The Screengrab : vincent schiavelli

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him. At the time, it must have seemed that this had worked out pretty great for Crowe; as a reporter, he really did cozy up to the rock stars he covered and wrote flatteringly about them (out of what seemed to be real awe for his subjects, rather than opportunism), and the connections he forged couldn't have done him any harm on his path to becoming a big Hollywood writer-director. But resisting Bangs's advice that he learn to temper his sweet enthusiasm with some distance and skepticism--to care more about his art than about others' feelings--he may have done some harm to his ability to extend his range as a filmmaker. In fact, after Crowe's last couple of movies, and the last couple of anthologies with Bangs's material in them, Bangs's career is probably the healthier one now, and he's been dead since 1982.

Howard (Walter Huston), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Howard, the ancient prospector (and proto-ecologist--witness his speech about leaving the Earth "the way we found it"), suggests Yoda crossed with Gabby Hayes, and may be the platonic ideal of the figure of the Western codger who sometimes seems half-mad but has great stores of wiliness and gumption. Drafted by a couple of tenderfeet to bring his experience to a gold-mining venture, he makes his pupils rich, while adhering to the rule that defines so many movie mentor figures: namely, his sage advice does him more good than the people to whom he offers it. When last seen, the old man is preparing to return to the Indian village where he can live out his golden years receiving the royal treatment in exchange for serving as the locals' "medicine man." Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs, the malcontent who scorns fair treatment for his mentor, makes his fortune but gets his lead lopped off before he can haul it back to civilization, while Tim Holt, who treats Howard with the respect that is his due, stays alive but loses his riches and has no recourse but to go back to being Tim Holt.

"Subway Ghost" (Vincent Schiavelli), GHOST (1990(

Lanky at six feet four, with a thick shock of untamed dark hair surrounding a bald pate and a long face like melted ice cream, Schiavelli (who died in 2005) was often cast for the shock effect of his appearance, whether he was playing an asylum inmate in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or a high school teacher in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (where the news that he has a hot-looking wife is good for a laugh). His role as a nameless and very touching spectre in Ghost gave him the chance to play an uncharacteristically direct and fiery character, and he rose to the occasion so fully that, for a few scenes, he actually brought something wholly unearthly to a movie that's mostly about comforting the audience by showing it that death is just another stage of life. Schiavelli seems to know different: being stranded among the living has turned him into the most alienated figure imaginable, and after he's consented to help the hero master his abilities, he abruptly takes his leave, as if he'd just remembered that the movie he's in is meant for those who are sweeter-natured than he has any interest in being.

John (Bruce Dern), THE TRIP (1967)

Never slow to jump on a trend, Roger Corman was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the late 60s, casting Peter Fonda as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. This is like buying the parenting manual by Lynne "mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn" Spears. Nonetheless, Groves agrees to take the drug under the supervision of Dern's unnerving weird-beard character John, and off we go into the lava lamp school of druggy filmmaking — pretty colors and shapes, strobe lights and colored gels. At this point, your more responsible LSD guide would put on some trippy tunes and maybe show you some groovy album covers, but John just sort of snivels and grins and makes Groves feel even more nervous and paranoid with his "hey, it's just a normal ol' chair, buddy" routine. It's even possible that Corman meant John to be a comforting presence, but happened to be out shooting second unit footage for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters the day the casting director learned Dern was willing to work for a sleeping bag and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches. Anyway, Groves' trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he's killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. Then he proves to be an even worse judge of character than we'd previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. Just say no, kids.

Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), REPO MAN (1984)

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud, the veteran repo man embodied in all his shambling, world-weary glory by Harry Dean Stanton, who schools our young anti-hero Otto in the tricks of the trade. Bud does have a code, though, and in a movie that ranks among the most quotable of the last three decades, he is a veritable font of direct and concise street-level wisdom. In other words, fuck Yoda. Here are the five elements of the Repo Code we've chosen to live by, and we learned them all from Bud.

5. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

4. It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective people are gonna think you're packing something.

3. Look at 'em – ordinary fucking people, I hate 'em. An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

2. Only an asshole gets killed for a car.

1. Repo man's got all night, every night.

--Phil Nugent; Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

That Guy! Classic: Vincent Schiavelli

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Like his fellow New Yorker and paisan Joe Spinell, Vincent Schiavelli was a tremendous character actor with a distinctive appearance and a wide range who died far too young. Before succumbing to cancer in 2005 — complicated by a lifelong struggle with Marfan syndrome, which contributed to his distinctive appearance — Schiavelli was an incredibly prolific character actor who appeared in over a hundred films and nearly as many television shows over a thirty-year career. Easily remembered for his hangdog expressions, drooping eyes, frazzled hair and looming height, Schiavelli was also capable of playing a wide gamut of roles; though he was usually cast in comedies, he was equally adept with drama, action and even voice-over work, as his frequent appearance in video games and animation proved. Schiavelli was also renowned as a gourmet cook, writing three books on Italian cuisine and a number of articles in food magazines, all of which contributed to his winning a prestigious James Beard award in 2001. In his latter years, Schiavelli moved to Sicily, where he wrote, produced, directed and starred in a number of plays for the local theatre, and endeared himself to the locals in his father's homeland by speaking the native dialect to perfection. Even in his lesser roles, Schiavelli had always taken such a perfectionist approach, and it was always surprising, given his stretched-out, gangly appearance, how adeptly he played his roles physically — he was a master of inserting little bits of business with his hands, movements of his back and shoulders, and bobs and weaves of the head that helped him round out his character. Whether it was in his recurring TV roles (including a handful of memorable appearances opposite Andy Kaufman in Taxi, which were weirdly echoed when he played an executive in the Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon) or in one of the many movies that led Vanity Fair to call him one of the finest American character actors in history, Schiavelli had the ability to redeem a film just by his presence — perhaps the best compliment an actor can receive.

Where to see Vincent Schiavelli at his best:

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

Although it’s an extremely minor role, it's noteworthy for the success of the film and the impression it leaves on viewers. One of the first roles in which Schiavelli left a major mark on moviegoers was that of Mr. Vargas, the Ridgemont High School science teacher. Playing off Jeff Spicoli (played by Sean Penn, whose career would go on to take a decidedly different course), he takes his students on a field trip to the local morgue to get a glimpse at fresh cadavers — and inspires Spicoli to seek out an exciting new occupation.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION (1984)

Even more so than any of the films of the Coen Brothers, cult hit Buckaroo Banzai is a sort of perfect storm of well-regarded character actors. In addition to a baked ham of a performance as the lead villain by John Lithgow, beloved second-stringers like Christopher Lloyd, Clancy Brown, Carl Lumbly, Dan Hedaya and Matt Clark put in appearances, and Schiavelli — frighteningly little-changed by all the alien makeup he's wearing — gets in a handful of good scenes (including a memorable bird-flip) as John O'Connor, the toady to Lithgow’s insane alien overlord.

GHOST (1990)

Probably Vincent Schiavelli's biggest mainstream success came when he played the phantasmal remnant known as the "Subway Lord," a figure even more ghostly and spooky-looking than the actor himself. Scoring more laughs than Whoopi Goldberg as the spirit of a man pushed in front of an express train, Schiavelli gives one of cinema's most longing looks (to a pack of cigarettes) and fulfills many moviegoers' lifelong dream (telling Patrick Swayze to go fuck himself).

— Leonard Pierce