The Screengrab : the sopranos

Screengrab Review: “Infestation”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:30:00 GMT

It’s a simple question we all have to ask ourselves sooner or later: Am I the sort of person who enjoys a good ol’ fashioned icky-fun movie about giant bugs? Go ahead and ask yourself. I’ll wait here.

Is the answer yes? Good, because that’s exactly what Infestation intends to be, and for the most part, it delivers. Chris Marquette (Fanboys) stars as Cooper, a fun-loving slacker who is about to be fired from his latest dead-end office job when…something happens. There is a flash of light and Cooper blacks out, only to wake up in the same office covered in a cocoon of webbing. No sooner has he managed to free himself than Cooper finds himself in a life-or-death struggle with a three foot long cockroach-looking creature. After defeating the gruesome beastie and freeing his co-workers from their own cocoons, Cooper and a small group of survivors set out on foot, hoping to find their way through a city infested with enormous creepy-crawlies to the sanctuary of a bomb shelter built by Cooper’s domineering father Ethan (Ray Wise).

Along the way, Cooper attempts to romance his boss’s daughter Sara (Brooke Nevin), fends off the advances of a distraught weathergirl (Kinsey Packard), and learns a few things about his insectoid tormenters. The bugs are blind and rely on sound to hone in on their prey. If they sting you on the small of the back, you’ll soon be sprouting multiple hairy legs of your own. Most importantly, they nest in a giant hive on the outskirts of town, the destruction of which may be the only hope for the survival of the human race.

Writer-director Kyle Rankin, who you may remember as one of the co-directors of The Battle of Shaker Heights from the second season of Project Greenlight, brings a welcome light touch to the proceedings, swerving from goofy to gross-out without missing a beat. Marquette makes for an engaging anti-action hero, and the special effects (supervised by Shaker Heights co-director Efram Potelle) compare favorably with those of the mega-budget bug movie The Mist (which could have benefited from the sense of fun displayed here).

It’s all good fun up until the abrupt, ambiguous ending, which may be an homage to The Sopranos or an awkward set-up for a sequel, but either way plays as too cutesy by half. If you can ignore that, you’ll find Infestation to be an ideal night at the drive-in, assuming you can still find one. As best I can tell, a release date is still up in the air, but in the meantime, here’s a short film from Rankin and Potelle that offers a glimpse of the big bug carnage to come:

Insex

Unwatchable #52: “In the Mix”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

In the Mix comes described as an “edgy romantic comedy,” which I guess is a romantic comedy in which people shoot at each other. Our star-crossed lovers are club DJ Darrell (R&B star Usher) and Mafia princess Dolly (adorable Emmanuelle Chriqui); they’ve known each other all their lives, but, you know, not in that way. Darrell’s late father was a trusted employee of Dollie’s daddy Frank (Chazz Palminteri), the mob boss of New Jersey. Frank hires Darrell to DJ a party, which proves fortuitous when a rival attempts a hit on him and Darrell takes the bullet in his shoulder.

It’s only a flesh wound, and Darrell quickly recuperates in Frank’s spacious McMobsion. Given the potential mob war a-brewing, Frank is unwilling to let Dolly leave the house without protection, but Dolly refuses to be accompanied by one of his goons. (Frank is perpetually surrounded by a cast of goombahs who might have finally made it onto The Sopranos if the show had run seventeen seasons; Robert Costanzo IS Fat Tony!)

That leaves it to Darrell to chauffeur Dolly around, and soon enough the old friends are playing tonsil hockey. This doesn’t sit well with Frank and the boys when they find out, so they decide to knock some sense into Darrell by having Fat Tony dunk his head several times in the pool. See, these are lovable mobsters! Except for the two young nitwits who kidnap Darrell and Dolly in order to lure Frank into a trap, so they can kill him and take over the crew. It all works out, though, when Darrell takes another bullet, finally winning Frank over. Hey, any asshole can take one bullet for you, right? But two? Ayyyy, gabbagool!

Directed by genial hack Ron Underwood (City Slickers, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and I don’t actually know that he’s genial, he just looks that way in his IMDb photos), In the Mix is at least competent in a straight-to-video sort of way, which, along with Chriqui’s million dollar smile, should probably be enough to disqualify it from Unwatchable consideration. If I had to guess why it ended up on the list, I would be inclined to place the blame on the character of Dolly’s brother Frankie Jr. (Anthony Fazio), an incredibly annoying wigger in the hiz-zayyy who somehow makes it through the entire movie without being beaten to death by either Usher or Palminteri. For this missed opportunity alone, I award In the Mix two Maurys.

Previously on Unwatchable:
53. Baby Geniuses
54. Meatballs 4
55. A*P*E
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz

Screengrab Review: "Gomorrah"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There's a popular nitwit theory that movies like The Godfather and TV series like The Sopranos "glamorize" Mafia life and make it look attractive. Again and again, the point may get made that Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and the people in their orbit are ruthless moral idiots who actually grow less and less loyal to their closest associates the longer they have to endure the sight of them, but the idea seems to be that as long as they're treated as fascinating characters, people worthy of the audience's interest, somebody's going to look at their way of life and think, it doesn't look half bad. The new Italian movie Gomorrah may be less likely than any crime movie ever made to be accused of romanticizing gangsterism. The movie, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes, uses Robert Saviano's nonfiction book about the Neapolitan-based criminal organization known as "the Camorra" (which means, simply, the gang) as its jumping-off point. The book is fiercely angry about what the Camorra and its corrupting influence does to innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. The movie, which was directed by Matteo Garrone, provides grounds for anger, though its own emotional temperature is basically even and steady, even frigid. It cuts back and forth among several characters, most of them barely blips on the Camorra's radar screen: a bookkeeper who works distributing money to the families of clan members who are in prison; a mobbed-up tailor; a thirteen-year-old boy just beginning to get his bearings in the crooked world in which he'll be growing up; a couple of teenage meatheads who, unlike the professional big boys, see themselves as romantic outlaws and run around with guns causing so much aggravation that they'll eventually have to be put down. (To better make the point about what kind of movie this isn't, the knuckleheads shout lines from Brian De Palma's Scarface as they play cowboys and Indians.) There are also some guys who work in "toxic waste management", which translates into directing trucks full of poisonous materials to out-of-the-way sites where they can be dumped or buried. Thus the Camorra's influence extends to literally despoiling the land itself, adding one more thoughtful conceit to a movie already groaning with them.

Gomorrah has been highly praised for its stubbornly unexciting handling of this potentially shocking material, but for Matteo, that may be the choice of a director who doesn't have many other options. His previous movies, the dysfunctional love story Primo Amore (2004) and The Embalmer (2002), about a dwarfish taxidermist who is employed by the Camorra to hook up a corpse so that it can serve as a drug mule, also treated sensational material in a flat, affectless way that minimized the viewer's ability to connect with whatever was going on. He either doen't know how to involve the audience or consciously rejects involving them because he's aiming for something more challenging and cerebral. He mostly winds up with something flatter and deader. He's not above using violence and noise to get a rise out of you; the movie opens with a bloody mass execution carried out in a tanning salon, and Matteo makes a point of never making it clear who the victims were or why their were killed. Because the movie never invites you to care about its characters beyond the level of seeing them as faceless victims of a corrupt society, the frequent violent explosions serve the same purpose they do in the sleaziest kind of exploitation films: they nudge you awake between the lapses into total boredom.

Any movie that deals with power and crime that doesn't acknowledge the attractions of those things is as much a lie as a movie that makes a gangster's life seem noble. When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, he didn't think he had to make the Corleones both colorless and unrelentingly disgusting to prevent viewers from thinking he was making a campaign commercial for the Mafia, because he assumed that most people have more sense than that. Gomorrah is being congratulated for assuming that people don't, and that a gangster movie's moral intelligence can best be judged by how hard it is to sit through it. The first step towards constructing a meaningful condemnation of organized crime might be to examine why people are drawn to it, but in Gomorrah, the reasons seem boiled down to: there's no resisting it. Nobody wants it, but if you try to stand up to it or even live apart from it, you'll get your head blown off. A lifeless depiction of a hopeless world, Gomorrah is an epic shrug of resignation.

“Reality Horror Night”: Survivors, Moles and Wack Packers Bite the Dust

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Via Defamer comes news of a feature film shooting this month in Long Island. It’s called Reality Horror Night, and the cast includes Destiney Moore, Erik Chopin, Paul Grassi, Billy Garcia, Frenchy and Ty White. Perhaps you don’t recognize any of those names, but you may have at least passing familiarity with some of the TV shows that brought them whatever fame they possess: VH1 Rock of Love, The Biggest Loser, The Mole, Survivor and The Amazing Race.

The premise, according to this press release: the reality stars “are invited to participate in a new TV Show where the prize is $1,000,000. Before the first contestant is voted off, a ‘freakish accident’ happens, and they meet their demise. When the second and third guest ‘bite the dust’ our contestants discover that they are not only playing for $1,000,000 but playing for their lives. This light-comedy, light-horror, suspenseful film ponders the question..."Would you kill for $1,000,000?" Little do our Reality Stars know that this night might be considered a scam, a scam for their lives.”

“Light-horror” suggests these folks won’t meet with especially gruesome ends, which is a shame – although I must admit the only one I could pick out of a lineup is Garcia, who I recall as the heavy metal Survivor who embarrassed himself and a nation by confessing his love for another contestant from a rival tribe. Actually, that’s not true – there’s another familiar name in the cast: Joseph Gannascoli, who has been selected for his work on Celebrity Fit Club. However, you may know him better as enormous closeted mobster Vito from The Sopranos. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

If this all sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Kill Reality, a 2005 E! series in which various Survivor and Real World veterans convened to make a horror movie called The Scorned. If anyone remembers that show at all, it’s probably for the rampant sexcapades amongst the cast or the infamous episode in which Johnny Fairplay was removed from the proceedings for defecating on another cast member’s pillow. Or, as an astute Defamer commenter noted, you may be thinking of Series 7: The Contenders, an indie film I reviewed way back when. Or maybe even The Running Man…which is apparently slated for a remake. As Defamer is fond of noting, The End of Ideas is nigh.

Related:
Steven Seagal Gets Real
Vanishing Act: The "Greenlight" Gang

DVD Digest for November 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

You can always tell when it’s the holiday season, because the studios begin to clear out their coffers to release titles both new and classic, no matter whether they’ve already been released on DVD.

DVD of the Week: With thousands of titles (both theirs, MGM’s, and other studios’) in their library, no studio has more classic movies to draw from than Warner Bros. This week brings a goldmine of classic WB titles, but none of these is more appealing than the new box set Warner Bros. and the Homefront. Just in time for Veteran’s Day, the box set contains three of the studio’s best-known flag-waving entertainments, all of which are new to DVD. The most notable of the bunch was the 1943 hit Irving Berlin’s This Is The Army, starring future president Ronald Reagan along with the titular composer. The other films in the set are a pair of star-studded patriotic musicals, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen. In addition, Warner Bros. has dug into their massive collection of archival material in order to pair vintage short films, newsreels, trailers and cartoons with each of the films, including the semi-notorious Herr Meets Hare. So while some might claim that the films in the Homefront collection are disposable, the box set is anything but.

Warner will also be releasing two box sets for the holidays, Warner Bros. Holiday Collection Volume 1 and Volume 2. Volume 1 includes previously-released DVDs of Boys Town, A Christmas Carol, and Christmas in Connecticut, plus a bonus DVD of The Singing Nun. Volume 2 contains the new-to-DVD titles All Mine to Give, Holiday Affair, and It Happened on 5th Avenue (each sold separately), plus Blossoms in the Dust, available only in the box set. Paramount will be rereleasing three of their most beloved classics- Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Sunset Blvd- in special “Centennial Editions” just in time for the studio’s 100th anniversary. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: JFK 3-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Quo Vadis (Warner), and The Director’s Series: Roberto Rossellini (Lionsgate), which includes Escape By Night and Where Is Freedom?.

The highest-profile recent releases coming to DVD this week are Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Universal, also Blu-Ray) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look, also Blu-Ray); the holiday-themed This Christmas (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Christophe Honore’s Love Songs (Genius Productions); the breakdancing doc Planet B-Boy (Arts Alliance America); and two titles who will have almost no audience members in common, Toby Keith in Beer For My Horses (Lionsgate) and the Flaming Lips in Christmas on Mars (WEA).

This week’s big TV on DVD news is the release of the massive The Sopranos: The Complete Series (HBO) box set. In addition, there’s also The Cosby Show: The Complete Series (First Look), as well as Scrubs Season 7 (Disney). And finally, the Blu-Ray only titles for this week are exclusively TV shows: Band of Brothers (Warner), Chuck Season 1 (Warner), Firefly: The Complete Series (Warner), and Supernatural Season 3 (Warner). So that’s cool, I guess.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Four

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

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

RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience. He was much better in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1949 drama House of Strangers, which, while not strictly speaking a crime movie, has similarities to The Godfather, with its squabbling Italian family balling itself up over questions of loyalty and patriarchal authority.

It soon became clear that film noir was Conte's natural milieu, but by the time he gave his strongest performance in the strongest movie of his career to date, Joseph H. Lewis's intense 1955 low-budget crime picture The Big Combo, film noir had slid down to a B-movie genre. Conte starred in Fritz Lang's The Blue Dahliah and Phil Karlsen's The Brothers Rico, then rid out the 1960s alternating between TV guest shots and opportunities to hang out with Frank Sinatra. (He appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven and then turned up in three other Sinatra movies, Assault on a Queen, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Maybe Sinatra decided that, on Ocean's Eleven, he'd taken one for the team by agreeing to play the character who is required to say the line, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is it the big casino?") Conte was reportedly considered for the role of Don Vito himself, but that was in the early stages, when the studio was thinking of making The Godfather as a cheap little action movie. Its elevation to prestige-epic level automatically took him out of the running for the title role, but by casting him as Don Barzini, the smiling-cobra nemesis of the Corelones who plays toastmaster general at the big meeting of the five families, Francis Ford Coppola was counting on Conte's movie past, with its long-time connection to the world of gangsters and other classic movie toughs (such as Edward G. Robinson, who played Conte's blustery Italian papa in House of Strangers) to give added weight to a character whose brief amount of screen time belies his power and importance in the narrative. Barzini was Conte's last hurrah as a Hollywood actor. He died in 1975 after spending the last three busy years of his life working in Italy and France, where even hacks know enough to be impressed with a long-time professional who has Fritz Lang pictures on his resume.

RICHARD BRIGHT: Was ever an actor more misleadingly named? It's not that Bright was dull, by any means. But he seemed to be allergic to flashiness and determined to never call undue attention to himself. He was very close to being the ideal example of a hard-working, serious character actor who finds his place in the overall pattern of whatever movie or play he's in, selflessly executes it with an unfussy mastery, and then recedes into the background until he's needed again. In 1965, he did his part for free expression and the counterculture by playing Billy the Kid (to his co-star Billie Dixon's Jean Harlow) in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which ended with a scene in which Dixon delivered a closing monologue while Bright simulated cunnilingus on her; the play so impressed the authorities that every night, the police came around after the performance to take Bright and Dixon down to the station house so that their eager fans there could have their fingerprints. In 1971, Bright appeared in The Panic in Needle Park, a young-junkies-in-love movie that marked Al Pacino's starring debut. The next year, he found the role for him as Al Neri, the most durable and colorlessly loyal of Corleone underlings in The Godfather. He would reprise the role of Al in Part II, and Part III, made fifteen years and set twenty-odd years later, found him still faithfully plugging away. He can also be seen in The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Rancho Deluxe, Mararthon Man, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Citizens Band, Once Upon a Time in America, and a great many other films. In 2002, he contributed a brief but memorable cameo to an episode of The Sopranos, playing the leader of a low-rent murder-for-hire crew, who negotiates a contract between puffs on an oxygen inhaler stuffed up his nose. Four years later, he was accidentally and fatally struck by a New York City bus.

AL LETTIERI: Lettieri kicked around in TV and movie bit parts for a decade or so before starting to get real supporting roles in such movies as The Bobo with Peter Sellers and The Night of the Following Day, a godforsaken kidnapping-plot movie starring a peroxided Marlon Brando. His performance as Solozzo the Turk is not the most subtle and nuanced element of The Godfather--Lettieri's performance was never the most subtle and nuanced element in any of his movies, not even the ones that starred Charles Bronson--but he had energy and the distinctive presence of a man who'd decided to act as if looking like a warthog in spats was really working for him. The Godfather established Lettieri as a good man to hire if you were making a movie whose heroes were killers and thieves and you needed a clearly contrasting type to make it clear why these other killers and thieves were the good guys. If sheer, unadorned vicious meanness is what floats your boat, it's hard to think of a riper example than Lettieri's bad guy in the 1972 The Getaway, who enlivens his pursuit of the movie's ostensible hero and heroine by abducting a husband and wife (played by Archie Bunker's little girl, Sally Struthers, and Jack Dodson, formerly Howard Sprague on The Andy Griffith Show) and indulges in an infantile, trashy affair with the wife while the husband is forced to watch from the back seat. Off camera, Lettieri seems to have been one of those uncontainable, life of the party types who other character actors tell stories about until they turn into legendary figures. He is said to have arrived on the set of the Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk in a car full of hookers he'd thoughtfully brought along to service the crew, which definitely puts those gift baskets that Jay Leno sends out into perspective. Once there, he persisted in addressing his co-star, who played a melon rancher in dutch with the mob, as "my melon-Chollie baby," something that all the witnesses agree seemed to strike Bronson as the single least amusing thing in the world. Sadly, Lettieri would have no more time to feel around for the location of Charles Bronson's funny bone. He died of a heart attack in 1975, at 47.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Three

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

LEE STRASBERG: Co-founder of the Group Theatre and a director of the Actors Studio, Strasberg was a legendary acting teacher and Method guru but had barely had an acting career of his own when his former studio Al Pacino suggested that, at 72, he might be the right man to incarnate Hyman Roth, the ancient Mafia rainmaker who is said to have earned Vito Corleone's respect but never his trust. There may have been a bit of sly mischief mixed in with Pacino's worship when he put the actor and the character together; Strasberg had inspired a fair amount of gossip over the years about his manipulation of those under his sway--particularly Marilyn Monroe, who left him the bulk of her estate in her will--and there are moments when it's easy to see in Roth an old actor who's used to playing up both his accumulated wisdom and his infirmities to get attention, and also to gull those around him into thinking that he's as harmless as he seems. Yet Strasberg, handed this unexpected opportunity to show what he could do with rich material after many years of talking the talk, really dove in and acted the hell out of the role. Given his reputation for stressing the importance of emotional groping in acting, one might be surprised at how technically accomplished his work is, especially in the scene where he talks about the grounds he has for harboring a grudge against Michael, begins to make a painful-sounding noise indicating that he's having trouble controlling his breathing, and just plows on ahead with his monologue, mastefully using the painful-sounding grunts as counterpoint to the lines. Strasberg won an Academy Award nomination for the performance but lost to another of his old students, Robert De Niro, for De Niro's performance in the same movie. It's no surprise that after this late-life fling, he was eager to do more film acting, though it's also no surprise that, at his age, there seemed to be no surplus of appropriate roles halfway worthy of him. He played Pacino's grandfather in the 1979 ...And Justice for All and co-starred with Ruth Gordon in Boardwalk and with Art Carney and George Burns in Going in Style that same year, and died in 1982.

DOMINIC CHIANESE: Chianese, who played Hyman Roth's right-hand man Johnny Ola, is unique in the annals of Godfather cast members in that he didn't really get much of a career boost from the movie but later became a celebrity thanks to his work in another organized-crime drama made twenty-five years later, which often used The Godfather itself as a handy reference point: The Sopranos. Chianese began his show business career as a musician with one foot in musical theater-- Gilbert and Sullivan, off-Broadway musicals, Oliver! He was working for the man, giving guitar lessons in a rehab center, when he landed the role of Johnny Ola and performed it with a skillfully applied veneer of polished smarm. (It was his second movie role, after a bit part in the 1972 Fuzz.) It did lead to fairly steady work in film and TV and a continuing association with Al Pacino: a year after The Godfather, Part II, he played Pacino's father in Dog Day Afternoon, and twenty years after that, Pacino invited him to participate in his documentary about acting Shakespeare, Looking for Richard. But none of that brought him anywhere near the attention he earned when David Chase stuck a pair of Mr. Magoo eyeglasses on him and dubbed him Uncle Junior. Since then, he has appeared in such movies as Unfaithful (2002) and When Will I Be Loved (2004) but has mostly used the boost he got from the TV show to re-energize his singing career, making personal appearances and releasing the CDs Hits and Ungrateful Heart.

ABE VIGODA: Vigoda was hired at an open casting call to play Tessio, the dignified and, to his ultimate misfortune, the tragically "smarter" of the Don's two oldest and most trusted close associates. At the time, he had done some stage work and a little TV, but had gained an embarrassingly slight toehold in the business for a working actor who'd recently entered his fifties. The shot of him at the Don's daughter's wedding, smiling while dancing with a little girl who's standing on his shoes, is as endearingly human as any image in the film; the later shot of him, lit like Boris Karloff at a black masque and laughing at the idea of the upstanding Michael carrying out an assassination, is scary enough to make you lose it in your pants. The movie automatically raised Vigoda's profile among casting directors. (Vigoda would tell interviewers that it also raised his profile among traffic cops, who took to stopping the shifty, baleful-looking man who they knew they'd seen someplace before...) Vigoda's big post-Godfather break was, of course, that of Fish, the senior citizen member of the detective squad on the TV comedy Barney Miller. That role made him semi-beloved, but after a couple of years, the network insisted on spinning him off onto his own goddamn sitcom with a bunch of goddamn kids, and after that was quickly canceled, Vigoda was stranded, overexposed, and badly typecast.

But he didn't turn into an official joke until the premature reports of his death started in 1982, with a false item in People magazine. It might have helped if Vigoda hadn't seemed so grateful for the attention. By now, late night talk shows, Conan O'Brien's in particular, have gotten a lot of mileage out of treating Vigoda as a punch line, the way comedians of an earlier generation used Sonny Tufts or The Horn Blows at Midnight. Sometimes the joke is that Vigoda, who turned 87 this year, is still alive; that may be an inevitable result of his having had his greatest success playing walking dead men before he himself was sixty. Sometimes, the joke seems to just be that there's this fellow named Abe Vigoda out there who was once in a great movie and whose name is still recognizable. It doesn't help that in Vigoda's few appearances in movies that have actually been released to theaters since 1974--such deathless classics as Joe Versus the Volcano and North--he seems to have been cast on the theory that it'll just tickle people to see Abe Vigoda turn up in a movie, as if he were an actor or something. Perhaps sensing this, Vigoda has generally seemed less alive and committed in these roles than he does when Conan or Dave has trotted him out to use as a sight gag. It's not altogether clear just what he's done to deserve this, but sometimes the world is just brutal on people who insist on continuing to exist after we've decided that that their fifteen minutes are up.

Unwatchable #71: “Gigli”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Based solely on its critical reception, it would have been easy to confuse the release of Gigli in theaters with the release of a notorious child murderer from prison. The title became an instant punchline, made even funnier by the fact that no one could pronounce it. (As the title character informs us repeatedly throughout the movie, it “rhymes with really.”) Few movies could be as terrible as it was purported to be, and indeed, Gigli isn’t one of them. In fact, it seems as though America has re-evaluated the movie since its release. I expected to find it much higher on the Bottom 100 chart, but #71 sounds about right.

The wave of bad publicity that crushed the movie can largely be blamed on the off-screen shenanigans of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. You could argue that it was unfair of reviewers to take out their frustrations on the movie itself, and you would have a point, but let us not forget how truly obnoxious the whole Ben ‘n Jen circus became. Somebody had to pay and writer/director Martin Brest got caught in the crossfire.

Brest was originally set to direct Rain Man but resigned over creative differences. Apparently he never got over them, because Gigli revolves around a similar autistic character, this one the brother of the L.A. district attorney. In an effort to blackmail the DA, a lowlife thug enlists two contractors, Larry Gigli (Affleck) and Ricky (Lopez), to kidnap and babysit the kid. Gigli and Ricky mistrust each other, especially when Gigli learns Ricky is a lesbian and immune from his charms, but their relationship evolves in an almost interesting way as Ricky undermines Gigli’s masculinity, engineering a gender role-reversal of sorts.

Meanwhile, Brest the screenwriter undermines Brest the idea man. His notion of stylized tough guy dialogue amounts to putting words like “excoriate” and tortured syntax like “Might you know what it is I’m getting at?” in the mouths of his goombah characters. That’s a minor offense compared to Lopez’s big speech on the merits of the vagina over the penis, a monologue that must be a big hit at off-Broadway auditions these days. J-Lo is also stuck with a sub-Tarantino soliloquy on the subtleties of ripping someone’s eyeball out of its socket. It’s almost harder to listen to than “Jenny From the Block.”

As the not terribly bright protagonist, Affleck is playing to his strengths. His Gigli is like one of those blowdried dumbasses who works for Christopher on The Sopranos and ends up getting whacked for doing something really stupid. Christopher Walken makes an unusually constipated appearance, while Al Pacino shows up at the end to deliver one of his patented late-career hameos.

The critical outrage over Gigli might be understandable in a vacuum, but in the context of the Affleck oeuvre, it’s a little puzzling. A cursory check of Rotten Tomatoes shows Gigli with a freshness rating of 7% on the Tomatometer, while Reindeer Games garnered 23% and Paycheck pleased 25% of the critics. Even Surviving Christmas edged out Gigli, with an 8% freshness rating. Clearly the outrage is misplaced here. Then again, Armond White called it “the only Hollywood movie of the summer with ideas,” so maybe it’s worse than I thought.

(NOTE: Today's installment of Unwatchable first appeared in slightly different form in this High Hat piece. Sorry if you already read it, but it's not like I was gonna watch Gigli again and come up with a whole new set of thoughts about it.)

Previously on Unwatchable:
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War

Unwatchable #88: “College Road Trip”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

No, this is not a rerun. Unwatchable is back from a brief (but oh so blissful) summer hiatus, and we’ll continue our march up the IMDb’s list of the 100 worst movies ever made next time with #76. But as you may dimly recall, I was forced to skip #88 initially because it had not yet been released on DVD at the time. It was a better world back then, a world in which College Road Trip was not available on video, and I miss it so. But we can’t go back. College Road Trip is now out on DVD, it will always be out on DVD, clogging landfills and supporting drinks on coffee tables, so let’s just get it over with.

If you like your Martin Lawrence movies G-rated – and who doesn’t? – you’re in for a real treat. Lawrence is James Porter, police chief and doting father, two roles he was born to embody I’m sure we all agree. His dream is to send his college-bound daughter Melanie (Raven-Symone) off to Northwestern, a mere 18 minutes from his doorstep, but she has eyes on Georgetown in far-off Washington DC. When two of Melanie’s friends invite her along on a COLLEGE ROAD TRIP, James objects but reluctantly volunteers to drive her himself. Tagging along for the ride are Melanie’s precocious brother Trey and his super-intelligent pet pig Arnold. My guess is that the pig was added to one of the later College Road Trip drafts at the suggestion of a Disney executive concerned about the lack of slapstick involving anthropomorphic animals in the original story. This may have happened before or after another executive suggested the inclusion of a musical interlude in which Raven-Symone performs a teen-pop version of “Double Dutch Bus” on a bus full of Japanese tourists. It is believed that a third executive – the one who insisted that Donny Osmond be cast as the overly cheerful father of another prospective student – is now selling pencils on the Third Street Promenade.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss College Road Trip as a mere collection of mind-numbing pratfalls (including a hee-larious scene in which Lawrence parachutes onto a golf course and knocks fat Vito from The Sopranos into a water hazard). It’s also a collection of saccharine life lessons! Fathers, it’s not a good idea to sneak into the sorority house where your daughter is staying and hide under her bed. In fact, it’s a good way to get tazed. And young ladies, if your dad hides under your bed, that just means he loves you. But not in a creepy way. Really.

Previously on Unwatchable:

77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead
79. Anus Magillicutty
80. The Smokers
81. Soccer Dog: The Movie

Morning Deal Report: “The Godfather” – Now With Pimps!

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while since the work of hard-boiled crime writer Jim Thompson was adapted for the screen (since 1997, to be precise, which is when This World, Then the Fireworks debuted), but producer Charlie Loventhal is giving it a shot. He’ll bring a feature based on Thompson’s 1953 novel Recoil to the screen, Variety reports. “Story follows a young inmate who's sprung from prison, only to be set up for murder by the same corrupt political insiders who sponsored his parole.” Ralph Pezzullo, who recently scripted an adaptation of his nonfiction book Jawbreaker (co-written with Gary Berntsen) for Oliver Stone, will write the screenplay.

The Hughes brothers are pimpin’ again. Per the Hollywood Reporter, Albert and Allen Hughes, directors of the 1999 documentary American Pimp, have signed with HBO to develop a series called Gentlemen of Leisure. The show “will explore the generational conflict of old-school pimps living by honor codes and creeds who are being pushed aside by violent upstarts who are coming ‘with their guns blazing,’ mixing prostitution with drugs and thievery,” says Allen Hughes, who adds: “These are some of the themes from The Godfather but in the world of pimping.” Guys, it’s HBO. You meant to say, “It’s like The Sopranos – but with pimps!” They need all the help they can get these days.

And finally, here are five words I’d never hoped to see in this order: “Erotic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher.” The movie is Spread, which “tells the story of a womanizing conman who meets his match when he crossing the path of a female hustler,” says Variety.

Related:

No, But I've Read the Movie: The Killer Inside Me
Forgotten Films: This World, Then the Fireworks

Morning Deal Report: Time Traveling with Spike Lee

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In re-launching the Morning Deal Report, we promised you all the latest news on comic book and videogame adaptations, but here’s one we didn’t see coming: According to the Hollywood Reporter, J.J. Abrams will soon be bringing a New York Times feature to the big screen. The article, entitled “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” concerns “an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that the occupants had redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.” The $8.5 million residence houses “an elaborately clever ‘scavenger hunt’ built into the apartment that involved dozens of historical figures, a fictional book and a soundtrack.” It’s nice to have more money than you know what to do with, or so I’m told.

Variety reports that Spike Lee will take a break from feuding with Clint Eastwood long enough to direct The Time Traveler, adapted from “a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics.” The book contains “the technical specs for what Mallett envisions as a workable time machine. Developing a time machine became an obsession for Mallett from the age of 10 after his father's death. His goal was to travel back in time to save his father.” Spike Lee’s goal is travel back in time to prevent himself from making She Hate Me.

Finally, those who are still experiencing Sopranos withdrawal a year later can take a break from those elaborate last episode theories with Son of Mourning, a “satirical indie comedy” that will co-star Lorraine “Dr. Melfi” Bracco and Jamie-Lynn “Meadow” Sigler. Per the Hollywood Reporter, “Bracco and Sigler will play the mother and love interest, respectively, of a disaffected ad copywriter (Joseph Cross). When he returns home to deal with his parents' divorce, the locals mistake him for a spiritual savior who will deliver them from the world's climate crisis.”

Take Five: HBO

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Sex and the City: The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life. There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good. One thing is for sure: it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming. They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (the Tales from the Crypt spin-off Bordello of Blood). If the long-rumored Deadwood movie ever gets made, or if the Sopranos movie doesn't turn out to be a disappointment, this may change things, but in the meantime, HBO's television shows have yet to produce a movie worth watching. Less known, however, is that HBO has a production arm that has put out a number of worthwhile films, many of which had theatrical releases prior to their run on the pay cable network; some of them, in fact, were released exclusively for theatrical release through HBO Films or their sister company, Picturehouse FIlms. With their overseeing company, New Line Cinema, dead, the future of HBO Films is uncertain, but given the quality of their past releases, they're sure to find a new home somewhere with parent company Time/Warner. Here's five fine films that were released under the HBO Film distribution banner.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original. The comparison is by no means coincidental: legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life. If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

ELEPHANT (2003)

The first of a series of collaborations between HBO Films and director Gus Van Sant, Elephant is the best of the lot -- and may in fact be one of the finest films of the decade. Inspired by the horrific mass murder at Columbine High School, the fragmented, almost dreamlike story of a pair of alienated high school students who go on a shooting rampage is a meditation on violence unlike any other in recent cinematic history. Elephant is a quiet, open, almost meditative film, breaking off to follow one character after another in order to present the day of the shooting as resolutely normal; but its greatest trick is to constantly dangle in front of us tantalizing 'clues' to the motivation of the killers, only to have every one of them lead to an unproductive, uncomfortable dead end. After the final bloodbath, we have an almost tangible need to know the whys and wherefores of the senseless killing, but the movie is wise enough to deny us an easy solution to an impossibly difficult question, and is brave enough to believe in its director's vision and leave us hanging without a quick fi or an easy scapegoat.

DEATH IN GAZA (2004)

One of the least partisan -- and most tragically unbearable -- documentaries about the Israeli-Palestine conflict was the 2004 film Death in Gaza, which concentrated largely on the impact the war had on children in the area. Focusing on a quartet of Palestinian kids, all in their early teens or younger, who take up arms against their occupiers, Death in Gaza neither exculpates the bad behavior of the kids (their anti-Semitism is extremely uncomfortable, especially from children so young) or glosses over why they might be so driven to militancy and violence (we are constantly exposed to the insufferable living conditions into which they are born and raised, and every one of them has a jaw-dropping horror story about the death of a friend or relative). What makes the move especially harrowing is that its 34-year-old British director, James Miller, was himself killed by the Israeli Defense Forces while filming in Gaza at night, a typically stupid, futile, and enraging event that is captured on film and shown matter-of-factly during the course of the documentary. Powerful and sad.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (2004)

Joshua Marston's feature about a young Colombian teenager who becomes a drug mule in order to raise money for her impoverished family is filmed in such an effective, simple neorealist style -- and manages to so effectively encapsulate one of the most degrading yet banal aspects of the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism -- that it's hard to avoid comparisons to De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. And while it's not even remotely in that film's league, it's still very much a movie worth watching, updating De Sica's themes for a post-socialist age, and it does at least have one advantage over its spiritual forebear: the presense of the heartbreaking, compelling, fascinating lead actress, Catalino Sandino Moreno. The then-17-year-old Moreno turns in one of the most watchable yet tragic performances in recent memory as a headstrong, intelligent girl who has nonetheless begun to move in circles who will shape her into something she cannot control; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off her from the beginning of the movie to the end.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)

The Notorious Bettie Page, a serviceable if never stunning biography of the legendary 1950s pin-up queen, was brought to us by the writer/director team of Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron. The duo also was responsible for the highly problematic American Psycho, and Harron also directed the truly discomfiting I Shot Andy Warhol. While its problems are different (a lack of depth and a somewhat flat visual style, neither of which were the difficulties with Harron's other movies), it does reflect the curate's egg nature of all three films. Clearly, it wasn't a movie made to do nothing more than titillate, but by the same token, we walk out of the theater knowing precious little more about the notorious Bettie Page than we did when we came in. That said, it shares with the other films a great deal of energy and feeling, and is supported by the sort of tremendous central performance Harron seems to coax so easily out of her stars -- Gretchen Mol is easily the equal of Christian Bale or Lili Taylor, and it's her charm and control in the role that makes this a movie worth watching.

"Sopranos" Creator Cuts to the Chase

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Over the years, whenever one of the long lulls between seasons of The Sopranos would finally draw to a close, creator David Chase would emerge from the back room of the Bada Bing and entertain a few questions about the upcoming episodes. After jotting down a few of his substance-free replies, one enterprising reporter or another would ask whether or not this was the end of The Sopranos, for real this time. At which point Chase would make it perfectly clear that what he really wanted to do was direct. Direct movies.

This comment was usually accompanied by some remarks about the base nature of the television medium, how impossible it was to do good work in it, and how movies were really where it was at. Remarks which left us fans of the series dumbfounded. Had Chase no inkling that The Sopranos was head and shoulders above 99% of what was released to theaters while it was on the air? Did he truly think there were more than five people on the planet who had more creative freedom than he enjoyed in his years with HBO? Did he never hear the phrase - on his own television show, even - "Be careful what you wish for"?

Well, now Chase is getting what he wished for. Reuters reports that Chase has signed to write, direct and produce his first feature film for Paramount Pictures. In line with his usual forthcoming manner, a spokesman describes the project as "an original drama." And cutting any speculation off at the pass, it will not be a big-screen version of The Sopranos.

So now we'll see if Chase is able to go about his business with no outside interference and if the world of movies is really more fulfilling than his years with the Jersey mob. One hopeful sign: Paramount Pictures is run by Brad Grey, the longtime Sopranos producer. "David is one of the great storytellers of our time, and his debut as a filmmaker is both highly anticipated and long overdue," says Grey. I agree. But if Chase eventually decides to return to television, it wouldn't be any crime.

Batman: The Lost Years

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

You kids today, with your sequels and remakes and instantaneous re-boots, you’re spoiled! Between The Dark Knight and Gotham Knight and umpteen animated Bat-shows on the tube, you’re up to your pointy ears in Batman. It wasn’t like this back in my day, let me tell you. Growing up as a Batman fan in the 70s and early 80s, I would have killed for just one Batman movie, any Batman movie, even one directed by Joel Schumacher. But between the end of the ABC television series in 1968 and the first Tim Burton movie in 1989, there was a long Bat-drought, broken up only by the occasional rumor and ill-conceived attempt at resurrection.

As far as the comic books were concerned, mind you, we had it pretty good. My childhood coincided with two of the most acclaimed eras of the Dark Knight’s career. The Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams reign of the ’70s is rightly credited with restoring some mystery and moodiness to the character after several decades worth of goofy gimmickry. Those issues weren’t “dark” in the Frank Miller psycho-Batman sense – they were still kid-friendly, but just gritty and grimy enough to open the doorway to the adult world a crack for a young reader like myself. In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am practically grinding the 1973 issue “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” into dust with repeated re-readings. (There are rumors that The Dark Knight draws heavily on that particular story.) Later that decade, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers collaborated on a brief but memorable run of Detective Comics; their noirish, atmospheric take on Batman was later collected in the trade paperback Strange Apparitions.

Those of us who wanted to see our hero come to life on the screen, however, were basically shit out of luck. There was the occasional rerun of the ’60s TV series, which was fun for a kid with no conception of the word “campy,” and there was a Saturday morning cartoon, but that was about it until an ad for an NBC show called Legends of the Superheroes appeared in the TV Guide one week in 1979. This seemed to come out of nowhere, and I couldn’t have been more excited; not only did it promise live-action Batman and Robin, but a bunch of my other Justice League favorites like the Flash and Green Lantern, as well as a passel of great supervillains. Then the thing actually aired and my heart sank. There were two episodes total, a “Challenge” and an Ed McMahon-hosted superhero roast, both shot on videotape and featuring a laugh track. This was not what I’d had in mind:

These things made the Star Wars Holiday Special look like The Sopranos by comparison, and were quickly, mercifully forgotten. Not long afterward, however, rumors began to surface of an impending big-screen version of Batman. Back then we didn’t have the Ain’t-It-Cools and Dark Horizons tracking every blip and fart out of Hollywood; no, we were reliant mainly on Starlog magazine to keep us abreast of such happenings. In 1980, a small blurb indicated that a Batman movie would be in theaters by Christmas of 1981, with rights-holder Michael Uslan announcing, “This film will be done straight.” An update in October 1981 indicated that the original timeline may have been a little ambitious. Despite continued claims by the producers that the movie would be truer to the dark origins of the character, Adam West was now angling to reprise the role. When asked if he would be willing to take on a smaller role – say, that of Bruce Wayne’s father – the man who was then starring in the likes of The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood huffed, “If the character was important enough and handled well…I might consider it.” Even then, this made me laugh. Nonetheless, a whole “Put the Man Back in Batman” movement was launched, dedicated to restoring West to his rightful place under the cowl. There were ads, petitions and even a song, which fell on deaf ears.

A 1983 profile of Tom Mankiewicz revealed that longtime James Bond screenwriter was working on a script then titled The Batman. “We’re trying to return to the original concept – Batman as a dark avenger of the night,” said Mankiewicz. “The villains, while being outrageous, will be very cruel people.” While he wanted an unknown in the title role, his wish list for the supporting cast included Peter O’Toole as The Penguin, David Niven as Alfred, and…Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Of course, only the latter came to pass, and by the time it did I was past my Bat-prime. But it’s still possible to get a glimpse of the movie that might have been; the Mankiewicz script can be found here.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Texasville (1990, Peter Bogdanovich)

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There's a general rule of thumb that any sequel worth making is generally made within four or five years of the original film. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule, but they're few and far between. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, anyone? It's best for sequel makers to strike while the iron is hot, not merely from a business point of view, but also to build on the goodwill of the original. Yet the cinematic landscape is littered with sequels that arrived well past their franchise's expiration date. For every Before Sunset, there's a dozen Oliver's Storys, standing on the dusty highway of cinema history, angrily shaking a tire iron at the pop-culture bus as it passes them by.

1990 brought us three notable examples of this phenomenon, all follow-ups to canonical classics of 1970s Hollywood cinema. The most famous of the bunch was, of course, The Godfather, Part III, an admittedly unnecessary film that's still mostly better than its rep. Then there's The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel to Chinatown that's a mess but boasts a fine Harvey Keitel performance. The worst of the lot is easily Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville.

Some of you might not remember this, but Peter Bogdanovich was once known primarily as a fine filmmaker, rather than for playing Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos or as the boring dude who keeps turning up on DVD commentaries. But in his salad days as a filmmaker, he made a number of excellent films, with his 1971 film The Last Picture Show enduring as a honest-to-goodness masterpiece. But after his career cooled off — a cooling due in no small part to 1975's disastrous At Long Last Love — Bogdanovich had much more trouble getting films made, so he finally decided to make a Last Picture Show sequel, adapting the second Anarene novel by Larry McMurtry and reuniting the lion's share of the original cast.

Some sequels exist to build on and deepen the story of the originals, while others are more about catching up with characters we've gotten to know and love some years down the line. In theory, Texasville should fall into the latter category, but this can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially in a setting like Anarene where everyone knows each other and not a whole lot changes over the years. So instead of exploring how many of these old relationships have played out since the last film, Bogdanovich tightens his focus to Duane Jackson (played in both films by Jeff Bridges), the former football captain who now primarily exists to be picked on by his wife, children, and life in general.

Part of the problem with Texasville, and a major reason why it can't even come within spitting distance of The Last Picture Show, is because Bogdanovich is no longer the young tyro he was in the seventies. That's apparent from the film's opening shot, where we see the Texas landscape in lifelike color, whereas Last Picture Show was in beautiful black and white. But the new color scheme is the least of Texasville's issues. The original film was a realistic fifties-era slice of life about a town so small that there was little to do but go to the movies and fool around as each day brought you a little closer to death. It was a world so desolate that the movie theatre ended up closing.

Texasville is also founded upon the same conception of the town, but it's hard to reconcile the two worlds. The original film's roads and houses were almost always empty, but the more modern version of Anarene is a flurry of activity. Yes, the characters still screw around, but it's played almost as a joke rather than the sad reality we saw in the original film. It's as though Bogdanovich no longer had the nerve to play the story as tragedy anymore, so he settled instead on farce.

Making Duane the central character in the film was probably a mistake as well, although I suppose it's as much McMurtry's fault as anyone's. But regardless of who's to blame, Duane wasn't a character we especially cared about in The Last Picture Show, and while Bridges is a fine actor, even he can't distract us from the fact that we're too busy wondering what happened to the more interesting folks. Honestly, did McMurtry and Bogdanovich really think audiences had waited nineteen years to find out what would happen if Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) came back into his life? Or that he now has a son who can't keep it in his pants, just like his daddy was back in high school?

Texasville is almost perverse in the way it avoids rekindling the old feelings that were originally summoned up by The Last Picture Show. Consider the original film's protagonist Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who's now relegated to a supporting part in the story. Aside from the dearly departed Sam the Lion (played in the original by Ben Johnson), the heart of The Last Picture Show was Sonny's relationship with Ruth Popper, played in both films by Cloris Leachman.

Yet Texasville gives the two almost no screen time together. The film practically forgets Sonny altogether at several points, returning to him every so often to show him getting steadily crazier, as when he visits the abandoned (after thirty years!) Royal Theatre to "watch movies in the sky.” Even when Sonny moves in with Ruth after a nervous breakdown, we never see them together as we did in the first film. Does Bogdanovich even care? Surely he could have found some tender moments between Sonny and Ruth had he not devoted so much time to, say, an awful scene in which Sonny's troublemaking twins spearhead a mass egging of the town's centennial festivities.

While Texasville isn't the all-time worst sequel to a great film, it may be the most disheartening. To see Bogdanovich so colossally misjudge what made The Last Picture Show so great makes me wonder whether he ever knew in the first place. In a way, the fate of the Royal Theatre sums up the difference between these two movies. In the original film, it played a central role in the town, and brought joy and goodwill into the lives of its residents. In Texasville, it's a ruin, an eyesore, a pale shadow of what it once was, and you pretty much have to be crazy to go there.

Screen Actors' Guild Awards

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The fourteenth annual Screen Actors Guild Awards were handed out Sunday night, in a brisk televised program that the striking Screen Writers' Guild gave its blessing to. This year's awards got perhaps a bit more attention than usual in this season, when the writers' strike turned the Golden Globes into a glorified press conference and threatens to do we know not what to the Academy Awards show. Dignified yet friendly, the evening struck a nice balance between this year's gutted-out version of the Golden Globes and the bedazzled vulgarity of the traditional Oscar blow-out, which helped to compensate for the fact that the list of chosen winners didn't have a lot of surprises. Among the movie nominees, There Will Be Blood's Daniel Day-Lewis took the Best Actor prize, which he dedicated to the late Heath Ledger. Julie Christie (Away from Her won for Best Actress, while awards for Best Supporting performance went to Javier Bardem (for No Country for Old Men) and Ruby Dee (for American Gangster). The SAG Awards also set aside awards for Best Cast Ensemble and Best Stunt Ensemble: these went to the fine actors who appeared together in No Country for Old Men and those motherfucking lunatics who risked life and limb while giving the finger to gravity itself in The Bourne Ultimatum, respectively. In the television category, the most notable awards were those slathered on the cast of The Sopranos, in its last year: the show won for Best Actor (James Gandalfini), Best Actress (Edie Falco), and Best Dramatic Cast Ensemble. The cast of The Office won for Best Cast in a comedy, but the awards for Best Actor and Actress in a comedy went to Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey, both of 30 Rock. Fey got off perhaps the most gracious one-liner of the evening when she credited Baldwin with her win, saying that if you spend enough time watching "Fred Astaire dance with a hatrack; after a while, you’re, like, ‘That hatrack is pretty good too.’ ”