The Screengrab : the phantom menace

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever

1. WIRED (1989)
2. SHOWGIRLS (1995)
3. THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

Even the worst movies at least attempt to be...y’know, movies. And by “movies,” I mean human behavior consciously recorded with a motion picture camera for the purpose of entertaining or engaging other humans...even if said “movie” is just a random series of unrelated images that are cool to look at when you’re stoned. Sadly, Dennis Hopper couldn’t even attract potheads (potheads!!!) with this legendary debacle, one of the films that helped to end the 1970s American film renaissance with its extreme, boring crappiness. I attempted to get through it once, and as far as I can tell, Hopper just accidentally left a camera running during a wild weekend in Peru . My in-laws’ old home movies are at least 17 times more interesting, relatable and dramatic, and cost about a million dollars less to produce.

4. REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000)

So...NONE of this movie’s fans ever saw Trainspotting? And the rave reviews and cult following were for...what, exactly? The daring, controversial idea that...gasp...drug addiction is bad? The hokey, sub-MTV visuals? The cartoonish, one-dimensional characters? The sneering condescension towards poor, sad, lonely people? Oh, I know, it must be the achingly self-conscious, utterly humorless pretension! I mean what is the point of this exercise in grim hopelessness, exactly? The characters are just as pathetic (and DULL!) when they're sober as when they're fucked-up -- they never even seem to get any pleasure out of their drugs of choice -- and there's no solution or alternative to all their misery. It's like the art film equivalent of a Friday the 13th movie: you meet some paper-thin characters with one trait each (one's sulky, one's pouty, one's black and one just wants to fit into an old red dress) and then wait for them to get knocked off, since it's the only interesting thing that's likely to happen. (And, excuse me, but wouldn't a trained medical doctor dealing with a pill-addicted middle-aged woman try, I dunno, placing her into a 12-step program or something before zapping 50,000 volts into her frontal lobe? Ooh...but that wouldn't be EDGY!)

5. FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991)

I just double-checked the Internet Movie Database to confirm that, yes, here was the exact moment Lucifer ate Steve Martin’s soul. This movie represents an entire genre of cynical, deeply mediocre capitalist pig comedies -- most of them directed by Nora Ephron, though Bride was in fact directed by Charles “I Love Trouble” Shyer, who earns his place on my shit list for kicking off the current My Super Sweet 16 era of American horribleness by promoting the notion that you’re a terrible father if you don’t mortage your house and go deep into debt to buy your spoiled bitch daughter a bunch of ridiculously expensive shit nobody in the world really needs.

6. BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1976)

It’s not that I have a problem with bloody movies or depictions of violence or even tortuous cinematic ultra-violence...but when blood, torture and suffering is the whole point of the exercise, I tend to get depressed...and then just bored and aggravated. I mean, hey, I got no beef with 2000 Maniacs or A Clockwork Orange or the various days and nights of the living dead or even Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Michael Madsen lopping off the cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs? Fine. Running down innocent bystanders in Grand Theft Auto? Sign me up. And porn of the sexual variety? Ahem. But explain to me again why I’m supposed to watch a sobbing woman scream and scream as her teeth are yanked out and a drill is shoved into her brain for minutes on end? Oh, right...because I’m a friggin' sociopath who digs torture porn, and Bloodsucking Freaks was the first sad example I ever saw.

7. THE MEXICAN (2001)

Many bad movies are dull, annoying and profoundly unentertaining, but the truly heinous ones go that extra mile into the realm of the downright philosophically offensive. I'm not even especially P.C., but at the time of its release, The Mexican was the most blatantly racist movie I'd seen since The Phantom Menace (see below)...and that's not even the worst part: what the hell were Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Tony Soprano doing in this crap? With all their 2001 A-list clout, they chose to do THIS...exactly the type of Hollywood diarrhea that prevents far, far better projects from ever seeing the light of day.

8. BREAKING THE WAVES (1996)
9. LAST DAYS (2005)

Sooooooooooooooooo boooooooooooooooooorrrrriiiiinnnnngggg...

10. THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

I was a hardcore Star Wars geek from the second that Imperial Star Destroyer first flew over my head at the Westgate Cinema in Brockton, Massachusetts way back in 1977...and 22 years later, long after I should have known better, I stood in line outside Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California for untold hours to get myself into one of the first screenings of The Phantom Menace. Once inside, the atmosphere was like a carnival love-fest of excitement, with beach balls bouncing around the theater while the faithful screamed and ululated in joyful anticipation. And then...Binks.

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

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Moving Pictures: Rush in the “Limelight”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:30:00 GMT

If I’ve learned nothing else from Entertainment Weekly – and how could that possibly be the case? – it’s this: when something burbles to the surface of our pop culture three times within a relatively short period of time, it constitutes a trend. That being the case, I have spotted a trend and named it…Rush. OK, I didn’t actually name it Rush. It already had that name. But I’ve definitely noticed a pronounced uptick in Rush content in our youth culture comedies of late, and I’m not talking Limbaugh. I mean that Canadian power trio straight out of 2112. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart. Rush.

First came Fanboys. Although most of the movie’s geek-centric humor revolves around the Lucasverse, the character of Hutch (Dan Fogler) makes it clear that only one band’s music will be heard in his van as he drives the rest of his motley crew of Star Wars fanatics to Skywalker Ranch, and that band is Rush. In I Love You, Man, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel bond over their mutual love of the band, jamming in the Segel character’s man-cave to “Limelight” and even attending a Rush concert together (which proves to be the pivotal moment when Rashida Jones realizes something has gone dreadfully awry). The band’s air guitar appeal is explored both here and in Adventureland, wherein a minor character attempts to woo amusement park babe Lisa P with his own shredding air guitar rendition of, again, “Limelight.”

So what does it all mean? It’s interesting to note that, although all three of the above movies use the band in a similar way – that is, as a signifier of social awkwardness in a particular brand of white American male – each movie takes place in a different decade. Adventureland is set in 1987, Fanboys takes place in 1998, a year before the release of The Phantom Menace, and I Love You, Man unfolds in the present day. Clearly there’s a universality to the Rush experience, something empowering about their sci-fi-tinged progressive-objectivist rock that speaks to the repressed geek in any era of their existence. Or maybe these particular filmmakers just happen to think they rawk. (Full disclosure: I have never owned a Rush album, although I did attend a Rush concert under duress in my college years. I do have the I Love You, Man soundtrack, however, and I have no problem with “Limelight.”)

For his part, bandleader Geddy Lee is eager to exploit his band’s newfound movie stardom. “We’re all available,” Lee tells – who else? – Entertainment Weekly. “We’re putting ourselves out there. We all want to be character actors now. We’re ready to be in any movie anybody wants to put us into. I’d love to be in a Coen brothers film. I would love to have a bit part in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I love the book, and I am perfect for that movie.”

Related:
Screengrab Review: Adventureland
Fantastic Fest Review: Fanboys

Fantastic Fest Review: “Fanboys”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve mentioned this a time or twelve here, but unlike my colleague Andrew Osborne, I don’t have the Star Wars gene. Sure, I loved the movies as a kid – maybe not quite as much as the Planet of the Apes series or anything with Bigfoot in it – but they never became an inextricable part of my life essence and I definitely wasn’t waiting in some smelly tent for Episode I back in 1999. If we’re playing “Star Wars vs. Star Trek,” Kirk, Spock and the gang win out with me every time. So I wouldn’t appear to be part of the target audience for Fanboys, the long-awaited story of four geeks and a gal who take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch in order to be the first to see The Phantom Menace.

Having said that – and despite all the delays, reshoots and controversies over plot points that dogged the movie in recent months – Fanboys proves to be an enjoyable ride for the most part. If you’ve followed the behind-the-scenes machinations, you know the set-up: It is 1998, and lifelong Star Wars geek Linus (Chris Marquette) has terminal cancer. (This is the part the studio didn’t like, but after an outcry from fanboy nation, it is restored.) Along with fellow Force enthusiasts Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel) and estranged best friend Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus sets out in a van to accomplish the one thing he wants to do before he dies: see the long-awaited first prequel to the Star Wars trilogy. (As an aside, and without giving away whether or not he accomplishes his goal – imagine this is your dying wish and the movie in question turns out to be the freakin’ Phantom Menace. Ah well, at least it wasn’t The Clone Wars.) Road trip hijinx galore ensue, including a pit stop in Austin to pick up top secret intel on Lucas’s fortress from Ain’t It Cool News ubergeek Harry Knowles, a night in jail that will have you rethinking your whole approach to prison pooping, and a rumble at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. There are cameos galore, including actors from the original trilogy, Seth Rogan in multiple roles and even the Shat himself, William Shatner.

Stylistically, Fanboys is sort of a mesh between the Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow sensibilities (Smith has a cameo and Apatow oversaw the reshoots and enlisted many of his regulars), but its secret weapon is co-screenwriter Ernest Cline, who has absorbed every ounce of nerdy minutiae from the past 30 years and deploys his vast store of useless knowledge for both punchlines and poignancy. Although Fogler still strikes me as a poor man’s Jack Black, the core cast is engaging, particularly Kristen Bell as the one girl who’ll put up with the geeks.

My main problem with Fanboys is that I wish it had actually been made ten years ago (as per Cline’s original plan), before geek culture became so pervasive and satisfied with itself. After another decade's worth of prequels, merchandising and ubiquitous references, I don't care if I never hear about Yoda, Chewie or Ewoks ever again. In a way, though, that's beside the point. Star Wars is the secret language of these characters – the way they always communicated. In that respect, it's no different than if the movie had been about, say, terminally ill Cubs fans taking a trip to see their team win their first World Series in 100 years – they'd just talk about Ernie Banks and “Let’s play two” instead of Darth Vader and “May the Force be with you.” The story is really about the friendship, the journey and the laughs along the way, and on that level it works even if you don't give a shit whether or not Greedo shot first.

Related:
Fanboys on the March
Fanboys vs. Darth Weinstein

Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip “The Clone Wars”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing that baffles me about 99% of my generation (which used to be called “Gen X,” but you never really hear that anymore, so let’s say “children of the ’80s”), it’s the unending fascination with Star Wars. Now, I’m not gonna pretend I never had any use for Star Wars (although I was always more of a Trekkist), but for me it’s a movie I liked as a kid, sorta like (as I’ve already confessed hereabouts) Herbie Rides Again or The Return of the Pink Panther. After Return of the Jedi (most of which had been spoiled for me by my asshole biology teacher, whose untimely demise I plotted for weeks afterward), Star Wars and I went our separate ways. I never even saw The Phantom Menace until three years after it was released, when I was assigned to review Attack of the Clones and figured I should get up to speed on all the important trade route issues.

I mention this not to paint myself as being somehow above movie geekdom – I certainly have my own obsessions that are probably much more embarrassing than Star Wars in the grand scheme of things – but merely as a warning to those of you who may not want to read anything negative about your beloved Lucasverse. For I have seen The Clone Wars and it is what the Greeks call “not so good.” To wit:

1. The animation sucks. This shouldn’t surprise, since the feature film version of The Clone Wars is basically an afterthought cobbled together in advance of a new cartoon series debuting this fall. Yet it did surprise me a little, since the last couple of Star Wars movies were 95% CGI anyway – you’d think they would have perfected it by now. It’s not like I was expecting Pixar here, but the human-types onscreen are so stiff, expressionless and generally carved-looking, they appear to be posing for their own action figures. The robots and other critters fare somewhat better, but the Lucasfolk could do the big battles and dogfights in their sleep by now, and it appears that they did. Which brings us to…

2. The Playstation factor. I enjoy playing videogames. What I don’t particularly enjoy is watching somebody else play a videogame. For nearly two hours. That’s the experience of watching The Clone Wars, however. It’s an endless series of suspense-free space battles, light saber duels, shootouts and narrow escapes connected by plot interludes that look and play like cut scenes from a Grand Theft Auto game, minus the wit and character development.

3. The “tween” Jedi. “Y’know, the Star Wars audience just isn’t big enough,” George Lucas muses, scratching his big blobby neck-thing. “I’ve gotta put something in there that appeals to the Hannah Montana crowd.” Enter Ahsoka Tano, the orange-hued tween introduced as Anakin Skywalker’s “padawan.” She’s spunky and sassy! And is there something just a little creepy about her following “Skyguy” around and calling him “Master”? I think there is.

4. “Stinky the Hutt.” The mission assigned to Anakin, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan Kenobi is to rescue the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt. (There are strategic reasons for this, but I won’t bore us all to death attempting to explain them.) The offspring in question – called “Rotta the Huttlet” in the credits, but referred to onscreen as “Stinky” – is such a cute widdle critter, I’m sure the dolls are already flying off the shelves at Toys R Us. Attention, geeks: Lucas didn’t care that you hated Jar Jar Binks and he won’t care if you hate Stinky the Hutt. He’s a toymaker and he’s just doing his job.

5. The Clone Wars. This epic intergalactic battle is so integral to the Star Wars mythos that most of it took place offscreen between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. That’s the setting for this movie, and the upcoming cartoon series as well. So hooray, we get more of Anakin Skywalker before he turns into Darth Vader! I mean, seriously, you’re George Lucas, you’re making an animated Star Wars movie, you can do whatever the fuck you want. So why do you pick the least interesting part of the story imaginable? Wouldn’t it be more fun to pick up the adventures of Luke Skywalker and crew after Return of the Jedi? You know, like that third trilogy Lucas used to talk about before he decided he really only meant to do two all along? Mark Hamill has been making a living doing cartoon voices for years now – I’m sure he could spare a few hours lending his pipes to that.

Just to let you know that I’m not a complete curmudgeon, there is one part of The Clone Wars I sort of enjoyed. It was a brief interlude in the seedy side of the Star Wars universe (which we haven’t seen much since the cantina sequence from the original movie) involving Jabba’s uncle, Ziro the Hutt. For whatever inexplicable reason, Ziro is a hookah-smoking drag queen who sounds like Truman Capote on a Bourbon Street bender. If Lucas came up with this, I can only imagine he’s gotten so bored with his own creation that he finally snapped. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll check out the cartoon series after all.

Related:
George Lucas and the License to Print Money
Tarkin 'n' Friends

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The watch scene from THE COTTON CLUB (1984)

Francis Coppola spent the first half of the 1980s despoiling his reputation and laying waste to his bank account by turning out a string of movies that concentrated on technological wizardy and hollow flash to such a degree that involving the audience in what was supposed to be going on became a moot point. Reduced to working as a gun for hire, he signed on to direct this elephantine period musical about the legendary Harlem night spot, and made all the same mistakes that he'd made with his own labor-of-love fiascoes. He and his screenwriting partner, William Kennedy, were not helped by their producers, who signed Richard Gere to star in the movie, and accepted his demand that he get to play a cornet player, before a script had been written. (This meant that Coppola and Kennedy had to vamp their asses off to come up with a story that would be set at a jazz club which only employed black musicians yet had a white musician at its center.) The best scene in the movie is a throwaway moment between the Cotton Club's gangster owner, Owney Madden, and his baleful partner, Frenchy Demange, played by Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne, who were not considered to be among the most glittering members of the movie's crowded cast. (At the time, Hoskins was largely unknown in America, and Gwynne, at 58, was just beginning to crawl out from under the shadow of Herman Munster, a role that had left him badly typecast for twenty years.) Frenchy has just been released from the clutches of a sociopathic thug (Nicolas Cage) who kidnapped him for ransom; Owney is reluctant to let Frenchy know how worried he's been for him, and Frenchy is pissed off because he's heard, falsely, thay Owney tried to bargain down the price of the ransom. Reunited, they use the ostensible subject of a busted watch as an excuse to dance around and finally reveal how much their friendship means to them. It's the only fully human scene in the movie, and not only does it not involve the leads, but Coppola and Kennedy didn't write it. Hoskins and Gwynne came up with it while hanging out together on the set, waiting for something to do.

The pie-eating scene from STAND BY ME (1986)

I know that a great many people have tender feelings for this gentle look at the bond between little boys -- or, to put it the way the grown narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) puts it at the very end, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" I guess that's sort of true: later on, I was never so hard up for someone to hang out with that I was willing to tolerate having friends who ate worms. The fact is that some of us would rather not even have to think about the possibility that Stephen King has a soft, sensitive side (and that goes triple for Meathead). However, there is one scene that fully lives up to what some of us might have hoped for in a collaboration between the author of Carrie and the director of This Is Spinal Tap. It's the scene where the kid who likes to tell stories (and who's going to grow up to be Richard Dreyfuss, i.e. Stephen King) gathers his mates together and enthralls them with the tale of Lardass, the fat kid who rewards the people of his town for their years of abuse with a little plan involving a pie-eating contest and a dose of castor oil. I never heard any gross-out stories that could top the ones invented by twelve-year-old boys who were secretly a lot less sensitive than they wanted to believe. Jesus, does anybody?

Darth Maul, Sebulba & The Pod Race from THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life). In retrospect, it was pretty obvious that seeing The Phantom Menace as a grown-ass man (especially after HOURS in line waiting for a seat at the Mann’s Chinese screening in Hollywood on opening night) would never come anywhere close to replicating the experience of watching the original trilogy at more or less exactly the right age. But from the dense trade federation blather and Sesame Street robots of the film's opening minutes through all the disheartening talk of mitochlorians and CGI miasma of its overlong running time, Phantom Menace barely even achieved the all-important Star Wars “feel” until Darth Maul unfurled that wicked pissa double-sided light saber and Sebulba hopped into his souped-up muscle car for the big Pod Race midway through the movie. Here, at last, were some worthy additions to that far, far away galaxy I'd known and loved, swaggering, mysterious and truly alien figures who (like Jango and Li’l Boba Fett in Attack of the Clones, General Grievous in Revenge of the Sith and Ian McDiarmid’s series-spanning, scenery-chewing evil Emperor) were far more compelling than whatever nonsense was going on with Jar-Jar Binks and the rest of the so-called “main” characters over in the boring “A” story. And the Ben-Hur pod-race sequence (despite the hokey, sub-Spaceballs intrusion of those “wacky” sports announcers and the fact that Sebulba wuz robbed) was such a breathless, seemingly effortless mini-masterpiece of lucid storytelling and high tech filmmaking that it gave me the smallest flicker of hope that Lucas wouldn’t blow the rest of the new trilogy as badly as he'd blown Episode One.

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

George Lucas Promotes "Indy 4", Urges Fans to Get a Grip

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

USA Today has been covering George Lucas's attempts to help the Earth's population contain itself in the face of the imminent release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. "When you do a movie like this," says George, " a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming. And it's not. It's just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up." The paper's Scott Bowles suggests that "The remarks appear to be part of a larger strategy to build interest yet temper expectations for the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. Only one trailer is playing, and when director Steven Spielberg shows up for talk shows, he doesn't bring footage." Longtime George watchers may find it hard to resist speculation that Lucas is actually trying to help himself prepare to deal with the backlash — the bad reviews and moos of disappointment — that might conceivably be waiting to greet him at the end of Indy's latest dig. As if to confirm this, he went on to compare the new movie to The Phantom Menace, a movie that he regards as having suffered unfairly from too-high expectations among the groundlings, even as some of us think of it as proof that if you're packing enough hype, you can get away with anything. Lucas, who famously said of the first Raiders of the Lost Ark that he went to the trouble of putting it into production because "I just want to see this movie," adds that he and his associates made the new picture for the "fun" of it and that he has next to no interest in its commercial prospects: "It's not going to make much money for us in the end. We all have some money." (One of these statements is true, and both of them reflect what it does to your overall perspective when you can buy and sell Scrooge McDuck.) It's too bad that he doesn't get any charge at all out of the money, since the one thing that we know about Indy 4 going in is that it's going to make a mint. Questions of its quality will have to wait until it starts hitting movie screens — though it's almost certainly a safe bet that there will be plenty of people who'd insist that it was great even if Harrison Ford succumbed to senile dementia halfway through the shoot and started referring to his on-screen son, Shia LaBeouf, as "Harpo."

A few things may be in play here. Lucas may genuinely feel stung over the general consensus that, after all that business about remaking gods and myths for the modern age, the three Star Wars prequels he directed between 1999 and 2003 were, indeed, just movies, and maybe the movies of someone whose fun machine needed oiling. He could also be asserting his right to declare that if the members of the Skywalker family are just some characters in a movie franchise that, like so many others, had to deal with the law of diminishing returns, that goes double for the Jones boys, who only became flesh with the help of George's directorial hired hand and BFF Steven Spielberg. After all, the last time George really made news with regard to the Star Wars series may have been when he informed a stunned crowd at a Publicists' Guild luncheon that "The Empire Strikes Back is always written about as the best of the films, when it actually was the worst one.” That movie, too, had the distinction of not having been directed by George himself.

"Toy Story" Trilogy in 3-D

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In recent years, Disney has become notorious for tinkering with the cherished contents of its vaults; you could kill a year or so by just comparing all the various "restoration" versions of Fantasia. But Pixar, the computer-animation division that has been responsible for many of the company's biggest hits and most of its critically revered creative muscle since the mid-1990s, has seemed to be too busy moving forward to spend its time and money fretting over its back catalog. Now it's been announced that the 1995 Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film and first release through Disney, and its fine sequel, the 1999 Toy Story 2, will be "remade" in 3-D, in anticipation of the eventual release of Toy Story 3, scheduled to be made in 3-D. John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder and current chief creative officer at Disney Animation Studios who directed both films, says that "We thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way. . . 3D offers lots of great new possibilities for the art of animation and we will continue to use this new technology to tell our stories in the best possible way." It certainly represents an upgrade for Toy Story 2 in particular — that project was originally supposed to be one of the "direct-to-video" sequels that Disney routinely puts out after it's had a hit, but the movie was repositioned for a proper theatrical release after it turned out that Pixar was unable to sink to the usual Disney level. The 3-D Toy Story will be released in the fall of 2009, with Toy Story 2 coming out early in 2010 and the all-new TS3 scheduled to appear in summer of that year. The situation is slightly reminiscent of the re-release of the gussied-up versions of the first three Star Wars movies in 1997, in anticipation of the 1999 appearance of The Phantom Menace. Except that, you know, we have faith in John Lasseter.