The Screengrab : titanic

Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Nowadays, it seems like Hollywood blockbusters are more or less pre-ordained. With budgets routinely crossing the $100 million mark and marketing costs often running into the tens of millions, studios leave very little to chance. By the time movies actually hit multiplexes, the Hollywood hype machine has done its job, and audiences have little choice but to do as they’re told, lining up for movies on opening weekend before moving along to the next big thing. However, occasionally a movie will break free of this usual pattern by striking a chord with audiences. For example, Titanic transcended normal blockbuster status to become a must-see movie, ruling the box office for several months on its way to raking in the highest domestic gross in history. But the following summer brought a word-of-mouth hit that, while it didn’t make Titanic money, completely shattered box-office expectations. The movie was There’s Something About Mary.

Most Hollywood pundits weren’t expecting a whole lot from There’s Something About Mary. In a summer filled with big stars and big budgets, it was a broad comedy with no A-list draws. Leading lady Cameron Diaz made a splash with her debut opposite comedy king Jim Carrey in The Mask, but since then she’d appeared mostly in independent fare, with her only other hit being 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which she played a supporting role. Likewise, her costars Matt Dillon and Ben Stiller were hardly major draws- Dillon was seen by many as an aging 80s teen idol who had since entered his character-actor phase, while Stiller was still more of a cult figure than a mainstream star. And while directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly had previously made the popular Dumb & Dumber, its success had been largely attributed to the presence of Carrey in the lead.

Following a series of enormously successful test screenings, the executives at Fox began to realize that they had something big on their hands, if only they played their cards right. Rather than sticking to the usual marketing tactics, they decided to let the movie sell itself, booking an unusually large number of preview screenings across the country, in the hope that the advance word of mouth would boost the film’s box office performance. The gamble paid off, although not right away- Mary was released in mid-July, between the summer’s biggest juggernauts, Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan. But while these movies dominated their first few weekends, Mary opened fairly strongly and maintained this strength as its competitors began to lose steam. Finally, in its eighth weekend of release, There’s Something About Mary topped the box-office charts- a phenomenon that was almost unprecedented.

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why audiences responded strongly to There’s Something About Mary. In the early nineties, many people started to tire of tepid PG-13 comedies, and hard-R laffers geared to adult audiences began to grow in popularity, in the process making stars out of people like Carrey and Adam Sandler. With Mary, the Farrellys tackled subject matter (and bodily functions) that had previously been taboo in big-budget comedies, and much of the film’s buzz centered around its sheer outrageousness. But there was more to Mary than dirty jokes. Most of the scatological comedies being made at the time were buddy movies, in which the female characters were mostly there for decorative purposes.

By contrast, Mary was at its heart a love story about a woman (Diaz) who attracts all the wrong men, and the mishap-prone guy (Stiller) who is her one perfect match. By breaking away from the usual formula for the genre, the Farellys were able to attract female viewers as well as male, making it the year’s mostly unlikely date movie. And in addition to the jokes themselves, the movie offered Diaz as a kind of dream girlfriend for the men in the audience- beautiful, yes, but also able to drink beer, hit golf balls, and talk about sports as well as any guy. Understandably, Diaz made the leap to A-list status on the basis of her Mary performance, and Stiller quickly became a hot commodity as well.

A decade later, it’s the romance that remains the most successful aspect of the movie, keeping the plot grounded even at its most outrageous. Diaz hasn’t been this appealing before or since, in part because the Farrellys understood her appeal. Many filmmakers have cast Diaz in daffy roles or as the sexpot, but her beauty isn’t so much sultry as baby-doll cute. Stiller makes a good match for Diaz- he’s good-looking enough that the relationship doesn’t seem too far fetched, but looks enough like an every-guy that the outcome of the story is hardly a foregone conclusion. And it says a lot about the Farrellys’ worldview that out of all the (mostly very strange) men who pine for Mary, the one we’re meant to root for is the one who is able to see her as a friend instead of an idealized lust object. When a man can have an extended conversation with a woman about the possibility of “meat in a cone,” the two of them must get along pretty well.

On the other hand, the wackier stuff hasn’t dated nearly so well. At the time of the film’s release, much of the buzz centered around such scenes as Stiller’s zipper mishap and the infamous “hair gel” gag, but now that the shock is worn off they come off not so much funny as desperate. There’s a certain comedic logic to the zipper scene, as one person after another crowds into Mary’s powder room to survey the damage (a nod to the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera), but the scene’s “money shot” is nothing but an oh-no-they-didn’t sight gag. And the hair gel bit just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either narratively or physically.

Likewise, the rogue’s gallery of crazy supporting characters wears thin pretty quickly. Matt Dillon’s performance as the untrustworthy shamus Pat Healy is growing on me, mostly because his performance acknowledges the disconnect between the hard-boiled sleazy detective Healy imagines himself to be and the manic loser he actually is. And when he’s trying to play smooth he’s a scream, especially during his priceless “retards” speech. But Chris Elliott is downright creepy as Stiller’s friend with a secret, and Lee Evans’ performance isn’t nearly as funny as the Farrellys think it is. When the camera lingers on his attempts to navigate a pair of crutches, it’s kind of pathetic, and once we find out the truth about Evans’ character, he futzes with an American accent so unconvincing that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

In the past decade or so, There’s Something About Mary has failed to live up to the “funniest movie ever” hype that once surrounded it. Yet considered in light of the Farrelly brothers’ more recent films, it may be more interesting now than it ever was. After Mary, the Farrellys were Hollywood’s reigning kings of lowbrow humor, but after their disappointing follow-up Me, Myself & Irene, their subsequent projects have grown less reliant on sight gags, generally favoring a more gentle, character-based kind of comedy. So far, these opposing comedic impulses achieved their most ideal balance in the brothers’ most personal film (and in my opinion, their best), 2003’s Stuck on You, but this shift was already evident in Mary, even if we didn’t know it yet. There’s Something About Mary may not be as uproariously funny as it was, but it’s a key film in the careers of its makers, and one without whose success their subsequent works may not have been possible.

The Letdowns: Ghostbusters II (1989)

Nick Schager — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

It says something about Ghostbusters’ enduring popularity that, twenty-five years after its proton pack-wielding foursome first rid Manhattan of evil specters, news of a forthcoming video game and potential third cinematic installment – both of which plan to bring back most of the original cast – elicits near-breathless excitement. And yet the franchise’s twenty-year idleness since Ghostbusters II also speaks volumes about that 1989 sequel, which effectively slimed everyone’s fond memories of the original. Reuniting Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis and Annie Potts for another supernatural go-round, Ivan Reitman’s follow-up (co-written, as before, by Ramis and Aykroyd) seemed to have all the requisite pieces in place for another blockbuster, including a bigger budget that afforded all manner of special effects. Yet nearly two decades after it first disappointed fans, the film remains a lumpy mishmash of regurgitated elements and creatures, carelessly tossed-off one-liners and wannabe catchphrases (“Two in the box, ready to go, we be fast, and they be slow!”), and a plot made up of one good idea and many, many lousy ones.

Five years after they defeated Gozer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the Ghostbusters’ business has been disbanded by lawsuits and court orders, and Peter Venkman (Murray) has broken up with Dana (Weaver) – who, busy bee that she is, rebounded by getting married, having a baby boy named Oscar, and getting divorced. When Oscar’s baby carriage mysteriously speeds down the sidewalk and into traffic, she turns to her old friends, who discover that a river of slime is running beneath the city’s streets, and in the direction of the art museum where Dana works and an enormous, cartoonishly spooky painting of a 16th-century despot named Vigo resides. Ghostbusters II’s sole clever idea is to make the metropolis’ slime a manifestation of New Yorkers’ unpleasantness. It’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek mockery of the city’s notorious reputation that might have proved fruitful if the story wasn’t such a slapdash mess, lurching from a pitiful construction-worker bit (replete with Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis affecting overripe New Yawk accents), to a courtroom scene in which the goo goes nuclear once a judge screams that the Ghostbusters should “burn in hell,” to an FX-heavy finale that finds a way to make the appearance of the Titanic, a walking Statue of Liberty and the resurrected Vigo seem equally underwhelming.

Throughout, there’s the familiar-to-sequels impression that the filmmakers are merely trying to rehash what viewers liked about the first installment, including the Ghostbusters’ conflict with City Hall, a short, strange weirdo who gets possessed by the main villain (in this case, Peter MacNicol’s insufferable art restoration chief Janosz), and a cruddy, upfront soundtrack that desperately wants to make the same impact as its predecessor. This last issue is made even lamer by Reitman not only using Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own” at least three times during the film (including over the final credits), but actually providing the former New Edition singer with a cameo that, within the context of the action at hand, makes absolutely no sense. Then again, very little of Ghostbusters II seems guided by clear thinking, whether it’s the fact that – after getting clearance to resume business – the Ghostbusters’ uniforms feature the new spook-with-two-fingers logo (what, they know they’re in a sequel?), or the climactic shot of a painting that envisions the Ghostbusters as classical champions rather than the pitiable faded heroes this second saga turned them into.

Thursday Poll for New Year's Day 2009

Paul Clark — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The celebration of some obscure holiday caught me completely off guard a week ago, and so shocked was I by its sudden emergence that I completely forgot to run a Thursday poll. Because of this, I neglected to report that fully half of our readers, when given the choice between Kate Winslet’s Oscar-nominated performances, preferred her turn as the mood-haired Clementine in Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Somewhat less expected was the 25% showing for the second-place finisher, 2006’s Little Children, followed by her performances in Sense and Sensibility and Iris. Bringing up the rear was her starmaking role in a little sleeper hit called Titanic, which brought in no votes whatsoever. So that only leaves us with the question of whether she’ll finally take home an Oscar this year, either as Revolutionary Road’s disenchanted housewife or the “illiterate Nazi cougar” (thanks, Uncle Crizzle!) of The Reader.

Over the past week, the writers of The Screengrab have posted their lists of the best movies of 2008. Now it’s your turn. Which of the Screengrab’s top five favorites from the past year do you prefer?

Which is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

Feel free to post your lists of the best of 2008 in the comments section if you wish. See you next week!

Kate Winslet Allows Leo DiCaprio to Strangle Her until She Passes Out

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

We’re learning a lot about Kate Winslet as we get closer to the release of her two latest films, Revolutionary Road and The Reader. We already know she doesn’t use a stunt ass. Now Leonardo DiCaprio reveals a bit more of her process than she may have wanted us to know. “We're old friends and we know where we can go with each other,” DiCaprio is quoted as saying in The Guardian. “She will let me strangle her until she literally passes out in the scene.” I don’t remember the strangulation scene in Titanic, so presumably that’s something to look forward to in Revolutionary Road, which reunites the sinking ship co-stars for the first time.

“‘We were very interested to let it go and see where it went. I was like, “If you want to smash me up, OK, you want to smash me up”,’ said Winslet at a Q&A session which followed a screening of the film in Los Angeles at the weekend… In the middle of [filming a confrontation scene over breakfast] Leo and I became completely hysterical. We had to laugh or else we were going to cry.”

As for The Reader, it probably won’t come as much of a shock to learn that the oft-nude Winslet bares all again. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Winslet “refused to use a body double or lose weight for the scenes, wanting a completely realistic look for her character. Describing her own body, Kate admits to having aged, but maintains she is proud of her flawed physique, saying: ‘Here we go, I have a crumble baby belly, boobs are worse for wear after two kids... I'm doing all right. I'm 33. I don't look in the mirror and go, “Oh, I look fantastic!” Of course I don't.’” We at the Screengrab respectfully disagree.

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Wall Street Meltdown Boosts Dark Knight’s Oscar Hopes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Another unforeseen aspect of the financial crisis has been dubbed “The Oscar Recession” by former Radar magazine editor Willa Paskin. Writing for The Daily Beast, Paskin makes the case that the economic slowdown “is changing the dynamics of the Oscar race, and narrowing the Best Picture field. Since full-fledged Oscar campaigns can break the bank, some studios are pushing potential Academy Award into 2009, taking them out of the running. Paramount’s The Soloist, an uplifting tale of a schizo, homeless violinist, and Weinstein’s The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s soul-crushing apocalypse novel, have both been pushed back to next year.”

Paskin makes the somewhat more dubious claim that “an unusually high number of films are also being released late in the season, which means they may not have time to build the word-of-mouth momentum to clinch votes,” citing Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Gran Torino, among others. In fact, this happens every year: a certain number of Oscar contenders open very late in the year, often only in New York and LA (for qualification purposes), before slowly rolling out nationwide. (For example, 2004 Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby opened in limited release on December 15, 2004 and didn’t go into wide release until January 28, 2005.)

Nevertheless, Paskin has a point: The Dark Knight would seem to have a better shot at the top honors than anyone would have imagined before its release. Critical acclaim is part of the reason, but as with Wall Street, it’s the bottom line that counts. “The Dark Knight is exactly the kind of film that may help the Academy itself, which makes revenue off the Oscar telecast, weather the financial crisis. Ratings for the tinsel town extravaganza tend to correlate with the popularity of the films nominated. Last year 32 million Americans tuned in to see indie No Country for Old Men win in the least watched awards ceremony ever. In 1998, 55.3 million people watched all-time box office champ Titanic triumph in the most watched awards ceremony ever. Dark Knight, easily the highest grossing film of the year, could be a corrective to last year’s poor showing, hugely boosting the ratings.”

Related:
Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World
Suppose They Gave an Oscars and Nobody Came

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuaron)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since making his feature debut with 1991’s Solo con tu pareja, Alfonso Cuaron has become one of the world’s most acclaimed and distinctive filmmakers. That he has managed to do this is a credit not only to his talent but also his versatility. With a scant six features under his belt, he has managed to makes films both large and small, both light and dark, and in both English and Spanish. His breakthrough film A Little Princess is a lovely and underseen family film, and his instinctive feel for family-friendly entertainment helped him immeasurably on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, seen by many as the best big-screen Potter adventure to date. In between, he’s also managed to transcend the teenage sex film into transcendent cinema in Y Tu Mama Tambien, and crafted one of the most unique dystopian visions of the cinema in Children of Men.

But in the evaluation of Cuaron’s career to date, one film has gotten lost in the shuffle- 1998’s Great Expectations. A loose, lushly-mounted update of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, the film was released in 1998 in the dog days of February, in the wake of the Titanic juggernaut. Reviews were middling, and audience response was unenthusiastic. In the eyes of many Hollywood insiders, the project that should have been a stepping stone to Cuaron’s future as a big-name Hollywood filmmaker became a stumbling block that sent him tumbling back to Mexico to make his subsequent film. But while there’s no denying that the perception of Great Expectations didn’t help Cuaron’s career, the real question is here more simple- is the movie any good?

Having watched the film recently, I would maintain that it is, and certainly better than its reputation would suggest. That said, it’s hardly perfect. A number of critics took the film to task for being insufficiently faithful to Dickens, and certainly, Great Expectations didn’t benefit from being one of a rash of loose “re-imaginings” of classic novels that were in vogue during the mid- to late-nineties. But I found that the contemporary trappings suited the original story pretty well. More distracting was the way the screenplay, written by Mitch Glazer, pared down Dickens’ story to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Pip (now named Finn and played by Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow). In doing so, Glazer sketches over much of what makes the book really interesting, that story of a man who is carried along by destiny from one fascinating situation to another guided by two benefactors, one known to him (Miss Havisham), the other unseen. As a result, Great Expectations lacks much of the narrative interest that the novel had.

But if Cuaron’s film largely fails as Dickens, there’s plenty of other aspects to the film to enjoy. The majority of Dickens adaptations for film and television have emphasized the squalor and hardscrabble lifestyle of the period in which he wrote, but Cuaron’s style infuses the story with liberal amounts of magic realism, and the two are a surprisingly good fit. It helps that the film is set in two locations in the U.S. that are best suited for magic realism- the Gulf Coast of Florida (with its swamps and vegetation and distinctly Hispanic influence) and New York City. Look at the decaying manse of the film’s Miss Havisham character, here called Ms. Dinsmoor and played by Anne Bancroft. The home itself is based on the Alhambra in Spain, but everything is falling apart and overgrown, and the wedding party, still set out after three decades, is made all the more eerie by the Spanish moss that’s hanging from the trees. And the film’s version of New York is a city full of mysterious settings and endless possibilities, and Cuaron and regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make good use of the weather to reflect the tone of the film, with the sun shining warmly when Finn is content, and rain pouring or leaves falling when his emotional state has become tumultuous.

Likewise, the film is ideally cast to suit Cuaron’s style. At first glance, Ethan Hawke seems too lightweight to work in the lead role, and certainly to intone the wholly gratuitous narration. But consider that Dickens’ main characters usually tended to be observers through whom the reader could experience the adventures of the story, so in this way the casting makes perfect sense. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a perfectly fine Estella, pulling off both the coldness that results from her upbringing by Ms. Dinsmoor and the sadness that she’s ill-equipped to love Finn because of this. Anne Bancroft, always a marvelous ham, digs into the role of Ms. Dinsmoor with plenty of relish, and no small amount of wit (listen to her response when young Finn asks about her cat). Chris Cooper is affecting as Finn’s Uncle Joe, who for the boy only to be cast aside when Finn became a famous artist. And Robert DeNiro gives perhaps his last great performance in the small role of the prisoner Joe (Magwitch in the book), successfully playing the frightening prisoner early on, only to turn up again years later as a shadowy, eccentric figure in the hero’s life.

On balance, Great Expectations is fairly flawed but ultimately a worthwhile film. As narrative, it’s sometimes less than compelling, and it certainly isn’t successful as an adaptation. But it’s so visually enchanting and full of vivid supporting characters that it hardly matters. The film’s failings are those of the script and of the studio who tried to make the film more palatable to mainstream sensibilities (which explains the narration), while the stuff that works is almost entirely Cuaron’s. Despite its reputation, Great Expectations is an interesting entry on Cuaron’s filmography, and one that bears a second look in light of his more recent work. I suspect time will be kind to it.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. LAUREN BACALL (1924 - )

How cool is Lauren Bacall? Cool enough that she tamed Humphrey Bogart, the greatest leading man of all time. Originally making her name as a teenage fashion model, Bacall’s slender frame and fiery eyes caught the attention of Howard Hawks, who changed her name, fixed her hair, and likely would have driven her career straight into the ground if he hadn’t arranged to cast her in The Big Sleep opposite the man she called “Mr. Bogart”. Bacall wasn’t even the best actress in the movie – according to both Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner, Martha Vickers, cast as her sister, acted rings around her to the degree that her scenes were cut so as not to make Bacall look bad. But she was good enough: her chemistry with Bogey was electrifying, her patented chin-down, eyes-up look was enchanting, and her clever patter, delivered in a sultry, husky voice combining East Coast class with East Side brass, could be felt in the hip pockets of every man in hearing distance. America demanded more of her, and she went on to prove that while she wasn’t the greatest actress of her day, she was at least game for anything, and surprisingly adept with light comedy as well as her trademark dangerous-dame roles. Now a ripe old 84 years old, Bacall is the very image of the classy old Hollywood dame, occasionally taking acting work (with Lars von Trier, even!), but mostly content to be one of Tinseltown’s great raconteurs – a fearless liberal, a hilarious storyteller, and a priceless link to the Golden Era.

14. ANNA KARINA (1940 - )

When she was young, she was the face of the French New Wave. And she was (and is) utterly beautiful, but she has always looked younger than her years. So she has the face of a little girl in those early films, but the words that she speaks -- and the way that she speaks them -- are those of an older, wiser person. Her first film appearance was in a film by the Situationist philosopher Guy Dubord. She has worked with Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette, Fassbinder, Visconti, and, of course, Godard, to whom she was married during his greatest period of creativity. Wow.

13. MYRNA LOY (1905-1993)

With her pert features and her way with a tart comeback, Loy was peerless in her day at the delicate art of making sanity look sexy, which is always a cause worth fighting for. Much of what needs to be said about her career got said last week in our entry on William Powell in our Leading Men list: they did, after all, co-star in fourteen films. It was the double impact of Manhattan Melodrama, in which she left Clark Gable (with Gable's enthusiastic consent) for Powell, and their first Thin Man movie that, as she was wont to put it, made her an overnight success after more than eighty films. Her earlier jobs had included uncredited bit parts in The Jazz Singer and the 1925 silent Ben-Hur, as well as punching the clock as the sexy-evil-zombie daughter of the Yellow Peril supervillain embodied by Boris Karloff in the camp classic The Mask of Fu Manchu. She also served her country as Fredric March's wife in The Best Years of Our Lives, making a pretty good case for going off to war so long as you had her to come back to. Her last movie roles included 1978's The End (where the director-star, Burt Reynolds, made a bid for being considered a man of taste by casting her as his mother), and the underappreciated Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), as Alan King's unflappable assistant. In 1973, she made her Broadway debut in a production of Clare Booth Luce's The Women, which was reportedly a failure, but which absolutely has to have been better than the recent movie version.

12. GRETA GARBO (1905-1990)

Garbo began her career in silent pictures in her native Sweden and in Germany. It was after seeing one of these, Gosta Berlings Saga, that Louis B. Mayer decreed that she and the film's director be brought to America and installed at MGM. It didn't take him long to decide that the director could go back home after all, but Garbo stuck around, entrancing the crowds who piled into theaters to watch her co-starring roles with her offscreen lover John Gilbert through the clouds of steam that the two of them seemed to give off together. When Garbo made her first sound picture, Anna Christie (1930), MGM famously promoted it with the line, "Garbo Talks!"; years later, when she made the comedy Ninotchka (a calculated, and successful, attempt to lighten what had come to seem an oppressively heavy image), they used the line, "Garbo Laughs!" Pauline Kael once asked why, when she gave what is generally remembered as her finest performance in the 1936 Camille, they didn't think to use the line, "Garbo Acts!" Garbo was a superb actress, but the real historic impact of her career is the degree to which she established that there are some faces so beloved by the camera that their bearers can do no wrong in its all-seeing eye. Although most of her vehicles (Camille included) are kind of stodgy and crude and cheesy at the edges, they hold up to the extent that you cannot take your eyes off that woman. Garbo retired from the screen after 1941, reportedly due to a feeling that her moment had passed and in rebellion against MGM's desire to change her image and maker her seem like more of an accessible, regular gal. (The mind reels, the blood curdles, at the thought of how they might have tried going about this.) The only known time since then that she willingly stepped in front of a camera came in 1949, when she was 43, and agreed to do a screen test for a picture that she was considering coming out of retirement for but that subsequently fell through. To judge from that footage, seen above, whatever her reasons for not returning to movies, it couldn't have been that she'd lost her ability to make the camera go weak in the knees.

11. KATE WINSLET (1975 - )

The story of modern Hollywood is largely one of actresses who start out doing interesting, challenging roles until some big studio takes notice and rewards them for their hard work by putting them in blockbuster movies that make them rich – and utterly boring. Though she’s made some bad choices in her career (let’s not even talk about The Life of David Gale), former sandwich shop employee Kate Winslet, after becoming one of the biggest stars in the world by virtue of appearing as the female lead in Titanic, has steadfastly refused to settle into the role of a reliable, rich and uninteresting box office draw. Her pre-Titanic career was launched with an eerie, unforgettable performance in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, which she followed up with adventurous roles in classical adaptations like Jude and Hamlet; but shockingly, it was after appearing in the highest-grossing film of all time that her career really got interesting. Since that time, she’s become known for her unconventional beauty (having had many pointed things to say about Hollywood’s insistence that its leading ladies stay rail-thin) and her willingness to portray women who are sexually adventurous, unflatteringly neurotic, and possessed of unexpected and sometimes alarming depths. Outside of a few bill-paying blockbusters – likely the result of knowing she’ll never luck into another Titanic – she’s chosen a rare path, appearing in movies like Hideous Kinky, Quills, Iris, and Finding Neverland. She’s even put an unforgettable twist on romantic comedy with her role as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. When you’re the star of the biggest movie in history, maybe you can afford to take those kinds of risks; if so, we’re glad it was Kate Winslet who got the chance.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Trailer Review: Revolutionary Road

Paul Clark — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Once again, Sam Mendes turns to suburban ennui, which previously won him Oscar gold in American Beauty. But while that film had plenty of sassy (some would say snarky) humor courtesy of screenwriter Alan Ball, Revolutionary Road is pretty sober stuff. Of course, the production values look pretty impeccable here- with Roger Deakins behind the camera it’d almost have to be a great-looking movie. And given the movie’s pedigree, the filmmakers clearly have Oscar in their sights again. Who knows- this buzz could very well be warranted. But I worry that the “Leo and Kate reunited” angle perpetuated by the Hollywood hype machine could overwhelm anything else about the movie. Sure, it might put a few more asses in the seats, but in the long term I’m not sure it does the movie any good, especially when it’s quite likely that the original Titanic audience simply hasn’t grown up like its stars have.

Thursday Morning Poll for July 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It took almost three months, but it’s finally happened- it’s a tie! When polled about their favorite of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 5 Movies of the last 25 years, Screengrab voters overwhelmingly chose the critics’ favorites over the crowd-pleasers. After a tight race, it was Blue Velvet (my pick) and Pulp Fiction in a dead heat, garnering between them all but two of the votes, which were claimed by the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Even with the release of WALL*E, it appears that Pixar’s inaugural feature Toy Story couldn’t get any love, and the Titanic reassessment is just going to have to wait until next year’s release of Jim Cameron’s Avatar.

Just in time for the holiday weekend, we’re getting’ jiggy with Mr. July 4th himself, Will Smith. After years of non-Independence Day releases, Smith returns to the weekend that made him a superstar to reclaim his throne. To commemorate the occasion, we’re polling you- our loyal readers- for your favorite of his movies released on the weekend of or preceding July 4, which rules out such later-July releases as I, Robot and Bad Boys II. Sorry, Nick Frost.

As always, the comments section is open for you to sound off on your thoughts. I’m especially curious to hear from anyone who would defend Wild Wild West because, I mean, come on.

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Great Legos: Built Like a Brickfilm

Phil Nugent — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Julian Dibbell meets some of the more prominent members of the brickfilm community, a bunch of dedicated types who make short, handmade animated films using stop-motion and Legos. The Lego Indiana Jones short has become a genre unto itself, along with Legis variations on the likes of Fight Club, Titanic, and assorted music videos. Now, ambitious brickfilmers (whose work can be sifted through at YouTube or freely sampled here have begun turning out insanely assured originals such as Nathan Wells's Unsound or Night of the Tater, by seventeen-year-old Nikolas Jaeger. As Dibbell delicately puts it, "Lego does have its limitations as an expressive medium," but what Wells and Jaeger are demonstrating is that making brickfilms may be a way for talented budding directors to experiment with lighting and editing in a narrative form without a lot of money or the disadvantage of live actors who may object to hanging around your bedroom all day and night waiting for you to have your next brainstorm. "Spend enough time browsing the Brickfilms.com directory, though, and you're likely to end up seeing them a little less like an outsider, and a little more like a brickfilmer," writes Dibbell. "It's not that you stop seeing them like little plastic toys. Not quite. It's that you see them as little plastic toys with lives of their own."

And the ReOscar Goes to…Peter Fonda?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While we’ve been busy with our spreadsheets and slide rules, trying to figure who the big winners will be come Sunday night, Time’s Richard Corliss is just getting around to giving his picks for the 1998 Oscars. No, Corliss hasn’t slipped through some sort of wormhole in the space-time continuum. Instead he’s presenting Time’s First Annual Re-Oscars.

The premise is that the Academy may have occasionally made a mistake or two over the years, a controversial notion we’re nonetheless prepared to embrace. "What we're offering is a second chance at the Academy Awards handed out on March 23, 1998," Corliss writes. "To a lot of people, the record eleven Oscars that James Cameron's Titanic lapped up that night were suitable acknowledgment of a much-loved movie that quickly became the top box-office attraction in film history. We're asking how Titanic, which was named the Best Picture of 1997, and the performances that won in the four actor categories have stood the test of time. And we're answering: Eh, not so well."

If your memory of the films that challenged Titanic for Best Picture that year is a little shaky, we don’t blame you. Somehow we’d forgotten those timeless classics As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty were nominated as well, although with guns to our heads we probably could have guessed Good Will Hunting made the final five. Given those choices, we’ll go along with Corliss’s selection of L.A. Confidential as the first Re-Oscar winner, although his reasoning is a little shaky: “A guilty secret of film criticism is that reviewers often lavish their fondness on modern versions of the kinds of genres they don't make any more. Thus The English Patient, a film in the David Lean epic tradition, was my choice for best film of 1996. L.A. Confidential is a time trip back to the period in which it's set, the early '50s, when film noir (as the French called Hollywood's crime dramas) argued that postwar optimism was a lie — that brutality and betrayal lurked around the every city street corner, where the cop on the beat might also be on the take.”

Corliss also reminds us of one of the laziest Academy decisions in recent memory: Jack Nicholson winning his third Oscar for his Jack Nicholson-esque performance in As Good as It Gets. "Nicholson had lost an Oscar a few times when he deserved one: in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and especially Chinatown, a great performance that lost to Art Carney's turn as a lonely older guy with health problems in Harry and Tonto. . . Chalk up Nicholson's third Oscar as an early Life Achievement Award." Instead, Corliss chooses to recognize Peter Fonda’s nearly forgotten turn in the all-around understated Ulee’s Gold. Hey, we’re happy for him. For the rest of the ReOscar roster, click here.

Yesterday's Hits: Titanic (1997)

Peter Smith — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

What makes a movie a hit? Whatever it is, it's fascinating to look how moviegoing tastes change over the years. I hit upon the idea for a feature called "Yesterday's Hits" as a flipside to Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops, and I'll be focusing on movies that were initially popular but haven't sustained that popularity. To this end, I plan to ask three questions:

1. What made this movie a hit?
2. What happened to the movie's popularity?
3. Divorced from the original buzz, does the movie itself still work?

We'll begin with the highest-grossing film of all time, James Cameron's Titanic.

What made Titanic a hit? Titanic had something for everyone — adventure, romance, destruction, tragedy, cutting-edge effects, history, and protagonists to whom audiences could relate. Cameron mixed these elements so cannily that the movie became a must-see, even for those who almost never went to movies, like my grandfather, who trekked to the local cinema for the first time in fifteen years. But the film's biggest supporters were teenage girls, a underrepresented demographic, who famously saw the movie dozens of times.

What happened to Titanic's popularity? Teenagers — both male and female — are notoriously fickle. The movie's original fans are now in their twenties and have mostly moved on, and today's teenagers want to find a hit of their own to embrace. Likewise, Titanic isn't particularly well-served by video and DVD, its largesse diminished by the smaller screen while the cornball dialogue and nuts 'n' bolts characterization become more glaring.

Does Titanic still work? Yes and no. Titanic is a mix of classical and modern elements, and these elements don't always mesh well. Most of the supporting characters are given exactly one note to play — Billy Zane's sneering possessiveness, Frances Fisher's old-money snobbery, Kathy Bates' aw-shucks Molly Brown — which grows a little tiresome over three-odd hours. By comparison, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) are relatable because they feel more modern than the others. It's a convenient way to elicit audience sympathy, but Cameron's more baldfaced attempts to inject their characters with contemporary traits, such as Rose's love for modern art (Billy Zane: "That Picasso will never amount to anything!"), fall flat.

In addition, a lot of smaller elements of the film don't really work. The framing story takes too long to get going, and Gloria Stuart's Oscar-nominated performance as Old Rose doesn't age well. And couldn't Cameron have found a better MacGuffin than the Heart of the Ocean diamond? Then there's the matter of the music. James Horner's Enya-inflected score is even more distracting now than it was ten years ago, and Celine Dion's end-credits number "My Heart Will Go On," never that great a song to begin with, has become so ubiquitous that it's almost unlistenable.

Still, a lot of the movie still sings. Titanic's bravura second half, containing the sinking, plays to Cameron's strengths as a filmmaker (destruction and human chaos). Both the opulence and the effects remain impressive today. And even the old-fashioned storyline plays better than I'd remembered. Cameron wisely stays mostly with Jack and Rose, and in doing so he taps into one of the great themes of epic cinema: people at the mercy of history. It worked in Gone With the Wind, it worked in Casablanca, and it still works like a charm in Titanic. — Paul Clark