and stable jobs and friends who were getting ready to vote for Reagan (or even, shudder, entertaining the thought of voting for him themselves) and who might respond to entertainment that helped them find their bearings. Five years later, The Big Chill would clean up playing to that demographic, as would, another five years down the line, the TV series thirtysomething. Both of those laid their concerns right out on the table without the genre sweetening of a private-eye thriller. And both were much, much, much better made than The Big Fix. I've never met Jeremy Paul Kagen and don't really know anything about him but his filmography, but I think it must be safe to conclude that he's a hell of a nice guy, because anyone who's been entrusted to bring in a major feature film and proven himself as incompetent at making a complicated plot and key actions lucid and coherent as Kagen's work here would have been driven out of the business pretty quick if people weren't rooting for him. Of course, nobody ever walked out of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep fuming in disgust because he couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur. It's a mark of how dreary Kagen's work is that a viewer has plenty of time to ruminate on how how little success he's having figuring out what's supposed to be going on.

The Big Fix also served notice to Richard Dreyfuss that his movie career might be added to the list of things that he was about to be able to regard, along with adulthood and the American political system, as personally disappointing. Dreyfuss had just enjoyed perhaps his best year ever, starring in the blockbuster Close Encounters of the First Kind and winning an Academy Award as Best Actor (for The Goodbye Girl!) Having set this project up, he must have hoped that it would be the start of a new stage in his career, but it actually announced the beginning of a long downward slide. He would only make three other movies (The Competition, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and The Buddy System) in the nine years before he re-emerged, playing third fiddle to Nick Nolte and Bette Midler, in his next hit, Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The chastening experience of his time in Siberia seemed to have done him some good as an actor. If The Big Fix had, by whatever intervention of God or the devil, somehow been a hit, and he'd felt encouraged to go even farther in the supposedly adorable mixture of (unconvincing) self-deprecating humor and tear-stained lonely-boy heroics that he was peddling here, things could have gotten really gross really fast.

WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: The character of Moses Wine was created by Roger L. Simon, for a series of mystery novels that began with two books--The Big Fix (1973) and Wild Turkey (1974)--that were first published by Straight Arrow Books, the short-lived literary imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. (Carrying on the roman a' clef element from The Big Fix, Wild Turkey included a knockoff of Rolling Stone star writer Hunter Thompson, called "Gunther Thomas.") Simon also did the screenplay for the movie, which led to a Hollywood career that includes a co-writing credit on one actual good movie, Paul Mazursky's 1989 adapatation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story. The most interesting thing about the first Wine novel and the movie made from it may be a shift in tone that says a lot about how much things had changed in five years: in the book, ol' Mose still harbors dreams of progressive political change, which are embodied in the candidate he's working for, but in the movie, the candidate is a doofus and all hope is dead. Moses Wine has yet to rear his frazzled head in another movie, but Simon has continued to grind out novels about him, and in 2003's Director's Cut, Wine opened the floor with the announcement, "I knew I was in trouble when I was starting to agree with John Ashcroft-- me a lifelong card-carrying left/liberal and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, who had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke to pro-choice to saving the West Indian manatee, arrested at a half dozen demonstrations and bashed over the head by at least as many cops, nodding approvingly at the utterances of our Attorney General..." Wine goes on to explain that his "political about-face" is a "symptom of the times in which we lived. Like others I wanted to help, be Rosie the Riveter or even Clarence the Computer Chip maker, but I didn't have the skills for any of that, and besides we were told to just go about our normal work, that simply being vigilant would be enough to fight terrorism, whatever that meant." What this shrugging manifesto meant was that Simon himself had been so badly scared by 9/11 that he was now a lockstep Bush supporter, and just as his earlier novels had tried to fuse the images of Jerry Rubin and Humphrey Bogart, now he was trying to inject that World War II gung-ho spirit into his bilge. At the same time he was promoting his own political about-face on-line, at his blog and his site Pajamas Media, and in profiles with conservative writers who seemed charmed to find an actual living cartoon of a decadent Hollywood liberal type who was so eager to make cartoon attacks on the left.

Simon still peddles the Moses Wine books on his website, as if, for all his blather about how wrong he was in his younger days about who the bad guys, he has no sense of shame about having set that awful hippie-smart-ass sterotype in stone and tried to pass it off as a heroic image. Maybe he doesn't. In his own writing and in interviews, Simon comes across as vain and shallow, and utterly unconcerned about sounding as if his road to Damascus moment was motivated by something more than sheer, stark terror of the Islamofascist menace; maybe he loves his younger, dopier self too much to disown it, even as he sneers at anyone who would have agreed with him at the time. It's amusing, though, that in recent weeks, the McCain campaign has appropriated the same tactic that the villains used in The Big Fix, desperately trying to link Barack Obama to members of the Weather Underground. The fact that they're trying to do that to a candidate who was in elementary school at the time makes you wonder just how scary and confusing the world is going to seem to some people when we finally reach the point that nobody cares more about "the sixties" than the present, if we ever will. If Simon had been luckier--if, say, a brick had fallen on his head on September 10, 2001, and he'd lapsed into a coma and didn't come out of it until a week after Katrina--then he might today be able to sell a few copies of The Big Fix by touting it as a dire prediction of the corruption and self-debasement of the McCain campaign, but instead, he's been one of those sad lost souls wandering from TV studio to TV studio insisting that, because of his faith in John McCain;s honor, he believes that his candidate must be too senile to know what his own campaign is doing--now, get out there and vote for him, dammit! More recently, he heaped shame upon himself by declaring "interesting" another idiot's theory that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama's first memoir. All this must have given Richard Dreyfuss something to chuckle about to himself as he hung around the set of Oliver Stone's W., bestowing his own Blofeldian impersonation of Dick Cheney on posterity.

My Troma Summer, Part Two

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Previously on My Troma Summer

What happened was this: while filming the second Toxic Avenger sequel on location in Japan, Troma, Inc. co-founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz somehow got hooked up with Toxie fans Tetsu Fujimura and Masaya Nakamura, big wheels at Namco, the Japanese video game company responsible for Pac Man, and the foursome entered into a deal to create a Kabuki-themed superhero movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget, the most lavish in Troma history.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I’d only just received a call from a guy named Andy (soon-to-be First A.D. of the project, then titled Kabukiman), who’d invited me to come down to Hell’s Kitchen and join the Troma Team for the princely sum of fifty dollars a week. In New York City.

Fortunately, I had a friend from the Harvard Lampoon who lived on the Upper East Side with his beautiful wife from Spain, and they offered me room and board in exchange for my help writing text for a coffee-table book featuring artistic photographs of feces. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

And so, thus installed, I showed up for my first day at Troma’s second floor walk-up headquarters on 9th Avenue, a cramped office stuffed with posters and swag from the company’s long and storied history. Off the main room was the private office shared by Lloyd and his silent, intimidating business partner, Michael.

Lloyd welcomed me and gave me a brief introduction to the company, then asked what my favorite movie was. At the time it was The Big Chill, which, I gathered from Lloyd's reaction, was not exactly the answer he'd been hoping for.

After that, I was handed off to Andy, a tightly-wired, anal retentive type who clearly relished his role as resident drill instructor in Troma’s boot camp for aspiring filmmakers. “All you college kids come down here after four years of parties and sleeping late and think you know how to make movies. Well, that’s not how it works in the real world, and I’m not here to wipe your ass, okay, so if I tell you to do something, you do it, then you tell me you’ve done it, otherwise I’m not gonna know and everything gets fucked up and it's your fault, understand? Now go down to Blimpy’s and get us some lunch, and don’t forget the fucking receipt!”

By the end of the first day, I’d screwed up Andy’s lunch order, accidentally washed another Troma Teammate’s contact lens down the drain after rinsing out a cup I thought was empty and somehow felt even stupider than I had after deliberately flunking out of college (though I hadn’t nearly killed the gorilla yet...that would come later).

But I also knew Andy was right: I’d been living in a boozy academic cocoon for the past four years, totally unprepared for the real world outside. Thus chastened, I headed back to my temporary East Side residence, determined to get my shit together, then took a crap on a plate of linguini for one of my friends' feces photos and went to bed.

Tomorrow was another day.

To Be Continued...

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Smart People, Ellen Page reprises her wise-ass, brainy-sexy persona from Juno, reaffirming her place as the current It Girl for a brand new generation of future I.T. professionals and I.T.T. graduates.

Lord knows I enjoyed the standard-issue sex dolls of my Gen X adolescence, from Catherine Bach’s Daisy Duke to Sylvia Kristel’s steamy French maid in Private Lessons (which my parents naively allowed me to go see all by myself because it co-starred that nice Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati).

But horny fantasies aside, I knew from the get-go I was far too much of a Starlog-reading, drama club-joining, Honor-Roll attaining nerd to ever wind up with the hot blondes or the Bond babe, and so it was always the relatable, approachable freaks and geeks of cinema that gave me hope. And while most of the actresses on the following list were actually gorgeous starlets in real life, it was reassuring to believe the following characters, at least, would maybe lend you their panties if you ever needed to win a bet for a dozen floppy disks. (And don't worry, we'll get to the GUY geeks next week...but suggestions are certainly welcome!)

10. MOLLY RINGWALD AS SAMANTHA BAKER IN SIXTEEN CANDLES

Sure, she wound up with the hunky popular guy at the end, but she WAS nice enough to lend Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek her underwear, and I was always hot for Ms. Ringwald, especially when I read in later interviews that she eventually grew up, fell hard for a French guy and became quite the sex enthusiast.

9. ALLY SHEEDY AS ALLISON REYNOLDS IN THE BREAKFAST CLUB

A pivotal character in my early development, who inspired a life-long love of freaky Goth girls but also broke my heart, dropping the knowledge on my adolescent ass that even the misfit girls would usually choose the Jocks over the Brains of the world if given half a chance. Traitor!

8. MEG TILLY AS CHLOE IN THE BIG CHILL

Sexy, exotic and a little odd-looking, Chloe made me want to be the kind of cool, smart rebel her soulful misfit would dig (a.k.a. William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet Nick) as opposed to the gabby neurotic Jeff Goldblum-y type I actually was (and am).

7. HOLLY HUNTER AS JANE CRAIG IN BROADCAST NEWS

Friends still mock me for my obsession with Holly Hunter’s t.v. producer character, but Broadcast News was the movie to beat in 1987 for nailing the friends vs. lovers dilemma faced by supportive, dorky guys in love with female “friends” who think of them as brothers. The scene where Albert Brooks’ character finally tells off Jane, then dumps her from his life is still one of my all-time favorites, finally teaching me the best way to avoid “nice guy” syndrome with girls was not to be so goddamn nice all the time.

6. DAPHNE ZUNIGA AS ALISON BRADBURY IN THE SURE THING

This Gen-X version of It Happened One Night dramatized the other side of the friends vs. lovers dilemma: once you finally figure out how to attract girls, do you go for great sex or great conversation? With Alison Bradbury, John Cusack’s Walter Gibson found the perfect balance.

Click here for part 2!

YouTube Film Critics: Spill and the Reel Geezers

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

Newspapers have been shedding personnel at an alarming rate in recent months, and those of us who earn our beer money writing about movies are no exception. As the Hollywood Reporter notes in a piece about small independent films being overlooked by major newspapers, “Critics have recently been laid off, bought out of their contracts or left and were not replaced at the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, New York Newsday and more than 15 papers around the country.”

This presents a problem for you, the film consumer. Where to go for a diverse array of informed opinion on the motion pictures of the day? Well, once you’ve read all the latest news and reviews at the Screengrab, you might want to click on over to YouTube, where the time-honored Siskel & Ebert format lives on in two very different web series.

Spill.com is the latest permutation of Korey Coleman’s long-running Austin cable access show The Reel Deal. Coleman, his friend Martin Thomas, and a rotating cast of co-hosts conducted a loose, funny and very low budget roundtable discussion of the current cinema for over a decade before relocating to the internet. A cartoonist and filmmaker (his indie film 2 A.M. played SXSW in 2006), Coleman decided to take on a new creative challenge and animate webisodes of The Reel Deal (podcasts of this version of the show can be found here). The show proved so popular, it was bought out by a New York company and reemerged as Spill.com. Aside from Korey, the rest of the Reel Deal crew took on new personas for the revamped version, but the irreverent humor and down-to-earth vibe remain intact, as you can see in this review of The Mist:

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Reel Geezers. If you ever wanted to recreate the experience of listening to your grandparents bicker about movies, this is the show for you. Lorenzo Semple Jr. (screenwriter of Papillon, The Parallax View and 16 Batman episodes) and Marcia Nasatir (a former agent and producer of The Big Chill and Ironweed) give the octogenarian viewpoint on the latest releases, which is particularly helpful when it comes to a movie like Superbad: