The Screengrab : the lord of the rings

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:45:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

Some comedian, possibly Seinfeld, did a routine once that perfectly captured my own pubescent experience during the final moments of The Empire Strikes Back, that sinking, slowly dawning realization that...holy shit! To Be Continued? Is THAT where this is heading? Are you fucking kidding me, Lucas? You’re gonna make me wait THREE YEARS to find out what happens to Han Solo? Last time around, the big finale was the Rebels blowing up the Death Star and this time it’s...Luke getting a new hand? As an adult, of course, I eventually learned to accept years-long gaps between, say, seasons of The Sopranos and Lost (and...uh...girlfriends), but way back when, it seemed like George Lucas was pulling a cruel prank on his faithful fans. (Little did we freakin’ know...) (AO)

RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

Bad:

Worse:

My esteemed colleague Andrew Osborne said of this last week: "And then, to make matters worse, Egghead suddenly materializes at the grand finale Ewok rave with the shiny, happy ghosts of Yoda and Ben Kenobi...a scene Lucas inconceivably managed to make even worse decades later by adding Hayden Christensen." Yessir, this movie was the first clue that George Lucas had no idea how to separate his best impulses from his worst. What can I say? I was 11, and I knew that bouncing Ewoks singing a creepy-awful song while the ghosts of Jedis past grin at Luke was a miserable way to end things. Then, when Lucas got around to taking a crap on his legacy with the three prequels, suddenly we had to deal with whiny ol' block of wood Hayden Christensen taking scary ol' Egghead Vader's place, while the Ewoks sang a New Age anthem that left me longing for the relative greatness of the "Yub Jub" song. Hey, Lucas, here's an idea: you put Lawrence Tierney under that mask and then have the Rebels celebrate their victory on a planet where the inhabitants aren't covered in fur. Because when the furry people in your universe get together to celebrate, everyone loses. (HC)

DR. T & THE WOMEN (2000)

Critics were unkind to this movie, but I'm willing to cut Altman some slack. It's not that bad. Even as it states that Dallas society forces its women to interact with constant near-brainless patter, it suggests that underneath each perfectly coiffed hairstyle is a powerful intelligence trapped in a socially empty cage. But it all falls apart at the end. After the above clip, when Dr. Travis' daughter runs away from her wedding with her maid of honor, everything in Dr. Travis' life cruelly falls to pieces and he drives off in an increasingly frantic rain, which suddenly turns into the tornado from The Wizard of Oz, and then he's deposited in Big Bend, where he helps a young woman deliver a baby. I mean, I get the point: somewhere over the rainbow, Dr. Travis is practicing the business of bringing life into this world for the needy rather than assisting rich women with their petty neuroses. But Altman asks too much of the viewer with his sudden left turn, and it doesn't make a lick of sense. (HC)

PLANET OF THE APES (2001)

Tim Burton was in a bind when it came to ending his remake or reboot or re-imagining or retardification of Planet of the Apes in 2001. After all, he couldn’t go with the original surprise ending and expect it to wow audiences all over again. At the same time, it’s Planet of the Apes, so it needs some sort of mind-blower of a twist ending. Ultimately, Burton decided not to spend too much time thinking it through. Wouldn’t it be cool if the astronaut played by Mark Wahlberg manages to get back to his own time…only when he looks up at the Lincoln Memorial, he sees the face of his ape nemesis Tim Roth? And then a bunch of ape police show up with guns? Whoa! It was a nifty image to be sure, but could it possibly be explained by the events leading up to it in the movie? Attempts were made to justify it, but none by Tim Burton. "It was a reasonable cliffhanger that could be used in case Fox or another filmmaker wanted to do another movie," Burton claimed on the DVD commentary. Sadly (or not), no one has taken on the challenge…although as you’ll see in the clip above, some enterprising young people did make an attempt to improve on Burton’s finale. There may be some plausibility issues here, as well. (SVD)

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE (2003)

Run, Kate Winslet, run! Look to the sky and scream, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" And then, ohmigodIdidn'tseethatcoming, it turns out that the anti-death penalty activist framed his own death so that they could prove that the Texas legal system gives innocent people the death penalty. No! And the smoking gun (or, in this case, unsmoking gun) was always right there, just beyond her fingertips! No! No! No! Well, actually yes. As in Alan Parker's repulsive Mississippi Burning, which suggested that change came to Mississippi in the 1960s through the work of white FBI agents rather than the brave, but inconveniently often non-white, people of the Civil Rights Movement, here Alan Parker tries to suggest that an anti-capital punishment advocate in freakin' kill-happy Texas has to frame himself to prove that the Texas justice system occasionally puts innocent people on death row. Jesus, a thousand times no. Here's Roger Ebert from his review: "let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein." I might have gone with Idi Amin, but I think you get the point. (HC)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

Since we spoke earlier of how a great movie earns its ending by putting us through so much with the characters we feel they deserve their closing moments, let’s look at a movie that goes about it entirely the wrong way. There’s no question that the Lord of the Rings trilogy earns a good ending; the cast of characters we know and love absolutely deserve a great moment of closure after all that we’ve been through with them over the space of three entire movies. The problem is, Peter Jackson doesn’t give us one ending; he gives us a dozen. There are so many moments of building climax and rest that it starts to seem like a joke when the credits don’t actually roll through one false stop after another. Sure, Jackson and his writers were working with an incredibly long source trilogy, and to their credit, they did cut out plenty; it was just all the wrong stuff. For a director who seemed all too willing to hack bits out at the beginning of the series, he seemed downright reluctant to lose anything at the end, no matter how tedious it became; and even then, some of the choices he made were dubious. Why did we lose the Harrowing of the Shire – one of the more gripping parts of the final novel – so we could have ten minutes of the hobbits bouncing around on a feather bed? For a movie that gave us scene after scene of excitement in the early goings – for that matter, for a movie whose every installment left you begging for the next movie to come out – the endgame left even the most diehard fans longing for the credits to roll.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

"The Hunt for Gollum": Raising the Fan-Film Bar

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Tim Masters interviews Chris Bouchard, writer-director of the forty-minute "not-for-profit" fan film The Hunt for Gollum. Made on HD video by a 160-member volunteer crew for £3,000, and set between the action of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the film, which exists in legal limbo, is intended as a love letter to the Peter Jackson films; it not only approximates their visual style as best it can, but stars a Viggo Mortensen look-alike named Adrian Webster as Aragorn. The film, which recently premiered at the Sci-Fi London film festival, can now be viewed online here.

In response to the question "Isn't the charm of a fan film that the villain looks like he's made out of cornflake packets?", Boucher replied, "I suppose most fan-films tend to be that way, but you're always dreaming that you can make something that has good production values. So we went for that, to try and raise the bar of what is possible on a low budget." At the same time, "It's a story that's not too ambitious for our budget - there are just three or four main characters, but we could put in loads of orcs and there's a huge fight scene in the middle of the film." Boucher says that he's reached an understanding with the Tolkien estate that they're okay with his film so long as it remains a non-profit venture, though of course, he'd like to use its success as a launching pad "to do an original film on a more commercial, professional level." Not that he thinks that fandom will never see his like again. "I think that we'll see more fan-films with better production values. They've already turned into a genre, which is cool - because they're free and you can see that people have put a lot of love into them. And if you're a fan of a particular genre it's nice to be able to return to that world briefly - even if it is another fan's interpretation."

He Died, but Then He Got Younger: The Prequel Perplex

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ryan Gilbey suggests that, now that it's barely even fun anymore to complain about sequels and remakes, we should shift gears and reserve our disgust for the concept of prequels. By some accounts, the term "prequel" was coined by George Lucas to describe the young-Don-Vito sections of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Godfather, Part II. However, the first time the term was widely used in the press to label a feature film which had no other discernible reason for being may well have been in 1979, when Tom Berenger and William Katt starred in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.

This was not the first time that somebody had built a new work around a speculative history of what happened to the characters in an earlier work before they reached the point in their history where they made the audience's acquaintance in the first place. Even before The Godfather, Part II, this approach actually had a tony literary pedigree. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (filmed by John Duigan in 1993) filled in the pre-history to Jane Eyre, and the 1971 movie The Nightcomers, with Marlon Brando, attempted to lay the groundwork for Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But Butch and Sundance established the basis for regarding prequels as a singularly uninspired and parasitic form. Apparently it was made because some genius noticed that the tenth anniversary of the money-making Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was approaching, and it seemed a shame to waste such a ripe excuse to try to cash in again. There was just one problem: the first movie ended, famously, with Butch and Sundance being turned into Swiss cheese by the Bolivian army. So a sequel was out of the question, but it might be possible to go backwards. And since there was this new actor in town whose major qualification for stardom seemed to be that he looked a lot like a young Robert Redford...

In the end, Butch and Sundance tanked, William Katt transitioned from starring in movies to appearing on TV each week in The Greatest American Hero and looking as if he was praying to take a bullet between line readings, and it looked as if prequels might turn out to be one of those momentary fancies of the movie industry, like disaster epics or Steven Seagal. A few more prequels did trickle out in later years, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Amityville II: The Possession. But the concept wasn't revived big time until, yes, George Lucas decided to jump-start his fantasy of actually making another Star Wars trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace. Even now, though, prequels, which are much more commonly found in the ranks of the straight-to-video than among actual theatrical releases, tend to occur only when a franchise has been tapped to pitiful death (see Hannibal Rising) or when the producers are desperate for a gimmick that might help to compensate for the fact that the original stars want nothing to do with it (see Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd).

We might also want to define our terms a little. Gilbey, anticipating the day when movie prequels themselves become "respectable", cites Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming The Hobbit, as a prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the book that del Toro is adapting before he wrote the Rings books; surely that matters more than the fact that the books have somehow managed to get themselves filmed in the wrong order. On the other hand, J. J. Abrams's Star Trek straddles the line between "reboot" and prequel: it means to reinvent the old franchise, but in the process of doing so, it introduces the audience to James T. Kirk and his merry band at an earlier stage of their development than Gene Roddenberry dared, or cared, to go. Ideally, this kind of thing might be done with a little humor, teasing the audience with the shared knowledge we have of what these characters are fated to become. At worst, it might give us the chance to see what it looks like when fan fiction is perpetrated with a $150 million budget.

Of the high-profile releases about to come barging through the door, Wolverine is closest to the dreaded prequel prototype. The signs are pretty much there, except in reverse: the X-Men franchise has been pronounced dead, or at least mothballed, but everybody's favorite moody mutant is indestructibly immortal, and Hugh Jackman is still at an age where he can pull off the role. So maybe the best way to try to squeeze a little more money out of the character, minus his familiar supporting cast, is to zap back to before most of them were born and fill in some of the bad boy's back story, which apparently goes back for fucking ever. Wolverine's director, Gavin Hood, who readily acknowledges that "Prequels are usually bad," adds that, since "most of the audience knows what's coming... the excitement should be not 'what?' but 'how?' It changes the emphasis. Usually a movie is about what will happen. Here it's 'How will what we know will happen, happen?'" That sounds about right. And it's true that even when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, the movies can still surprise you. For instance, I saw Gavin Hood's previous films, Tsotsi and Rendition, and now, people who may well have seen them too have hired him to direct a big-budget summer movie. Boy, am I surprised.

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years,” implored L.L. Cool J (shortly before his mother told him to knock us unconscious), raising an interesting point in the endless Hollywood parlor game of career perception: after all, the recent Golden Globe nominations for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem would seem to mark Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a return to form for Woody Allen...but what then to make of the fact that Match Point, Sweet & Lowdown, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Crimes & Misdemeanors, etc. etc. were all considered phoenix-like returns to form in the Woodman’s prolific (and sometimes crappy) oeuvre? How many times can a person come back if they never really go away?

Sometimes, though (as in the case of pugilist/thespian Mickey Rourke), the weepy entertainment magazine profiles and welcome home parties seem entirely appropriate. After all, the one-time heartthrob used to be a bona fide movie star (and light bondage icon) thanks to hits like Diner and 9 ½ Weeks, and though he’s done interesting work since then in films like Buffalo '66 and Spun, among others, there’s a big difference between co-starring with Eric Roberts and generating Oscar buzz.

Sure, Rourke essentially torpedoed his own career by stomping around like the Pope of Douchebag Village for years and years...but as the auto and financial industries have shown, everybody gets a second chance in America, no matter how bad you fuck up (unless, of course, you’re poor).

So, in honor of this week’s release of The Wrestler, we here at The Screengrab hereby salute...THE GREATEST COMEBACKS OF ALL TIME!

(And stay tuned next week as we ask Santa for THE COMEBACKS WE’D MOST LIKE TO SEE!)

JACK NICHOLSON in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

Though you could be forgiven for not believing it, there was a stretch there where it looked touch and go for the continued health of Jack Nicholson's continued career and reputation. After winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Nicholson jumped head first into a series of high-profile ventures -- The Missouri Breaks, Goin' South (which he also directed), The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, yes, friends, The Shining, which did disappointing box office and was badly mauled by most reviewers. However many fans it's racked up in the years since, the reaction to his performance in The Shining was typical: the conventional wisdom was quickly turning towards the direction that a man once capable of sensitive work had turned into an eyeball-rolling self-parodist, and in a Playboy interview published a year before his 1982 death, the gentle-spirited Henry Fonda criticized Nicholson for having thrown away his career and disgracing his profession. The actor's critical reputation began to recover around the time the magazine hit the stands, starting with his supporting performance in Reds and then with his starring role in the little-seen The Border, but it was Terms of Endearment that set the tone for Nicholson's successful reinvention of himself as a post-counterculture elder statesman who styled himself as a broad but soulful entertainer, someone who was still prone to go over the top but could usually make you love him for it. It could be argued that Nicholson lost something beautiful in the process -- as Anthony Lane later wrote, Nicholson rose to stardom as a man who seemed deeply pained by the state of the world, and sustained his stardom into old age by turning into someone who seemed very pleased with himself -- but it was still an audacious pull back from the career abyss. The role of the pear-shaped horndog Garrett Breedlove won him a second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actor, neatly bookending his time of trouble. It also established that he was smarter than Burt Reynolds, who famously turned the role down to honor his commitment to Hal Needham to do Stroker Ace, which in career terms was like honoring his commitment to show up in front of the firing squad at dawn with a cigarette in his mouth and the blindfold in place.

AL PACINO in SEA OF LOVE (1989)

This entertaining, twisty little thriller made the leap to event status on the strength of its announcement that Pacino had returned to functionability. Pacino had entered into a nightmarishly sustained slump after The Godfather, Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, starring in a series of movies that rank among the very worst of their time (Bobby Deerfield, Revolution), films so thoroughly mediocre and tinny that it was impossible to imagine what appeal they'd ever had for him (...And Justice for All, Author! Author!), as well as Cruising and Scarface, which, for whatever cult status they would come to enjoy, earned him more in bad press at the time than they did in good reviews or box office. Compared to some of those misfires, the relative modesty of Sea of Love was part of its appeal at the time: it was a relief to see Pacino, returning to the screen, after a four-year absence, in a clever little cop opera that gave him a chance to look worn-down and middle-aged but not romantically implausible, enjoying the Richard Price-scripted byplay with such solid pros as John Goodman and Richard Jenkins, and -- an eternal Pacino specialty -- demonstrating that he wasn't afraid to pitch on-screen woo with an actress (Ellen Barkin) who looked as if she could fold him up and stick him in her purse. His spirit refreshed, Pacino was back a year later as Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, happily gnawing the last traces of meat from the hambone.

CHRISTOPHER LEE in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) & STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)

Lee has scarcely stopped working since entering movies in the late 1940s, but his ghettoized stardom in horror movies failed to translate into mainstream screen prominence, and as the decades went by, he seemed most likely to appear in high-profile pictures when the director was someone like Joe Dante or Tim Burton, who'd cut his teeth on Hammer films and felt an affectionate debt of gratitude to the old gent. Which is nice, but self-paroding cameos in Gremlins 2 and Sleepy Hollow do not a comeback make. The first real sign in years that the then-78-year-old Lee still had strapping reserves of energy going to waste came when he turned up in the 2000 BBC version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, where he was dashingly costumed and looked and moved like a man twenty years younger. But the cherries on top of his career came with his villainous performances as Rings' malignant sorcerer Saruman and the abuser of the Force Lord Dooku -- subtle, George -- which, by drawing on memories of his screen past even as they threaded him into the texture of the two biggest multi-part fantasy series of the turn of the century, honored his career while tying it up with a handsome bow. After which, Lee being Lee, he called his agent and went back to work.

DENNIS HOPPER & DEAN STOCKWELL in BLUE VELVET (1986)

For most of his career, Hopper had led the league in blackballings, being driven out of the acting profession by the director Henry Hathaway, then remaking himself as a director and returning in glory with the 1969 Easy Rider. The box office success of that movie was so bewildering to the studios that Hopper was given a big bag with a dollar sign on it and absolute creative freedom to do whatever he wanted for his next movie as director, which resulted in 1971's The Last Movie...and cue blackballing number two. Hopper would spend most of the next fifteen years reeling from his intake of drugs and drink while working on a string of offbeat projects for European and American maverick directors, ranging from Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish for Coppola and Wim Wenders' The American Friend to Neil Young's Human Highway, Henry Jaglom's Tracks and Orson Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. His performances in most of them were pretty unsteady; Hopper seemed to have his notion of artistry boiled down to the actor's willingness to do anything, but nobody ever hesitated to hire Dennis Hopper because they were concerned that he might not be crazy enough. He's said that Blue Velvet, one of a string of films he appeared in around 1986 which also includes River's Edge, Hoosiers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part II, was the first job he'd gotten after getting clean and sober, though he apparently almost talked himself out of it by telling David Lynch that he had to play Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, after which Lynch considered hiding under the table. It's a measure of how impressed Hollywood was with both Hopper's performance and the sheer feat of rendering himself employable that Entertainment Tonight had a camera installed in Hopper's home when the Academy Award nominees were announced on television so that they could record his reaction, it being a forgone conclusion that his name would be among those read aloud. (It's a measure of just how freaked out Hollywood was by Blue Velvet that the E.T. cameras got to record Hopper's momentary confusion when it turned out that he'd been nominated instead for his work in Hoosiers.) Hopper's long shadow also obscured some of the triumph of his Blue Velvet co-star, one-scene wonder Dean Stockwell, who had also appeared with him in The Last Movie, Tracks, and Human Highway. A child actor back in the 1940s, Stockwell had kept his career going into adulthood, winning the Best Actor award at Cannes for 1959's Compulsion and co-starring with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in 1962's Long Day's Journey into Night. He went counterculture and turned his back on Hollywood in the late '60s and '70s, then slowly began creeping back with parts in Paris, Texas and To Live and Die in L.A., as well as Lynch's Dune, which he later told an interviewer was the only role he wanted badly enough to screen test for. (The interviewer next asked if he'd care to explain why he'd wanted it so badly. Stockwell replied that he'd rather not.) But it was his performance in Blue Velvet that made him hot enough that he could quit his second job hustling real estate.

JOHN TRAVOLTA in PULP FICTION (1994)

Travolta may have mixed feelings about having had his career resurrected by Quentin Tarantino, given that he's been known to insist to interviewers that he wasn't that far down the ladder when Pulp Fiction broke -- those Look Who's Talking movies made a lot of darn money, thank you very much! -- but most people who cared knew that Tarantino's dialogue and taste in hair extensions restored cachet and hipness to a star brand that had gotten badly devalued since 1981. Travolta cemented his comeback with Get Shorty, a project that he, yes, turned down before Tarantino called him up and advised him to snap to attention. His filmography since then has more than its fair share of stinkers, but it's better remembered now than it was in 1993 that he really is a terrific actor, and he retains the special dignity of a star who came back after being depicted as having been reduced to tending bar in a '70s nostalgia club on an episode of The Simpsons, an episode on which -- the ultimate indignity! -- he didn't even get to provide his own self-mocking voice. And, lest we forget, he did get to name Harry Knowles's site.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: YouTube the Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

“Producers Chris Adams and Steve Kearney are joining with producer-director RJ Cutler to create a feature documentary about a true-life love story that played out on YouTube.com,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “The film will follow the romance of teenage video blogger Daniel Meadows, an Austalian who fell in love with an American teen, Shannon Jones, online, where they documented their relationship.” If this is a success, we can look forward to Leave Britney Alone: The Motion Picture.

Keanu Reeves will strap on the sword and sandals for 47 Ronin. Wanted screenwriter Chris Morgan will pen the story “based on the true tale of a band of samurai swordsmen who avenged the death of their master in 18th century Japan," according to Variety. "The film will tell a stylized version of the story, mixing fantasy elements of the sort seen in The Lord of the Rings pics, with gritty battle scenes akin to those in films such as Gladiator.”

“Ben Affleck is in negotiations to follow up his directing debut, Gone Baby Gone, with the story of the death of Arizona journalist Don Bolles and the events it provoked,” THR reports. “In 1976, Bolles was a reporter for the Arizona Republic looking into political corruption and the convergence of New York, Chicago and Detroit mobsters in Phoenix. When lured to a downtown hotel by a source who didn't show up, Bolles was blown up in his car. He died days later.” Spoiler!

Related:
21 Stars We Hate
Ben Affleck on the Town

21 Stars We Hate (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

JESSICA ALBA

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I like sexy women. Sometimes, I like to hear them discuss foreign policy in a purring Greek accent (Arianna Huffington...mrowr!), while other times I've been known to enjoy a more prurient visual display of nubile hips and boobies. Fortunately, I’m not alone in this interest. Unlike, say, my lonely passion for Whit Stillman films, which can apparently no longer be satisfied, the demand for sexy women has glutted the market to the point where it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. Everywhere you look (in pop culture, if not my local gym) there are sweaty, well-toned H-O-T girls and women gyrating their pelvic muscles and shaking their butts in thongs and Daisy Dukes and whipped cream bikinis...so WHY, out of all the sexy women in the world, from Arianna to Miss November 2008, does Jessica Frickin’ Alba get to be in so many movies? Yes, she has a nice bod, and I enjoyed watching her undulate in Sin City as much as the next straight guy...until, that is, the camera panned up to her completely vapid expression, on a face completely devoid of mystery, personality or even the lusty carnality of supporting co-star Brittany Murphy. In real life, Alba may be a sweet, darling lass who bakes pies for orphans, but onscreen she’s got less acting talent and charisma than Ryan Gosling’s sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl...and yet Alba is somehow considered an A-list player, who gets to appear not just on the cover of Maxim, but in major motion pictures, in multiple genres, from action and horror to romantic comedy, while far more interesting and far sexier actresses like Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Mila Kunis, Thora Birch, Marley Shelton (and, no doubt, a huge percentage of the rest of the female S.A.G. membership) bob along under the surface, crossing their fingers in hopes of landing some of the high profile lead roles currently going to America’s favorite bleach-blonde void.

CHRISTOPHER REEVE

Oh, boo yourself. In the years since his unfortunate death, it has become distasteful bordering on offensive to say anything even remotely critical about Christopher Reeve. And certainly, it’s not my intention to impugn him as a man – he was, by all accounts, a decent human being, a loving husband, and a fine father to his children. The tragic accident which cost him his health was an event to be lamented, and he became a hero in its wake by advocating relentlessly for the rights and dignity of the disabled; and the comeback he made from his paralysis was very nearly a miracle. But before he took that unlucky tumble from a horse, a lot of people already knew what no one is now willing to say: Christopher Reeve was a terrible actor. Wooden, clumsy, and extremely limited in range, he started out as a pretty boy who might have been a modest success if he’d stuck to what he was good at. But Reeve was an ambitious man who soon discovered that his ambition led him to places his talent wasn’t able to go. He was laughable in Somewhere in Time, embarrassing in Monsignor, and, matched up against genuine heavyweight Michael Caine in Deathtrap, he just looked like he wanted to go home. His reputation as an actor, such as it is, rests on the Superman movies he did in the 1980s, but a lot of that adulation is vested in the character he played, and a lot more in the man who was playing him; looking at Reeve’s actual performances in the movies, it’s hard to believe anyone got very excited over that.

HALLE BERRY

It must have taken a phenomenal amount of determination and perseverance for Berry to work her way up through decorative eye candy roles in such movies as Strictly Business, Boomerang, and The Flintstones to more challenging dramatic parts in Losing Isiah and Bulworth, and then to her landmark win as the first African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actress for Monster's Ball and all the attention about her becoming the first black Bond girl in Die Another Day. But Monster's Ball is still a ridiculous movie, and Berry is hardly the least ridiculous thing in it. And her Bond girl made a great entrance, walking in from the surf, but then, as is so often the case with Berry's characters, wore out her welcome as soon as she started talking. Berry can be off-putting because, like Demi Moore, she seems to be less interested in entertaining the audience than in daring them not to respect her; at her worst, she radiates a defensive insistence on her own stature as an actress that is way out of proportion to her proven abilities, which in moments of high drama seem to consist mostly of a tremulous, anxious quality combined with a "Who farted?" expression. And that's when her mouth isn't even moving: her big line from the first X-Men movie ("Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lighting? The same thing that happens to everything else.") has the special distinction of being both the lamest-written and the lamest-delivered line in the history of superhero movies. It's just too bad that her need to be taken seriously may preclude her from doing more comedy. Because if the clip above is any indication, we do have to give her props for having a sense of humor.

ORLANDO BLOOM

Did Peter Jackson have him grown in a lab? In the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings pictures, most of the cast can be seen with hair and sweat flying while Bloom, as the elf Legolas, always looks as if his smooth plastic surface had just been wiped clean with a damp cloth. When I saw the movies, I assumed that he'd been CGI'ed to look that way, on the theory that elves never have a hair out of place even when they go on the flume ride at the water park, but Viggo Mortensen has since told interviewers that he used to stare at Bloom in disbelief while they were filming, wondering how the little bastard kept looking like a fashion spread no matter what got thrown at him or what exertions were required of him. Will Bloom ever find another role as perfectly suited to his lightweight, poreless quality as that of an arrow-shooting elf? He hasn't so far. He was cast as the romantic hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, only to have the movies use his inability to hold the screen with Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley as a running in-joke. It was fun getting to see Brendan Gleeson slap the pluperfect shit out of him in Troy, but the directors who've given him the chance to carry a picture -- in Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown and the barely released Haven -- have only succeeded in putting nasty dents in their own careers. So far, he hasn't done enough damage to otherwise promising projects to qualify as a menace, but that could change: he's supposedly threatening to play the Alain Delon role in Hong Kong action master Johnny To's planned remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 French gangland classic Le Cercle Rouge. If he pulls that off, all will be forgiven. If he screws it up, film geeks of many kinds will want to lasso his balls and leave him hanging upside down from a Times Square billboard.

RENÉE ZELLWEGER

Where did Renée Zellweger come from, and what did she ever do to earn her keep in the gallery of semi-major starlets? She has the acting abilities and charisma of a lutefisk. There is little that is redeeming about her in any of her movies. Especially not her uhm, "method" act as "fat" in Bridget Jones's Diary. Whose hand she greased to win an Oscar for Cold Mountain we will never know. And speaking of Oscars, a nomination for her role in Chicago? You must be joking. Just about every other actor in that movie swept the floor with her. And that includes Mr. Cellophane. All this is quite aside from the fact that she perpetually looks as if she just bit into a lemon.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: STEVEN SEAGAL

There’s a certain amount of humor in the notion of a big fat guy playing an indestructible martial arts machine. But Steven Seagal isn’t laughing. Ever. In fact, he may not even have the physical capability. And if watching close-ups of his portly mug intercut with shots of an obviously thinner stunt man kicking ass on the roof of a speeding train in Under Siege 2 didn’t get the man to laugh out loud, I guess he never will. Which is probably all for the best: based on the witty one-liners in his godawful body of work (as evidenced in the clip above), the only thing worse than Seagal’s “enlightened” action flicks would be a string of inspirational Zen comedies. Speaking of which...

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: MIKE MYERS

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, Mike Myers (despite his loveable Wayne’s World and Austin Powers personas) is a hellacious douche, largely despised in Hollywood for both the right and some of the wrong reasons, by good and evil people alike. As if beating the Powers franchise to death and helping Jim Carrey and Theodore Geisel’s money-grubbing widow to destroy the wonder and magic of Dr. Seuss’ legacy weren’t enough, Myers actually said The Love Guru was “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas,” a statement that’s actually funnier than anything in the movie.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Sean Connery's Life an Open Book

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

William Langley reports that "The huge print run of what is being optimistically described as Sir Sean Connery's autobiography is sitting in a warehouse awaiting release on the actor's 78th birthday next month." From his coronation as James Bond in the 1962 Dr. No to his possible swan song as Alan Quartermain in the 2003 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Connery was able to develop from a stud bodybuilder into a respected actor of rare power and daring, while maintaining his status as a leading international star (and sex symbol) for a remarkable four decades. His memoir is probably the most eagerly anticipated actor's autobiography since Marlon Brando's 1995 Songs My Mother Taught Me--and anyone who braved the gassy depths of the Brando book will recognize that as a shaky reference point at best. Since making good on his threat to stay retired from acting after the Extraordinary Gentlemen debacle (a project that Connery reportedly took on after deciding that he didn't understand it, and remembering that he'd turned down roles in The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings because he hadn't understood them), Connery has had plenty of time to strip-mine his memories, but what no one knows yet is whether or not he's had the inclination to do any serious digging. Langley notes that "In 2003 he pulled out of a project with author Meg Henderson, a personal friend, for a co-written book of memoirs. Two years later he withdrew from a seven-figure deal with the biographer Hunter Davies. A subsequent project with Canongate, a prominent Edinburgh publishing house, collapsed when the two parties 'failed to see eye-to-eye' on the book's content...The head of Canongate, Jamie Byng, said: 'Sean has got a great storytelling instinct. There was some beautiful Angela's Ashes-type stuff about growing up in Edinburgh, but ultimately we couldn't agree on what the book should be, and how we could move it on.'"

Connery's publisher says that the forthcoming time, Being a Scot, "fuses Connery's own experiences, including his acting career, with his efforts to track down what Scots have given to the world in art, science, and sport." This loose, baggy description really does make it sound like Songs My Mother Taught Me with a burr. Connery once said that he wasn't inclined to discuss his life "because I realized I was going to be spending the rest of my life trying to correct the inaccuracies, and I can't be bothered." With his book completed and ready for market, he may only now be realizing that the "inaccuracies", or at least other people's side of things, will be bobbing to the surface whether he declines comment or not. Just last week, he had to suffer the indignity of responding to claims by Diane Cilento--once a fine, fiery actress (Hombre, The Wicker Man) before her own retirement in the 1980s, and Connery's first wife, from 1962 to 1973--that he had verbally abused and financially deprived their son, Jason. "Sean has a problem about relationships," said Cilento, "as everyone around him knows." For his part, Connery responded by calling his ex-wife "insane" and adding, "“I haven’t seen the woman in 37 years and she knows nothing about me or my life now. Diane can’t move on from the break up of our marriage and I have already had to contend with her accusations about me being violent towards her. Now the lies seem to be getting even more vicious, and, what is worse, she is dragging our son into it." For more juicy stuff, you can wait another month and read the book. Maybe.

After Forty Years, the End of the New Line

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

It's been announced that New Line Cinema is being folded into Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Both studios are subsidiaries of Time Warner. New Line's connection to Time Warner goes back to 1996, when the corporation picked up New Line's parent company, Turner Broadcasting. As Forbes reports, "The decision to merge the two film divisions didn't come as a surprise. Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said during a Feb. 6 conference call that 'there is an obvious question about whether it still makes sense for us to have two completely separate studio infrastructures at Warner and New Line.' In a statement Thursday, Time Warner said that New Line will keep its own development, production, marketing, distribution and business affairs operations, but will coordinate them with Warner Bros. 'to maximize film performance and operating efficiencies, achieve significant cost savings and improve margins.' " It't not yet clear how many jobs will be lost in the downsizing process, but Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who co-founded the company forty years ago, and who had been sharing the titles of chairman and chief executive, are both already out the door.

The latest development marked the end to a long, strange trip to the top for a funky little company that had its first big successes in the early 1970s marketing John Waters's 1972 Pink Flamingos and the camp revival of the 1936 drug-hysteria picture Reefer Madness. New Line hit a new level of mainstream commercial success with the 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street, which the company built into a powerhouse franchise. By the end of the eighties, New Line had one foot in the art house and one in exploitation/genre movies, a formula that it made work with a lively mix of films such as The Evil Dead, Sid and Nancy, The Hidden, House Party, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Player, Glengarry Glen Ross, Menace II Society, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Se7en, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Austin Powers, Friday, Blade, and Final Destination and the franchises that grew out of them. The studio's biggest gamble, and biggest success, was probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a high-stakes commitment that left the company CEOs looking brilliant--at least, until they proceeded to alienate the director Peter Jackson so badly that he become but one of a long line of litigants who filed lawsuits that grew out of controversy about the company's accounting practices and charges that they failed to honor various pledges and legal committments to everyone from bit players in the movies to the heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien. New Line had recently updated its corporate logo to celebrate its fortieth birthday last October 5.

The Lawyering of the "Rings"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

New Line Cinema only recently settled a lawsuit filed by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that was supposed to clear things up between the studio and the filmmaker and open the way to production on Jackson's version of The Hobbit. Now the studio has been hit by a suit by heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien and a group of publishers who are looking to tap the studio for millions. Also waiting for their day in court: the Saul Zaentz Company, which once upon a time owned the film rights to Tolkien's work--they sold them to Miramax, which in turn sold them to New Line, and which has already had its own complicated round of legal action with New Line — and "sixteen New Zealand actors who appear in supporting parts in the films, who last year charged New Line with bilking them of a share in an estimated $100 million profit from the sale of video games, caps and other film-related merchandise." As The New York Times reports, "the trilogy may be turning into the first true cinematic 'franchise' for local legal representatives. The lawsuits, to some extent, have fed one another, and are providing a feast for those who bill by the hour."

Much of the — let's be generous and call it "miscommunication" — between all these warring parties may come down to New Line's status as an "independent studio", albeit one owned by Time Warner, which has its own manner of accounting for international revenue that differs from that of the major, worldwide studios. That's cold comfort for New Line when it considers the full ramifications of the Tolkien family suit, which "has the earmarks of a public relations nightmare." The studio stands accused of shafting the heirs of a beloved author, including a charitable trust whose revenues go to various very good causes, by ignoring a long-standing agreement regarding the money they were to receive from any film adaptations of the Rings books. Bonnie Eskenazi one of the lawyers for the Tolkien forces, has said that her clients waited so many years before filing suit because they were innocent enough to think that the greedy movie hustlers could be dealt with on a reasonable level, without bringing lawyers into it: "They do things politely, in a certain manner," she said, a statement that for all the sense it will make to most lawyers in the greater Los Angeles area might as well have been issued in Esperantu. Certainly it seems a long, long time ago that the Rings movie project smacked anyone of a risky financial venture. It'll be the ultimate sick joke about Hollywood accounting if the comparatively modest follow-up project The Hobbit never gets off the ground because New Line can't get everyone paid to the courts' satisfaction.

John Alvin, 1948 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The painter John Alvin, one of the most iconic movie poster artists of the last three decades, has died of a heart attack at fifty-nine. Alvin's first official movie poster design was for Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles; its depiction of Cleavon Little flashing a peace sign while straddling a horse, set against a profile of Brooks, in Native American makeup and headdress, on a nickel emblazened with the words, "Hi, I'm Mel, trust me," established Alvin's gift for cariacture and for his knack for boiling the elements of a movie down to punchy image that captured a movie's flavor. His career made in the business, Alvin would work on more than a hundred movie campaigns; among the most celebrated and memorable were his posters for Young Frankenstein, Phantom of the Paradise, Blade Runner, Melvin and Howard, The Princess Bride, Gremlins, Empire of the Sun, New Jack City, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, and a slew of Disney movies, among them The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and The Pirates of Caribbean pictures. One project that had a special place in his heart was the campaign for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. For the poster image, inspired by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, Alvin used his daughter Farah as a hand model.