The Screengrab : tom hanks

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

And now, the worst...

Bjork in DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)

Most of the deaths on this worst list are disappointing, ill-conceived or simply ridiculous, but Dancer In The Dark is another animal entirely. The end of feel-bad auteur Lars Von Trier’s 2000 sadistic (and ultimately pointless) exercise in suffering and hopelessness was so excruciatingly painful and unpleasant to watch that I felt like I'd been punched in the ribcage. Which is not to say it's a bad movie, exactly. Which is not to say it's a good movie, either. I have to give a certain amount of respect to a film (and scene) that produces such a visceral reaction in me -- but, then again, I had a similar reaction to that infamous bootleg videotape of a politician shooting himself in the head at a press conference. Like somebody said once, it's easy to get a reaction out of an audience: just strangle a puppy. But that don't necessarily make it art. (AO)

Tom Hanks in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

Earn this? Blow me. Saving Private Ryan isn't thoroughly terrible, but the schmaltz at the end is hard to take. Tom Hanks is shot by the same guy whose life he spared a few days before? Gimme a break. Why, those evil, ungrateful Germans. I guess they got what was coming to them. All of the swelling strings and tearful codas in the world can't mask how unearned and meaningless this death scene is. I'm fairly sure that Spielberg expects his audience to start laying palm fronds at the feet of the greatest generation who fought the Nazi menace after all this sturm und drang, but I was left wishing it had come some 14 hours earlier, back when I cared about the movie. (HC)

Mel Gibson in BRAVEHEART (1995)

Mel Gibson is really into the torture porn and martyrdom, isn't he? I know this isn't news; even the South Park parody is old and moldy. But at the end of Braveheart, Gibson's weird fetish wasn't old and creepy yet. It was new and creepy! And meant to lead the audience to admire ol' William Wallace for his hearty shout of "FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMM" despite his (offscreen) pain. And hey, if Mel could take the fake pain of the fake torture and still rally enough shout for freedom, what's a little waterboarding among friends? Perhaps I'm being overly glib; this movie was made well before our nation turned a blind eye to torture. And the message really isn't pro-torture so much as "boy, those English sure enjoyed publicly torturing that Scot guerrilla warrior." But the endless slo-mo, the black-and-white morality throughout, the obnoxious pushy score, all of these were torture enough for me as a viewer before we even approached Mel's craptastic death scene. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to shout freedom and escape the theater. (HC)

William Shatner in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994)

They got Spock’s death right in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, except that he wasn’t really dead. They got Kirk’s death all wrong in Star Trek: Generations, but he still stayed dead – hell, he couldn’t even score a cameo in the new movie. A misconceived bridge between the old school Trek crew – emphasis on “old” by 1994 – and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and company, the movie was meant to launch a series of Next Generation movies while giving the outgoing administration a dignified sendoff. It didn’t accomplish either task with much success. The Next Gen flicks quickly petered out, and only three of the original series cast signed on for their farewell voyage – two of whom (James Doohan’s Scotty and Walter Koenig’s Chekov) disappear with little fanfare early in the proceedings. In the final reel, Screengrab MVP Shatner shows up to lend Picard a hand stopping Malcolm McDowell from destroying the universe or something, but Kirk’s “heroic” actions are pretty run-of-the-mill by his standards and his final moments woefully anticlimactic. (SVD)

But don’t take our word for it – here’s the man himself:

Shatner Responds: The Death Of Captain Kirk

Al Pacino in THE GODFATHER, PART III (1990)

No matter your faith, your creed, your political persuasion or your favorite Beatle, there’s one thing upon which all right-thinking people can agree: Michael Corleone’s story ended with the final shot of The Godfather, Part II. Nothing came after that. We all know he died at some point, because that’s how it works, but there was no reason to ever see it happen because the story was over. Unfortunately, some wrong-thinking people disagreed and eventually one of those people turned out to be Francis Ford Coppola, who had some bills to pay. He even wanted to title this movie The Death of Michael Corleone, just to make it clear that this is something he thought we should see. And so, at the end of his very terrible movie The Godfather, Part III, Coppola jumps some unknown distance into the future, where we find Al Pacino sitting alone on a bench with a bunch of grey shit in his hair. And then suddenly – and here I can’t put it any better than my friend John Mitchell did back in the day – he slumps over like Ruth Buzzi just whacked him with her handbag. And a little dog licks his face. I realize this is how I’m probably going to go out, too, but nobody made three movies about me. (SVD)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak

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

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

Phil Nugent's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part Two)

6. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART II (1985)

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To judge from the overly polite reactions to the recent Rocky Balboa and Rambo pictures, some critics who were there when Sylvester Stallone was the biggest star in the world and who had sense enough to cringe about it now feel so sorry for the poor has-been son of a bitch that they're happy he's still alive, steroid-addled, and capable of pulling crows to a cornfield at sundown. They were right the first time and need to get over it. Stallone's naked need for not just ticket sales but approval and respect was always pathetic, and in order to reap these ill-gotten rewards, he made a string of movies that were progressively more brutal in their stupidity, to the point that you could actually sit there feeling the collective I.Q. points being shaved off the audience. Nor does it necessarily make one a humorless tight-ass to regret the fact that, in order to get those fists pumping to his satisfaction, he had to throw gasoline on the fantasy that Vietnam in the mid-1980s was full of captive American POWs, which amounted to emotionally torturing the families of MIA servicemen for the sake of an adrenaline surge, as well as the idea that we didn't lose the war but "weren't allowed to win it," a contention that guaranteed one an interesting crowd reaction in theaters where Vietnam vets were present. The next time somebody as hard up for stardom as Stallone and as shameless about how he gets it comes along, for God's sake, let him be satisfied with making movies where he kills Martians or something.

7. BREAKING THE WAVES (1996)
8. AMONGST FRIENDS (1993)

No list of worst movies would be complete without a Scorsese imitation, and while Phil Joanou's State of Grace remains a standout for the blatancy of its appropriation of the uptight guy/crazy guy central dynamic--with Gary Oldman's performance some kind of benchmark for fake Method acting--this embarrassment, made for some $900,000 by the self-promoting tyro writer-director Rob Weiss, doubles as a horror story about overhyped "indie" filmmaking in the wake of sex, lies and videotape and Reservoir Dogs. (For the true and terrible story, see John Pierson's chapter on the movie in Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, titled "Amongst Jerks.") The best thing you can say about the movie's male cast is that they would never be seen onscreen again; Weiss himself has never directed another movie, apparently having concluded that it's too much like work. (Surely he could get another job if he wanted to; if Phil Joanou does it, anybody could.) Instead, he lives out his dreams of show biz glory vicariously, grinding out scripts for the televised circle jerk that is HBO's Entourage.

9. CRY FREEDOM (1987)

Richard Attenborough takes rich, complex dramatic stories about amazing men, turns them into pap, and then stands there beaming with pride at the great favor he's done by making these stories dull enough that any muttonhead can now presumably benefit from them. He does sometimes get great performances in spite of himself, and this movie features a staggering piece of work in Denzel Washington's portrait of the martyred anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko. So it's all the more patently insulting that the movie is shaped as the story of a white family man, Biko's biographer Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), and that Kline's colorless performance as a man who's presented as being unexciting and virtually of no interest--I guess so that we dullards in the audience can "identify" with him--is supposed to be the center of the movie, with Biko in his shade. Attenborough is very lucky that the apartheid government was well on its way to collapsing by the time his movie came out; it distracted attention from his film and made it seem more of an irrelevance than an outrage. But if a Truth and Reconcilation Campaign for movies were ever created, Cry Freedom would be first in line, and few movies would deserve forgiveness less.

10. SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

The practice of grabbing hold of the title of a non-movie-related pop culture touchstone did not in fact begin with Uwe Boll, and in fact, it's hard to think of a computer-game-based movie that would make less sense than this project. Produced by Robert Stigwood in the wake of the success of Saturday Night Fever, the new Beatles who head the all-star cast are the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, who a year or two before had been the biggest pop star in the English-speaking world. With all due respect to Steve Martin's gonzo movie debut as Dr. Maxwell Edison, the best joke here is that by the time the film was released, Frampton had less clout and credibility with the rock audience than his erstwhile co-star, Mr. George Burns.

Runner-Up: FORREST GUMP (1994)

Combining all the aesthetic crimes of a Hallmark card, a soap opera, an Oscar-bait "very special" performance, and a Fox News report on why the sixties were bad for you, Robert Zemeckis' crime against humanity officially declared the end of the Being There era, a time when most of humanity would have agreed that there was a downside to seeing a well-intentioned moron as a fount of wisdom and moral superiority. And the dubbing in the scenes with JFK and John Lennon sucks donkeys. Sometimes, flipping the channel and coming across a rerun of Bosom Buddies or the scene in Turner & Hootch where he tries to explain Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp to a dog, I'm reminded of how much I miss having had an iota of respect for Tom Hanks.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Worst Movies Ever (Part Two...plus 5 honorable mention bad movie haikus!)

6. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)

Long ago I was happy and carefree, way back when Roberto Benigni was the sorta-annoying Italian guy from those Jim Jarmusch movies. He made funny jokes, I made funny jokes, everything was good, see? But now that happiness is gone forever. The day that I saw Life Is Beautiful, my love - strike that, let’s say “tolerance” - of Benigni became a tearful nightmare. You could call it the day the clown cried. See, the premise of the movie is that Benigni is trying to convince his child that the Nazi concentration camp they are in is all a big, jokey game. Actually, that's only the second half of the movie. The first half is about Benigni trying to woo his lady through a bunch of wacky pratfalls. The second half is Benigni making light of the Holocaust through wacky pratfalls. It's the craziest genocide of a people ever! You'll laugh, cry, puke in horror, and never be able to watch Down By Law again!

7. HAPPINESS (1998)

This was the least repellent clip from this film that I could find. Todd Solondz thinks that he’s the most misanthropic man in movies, but his misanthropy is as meaningless as Natural Born Killers' satire because it has no center. It's one thing to be a misanthrope because you are deeply disappointed in humanity (as with, say, Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Michel Houellebecq), but it's a completely different thing to strive towards misanthropy just because...what? Because deep down, we're all just using each other, right? We're all just biding time until we can rape children, right? We're all just waiting for the numbness of age and indifference to envelope us, right? We're all just wanting to get our own rocks off and to hell with everyone else, right? Beneath contempt.

8. IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone’s just waiting for the right moment to stab you in the back. A nation of creeps. Fuck you, LaBute.

9. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING (1991)

"$34 million? They must have had a limousine every time they went to the john!" Ah, Roger Ebert, you slay me. Most of the movies on my list are repulsive due to their content rather than the complete incompetence of the filmmakers. This one is both! It makes no damn sense, looks like shit, cost the studio a ton of money, and stars Sean Connery! I had seen bad movies before, but this was the first really bad movie that I ever saw where I literally couldn't understand how it had come to be. For that, it'll always have a special place in my heart.

10. THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995)

Dimwitted Irish guys from Long Island who fuck around while women swoon all over them? Sign me up! They're going to talk about life and love and pseudo-profound heavy stuff like that, all with the same bada-bing inflection? Whoa nelly! They'll all learn to believe in love again? Warms the ol' cockles of the heart, it does, faith and begorrah! And boy howdy, that Ed Burns is dreamy, isn't he? Whoever made this movie sure thinks so! (HC)

Bonus 5, in haiku:

American Beauty (1999)

Suburbs: repression,
Sadness, revelation. Then
You're shot by a queer.

Armageddon (1998)

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Shazam! Whizz! Bang! Crash! Ba-donk!
Kablooey! KaBLAM!

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Oh, Robin Williams,
Bearded man with life lessons,
You ruined poetry.

You've Got Mail (1998)

Bloody thoughts! Only
One way to quell: watch The Shop
Around The Corner.

Memento (2000)

Start here. Smart conceit
Hides lacuna at the heart
Of story. Start here.

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

Contributor, Haikuist: Hayden Childs

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. K-PAX (2001)

K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it dares to teach us that all mentally ill people can be Magical Negroes if they try. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because it makes one pine for the relatively wise and somber tones of Patch Adams. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because its twinkly-winky score underlines every single emotion onscreen, which are themselves shaded in primary colors and writ large enough for a pre-schooler to grasp. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because Kevin Spacey approaches his mentally ill/spaceman character as if the ideal mentally ill spaceman is part-Jack Nicholson and part-Bono, basically a smirk in shades. K-Pax is not a bad movie merely because supporting characters are constantly telling the audience how awesome Keven Spacey’s mentally ill spaceman is. In truth, any one of these reasons is enough to make K-Pax a bad movie, but the real problem with K-Pax is that it insists that the audience swallow all of this Hallmark-lite hokum when it knows that it’s heading towards a broad Christ metaphor that even Kirk Cameron would shy away from. This movie is the strongest cinematic argument ever made for involuntary lobotomies.

2. FORREST GUMP (1994)

I never intended to see this movie. But I was staying with a friend who insisted that I had to see it now now now because it would change my life. Maybe it did. I swore that as God was my witness, I would never sit through Forrest Gump again. And I’ve kept that promise. Like the title character, I grew up in Alabama. Being from there means that I tend to detest movies set in Alabama, which are all about the oh-so-colorful hicks who live there with their strange okra-eating ways, and usually star people who seem to have learned everything they know about Southern accents by watching Hee Haw reruns (as Hal Crowther once wrote, can you imagine seeing the tables turned with a movie set in New York where the cast was full of genuine rednecks from Alabama and Mississippi mimicking Howard Cosell?). But the setting is just the surface gloss of this movie's bone-deep stupidity. From what I understand, Winston Groom’s novel is a rather clever satire of the late 20th century, but I have never read it. The movie is the opposite of satire, a picaresque story designed to tug and strain at heartstrings, to make grown men weep and ladies quiver with its story of the extraordinary man-child Forrest Gump. But underneath all that gooey Lifetime Movie stuff, the message is that idiots deserve your respect. Idiots make history happen. Idiots stick to their core principles and blindly charge forward, damn the facts, and are blessed by the god of their choice. Did the makers of this film never read Of Mice And Men? Idiots destroy the things they are supposed to protect. Forrest Gump negates that story, and dares to tell the audience that idiots are born leaders. Perhaps it's needless to say, but this movie is directly responsible for the eight long years of the Bush Administration. Whenever you hear the words "mission accomplished" from an official source, you should know that they're really saying "stupid is as stupid does." The success of Bill Kristol makes a lot more sense if you imagine him droning on about how life is like a box of chocolates.

3. MOULIN ROUGE (2001)

Combining all the fun of epilepsy with all the subtlety of musical theater, Moulin Rouge was like a romance novel written by high-fructose corn syrup. I'm pretty sure that this movie gave me inoperable cancer. Of the soul. I know that there's people out there who like it, but I cannot imagine why. Among its sins are bad editing, terrible acting, actors singing the ubiquitous hits of any generic Clear Channel radio station, an eyescaldingly hideous color scheme, and a plot that would embarrass Danielle Steele. The only redeeming thing about it is that it should make it clear to all the homophobes out there that homosexuality cannot be passed around like a virus, because if it were, this movie would be Patient Zero for the Campy Queer Flu.

4. SIGNS (2002)

Are there words in the English language more terrifying than “Written, Produced and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan”? Signs is about aliens who come to Earth to help Mel Gibson recover his faith in God. Signs is also about helping Mel to understand his wife’s dying words, in which she somehow predicted that hostile aliens would invade a planet which is more than 70 percent covered in liquid death and presciently knew that Mel's baseball-loving brother could save her child with a well-swung bat. Signs is also about how brilliant alien invaders who can build spaceships and disrupt electrical signals and stuff like that might decide that the best way to begin their invasion is by invading a child’s birthday party in Brazil, irritating a farmer's dog, or hiding in a pantry. Hoo boy. Too bad these aliens couldn't take the obvious route of replacing everyone around Mel with pod people. Or bursting out of his stomach at a family dinner. That would have been quite the twist!

5. NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)

Oh, it’s sooooo deep. Those people will do anything for fame! I realize Oliver Stone thinks he’s being all clever about the MTV generation, but this is a movie devoid of ideas desperately trying to pass itself off as a smart film. It's like The Honeymoon Killers remade by MTV Cribs, only less so. I think that the makers of this movie would say that overexposure to the media makes people crazy and amoral, but that doesn't explain why they fought lawsuits blaming this movie for copycat murders by overexposed fans. They're trying to have it both ways: trying to say that the movie is against the violence it portrays, even as the whole point of the movie is the glorification of that violence. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original script, has allegedly disowned the movie, and it's clear why. Tarantino may not be the deepest filmmaker - a lot of his clever flourishes don't have a whole lot of thought behind them - but he has a great eye and a working brain and he understands that satire has a point. All of Tarantino's films have cold-blooded killers in them, and all of them ask for you to sympathize with a killer, one way or another. Tarantino doesn't feel a need to explain how these killers got to be that way, nor does he bludgeon the viewer with faux-irony about how society views these killers, especially not while producing his trademark extremely-stylized violence. But Stone, on the other hand, doesn't know how he feels about his killers. His movie seems to be saying over and over again that they are awesome, and what's more, everyone in his movie (other than the victims, presumably) is a cold-blooded, amoral murderer. That's not satire. It's nihilism. Say what you will about the tenets of Quentin Tarantino, but at least he has an ethos.

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

Contributor: Hayden Childs

25 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Better Zmed Than Red

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

No publication on film, either in print or on-line, has a more illustrious history than that of the Screengrab. The SG was founded ninety years ago, in conjunction with the birth of the studio United Artists. The earliest issues of the Screengrab reported the latest industry news on loose sheets of paper taken from Big Chief note tablets and were circulated at UA board meetings so that Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. would have something on which to doodle. (It was a Fairbanks drawing of Louis B. Mayer as a pig in spats that inspired D. W. Griffith's epic film Orphans of the Storm.) Some years later, ownership of the Screengrab was obtained by Al Capone, who operated it as a tax write-off, with unfortunate results. Some believe that the government vendetta against Capone was inspired by a Screengrab editorial by then-editor Frank Nitti, entitled, "J. Edgar Hoover and Rin Tin Tin's Nut Sack: Separated at Birth?"

By the 1960s, it was understood that no critical voice on motion pictures had been fully tested until it had passed through the fire of the Screengrab's blazing furnace. It was here that Pauline Kael published her devastating essay, "Some Notes on the Auteur Theory and Its Advocates", which was soon followed by Andrew Sarris's response, "Sit on It and Rotate, Ma Barker." Many of the directors who would later make up the French New Wave--Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette--first published their views on the need for a new cinema here, only retreating to the yellow pages of Cahiers du Cinema when someone actually read the copy they were submitting and saw that it was written in some weird moon man language.

For many decades, the Screengrab was distributed exclusively by Mickey Rooney, who was paid five dollars a week to bicycle around Los Angeles sticking the Big Chief sheets under men's restroom stalls. (After a few years, Mickey began paying us, in exchange for our allowing him to stick the pages under ladies' restroom stalls.) A major change came about in the mid-1970s, when major technological advances made it possible to distribute the Screengrab nationally, by fax. Then, a couple of years ago, somebody at a party told one of the editors about this Internet shit, and as soon as he was sober enough to explain it to the rest of us, we were all over that bad boy like ugly on an ape. Now, as we approach the next and perhaps final stage in the Screengrab's evolution, we look back on the fruits of our labors, celebrating the cream of ninety years of the very best in film coverage.

JULY, 1984--For years, it's been considered all but axiomatic in Hollywood that TV stars and movie stars are not made of the same basic materials: success in one medium does not translate into success in the other. That may be changing, or it may just be that the kind of white-hot talent that has been scorching the eyes of viewers at previews of the new comedy Bachelor Party doesn't obey the usual rules. The one thing that everyone who's seen the movie agrees on is that Adrian Zmed can look forward to a long career on the big screen. Zmed made his movie debut a couple of years ago in Grease 2, in which he demonstrated his uncontainable charisma by actually stealing a couple of scenes from Maxwell Caulfield. That same year, he set up shop on the weekly series T. J. Hooker. Fans who've been looking forward to Zmed's return to the big screen but never figured that he could top his work in Grease 2 will be happily stunned when they catch Bachelor Party and see for themselves what it does for an actor's game to spend two years learning to hold his own with William Shatner.

Schooling Maxwell Caulfield does come at a price for a rising actor; his original Bachelor Party co-star, Paul Reiser (Diner), bailed out after a few weeks of shooting, presumably because he didn't like the competition. In what may be seen as a confession of defeat, the filmmakers ended up replacing him with sitcom star Tom Hanks (Bosom Buddies), pairing Zmed with another TV actor, but one eager enough for the job that he was probably willing to put up with being upstaged. (Not that Hanks doesn't have his own fantasy future as a movie star, God help him; he recently starred in a Disney movie about a man in love with a mermaid. As in, fish, tail, the whole deal.) Zmed is gracious about his colleague: "I actually did an episode of Bosom Buddies," he says, "back in my hungry days, and I thought right then and there that Tom was a real nice guy. I sure didn't mind having him around the set with us. Did I think that we'd ever be starring in a movie together?" Zmed chuckles. "Well...let's just say that it's not quite the direction I thought we were all headed in back then. But who knows, maybe the producers called Peter Scolari first and he didn't answer his phone."

Zmed demanded, and got, a certain amount of creative input on the script for Bachelor Party, and he's satisfied that he was able to shape the project in ways that will carry a relevant message for audiences. "I really wanted to say something about stuffy fathers and how they need to accept their daughters' potential husbands, especially if they're cool, wacky, fun-loving guys, and not try to interfere in their lives with a bunch of wacky schemes. I see that going on around me all the time, and it's very frustrating." Zmed, who intends to continue with T. J. Hooker for the time being, also sees that show as a vehicle for social change, one that encourages people to recognize "that the good cop, the maverick cop, may not always play by the book, but by golly, you have to respect the fact that he gets results!" In the meantime, Zmed's influence is spreading across the industry on screens both big and small. "The other day," he recalls, "I was standing in line to get a veggie burger, and was next to these guys, Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich, who are working on this new cop show that's coming out in the fall, Miami Vice. I overheard them talking about it, and I introduced myself and asked them what their goals were with the show, and Mann said that they were trying for something really "T. J. Hooker-esque, and then Yerkovich said, yeah, but they want to do something like T. J. Hooker taken to the next level! I said that it sounded really exciting, and then they both just started nudging each other and laughing and laughing. It's a great feeling to know that the example you're setting with your own work can make other creative people that happy."

Video of the Day: Julia Roberts Likes Tom Hanks. Really.

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

By now you may have heard that Julia Roberts’ speech at the Film Society of Lincoln Center 36th Gala Tribute to Tom Hanks at Alice Tully Hall was a big hit. America’s sweetheart got a little salty in her remarks, noting “I’m paying my babysitter overtime and I have to pee, so ... everybody fucking likes you.” She went on to sing the praises of Bosom Buddies, Turner and Hooch, and the tits and ass of Mrs. Hanks, Rita Wilson. But don’t take our word for it – we’ve got the video after the jump:

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Yes, it’s that magical time of year once more...as my late lamented Grampa Joe would say, quoting his favorite Brooklyn poet: “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the flowers iz? All the boids is the on the wing...isn’t that absoid? I thought the wing was on the boid!”

All of which is neither here nor there...but the real point is we’re just days away from the start of the Summer Blockbuster Season (which, like the Christmas season, keeps starting earlier and earlier each year, what with the upcoming May 1 release of Wolverine, the May 8 release of Star Trek...heck, even Vin Diesel’s already had a summer blockbuster, and we’re barely into baseball season!

And, since Hollywood now refuses to wait until Memorial Day Weekend to start firing off its big guns, your pals here at the Screengrab have no choice but to launch into the fray with our second annual attempt to prognosticate the Top 5 Biggest Hits & Bombs of 2009!

Now, for those of you playing along at home, the rules are simple: the following “HIT” and “BOMB” predictions aren’t necessarily based on the sheer volume of money we think the following films will amass, but rather how their performance will ultimately be perceived by the Suits in Hollywood and the public at large. So, for example, last year we predicted Prince Caspian would be a hit...but it cost more and took in less than The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, so it was ultimately considered a disappointment. Meanwhile, Sex & The City, which...ahem...some Screengrabbers thought would bomb took in about the same amount of money as Caspian and was ultimately considered a hit because all the wimmenfolk liked it so much (and also because it didn’t cost a zillion dollars to produce, despite all the CGI required to bring the eerie Kim Cattrall character to life).

And so, without further ado...our picks for THE TOP FIVE HITS OF SUMMER 2009!

5. UP (May 29)

Paul:
There were several strong possibilities for the #5 spot, but in the end I kept coming back to Pixar, who has managed to balance high-quality output with great box office better than just about anyone else in Hollywood. Consider that all but one of their summer releases has finished among that summer’s top five, and that the one that didn’t -- 2007’s Ratatouille, probably the least kid-friendly Pixar production to date -- landed at #6. So yeah, they’re a pretty good bet, and this family-oriented film should continue their hot streak. The opening weekend for Up could be tight, considering that it’s competing with the second weekend of Night at the Museum 2, but it ought to prevail in the long run given the thin June slate and the expected strong reviews.

Andrew:
This one didn’t make my list because it's got a meh title, I can’t figure out what the movie’s supposed to be about, and I don’t sense a lot of Up excitement in the ether...but then again, I thought Wall-E would tank, too, so what the hell do I know?

Scott:
The pundits are fretting that the new Pixar movie will turn off the kiddies because it’s about an old person. (shudder) How are they going to sell Old Guy action figures? Well, I seem to recall these same pundits wringing their hands over the nearly-silent first half of Wall-E, too, so I’m sticking with the assumption that Pixar knows what they’re doing.

4. ANGELS & DEMONS (May 15)

Paul:
Here’s where things get a little more iffy. A big-budget, star-studded adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller would seem to be a can’t-lose proposition, especially given the blockbuster grosses of The Da Vinci Code in 2006. Yet so far, the buzz on this one has been surprisingly muted, perhaps because it’s hard to imagine too many people getting worked up over a follow-up to its ponderous predecessor. Nonetheless, expect advertising for this to ramp up over the next month, leading to a big opening weekend followed by strong grosses over Memorial Day, as people line up for this almost out of obligation.

Andrew:
Considering people keep going to see those fake Nicolas Cage Da Vinci Code knock-offs, I expect there’s gonna be an audience for the genuine article. Plus, I’m told everyone and their mother (especially their mother) digs Tom Hanks, and devout filmgoers and atheists alike can all get behind a conspiracy thriller about all the creepy, weird stuff going on behind closed doors at the Vatican, right?

Click Here For The Hits (Part Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Blasphemy Isn't What It Used to Be: Ron Howard and "Angels & Demons"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Ron Howard's new movie, Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist super sleuth Robert Langdon, is a follow-up to their 2006 piece-of-shit movie The Da Vinci Code, which was based on Dan Brown's bestselling 2003 pice-of-shit novel of the same name. (Angels & Demons is actually based on an earlier novel that Brown published in 2000, which marked the first appearance of the Langdon character.) I couldn't quite follow the thread of The Da Vinci Code, but I think it had something to do with clues hidden in the Mona Lisa that Amélie is Jesus Christ's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. (I think there was also something about how "the Holy Grail", legendary for being Jesus's favorite thing to drink from, was actually his pet name for Mary Magdalene, but that's so unbelievably filthy that I must have imagined it. We are, after all, talking about a movie made by Opie, starring Forrest Gump.) The new movie reportedly has to do with the return of the Illuminati, which (in Brown's conspiracy-fantasy mythology) was murderously wiped out by the Catholic church some three thousand years ago for being too scientific and artistic and progressive and all. As before, the new movie is being threatened with organized protests from Catholic groups who take offense at seeing their church portrayed as Murder, Inc. with funnier hats. Faced with these complaints, Howard has done what any serious religious history scholar would do: he's gone to the Huffington Post to deliver his Sermon on the Mount.

Howard's bete noire is William Donahue of the Catholic League, who, in Howard's words, "writes that I and the people who made this thriller 'do not hide their animus against all things Catholic.'" (Apparently all things Catholic include basic grammar.) "Let me be clear," writes the director of Frost/Nixon: "neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?" As to the details, "Mr. Donohue's booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades)...Mr. Donohue's op-ed [in the New York Daily News] and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as 'anti-reason.' There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn't do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences." As Jesus used to say to Pontius Pilate, passive-aggressive much?

Unmollified by these and other valuable points made by Howard (ranging from "And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!" to "Even the current 'faith vs. science' debate over embryonic stem cells is briefly depicted in Angels & Demons in a balanced way."), Donahue has struck back in his latest press release: “Dan Brown says in his book that the Illuminati are ‘factual’ and that they were ‘hunted ruthlessly by the Catholic Church.’ In the film’s trailer, Tom Hanks, who plays the protagonist Robert Langdon, says ‘The Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence them forever.’ Howard concurs: ‘The Illuminati were formed in the 1600s. They were artists and scientists like Galileo and Bernini, whose progressive ideas threatened the Vatican.’ All of this is a lie. The Illuminati were founded in 1776 and were dissolved in 1787. It is obvious that Galileo and Bernini could not possibly have been members: Galileo died in 1647 and Bernini passed away in 1680. More important, the Catholic Church never hunted, much less killed, a single member of the Illuminati. But this hasn’t stopped Brown from asserting that ‘It is a historical fact that the Illuminati vowed vengeance against the Vatican in the 1600s.’" Perhaps sensing how many readers stepped out into the hallway for a smoke while he was rattling off dates, Brown adds, "Moreover, we know from a Canadian priest who hung out with Howard’s crew last summer in Rome (dressed in civilian clothes) just how much they hate Catholicism.” Personally, I have no plans to see Angels & Demons, but I would pay half my body weight in gold bullion to see a movie based on the true-life adventures of an undercover Catholic, dressed in a Canadian priest's idea of "civilian clothes"--I'm picturing Disco Stu with a cross around his neck--who hangs out with Opie and Forrest to listen to them express the true, hateful feelings they have about Catholics when they think all the Pope's children are in the bathroom. ("And the rhythm method--what's that all about!? You look at the size of some of these families, I guess maybe Mel Gibson's had a little trouble finding the backbeat, y'know what I'm saying? Cheese it, here comes Coppola!")

Now, we don't really have a dog in this race. And make no mistake about it, we here at the Screengrab are just crazy about blasphemy and try to encourage it whenever we can. What's discouraging, though, is Howard's good-natured, reasonable tone: yeah, we kind of dis your church's history and make your guys look like nut jobs and gangsters, but we don't mean anything by it! It's just necessary to the plot of a good thriller. What are you saying, that you don't like good thrillers? Go dig Hitchcock up and blow shit at him! Some real moviemakers like Bunuel risked their careers, their standing in the community, and maybe even their lives to make blasphemous movies, and somebody like Howard flirts with it, out of commercial necessity--somebody is going to make movies out of Dan Brown's bullshit--and expects everybody to understand that it doesn't really mean anything to him, so it shouldn't give offense to anyone. I myself am no fan of Oliver Stone's JFK, either as a movie or as an historical argument, but I'll give it this much: I'm willing to believe that the murder of John Kennedy is something that Stone is, or was, genuinely freaked out about. it's understandable that Howard would be baffled and even offended by William Donahue's assertion that he's actually a hater and propagandist against the Catholic church instead of a guy trying to make a buck with a pre-sold property, but if he would open his mind up a little, he might be able to see that, in his way, Donahue is paying him a compliment by suggesting that he's a serious enough man to believe in his own crap. As Al Pacino put it in Dog Day Afternoon, if somebody's going to blow my brains out, I hope it's somebody who does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE SHADOW (1994)

There are movies I remember as terrible, and then there are movies I simply don’t remember at all...as if a mysterious vigilante with the power to cloud men’s minds had simply erased all traces of this pre-intentionally-funny Alec Baldwin snoozer from my consciousness. The plot synopsis on Wikipedia sounds far more entertaining than the actual film, what with its dirty hypnotism, 1930s Genghis Khan revivalism and Phurba, the living knife (no relation to Furby or Flowbee). But even after reviewing the plot and rewatching a few YouTube clips, there are still only three things I really remember about the film. One, it co-stars Penelope Ann Miller...almost never a good sign. Two, the villain (played by John Lone) uses mental powers to make New Yorkers think his luxury hotel is invisible...a neat trick somebody oughta teach Donald Trump. And finally (and most memorably), my old pal Radmar Jao has the best line in the movie, advising someone not to light up in the hero’s secret lair: “No smoking in the Skull Cave.” Oh...wait a minute...that was that OTHER completely unmemorable 1990s adaptation of a 1930s comic: The Phantom, starring Billy Zane and Kristy Swanson (easily winning the bland-off with Miller). But, hey...at least Radmar was good.

ROAD TO PERDITION (2002)

Based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, Perdition takes a simple revenge tale, adds a dollop of sins-of-the-father melodrama, and inflates the flimsy result to Biblical proportions. Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hit man working for Paul Newman's John Rooney, mob boss of a Chicago suburb in the era of Al Capone. When his son Mike witnesses a gangland execution, Sullivan is forced to hit the road with the kid in tow, and soon father and son are bonding over a bank-robbing spree. Despite the pre-release speculation that Perdition would serve as the vehicle for Tom Hanks' first "bad guy" performance, the star delivers another of his flawed but noble saints. Sure, Michael Sullivan is a killer, but since almost everyone else in the movie is more vicious, and they're all out to get him, he comes off as a guy who's just doing what he's gotta do to protect his son. If you didn’t know Sam Mendes directed this tedious would-be epic, you'd swear it was a movie by master of bloat Frank Darabont. Nearly every scene is leaden, weighed down with portent and production designed to death. Torrents of rain are always pouring from the brims of fedoras while grim-faced men fire tommy guns into other grim-faced men who tumble to their doom in artful slow motion. It’s designed to be Oscar bait, but fortunately no one was biting.

HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)

This jaw-dropper, which was proudly emblazoned with the name of George Lucas, and which was the last movie directed by American Graffiti co-writer Willard Huyck -- he's still alive, but trust me, he's never going to direct another one -- belongs to what may well be the most select of all groups, movies that were catastrophic box-office and critical failures that nobody will now argue is actually a misunderstood work of genius. Heaven's Gate, Myra Breckinridge, At Long Last Love, Ishtar, hell, maybe Battlefield Earth -- each of them has some crackpot out there who'll keep you up all night explaining what's really so great about it. Not this thing. It's not even worth discussing its failure to in any way represent what's good, or even what sucks, about its alleged source material, an uneven but gorgeously cranky and weird Marvel series that writer Steve Gerber spun off from a supporting character he once threw into a Man-Thing comic, reportedly just to annoy his bosses. All you can do is stare at the thing and wonder what in God's sweet name they thought they were doing, until the noise becomes too much and you have to tune out. Howard was the first Marvel Comics-based movie to make it to theaters, and it is in fact harder to sit through than any number of subsequent Marvel-based projects that went straight to video. The only evidence that the people who made this had any sense at all is that, in the trailer and other publicity materials, they did their damndest to keep prospective ticket-buyers from getting a clear look at the poor bastard in the duck suit. If they'd found a way to keep people watching the movie from getting a clear look at it, they might have made some of their money back.

ELEKTRA (2005)

I’m pretty sure no one wanted Marvel Studios to resurrect Elektra, the hot ninja assassin (played by Jennifer Garner) who died in the dreadful Daredevil. But with Garner’s star on the rise, the fetching killer rose from the grave for this 2005 spin-off, a tiresome dud in which we learn that Elektra suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder but doesn’t mind tussling with (and spilling the blood of) yucky villains, is a trained murderer-for-hire who nonetheless has a pesky conscience, and likes to prance about like a runway model when not dispatching superpowered goons. Rob Bowman’s film has no energy or depth but plenty of turgid drama involving Elektra’s grief over her mother’s death and her tutelage under blind mentor Stick (Terence Stamp), unimaginative nonsense that – like the PG-13 ogling of Garner’s buff (but always clothed) body – unfortunately takes precedence over the heroine’s clashes with a group of intriguing baddies like Tattoo, a man whose body art comes to deadly life.

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

It certainly didn’t take long for the Superman franchise to bottom out. While many superhero legacies merely drop in quality, becoming disappointments after the first few installments, the Superman movies went from first to worst in the twinkling of an eye, and by the time the fourth installment rolled around, fans were praying for a hailstorm of kryptonite to kill the damn things off for good. When Superman IV was made, a combination of factors practically ensured it would be a disaster: the non-participation of many of the supporting players, the demands by Christopher Reeve to have more creative input, and the passing of the rights to the franchise from the Salkinds to the deplorable hacks at Golan-Globus. Reeve was given his script input, and the result was a well-meaning pile of shit so rank that he eventually pretended he didn’t have anything to do with it; and while Sidney Furie gets the official blame for directing this incoherent, overlong, and utterly incompetent disaster, most people believe that the real responsibility lies with uberhack/swindler/bad movie mogul Menahem Golan, who apparently spent most of the filming screaming at anyone who bothered to stick around the set. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was made for a fraction of what the previous films had cost, and it shows; if nothing else, it serves as a potent reminder to those who were so disappointed by Superman III that things can always get worse.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager & Leonard Pierce

Trailer Review: Angels and Demons

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The key to the success of Dan Brown’s novels is less the quality of the writing than the enduring fascination people have with ancient, secretive institutions, which gives his narratives a page-turning pulpy energy that causes many to overlook any deficiencies in his writing. Unfortunately, what made the Da Vinci Code movie such a chore to sit through was the portentous storytelling and leaden filmmaking from Ron Howard, which drained the story of any charge it might have had (it’s one reason I prefer the National Treasure movies, which are just as silly but at least know that they are). But in Hollywood, money talks, and the huge haul taken in by Da Vinci gave the studios the mistaken impression that people wanted more of the same, and it looks like Angels and Demons picks up where its predecessor left off, with Tom Hanks, his ridiculous haircut, some Catholic conspiracy fun, and a female star to serve primarily as windowdressing- with all the dialogue in the trailer, couldn’t they have Ayalet Zurer do anything besides look worried? Everything is in place for a big summer blockbuster- everything, that is, but the fun. And aren’t movies like this supposed to be fun?

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)

When it comes to second-guessing the Oscars, few Best Pictures raise Hollywood’s hackles like Shakespeare in Love. The legend goes something like this: way back in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant war movie Saving Private Ryan was a cinch to win the top slot, but sometime between the announcement of nominations and the opening of envelopes, Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the evil geniuses behind Shakespeare’s Oscar campaign) flew the invisible Miramax blimp over Hollywood and fired their diabolical Hypno-Ray at the helpless population, thus forcing all the innocent Who’s Who down in Whoville to vote for the wrong movie. As John Foote posts at InContention.com (reflecting an apparently common consensus), “Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that Shakespeare in Love, a lovely film, was actually better than Saving Private Ryan?” Well...uh, yes, actually. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Shakespeare in Love was MUCH better. Ryan, for all the slam-pow-gasp shock & awe chaos of its opening battle scene devolves shortly thereafter into a standard-issue World War II potboiler, circa 1952, complete with “Brooklyn,” “Redneck” and all the rest of the colorfully standard-issue Hollywood band of brothers fussin’ and fightin’ their way across Europe under the command of a tough but secretly tender-hearted father figure (played by a wildly miscast and completely unbelievable Tom Hanks). Shakespeare In Love, meanwhile, presented an Elizabethan world more fully-imagined than fellow Best Picture competitor Elizabeth, thanks to a remarkably literate and inventive screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And, while it’s easy to mock the GOOP-tastic Gwyneth of today, Paltrow generated palpable chemistry with co-star Joseph Fiennes in a well told, old-school love story, surrounded by a flawless supporting cast, all of them at or near the top of their games. True, movies this smart don’t usually win Oscars...which is probably why so many Academy voters are still baffled by Shakespeare’s victory.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)

So many of Oscar's pronouncements amount to a string of missed calls and concessions to sentimentality that when they get one right square on the nose -- when someone is rewarded for the best work of their career at that point in time as opposed to what they did a few years ago or what they might do if they can be induced not to chuck it all and go back to night school or even, as in the case of something like Ben Kingsley's performance in Gandhi, what the person they're playing did -- it stands out. The Academy has had plenty of opportunities to give Jack Nicholson a thumb's-up these past several years, and plenty of times they've jumped at the chance, even when, as in 1997's As Good As It Gets, the performance in question called to mind Picasso's boast that "I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody!" But they got it just right with Nicholson's first Oscar, for his Randall Patrick McMurphy, a performance that he gave a year after Chinatown set his movie star status in stone, and one that goes farther than he'd ever gone before, with fewer ingratiating winks and nods to the audience than he'd ever include in a full-length performance again. And since the movie, for all its virtues, rises and falls on the strength of its star, it deserved its Best Picture Oscar...a painful thing for this lifelong Jaws partisan to concede.

THE WORST:

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937)

Today Paul Muni is best remembered for his starring role in Howard Hawks' gangster classic Scarface. It turned out to be a rare occasion when Muni provided movie audiences with entertainment value for their money. After winning an Oscar nomination for his next film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Muni lost to Charles Laughton for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII and must have vowed to never be out-biopic'ed again. In short order, he established himself as the leading advocate of pompous, overbearing movies, winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Life of Louis Pasteur, in which he cured anthrax over the outraged objections of the small-minded, and then starred in Zola, in which he "J'accused" up one side of France and down the other. He also starred in Juarez, as Juarez, and The Good Earth, in which he must have disappointed his diehard fans by not actually portraying the planet. It all made him the Mister Oscar Bait of the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, audiences were sick of the self-righteous sight of him. He tried to get back to where he once belonged, but too much time spent reciting gaseous speeches while buried in historically conscientious makeup jobs had blunted his instincts, and some of his later movie roles, such as his lovable gangster in Angel on My Shoulder (1946), are actually even worse than the Oscar-bait stuff. He died in 1967, the bulk of his filmography fit only to serve as a cautionary example that Meryl Streep failed to heed.

DRIVING MISS DAISY (1989)

It’s not often that a movie dealing with racial issues is so totally (if well-meaningly) clueless that it gets an entire rap song dedicated to its utter boneheadedness, but Driving Miss Daisy is that movie, and Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn” is that song. After years of racism, stereotyping, and opportunities denied, Chuck D and his cohorts seemed to be saying, this is what constitutes progress? A movie about a cranky old southern Jewish woman whose black chauffer learns to live and love with her irascible, patronizing demeanor? Not only was it offensive on a number of levels – intentionally and otherwise – but it simply wasn’t a great movie by any reckoning. Its adaptation from a stage play was realized hamhandedly, Bruce Beresford’s direction is perfunctory, and the acting ranges from good but uninspiring to ambitious but dull (Dan Aykroyd ineptly takes the kind of risks that would later rejuvenate Bill Murray’s career). It’s easy to say that its victory came about because of a weak competitive field – other candidates ranged from poor (Dead Poets Society) to good-but-not-great (My Left Foot) – but the thing to remember is that 1989 was also the year that Spike Lee’s wonderful Do the Right Thing, a superior movie in every respect, and one that said far more about racial relations than Driving Miss Daisy could dream, was released. And it didn’t even get a nomination.

DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990)

Hot on the heels of Driving Miss Daisy, you wouldn’t think Oscar would be so quick to embrace another well-meaning racial drama, especially one helmed by someone who’s an even worse director than he is an actor. But sure enough, the voters’ tendency to absurdly overvalue any directorial effort by an actor that rises above total incompetence won out, and Kevin Costner’s bloated, plodding quasi-Western Dances with Wolves took home the Best Picture trophy in 1990. Continuing their history of giving Martin Scorsese the finger, they passed over his tremendous gangster tale GoodFellas in deference to this ridiculously overlong, condescending story of a white man who becomes beloved of the Indians by virtue of his sublime spirituality (heaven forfend the hero of the movie be an actual Indian, because then there wouldn’t be a starring role for director Kevin Costner’s favorite star, actor Kevin Costner). Dances with Wolves isn’t quite horrible enough to be the modern-day equivalent of The Greatest Show On Earth; it does contain some thrilling scenes, some decent acting, and direction that’s proficient if never outstanding. But its grossly overweight running time and heavy-handed message are easily the equal of anything in DeMille’s hokey circus epic. Still, things could have been worse; though no one remembers this anymore, The Godfather Part III was a Best Picture nominee in ’90, too.

BRAVEHEART (1995)

Oh, Oscar, when will you learn? By 1995, a clear theme was emerging: if you’re a well-known actor, and you manage to direct a movie without crushing yourself to death with a SteadiCam or making the entire movie with the lens caps on, you’ve got a pretty strong chance at winning a Best Picture or Best Director award even if your movie is an obvious mediocrity facing competition from much better movies by actual directors. You’d think the Academy would have figured it out: Warren Beatty did nothing worthwhile after Reds. Robert Redford never made a great movie after his Ordinary People win. Kevin Costner’s post-Dances with Wolves work is an utter embarrassment. Clint Eastwood is the most reliable acting director in Hollywood, and even he’s not that great by the standards of legitimate, non-acting directors. And yet, they fell for the exact same trick with Mel Gibson’s second directorial feature, the overheated, self-important William Wallace biopic Braveheart. A few well-staged battle scenes and some fancy speechifying don’t save the sluggish pace of the movie or the overwhelming sensation that Wallace is a bit of a sociopathic bully, and the movie doesn’t bear up to even one repeat viewing. It’s not awful, and Gibson has shown he’s capable of good work as a director since then, but Braveheart didn’t even remotely deserve to win Best Picture, even in a relatively weak year for movies.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

In 1939 dollars, Gone With The Wind is still the highest-grossing picture of all time, and it's certainly epic and iconic, what with the burning of Atlanta and Vivien Leigh’s mother of all Oscar clip lines, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” (not to mention Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler not giving a damn and Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy not knowin’ nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies). But lawzy me, what a stupid movie. For one thing, Scarlett O’Hara is easily one of the most annoying characters in cinema history – hardly the sort of person you’d want to spend 222 minutes with (or 238 minutes with overture, entr’act and exit music...thanks, Wikipedia)! Gable’s a hoot, of course...but there are plenty of other, better Gable movies that don’t require the audience to giggle at date rape and cheer the Confederacy. Even setting aside the fact that, as a Yankee (and a heterosexual male), I may not exactly be the film’s target audience, there’s still the issue of the production’s relentless over-the-top Cheez Whiz melodrama. Sure, acting styles have changed over the years, but Of Mice & Men, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Stagecoach were all nominated the same year, so it’s not as if Leigh’s proto-drag queen scenery chewing only looks goofy from a modern perspective: I’m pretty sure the movie was stupid in 1939, too.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)

Widely cited as the worst movie ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, the circus-corn epic The Greatest Show On Earth may have benefited from the political tenor of the times. Its main competition was High Noon, a vastly superior film that nonetheless made AMPAS voters nervous because of its barely disguised anti-McCarthyite message and blacklisted screenwriter. Whatever the reason for its win, there’s no denying that The Greatest Show On Earth is a big load of elephant shit. Even if Cecil B. DeMille hadn’t made it a good 25 years past his own personal expiration date as a filmmaker, it was leagues out of his comfort zone: used to coaching actors in sweeping Biblical and historical epics, he didn’t take to the tawdry, small love triangle under the big top, and no wonder. The dialogue is pure hokum, and the performances range from overblown (Cornel Wilde as an acrobat) to comatose (Charlton Heston as the circus manager). The central romance has as much heat as a paper safely match, and every subplot – and there’s plenty of them in its bloated two and a half hours – is as predictable as it is uninteresting. Even the presence of Jimmy Stewart does nothing to salvage the movie, since his role, as a clown with a dark secret, is telegraphed from the first frame. There’s lots of phony reaction shots of local yokels gasping at the wondrous sights and sounds of the circus, but it’s often unclear what they’re watching; it sure ain’t this movie.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)

The fact that this musical trip to the deep freeze that is Julie Andrews' soul was the biggest box-office sensation of the mid-1960s and held onto the title of Number One Hit of All Time for seven years until it was dislodged by, of all things, The Godfather, just goes to prove that you never know. Critics like to imagine that movies tell us something about the times in which they were made, but when you consider what was going on in the world between 1965 and 1972, all you can surmise from this movie's success is that people must have been desperate to escape reality as thoroughly as they could without barricading themselves inside an isolation tank. If you look at the reviews it received at the time, you see that even polite mainstream critics saw it as a potential menace that would lay waste to the culture like some species of plague, but looking at it with forty years of hindsight, the funniest thing about the movie is that it seems to have come and gone without leaving any progeny. It did inspired the studios to plow millions upon millions of dollars into "family musicals" (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, etc.), all of which are now best remembered for providing an education in just how little return it is possible to get on a major investment. Subsequent attempts to squeeze another nickel out of Andrews' screen image proved largely unsuccessful. (The 1968 musical Star! -- her reunion with The Sound of Music director Robert Wise -- was one of the great financial disasters of the era.) The closest the movie has come to being positively re-evaluated came in the 1990s, when it attracted a cult that attended screenings in fancy dress and talked back to the screen, Rocky Horror-style. For the first time ever, Christopher Plummer's Dracula-like performance as Baron Von Trapp actually made sense.

ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)

Had anyone else been behind the cameras for Ordinary People, it would have come and gone with no great comment -- and perhaps even a modest amount of praise, for the quiet family drama isn’t terrible by any stretch -- but certainly without much hoopla, and definitely without a Best Picture nomination, let alone a win. But because Robert Redford was its director, and Hollywood has always been dismayingly overimpressed with actors who don’t completely embarrass themselves in the director’s chair, it ended up being praised far beyond its virtues. It’s hard to pick out any element about it that’s rotten; the performances are generally adept, the story is competent enough, and the direction is inoffensive. It’s a lot like a small literary novel that comes and goes without much comment. But just as there’s nothing much to damn it with, there’s also nothing much to recommend it. The Best Picture victory of the movie a lot of wise-asses immediately dubbed Ordinary Movie wouldn’t be such a sore thumb if it wasn’t for the competition it bested; not only did it triumph over Coal Miner’s Daughter, which covered much of the same ground only better, but it also beat out The Elephant Man and, shockingly, Raging Bull, both of which, unlike Redford’s directorial debut, went on to be numbered with the greatest films of the decade. Once it became clear what kind of filmmaker Redford really was, the Academy stopped embarrassing themselves by nominating him for big awards; if only they’d figured it out sooner.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

Of all the problems with our culture, what is the single most destructive and indefensible? Gosh, there's so many to choose from, but I'm gonna have to go with the enduringly popular notion that mental retardation and moral goodness are closely linked, to such a degree that one may not be fully possible without the other. Even in politics, the candidate who does the worst job of concealing the breadth of his intelligence is likely to be tagged as a know-it-all elitist and silver-tongued devil, and the one least ashamed of coming across as a dumbass is touted as being a tribune of the people who has the moral certitude that comes from being too dumb to know internal conflict. Forrest Gump isn't a movie about a hero who makes the right choices but the story of someone who does the right thing because he's such a dope that he doesn't know he has any other options. (Forrest's smarter friends, his lifelong love Jenny and his commanding officer in Vietnam, go down self-destructive paths that Forrest is too good to even know are there.) I think that a movie like this must have a special sick appeal in Hollywood, which is full of cynical, morally compromised people who find such nonsense comforting because it can be taken as a reassuring message to slimeballs everywhere: only the stupid can be truly good, so if you're not as good as you might like, it's not your fault: you just had the mixed fortune of being smart. The director, Robert Zemeckis, knows a lot about cynicism and moral compromise; he used to satirize it in movies like his great 1980 comedy Used Cars, and he found out that satire doesn't pay the bills. But even he may have been surprised to discover just how profitable sentimentalizing stupidity can be. Compared to this thing, Pulp Fiction, which it beat out for Best Picture, is as innocent as a newly born kitten on Christmas morning.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

The Terrorists Win

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:45:00 GMT

We've lost a lot because of the terror attacks of September 11th. Thousands of lives; our sense of safety and security; odd little bits of the Constitution which seem to have fallen off and are yet to be located. Some would even argue that in a very profound way, we have lost our soul. But perhaps no loss is as incalculable, as tragic, as utterly horrifying as...Forrest Gump 2.

Yes, according to screenwriter Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his script to the feel-mawkish movie of 1994, he turned in a treatment for a sequel to the tale of a Zelig-like dullard -- which was meant to pick up immediately where the first movie left off, with Gump seated on a park bench eating drugstore candy and dispensing chain-restaurant-menu-ready platitudes -- on 09/10/2001. The events of the next day led to some serious soul-searching by star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis, who decided that "the world had changed" and "we don't think this is relevant anymore", as if it had been before a handful of maniacs flew planes into some buildings. Says Roth today, "Maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are." You'll never make it in today's Hollywood with that attitude, young man!

Not only do we now know the degree to which the terrorists truly damaged America, by depriving themselves of the right to hear an overrated actor mouth two more hours worth of wise-fool cliches, but we know that among the victims were Zemeckis and Roth, who had to find some other way to make a hundred million dollars, and, of course, Gump author Winston Groom, who was screwed out of the sequel money the same way he was screwed out of money for the original. Hollywood's sense of self-importance, fortunately, survived uninjured.

Related Posts:

Yesterday's Hits: Forrest Gump

Terror Hits the Heart of Bollywood

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

21 Stars We Hate (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

TOM HANKS

I know, I know...this list is called “Stars We Hate,” and it’s hard to work up any real vitriol against Mr. Hanks: after all, he seems like a peach of a guy, he’s turned into a pretty good producer and he established an eternal place for himself in the cinematic canon as the voice of Woody in Toy Story 1 & 2. But let me ask you something: do you consider Tim “Buzz Lightyear” Allen a truly iconic movie star? The Cary Grant of his generation? No? Why not? Like Hanks, Allen also rose to fame as a likeable lug in a dumb sitcom, then made the leap to movies with a series of mostly terrible high concept comedies, give or take one undeniable classic apiece (Galaxy Quest for Allen, Big or Splash for Hanks, depending who you ask). And, like Hanks, you totally wouldn’t believe Allen as a dangerous tough guy mobster in Road To Perdition...although, wait, actually, I take that back: considering Tim Allen was busted with a pound of cocaine back in 1978, ratted out 21 drug dealers to avoid a life sentence and spent more than two years in prison, I’m guessing he’s got more than a little bit of a dark side, which makes him an interesting performer even though, for some reason, he’s mostly chosen to squander his talent on crap over the years. Hanks, on the other hand, is more ambitious and, in the “serious” half of his career, has generally chosen better material (three movies with Meg Ryan notwithstanding)...but the problem is there’s no there there: he’s just not that great an actor, no matter how many Best Actor awards he wins. Sure, he pulled the “lose a lot of weight” gimmick for Castaway, which puts him on par (at best) with Ethan Hawke and Christian Bale, who pulled the same trick for Alive and The Machinist, respectively (though neither of them won an Oscar for their efforts). Playing gay was just another award-winning acting gimmick for Hanks in Philadelphia: I never believed his performance for a second, just as I failed to believe his grizzled tough guy act in Perdition or Saving Private Ryan. At his best, in light comedy or light drama like Apollo 13, Hanks is akin to the guy who got all the starring roles in your high school drama club...appealingly bland in productions the audience is predisposed to like. But a modern-day Jimmy Stewart (as people who should know better insist on calling him)? Hardly. For one thing, Jimmy Stewart would never have subjected us to Bachelor Party or Forrest Gump.

DIANE KEATON

In certain quarters here at Nerve’s opulent Screengrab HQ, Diane Keaton is held not only to be not a bad actress, but in fact a rather good one. You will recall, because I know you read everything we post here every day, that she even appeared in the Honorable Mention section of our list of the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time. A gentlemanly raising prevents me from mentioning the name of the Screengrab contributor who placed Ms. Keaton into nomination; but I beg of you -- since I assume you all agree with me that Diane Keaton could not act her way out of a paper bag, or act her way into a paper bag, or even act in the general vicinity of a paper bag -- do not e-mail jibes and rotten fruit at this individual. He is a fine man, an insightful film writer, and an intelligent human being, but once, when we were shooting the back nine at Burning Tree, he caught a stray Ben Hogan right in the temple, and ever since then, he has been unable to recognize Diane Keaton’s fretfully obvious limitations as an actress. Starting out strong by playing Woody Allen’s most appealing muse in Annie Hall, she soon discovered that a career as a professional actress would require her to display emotions other than whimsy and peevishness, a task to which she was sadly unequal. Witness, for example, her performance in The Little Drummer Boy, a woefully overrated film in which she proves that as an actress, she is unable to convincingly portray an actress. Even in her biggest break, playing the insufferably Kay in the first two Godfather movies, her greatest accomplishment is to leave you feeling baffled as to what Michael Corleone – or, for that matter, Francis Ford Coppola – ever saw in her to begin with. Happily, since she has descended into middle age, she has been relegated to the kind of roles Hollywood tends to offer middle-aged women, which greatly reduces the odds that I will ever have to see her in anything ever again.

ANDIE MACDOWELL

Joe Queenan, one of film criticism’s greatest haters, once said of the enervating Penelope Ann Miller that “if she is still alive, Penelope Ann Miller is the worst actress alive. And if she is dead, good.” While I can’t say that I actively wish for Andie MacDowell’s death, I will say that if she were suddenly stricken with some horrible disease that prevented her from ever appearing in front of a camera again, I would send a hundred dollars to any charity vowing to prevent the disease from being cured. While I certainly can’t argue that Penelope Ann Miller is a horrendously bad actress, I will say that, unlike Andie MacDowell, she did not seem to have a knack for convincing talented directors to put her in good movies. While MacDowell's career started out poorly – in her debut role in Greystoke, she was out-acted by both a chimpanzee and Christopher Lambert, and she went on to be only the third most annoying thing about St. Elmo’s Fire – she somehow got herself cast as the lead in the otherwise excellent sex, lies and videotape, where she first showed her ability to flounder around helplessly while being outacted by every sentient creature in the vicinity. She went on to appear in Groundhog Day, where she was unable to convince me that Bill Murray would bother crossing the street for her, let alone turning back time. But her crowning crappiness was in Robert Altman’s wonderful Short Cuts, a movie whose greatness is evident in the fact that it survived being completely ground to a halt by her reading of a line -- in what was meant to be the movie’s most intensely emotional scene -- with all the passion of a piece of cardboard. I haven’t seen her in anything since she conned Wim Wenders into putting her in The End of Violence, but IMDB tells me that she’s spent the last 12 years making movies, just as if she weren’t the very worst actress in the world.

ROBERT REDFORD

If you look at some of Redford's early supporting performances in movies such as Inside Daisy Clover and The Chase, or even his earlier guest shots on such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and Route 66, you see a self-aware guy with a sly wit and the ability to sketch out a character in a few quick strokes. What happened? He turned into a politician, focusing public attention on his support for good causes ranging from the environment to independent filmmaking and taking longer and longer breaks from the screen. It's good to have interests, but the thing is, the breaks from the screen eventually seemed to be continuing even when he was on screen. From the moment that he (belatedly) became a big star on the back of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford's acting became more and more minimalistic, until you began to suspect that he put out so little for fear of expressing something that might alienate or cool off a single member of his target demographic. At the same time, what looked like simple vanity was eating into and damaging his movies in big ways (such as his inability to connect with Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby) and small (such as his refusal to allow his character to receive a jailhouse haircut when he's undercover in a barbaric Southern prison in Brubaker.) Redford made his name at the moment when Hollywood was suddenly deluged with new "ethnic" stars such as Pacino, De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman, as well as stars who fell far outside the pretty-boy category, such as Gene Hackman, and for decades Redford got first pick of the glamorous, man of few words golden boy romantic lead roles in old-fashioned films such as Out of Africa and the benighted Havana because he was thought to be the closest thing left to a star in that mold. Which is fine, but it's surprising that so smart a guy would have wanted those roles, especially given that he didn't devote much time to doing anything else. (Maybe all that shampoo ate into his brain.) Whether as an actor (The Last Castle, Up Close and Personal, Spy Game), a director (The Legend of Bagger Vance), or both (The Horse Whisperer, Lions for Lambs), his films of the last several years couldn't be more beside the point. He faces the end of his career in the very odd position of being a hero to young independent filmmakers at the film festival his Sundance Institute sponsors rather than for any movies he's actually worked on.

BRAD PITT

Pitt became America's sweetheart through his role as the one night stand of Geena Davis' dreams in Thelma and Louise, but the thing about one night stands is you're never supposed to have to see them again. It didn't take too many leading roles to reveal that Pitt couldn't act a lick, but it was easy to sympathize with all the people who didn't mind so long as they got to rest their eyes on him for a couple of hours. However, two factors made Pitt's superstardom more grating than the success of most fabulously good-looking untalented people: first, a lot of people, some of them movie critics, liked looking at him so much that they actually started talking as if he were in fact one hell of an actor, and not just a skillful master of his craft, but rather some kind of high-flying hip icon, earning him the respect of people who wouldn't cross the street to piss on, say, Keanu Reeves; and, second, for a while he seemed to think that he had something to prove, so after being content to flash his teeth and his six-pack in Thelma and Louise, A River Runs Through It, and Legends of the Fall, he actually started taking on challenging roles in creatively ambitious projects, and in the course of time showed that he had it in him to be a real menace. To see Pitt trying to break new acting ground in 12 Monkeys, Se7en and Interview with the Vampire (where he mostly succeeded in making his co-star, Tom Cruise, look better than he ever had before, albeit by comparison) is to experience the same kind of flush of emotions one might feel watching a drunken monkey juggle plastic explosives. When he has no idea what to do, as in most of Vampire, he pouts as if the director just hit him with a yardstick and bruised his winkie. When, God help us, he's fully confident and going for broke, as in 12 Monkeys, his uncontrolled spasm of a performance makes you fear for his co-workers. During the late '90s, in such films as Seven Days in Tibet and Meet Joe Black, he did seem to find his true niche, getting paid kajillions of dollars to star in unbelievably long, misconceived movies that nobody would see. And he gave what will likely stand as his best-remembered performance in Fight Club, in which he was well-cast as a violent lunatic's vainest projection of his imaginary self-image. Time, money, and acclaim seem to have mellowed him, and the on-screen company of George Clooney and Angelina Jolie has been good for him; in the Danny Ocean pictures and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, he's been content to hang around on screen like a handsome lump, allowing the filmmakers to tap into his proven box office appeal while leaving the heavy lifting to his more gifted co-stars. But on those occasions where he's attempted to re-affirm his acting stature by impersonating Achilles or Jess James -- well, he still pouts real good.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Unwatchable #70: “Epic Movie”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:00:00 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.

How could you do this to me, IMDb Bottom 100 list? After all we’ve been through together, how could you make me sit through two Friedberg-Seltzer spoof movies in a single week? It was only last Friday that I took on #72 Meet the Spartans, and now you present me with the diarrhea duo’s previous exercise in pop culture regurgitation, Epic Movie. Look, I was patient and understanding when you made me watch two Kickboxer sequels. At least you gave me a few weeks to recover between them. But now you’ve crossed a line, IMDb Bottom 100 list. We’ll continue to do business together, but we’re no longer speaking.

The only good news is that, much like Spartans, Epic Movie barely crosses the 60 minute mark before the extended credits, complete with dance sequences and hee-larious outtakes, begin. Also, the word apparently had yet to reach the top Hollywood agencies that they would serve their clients best by destroying all query letters from Friedberg-Seltzer Industries; there are actual recognizable faces on display here in addition to the usual sort-of-look-and-sound-alikes. Kal Penn, Jennifer Coolidge, David Carradine, Crispin Glover (!) and perhaps most dishearteningly, Fred Willard, all show up and do their best to survive with their dignity intact.

The best I can say about Epic Movie is that it’s not quite as slapdash as Meet the Spartans. (I’ll dismiss the fact that it’s actually ranked higher on the list as a statistical quirk.) There’s a sort of plot, at least for a while, involving four orphans, each of whom secures a golden ticket entitling them to a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. (Wonka is played by Glover, doing a twitchy but uninspired take on Johnny Depp’s version.) Wonka takes the orphans prisoner in order to use their organs as the secret ingredient in his candy, but they escape through the wardrobe into Gnarnia. (The ‘G’ is what makes it a parody, right up there with those Cracked issues of the mid-70s featuring “The Fonze.”) There they battle The White Bitch (Coolidge), enlist the aid of Captain Jack Swallows, and get Punk’d by an Ashton Kutcher-alike in a trucker hat.

There are fleeting indications in Epic Movie that Friedberg and Seltzer have some dim awareness that making a pop culture joke involves putting some sort of twist on that which is familiar. For instance, turning the Mutant Academy into a high school where the X-Men are the cool kids is an amusing notion. Turning the Da Vinci Code phrase “So dark the con of man” into “So lame the hair of Tom” as a poke at the follicular follies of Tom Hanks in that particular movie – that’s moderately chuckle-worthy. Having the characters break into hip-hop musical numbers every ten minutes, however, is not funny. It’s not funny the first time, it’s not funny the fourth time, and it only calls attention to the fact that you’re desperate to pump up the running time.

There are indications that the game is up for our friends Iceberg and Salsa. (See what I did there? I spoofed ‘em! I spoofed ‘em good!) Their latest atrocity Disaster Movie did not approach the box office success of its predecessors, and it became the first movie ever to score a perfect 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now that’s funny.

Previously on Unwatchable:
71. Gigli
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Serve d
75. The Last Sign

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Feature Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, according to our very own Scott Von Doviak, Star Wars: The Clone Wars may not exactly be on the short list for this year’s Best Animated Feature Film Oscar, although, to paraphrase Warner Bros. head of distribution Dan Fellman, awards, critical praise and boffo box office were never really the point, since the movie, essentially, "was targeted to a specific audience for specific reasons [i.e., to promote the upcoming Cartoon Network series of the same name]. We accomplished that mission, and it will continue in another medium."

That crazy dreamer! Just goes to show that, when it comes to animation, even studio execs can get swept up in the magic that happens when pencils, paint, pixels, Plasticine modeling clay or paper cut-outs meet persistence of vision and insane amounts of patience.

According to our old friend, Wikipedia, “The earliest form of animation is a 5,200 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta which has five images painted along the sides. When the bowl is spun, it shows a goat leaping up to a tree to take a pear.” (And, ironically, scientists have since determined the bowl actually received better reviews and a higher per-screen average than The Clone Wars...but I digress.)

Anyway, the aforementioned bowl may or may not be included in NEXT week’s list of The Screengrab’s all-time favorite animated shorts, but in-between then and now (get it? get it? I’m here all week! Try the veal!) please join us for a very special Screengrab salute to the greatest animated features of all time!

PINOCCHIO (1940)

It’s possible my family would disown me if I didn’t include this classic of old-school Disney animation since, according to legend, this is the movie that my grandfather Joe took my grandmother Louise to on the night he proposed. (Awwww!) Personal family history aside, it’s hard to argue with Pinocchio as a prime example of traditional American cel animation. Oh, sure, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had scarier witches, The Jungle Book had Louis Prima and Bambi traumatized an entire generation, but Jiminy Cricket is one of the all-time iconic animated characters, Monstro the Whale is pretty fucking bad-ass, the Pinocchio nose bit launched a zillion stand-up routines and political cartoons and, between my grandparents’ love story and childhood memories of melancholy end-of-the-weekend episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney, “When You Wish Upon A Star” is embedded deep enough in my DNA that all the shitty cover versions and cynical Disney ad campaigns from then 'til now still haven’t managed to dislodge its pure, essential sweetness from my black little heart.

FRITZ THE CAT (1972)

The film that opened up brand-new horizons for scores of boomer spawn that accidentally stuck this in the VCR, mislead by the cartoon cover. Fritz, a Village denizen in a turtleneck sweater, discusses James Baldwin, scores with NYU chicks, starts a race riot and smokes a whole hell of a lot of grass. This was the first animated feature to be rated X. Yet the cartoon depictions of bathtub group sex amid pink clouds seem rather tame in this post-Britney age. The film is based on Robert Crumb's eponymous comic. However, Crumb did not like the film much. He felt it was, "really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi's confusion, you know. There's something real repressed about it. In a way, it's more twisted than my stuff. It's really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way."

AKIRA (1988)

Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s epic film adaptation of his own bestselling manga series isn’t just one of the best animated features of all time; it’s also one of the most important. Simply on its aesthetic merits, Akira is a winner: the cyberpunk-suffused story of a near-future Tokyo plagued by gangs and facing the threat of an uncontrollable teenage psychic is visually stunning, packed with detail, and suffused with unstoppable energy. The script is deep and complex, but never so deep that it gets in the way of the dynamic action sequences; every frame seems to burst with color, motion and power. It’s also well-acted, well-written, and surprisingly sophisticated in its use of music and sound. But beyond its merits as a film, it truly opened up the gates for “Japanimation”; what was previously the occupation of a relatively small number of hobbyists became the obsession of a whole generation of fans. Future anime productions would find millions of new admirers, and older movies and TV series would gain a brand-new audience, often leading to their first-ever home video releases in the west. The runaway popularity of Akira likewise lead to a new interest in manga comics, as fans of the movie tracked down the comic it was based on, establishing a new and insatiable western audience for Japanese serial comics. A live-action remake is currently in the works and scheduled for release sometime in 2009, but even if it can capture the thrilling visual imagery of Ôtomo’s animation, it can’t hope to duplicate the massive cultural impact of the original.

TOY STORY (1995)

Nowadays, the word “Pixar” associated with a movie is practically a guarantee that we’re going to get a smart, funny, technically astounding animated film that will be enjoyable for both kids and adults. But back in 1995, before Toy Story was released, there was a certain feeling of dread that accompanied the announcement of its production. We’d all seen computer animation, and to be honest, we weren’t all that impressed. It was thought of as a heartless, soulless medium, the playground of technicians, not artists. And at the very least, it wasn’t something that Disney Studios – the people responsible for the greatest animated features of all time – should be associated with. Once we actually got a look at it, though, all fears were laid to rest: Toy Story was a revelation. Its visuals were light-years beyond anything we’d seen at the time; it’s certainly been surpassed on a yearly basis since then, but even viewing it now, it’s hardly an embarrassment. But aside from the technical revelation of what computer animation was capable of, the story was downright terrific. It was driven by its characters, not its gimmicks; and, avoiding the trap that would befall many of its followers, its humor was driven by situations and not empty pop-cultural references. Though the precedent it set of using already-famous celebrities instead of established voice actors to voice the characters was a bad one, here the choice is unimpeachable, as Tom Hanks, Wallace Shawn, and even Tim Allen give performance perfectly attuned to their characters. Combine all of this with a timeless story and a terrific score by Randy Newman, and you begin to realize how Pixar got its sterling reputation in the first place.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four; Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

Yesterday's Hits: Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Forrest Gump a hit?: A number of factors that played a significant role in making Forrest Gump a success. To begin with, there was the storyline, which placed a Pilgrim’s Progress-style narrative in the context of the second half of the twentieth century. Forrest (played by Tom Hanks) meets many of the most significant people of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, while bearing witness to or even playing a part in a number of important events from the same period, all the while acting like it’s no big deal. And not only does he survive the journey, but he becomes an unlikely success, armed with only the sage words of his Mama (Sally Field), his undying love for Jenny (Robin Wright), and his own good nature.

In his re-creation of recent historical events, director Robert Zemeckis combined cutting-edge effects with good old-fashioned nostalgia, giving the audience a chance to see a fictional character interact onscreen with such key figures as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and John Lennon, instead of having actors portray them. In addition, the storyline combined a sincere celebration of hearth-and-home values with the ironic touch of making its uncannily lucky protagonist a simpleton with an IQ of 75. Forrest Gump became a monster word-of-mouth hit due to these factors as well as the iconic performance of Hanks, a well-liked (and Oscar-winning) actor who cemented his status as Hollywood’s favorite Everyman with this film. It was the #1 hit of 1994 and took home six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, plus a second consecutive Best Actor statue for Hanks.

What happened?: As is often the case when a movie becomes a surprise smash, Hollywood took the Gump brand and rammed it down the throats of America. Soon after the film became a hit, Paramount commissioned a volume entitled Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump, which basically consisted of folksy quotations from the film. Other tie-ins soon followed- posters, cookbooks, even a chain of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurants. Eventually, the majority of people were more or less Gump-ed out.

In addition, the fall of 1994 brought the year’s other big word-of-mouth hit, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s film was as cool and edgy as Gump was warm and fuzzy, and the two were quickly positioned as pop-culture polar opposites. While this assessment is somewhat unfair to both films- even Tarantino acknowledged as much- Pulp quickly came to symbolize the future of movies, while Gump was the establishment. Even today, Pulp’s critical rep remains intact, while Gump’s has fallen quite a bit- witness the former’s #1 status atop EW’s recent “New Classics” list, while the latter failed to crack the top 100.

Does Forrest Gump still work?: Sort of, although it’s not without its problems. The combination of sentiment and irony that Zemeckis tries to pull off here is a tricky one, and I don’t quite think he succeeds. There’s no small irony in Forrest’s situation- in a tricky time, he becomes a success largely because he doesn’t know any better than to live according to his nature. He doesn’t know better than to do as he’s told and be loyal to those closest to him, which helps him to become a star football player, a war hero, a table tennis champion, a successful shrimp boat captain, and a philanthropist, all with an intelligence level that wouldn’t have allowed him to enroll in public school without the (ahem) intervention of his Mama.

The trouble is that the irony of the situation only really works if we believe Forrest is slow-witted, and I never quite did. The trouble has less to do with Hanks’ performance as it does with the literal nature of film. On the page, Winston Groom sketched out the character of Forrest using only language, and despite the book’s numerous other flaws, we believed its hero was an idiot. Not so in the film. Hanks does a fine job with the role as written, but too much intelligence flickers behind his eyes for us to believe he’s as simple as the film says he is. In addition, screenwriter Eric Roth often falls back on impeccably written monologues to allow Forrest to express his deeper feelings, a tendency which runs contrary to the character’s nature. Such soliloquies would require no small amount of thought, and if there’s one thing Forrest Gump isn’t, it’s a thinker.

When viewing the film again recently, I also found the film’s treatment of Jenny to be fairly ugly. Forrest Gump uses Jenny as a counterpoint to Forrest, a woman whose background is considerably more unfortunate than Forrest’s. Unlike Forrest, Jenny is intelligent enough to think for herself, but the choices she makes for herself- posing for Playboy, shacking up with the leader of the SDS at Berkeley, getting into drugs- invariably get her into trouble, and time and again Forrest has to bail her out. This just doesn’t sit well with me- Forrest coasts on the tide of fate and is rewarded by meeting three presidents, seeing the world, and becoming independently wealthy, while Jenny uses her free will to get kicked out of college, abused by her revolutionary boyfriend, and turn into a junkie, before rebounding in time to die of a mysterious “virus”? I’m not sure whether this counts as misogynistic or simply anti-thought, but either way, I don’t like it much.

There are a few other elements that didn’t work for me. That extended sequence of Forrest running back and forth across the country serves little discernible purpose besides giving us picture-postcard shots of the American landscape, throwing a couple of nostalgia jokes into the story, and filling up a few years of Forrest’s life before Jenny calls again. And I became annoyed with the film’s tendency to use the most obvious soundtrack choices, especially during the scenes set in the late sixties. “Fortunate Son”? “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”? “Let’s Get Together”? Check, check, and check.

In spite of these flaws, much of Forrest Gump remains quite effective, beginning with Zemeckis’ use of special effects. Much was made at the time of the way the film placed Forrest into old newsreel footage, but while those effects have grown dated, other instances of CGI in the film are far more impressive. The most obvious example of this is the still-convincing removal of Lt. Dan’s legs, aided in no small part by Gary Sinise’s performance. But even in less obvious special effects scenes- the football games, the demonstration in Washington, D.C.- Forrest Gump remains a standard-bearer for photo-realistic CGI, which is a testament to Zemeckis and his effects teams’ attention to detail.

But in the end, it’s the human element that’s the heart of Forrest Gump. I’ve always been a fan of the way the film handles the complex dynamic between Forrest and Lt. Dan, as well as how their relationship between the two men evolves over time. I also found the simplicity of the friendship between Forrest and Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) to be surprisingly touching. And on the occasions when the screenplay gives Forrest dialogue that actually sounds like it might come out of the mouth of a man with a 75 IQ (rather than a screenwriter who’s trying to “write dumb”), Hanks’ performance is deserving of the love that was bestowed on it at the time. I especially liked the following exchange between Jenny and Forrest, which does a better job of getting to the heart of Forrest’s character than any Oscar-friendly monologue ever could:

Jenny: Why are you always so good to me, Forrest?
Forrest: You’re my girl!

This Is Anvil: Thirty-Year Heavy Metal Veterans Remade as Overnight Documentary Stars

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Anvil is a Canadian heavy metal band that goes back to 1978, though the two core sustaining members, Robb Reiner and Steve Kudlow, first started playing together five years earlier than that, when they were fourteen years old. They've put out a dozen albums since 1981, mostly on small labels with such names as Attic and Viper, but they've managed to stay just this side of cult status. Now their big break may have arrived in the form of a movie: they star in the documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil, which marks the directorial debut of Sacha Gervasi, who had his big break a few years back when Steven Spielberg directed The Terminal, from his original screenplay. Gervasi says that he's "grateful" for that experience, which he characterizes as having had "the greatest, most highly paid day job in the world." But after seeing his idea for a gentle, oddball little comedy turned into "their movie"--i.e., Spielberg's and star Tom Hanks's--he felt an urgent need to "make a statement I was in control of.” Anvil, which had a triumphant reception at the Sundance Film Festival, is shaping up as a positive career experience for Gervasi, his producer, Rebecca Yeldham, and the band itself, even if they are having to put up with hearing their life story compared to This Is Spinal Tap.

Actually, it could be that compared to Anvil, Spinal Tap didn't know from dues. Gervasi told reporter John Anderson that he knew he had the unconvinced Yeldham hooked when he took her out to dinner with Steve Kudlow and, as Anderson writes, "At some point during their meal Mr. Kudlow made a melancholy admission: During one of his many less-than-glamorous, non-rock ’n’ roll careers, he had delivered fish to that same restaurant. After all those years of lugging in the snapper and cod, this was the first time he had sat in the dining room." (Gervasi himself knew the band from when he'd worked for them as a roadie in the 1980s.) Inevitably, the buzz around the movie has now earned Anvil offers from record companies, including one that actually rejects them in the movie. For now, the band is happy to see how much promotion they can get out of the movie. Summing up the current state of his ambitions, Steve Kudlow says, “I can’t envision myself being a millionaire, but I can envision myself going to a gig every night and making enough money to make ends meet. I want to be the biggest bar band in the world and work endlessly.” Having played Sundance and Toronto's Hoc Docs festival, Anvil will soon be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its showcase presentation of this year's attention-getting Sundance entries.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Tina Fey is My Baby Mama

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Your Entertainment Weekly cover gal is Tina Fey, and why not? Not only is she riding high on television with 30 Rock, for which she won a Golden Globe, but she has some new movie product to promote. It’s Baby Mama, of course, and it’s about as high concept as it gets: upscale but infertile Fey hires white trash Amy Poehler to have her baby for her. ''I liked the topicality of the fertility issues that affect so many people,'' says Fey. ''There's so much weirdness and emotion about it. If you start with something juicy, you end up with a better [movie] than if you just start with some jokes. And Amy liked that it did not have anything to do with a goddamn wedding.'' Well, there is that to be thankful for.

Not that Fey is entirely comfortable on the A-list yet, as we learn when “she recounts her near run-in with director M. Night Shyamalan at the studio; Fey chose not to introduce herself, because she wasn't sure it was him until after he left (‘I thought it'd be racist to go up to the wrong Indian guy and ask if he was M. Night Shyamalan'’).”

There’s a lot of talk in the EW piece about how much heart the movie has and how that might translate to box office success, but we don’t care about any of that. We’re more interested in the time she called one-time SNL host Paris Hilton a “piece of shit” on The Howard Stern Show. ''I should really strive to have better manners about those things,'' says Fey. ''Pretty soon my kid's going to understand what I'm saying and be able to access it on the computer. I screwed up something a few months ago and I was like, 'You know who wouldn't do that? Tom Hanks. You know who would keep his mouth shut? Tom Hanks. I should try to be like Tom Hanks.'''

The Baby Mama website offers a clever little gimmick, if little else: it’s the Baby Mama Maker! Upload photos of any two faces and the software will reveal what your offspring will look like. I tried it using photos of myself and Tina Fey, and here, as a Screengrab exclusive, is our baby, Apple! Isn’t she adorable?

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

Vanishing Act: Daniel Waters

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Diablo Cody, take notice. Once upon a time, in a magical land called the 1980s, there was a hip youth-culture screenwriter of the moment named Daniel Waters. He wrote a zeitgeisty movie called Heathers that Variety described as “super-smart black comedy about high school politics and teenage suicide that showcases a host of promising young talents.” Among those talents were Christian Slater, unveiling the Jack Nicholson impression that would sustain his career at least until the release of Kuffs in 1992, future 90210 bad girl Shannen Doherty, and future shoplifter Winona Ryder, who was sort of the Ellen Page of her time. Heathers was a cult hit, and Waters got the lion’s share of the credit. (Director Michael Lehmann’s recent comeback attempt Flakes was described here as a “soggy mess.”)

Waters used his newfound clout to pen two of the most reviled movies (justly or not) of the early 1990s: the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and notorious bomb Hudson Hawk. He managed to reclaim a modicum of respectability by scripting Batman Returns (although much of his work went unused), then did some work on 1993’s Demolition Man before disappearing for eight years. He resurfaced with his debut as a writer-director, Happy Campers, a sort of cross between Heathers and Meatballs that never received a theatrical release.

Another long hiatus followed, but now the L.A. Times catches up with Waters, who has a new movie due in theaters Friday. Sex and Death 101 reunites him with Winona Ryder for the story of a man (Simon Baker) who receives a mysterious email listing all the women he ever has or ever will have sex with. As it happens, Waters has taken up residence in the former home of another man who was no stranger to prolonged vanishing acts, Orson Welles. "I bought the house because I wanted to get that Citizen Kane mojo," says Waters. "Instead I'm getting the end of [Welles'] career, the hanging out with Henry Jaglom, doing wine commercials and magic tricks part of his life. I mean, I enjoy my life, but come on -- where's my Touch of Evil?"

Like Welles before him, Waters also keeps busy “on never-made projects like an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land for Tom Hanks.” Is Sex and Death 101 his Touch of Evil? Here’s the trailer – judge for yourself:

Take Five: Cryptozoology

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Despite the fact that multiple reports of gremlins, wing-monsters and foo fighters by American flyers in WWII were all almost certainly the result of ordinary mechanical failure, combat fatigue, or smuggling a bottle of Old Crow into the cockpit, the Army took them seriously enough to launch a legitimate investigation, and by the 1960s, the beasties were entrenched enough in popular culture to inspire a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone. When a movie adaptation rolled around some twenty years later, a remake of this episode was arguably its high point, thanks largely to a wildly over-the-top, and yet somehow perfectly suitable, lead performance by John Lithgow. (Amusingly enough, almost twenty years after that, William Shatner — who'd played the gremlin's victim in the original TV version — was paired up with Lithgow on his own show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and the two baked hams overacted like there was no tomorrow in a sly inside gag about their shared past.) Nowadays, the movie is remembered largely for the disastrous accident that took the lives of several crew members, and given John Landis' rather contemptible behavior at a subsequent trial for negligence, it's surprising he didn't try to blame the helicopter crash on an invisible monster only he could see.

SPLASH (1984)

Yes, folks, there are those in the cryptozoological community — and apparently there is one — who believe that mermaids are really real, and not just the product of a dugong and a very lonely, very drunk sailor coming into contact with one another. It is to them and to you that we recommend a fresh viewing of this charming '80s comedy. It's long been an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape; few people even think about it these days. But Splash is in fact a very fine comedy of its day, not boisterous or insulting like the majority of Eighties comedies that reached its level of success. And it also functions quite well as a time capsule: it brings us a pre-iconic Tom Hanks, a pre-crazy-recluse Darryl Hannah, a pre-self-important Ron Howard, and a pre-death John Candy in one of his most appealing roles — all wrapped up in a genuinely funny, if slight, Bruce Jay Friedman screenplay. There's only five dugongs in captivity, but DVDs of Splash can be found anywhere.

ANACONDA (1997)

Despite an incredibly dismal record of investigations into various Nessies, Jersey Devils and Bigfeet, the cryptozoologists have been right exactly once: the giant squid. Long considered a myth, a dead Architeuthis washed up in New Zealand in the 1870s, and in 2004, scientists finally captured living speciments on film. Many believe that if the fringe biology crowd is going to score another stopped-clock victory, it will be with the discovery of gigantic specimens of the already huge constrictor snakes known as anaconda, and when that day comes, perhaps this movie will be viewed as eerily prophetic instead of an embarrassingly hokey, campy creature feature with a mind-blowingly unrealistic rubber snake as its villain. Anaconda isn't entirely unsalvageable; Jon Voight hams it up deliciously as a great white hunter, Ice Cube is entertaining in full-on Private Hudson mode as a doomed photographer, and there are many fine shots of Jennifer Lopez' structurally pleasing hiney. However, the script is an utter dud, the special effects look like they were done by a dull fifteen-year-old, and the plot makes The Mothman Prophecies look brilliant by comparison.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)

When the history of Richard Gere's movie career is written, it's unlikely that this will be one of its most glorious moments. It's hard to imagine a worse title than The Mothman Prophecies, and if the movie isn't quite as terrible as the title promises, it sure as hell ain't great, either. Supposedly based on true events, the flick is about as good as you might expect from a movie prefaced by such a claim; back in the 1970s, they used to make thousands of flicks like this loopy would-be chiller about a West Virginia town haunted by mysterious visions of the future and visitations by a rubbery, bug-winged extraterrestrial something-or-other, and they were all pretty bad, albeit in a different way. The Mothman Prophecies is plenty expensive as opposed to a cheap filmed-in-a-weekend exploitation flick, and it tries for a post-modern moody ambience instead of pure shock, but it's still pretty dire. There's a big, garish steel statue of the Mothman in the actual West Virginia town where the events of the movie allegedly took place; it's a safe bet that Gere's performance — alternately bored and confused — will ever be similarly immortalized.

That Guy!: Dan Hedaya

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

You know, folks, it's really not my intention for this feature to just go through a list of everyone who's ever worked with the Coen Brothers or appeared in Buckaroo Banzai, but that's the way it seems to be shaking down. Some people just share my appreciation of freaky-looking middle-aged guys who behave eccentrically, I suppose. Anyway, Dan Hedaya's first movie role was in Myra Breckenridge, but don't hold that against him: not only did he go one to have a beloved television career, most prominently as the dull-witted Nick Tortelli on Cheers, but he's also appeared in nearly a hundred movies, usually as some variety of dolt or sleazebag. 1999 saw him combine the two, playing doltish sleazebag Richard M. Nixon in Dick and fulfilling a sort of physical destiny: with his weighty jowls, shifty eyes, and perpetual five-o'-clock shadow, he's a near spitting image of the Tricky One. Born to a family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Hedaya taught junior high school science for a number of years before his acting career took off; his shuffling demeanor and absent-minded craziness is certainly reminiscient of more than a few science teachers we can remember from our own school years. Outside of television, the role which Hedaya made the biggest impact was that of Alicia Silverstone's wealthy father in Clueless; he also stole the show in the overblown, overpriced movie version of The Addams Family as Gomez's crooked, shiftless attorney, Tully Alford. Recently, as he closes out his sixties, he's specialized in playing the fathers of characters as eccentric as he is: he was Amy Sedaris' dad in the big-screen adaptation of Strangers with Candy, the patriarch of the Butabi Brothers in the dismal SNL spin-off A Night at the the Roxbury, and the father of the obsessive-compulsive detective played by Tony Shalhoub in Monk. His recent appearance in the controversial TV series The Book of Daniel shows that he won't stop shuffling into strange roles anytime soon.

Where to see Dan Hedaya at his best:

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

In their motion picture debut, Joel and Ethan Coen were already showing their deft touch with character actors, casting Dan Hedaya as Julian Marty, the possessive, sleazy strip club owner who stands between John Getz and Frances McDormand. Hedaya gets a rare opportunity to show off his capacity to express rage during his final confontation with Getz, and goes on to become the most persistent murder victim since Paul Meurisse in Diabolique. But all told, it's just one of the earliest examples of his long line of questionable scumbags, a man so dodgy that even ethics-deprived private dick M. Emmet Walsh finds him "disgustin'".

JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

John Patrick Shanley was one of Hollywood's hottest properties, coming off of a big hit with Moonstruck, when he made this rather strange little number, a suicidal romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan looking as uncomfortable as ever. But Dan Hedaya almost single-handedly salvages the movie with a brief but mercilessly hilarious cameo near the start of the film as the hapless, hopeless Hanks' boss. He vanishes from the movie early on and never has much impact on the plot, but he gets some of the greatest comic dialogue of any film of the year: "I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you!"

MUHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

We have it on good authority that when David Lynch approached Dan Hedaya about appearing as enigmatic movie producer Vincenzo Castigliane in Mulholland Drive, he asked him: "Dan, we know you can do eccentric. We know you can do sleazy. We know you can even do creepy. But can you do completely bugshit insane?" (He can get the job, but can he do the job?) It turns out he can, and we were all rewarded with another small but scene-stealing performance in this perplexing surrealist masterpiece from a guy who knows good character actors almost as well as the Coens.

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

State of Play in Hollywood

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.

Don't feel too bad for the studio bosses, though; in a business where sincerity is regarded as a first sign of the onset of dementia, the various strikes are in some ways a gold mine for the people in charge of spin. United Artists is currently backing out of Pinkville, Oliver Stone's planned movie on the My Lai massacre, and the official story is that it's because of, yes, script problems that can't be dealt with due to the strike. But anonymous sources claim, not implausibly, that UA was looking for a way to get out because, after the commercial failure of all the Iraq War movies this fall (including UA's own megaflop Lions for Lambs), the last thing anybody wants to do is fund another big-budget expedition back to Vietnam. — Phil Nugent

The Ten Best Deleted Scenes of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN," ALMOST FAMOUS

Depending on your feelings about Cameron Crowe, this is either the ballsiest or the most pretentious deleted scene ever released on DVD. Either way, Almost Famous would have been ten minutes and eleven seconds longer if Crowe had secured the rights to "Stairway to Heaven," which plays over this scene in its entirety. Here's the set-up: it's the early '70s, and high-school music critic William Miller (Patrick Fugit) has been offered the opportunity to accompany his favorite rock band on tour, but his mother (Frances McDormand) believes that rock n' roll is the devil's music. In order to convince her otherwise, William sits his family down and makes them listen to "Stairway." And they listen. And we listen. And we watch them listen. For eight minutes. The most amazing thing about this scene is that it works : it's a battle between William's youthful enthusiasm and his mother's skepticism, played out in facial expressions and body language. When McDormand's character reaches her decision, it's perfectly clear how she got there.

THE SPIDERWALK, THE EXORCIST

For all its grotesque make-up, bodily fluids and levitation effects, The Exorcist gets the most scare mileage from scenes in which possessed adolescent Regan (Linda Blair) does something that almost seems human — but is, in fact, frightening and impossible. The scene in which her head turns completely around is a bone-chilling example. This infamous deleted scene, achieved with the aid of a contortionist body double and suspension wires, is another. Director William Friedkin cut the spider walk from the theatrical release of The Exorcist, believing that it showed "too much" too soon. It later became the most talked-about inclusion in the director's cut, and it ranks among the film's most notable scenes for sheer creepiness.

THE RECORD-SELLING SCENE, HIGH FIDELITY

For record store clerk/owner Rob Gordon (John Cusack), romantic passion and musical passion are completely intertwined. If he were to lose faith in either one, life would not be worth living. That sentiment is perfectly encapsulated in this deleted scene from High Fidelity, in which a jilted wife (Beverly D'Angelo) attempts to sell Rob her husband's priceless record collection at an obscene discount. Most collectors would pounce on the deal, but Rob is thrown into a moral quandary — almost as if he's afraid of hurting the records' feelings. In addition to its endearing portrait of Rob's unique personal ethics, this scene forshadows his pivotal realization later in the film: that he actually kind of loves the job he spends his life bitching about.

THE PHONE CALL HOME, BIG

The '80s were a decade of body-switching comedies, but Penny Marshall's Big was a cut above the rest. Twenty years later, it's still fresh, believable and funny, mostly because Marshall eschews bloated gags and focuses on the small, day-to-day difficulties of being a child in a middle-aged world. There's a dark edge to the film's best moments, which inevitably emerge from Josh's fear, bewilderment and naiveté. This deleted scene takes place after Josh (Hanks) has received his first adult paycheck ("One hundred and twenty dollars!" he exclaims, having never seen that much money before) and spent it gorging on junk food. Up all night with a stomachache, the only thing Josh can think to do is call his mother — who, of course, doesn't recognize his post-puberty voice. The newly released extended version of Big includes this scene, and it's a moving counterpoint to the giddy junk-food-and-silly-string orgy that precedes it.

"MERCY" (THE LAIR SCENE), ALIEN

This gut-wrenching scene, cut from the theatrical release of Alien, contains a startling revelation: with the exception of John Hurt's character (whose chest was memorably split open), none of the alien's victims are dead. Instead, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the half-alive bodies of her friends being devoured, slowly and painfully, by the alien's offspring. In addition to being a great scene for Weaver — you can see her humanity leaking away as she aims that flamethrower — it's one of the more horrifying visuals that the filmmakers created, and it contains a stunning H. R. Giger set piece that didn't make it into the theatrical version.

— Gwynne Watkins

Check back tomorrow for Part 2!