The Screengrab : wedding crashers

DVD Digest for December 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! This week, the big studios drop a ton of new DVDs and Blu-Rays into the market to compete for your newly-acquired Christmas cash.

In recent releases, DVD shopping begins early this week, with three new Paramount titles: Shia Labeouf and Michelle Monaghan in Eagle Eye (also Blu-Ray); Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town (also Blu-Ray); and Keira Knightley in The Duchess (also Blu-Ray). Today brings us Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha (Image Entertainment), as well as a “head to head” match up (sorry) between Alan Ball’s Towelhead (Warner) and the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead (Sony).

In TV on DVD, today’s new releases include The Tudors Season 2 (Paramount) and Nip/Tuck Season 5 Part 1 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s bumper crop of new Blu-Ray-only releases includes: Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder (Paramount); the Shining-in-space thriller Event Horizon (Paramount); Demi Moore and the Swayz in Ghost (Paramount); Queen Latifah in Last Holiday (Paramount); Jim Carrey in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (Paramount); Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers (Warner); and finally, the Browncoats’ favorite, Joss Whedon’s Serenity (Universal).

Hot Mama

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Over in the Village Voice, Julia Wallace pens the first of what's likely to be many, many profiles of suddenly ubiquitous comic actress Amy Poehler. Poehler, who went from being featured in almost any comedy show worth watching in the early 2000s to everyone's favorite pal-around comedienne in recent years, is co-starring with Saturday Night Live co-star and inexplicable It Girl Tina Fey in the embarrassingly titled but promising Baby Mama, debuting this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her career has taken an odd turn, to say the least, and Wallace thinks she stands poised to make the transition from well-liked 'alternative comedian' to the most famous Hollywood Amy not named Ryan, Archer or Adams.

It's a pretty funny interview on its own merits -- with her improv background and a decade of experience, Poehler's always been one of the more able interviews in terms of coming up with spur-of-the-moment laughs -- but it gets especially enlightening when she decides to let a few glimpses of seriousness sneak into her jokey answers. Baby Mama has gotten a decent amount of attention for its focus on class issues and the difficulty of raising children from a financial standpoint; Poehler describes the film as a comedy version of Reds. Likewise, when Wallace tries to draw her out on the issue of making a career as a leading lady who specialized in comedy, using Christopher Hitchens' now-ancient "women aren't funny" essay as bait, Poehler won't bite: "I think that story's an old story. Same thing with 'SNL is a boy's club...they're all just kind of lazy headlines to me." But she does wax effusive about Baby Mama's status as that rarest of beasts, a female buddy comedy. "It's exactly what we were going for. We wanted it to be as much Wedding Crashers as it was Working Girl -- something that felt just like two buddies having a fun time. It was us getting to do comedy in a way that didn't necessarily have to be specific to 'lady comedy'. Not that I even know what that is, since I am a lady."

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."

The Devil Wears Izod: The Ten Greatest Preppy Villains

sometripe — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

There's something about pleated khakis and navy-blue blazers that gives us chills. Clearly we're not alone — the preppy villain has been a staple of Hollywood's light fare for decades. You can spot him (and it is always a "him" — girls like the Heathers were the same genus, different species) by his ascot and asymetrically parted hair, or perhaps the pink Lacoste sweater tied loosely across his shoulders. Sometimes he wears only tennis shorts, a polo shirt and a sneer. He had a big hand in popularizing feathered hair — that's how evil he is. The preppy villain hit his stride during the Reagan years (60% of our featured preppy villains are of the '80s), but he still pops up now and again, a magnet for our disgust so there's nothing left but love for the little guy.

10. Vice-Principal Gills, Summer School (1987)

Gills (Robin Thomas) plays a leisure-suit-wearing high-school VP who assigns his gym instructor, Mr. Shoop (Mark Harmon), to teach a remedial summer English course so he can spend the warmer months wooing the history teacher (Kirstie Alley). He serenades her with vintage convertibles and well-prepared picnics that include expensive fromage. Being the villain, he also tries to sabotage Shoop's class by loudly pointing out their inadequacies. Evil-prep quirks include dropping fancy French phrases like "joie de vivre" and expressing exaggerated horror at a clip of Texas Chainsaw Massacre before running from the room. — Liz Nadybal

9. Mick, Teen Wolf (1985)

Somehow, Scott Howard was only briefly fazed by the whole being-part-wolf thing. Yet Mick, his arch-nemesis and star of the rival high school's basketball team, threw his life into complete disarray. Mick could usually be found coordinating his denim-on-denim ensembles and inappropriately groping his girlfriend. When he wasn't playing point guard for the Dragons, he enjoyed creating clever quips about Scott, like "Hope your acting's better than your hook shot, kid." — LN

8. Zachary "Sack" Lodge, Wedding Crashers (2005)

Sure, Bradley Cooper's portrayal of Rachel McAdams' fiancé is over-the-top. But what do you expect from a plot in which McAdams' mother makes Owen Wilson feel her up and her sister jacks off Vince Vaughn under the dining room table? This is not a subtle movie, nor is Sack a subtle villain. He's designed to be the character you automatically hate, in direct contrast to Owen Wilson's laid-back butterscotch stallion and Vince Vaughn's affable teddy bear. He hunts quail with a vengeance, kisses senator ass, takes a game of touch football to death-match levels and wears the perfect rugby-shirt-and-Abercrombie ensemble for each occasion. His shining moment takes place at McAdam's sister's wedding to Vaughn, where the Sack tells Christopher Walken he "don't know shit" and orders McAdams to "get your fucking ass on that altar right now." We all cheer when Vaughn knocks him out. Nobody can disrespect Walken. — Nicole Ankowski

7. Patrick Bateman, American Psycho (2000)

I'd always imagined Christian Bale smelled of high-end grooming products like Kiehl's Rare-Earth Cleansing Masque, a preppie of the truly classy sort. Then I saw American Psycho, a Bret Easton Ellis adaptation in which Bale plays a slick Wall Street financier with a penchant for after-hours rape and torture, and Kiehl's suddenly seemed a bit twee. Still, Bateman has a Newport summer home, a prep-school diploma and a collection of Hugo Boss three-pieces we'd like to get our hands on. If he didn't insist on disemboweling people, we'd be in love. — Steph Auteri

6. Stan Gable, Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

Bright red short-shorts and feathered hair — we could never quite reverse that image of Ted McGinley, even after several years of his role as the girlish Mr. Marcy D'Arcy on Married...With Children. Nor the image of him tossing freshmen out their dorm windows after his frat house burns down, participating in a tricycle race, or pulling a jockstrap over the head of an Asian student while yelling, "Do you know karate?" Subtle! — Will Doig

5. Rand McPherson, PCU (1994)

Before he became the grizzled Dennis Finch on Just Shoot Me, David Spade played a pitch-perfect prep-frat leader, Rand McPherson, attending the counter-culturally diverse Port Chester University. Lackey to the university president, the sniveling Finch leads a group of Republican minions in a quest to rid the campus of binge-drinking, loud music and all things un-Izod. Obviously, he gets it in the end, locked into a room by Jeremy Piven with a stereo playing "Afternoon Delight" on repeat, though just locked in a room with Jeremy Piven might have been a more effective coup de grace. — SA

4. The tennis players, Trading Places (1983)
Philadelphia in 1983 was a septic system of crime and filth, so Louis Winthorpe III and his snotty friends played tennis at an upscale private club. Winthorpe's friends were the kind of old-money preps that almost don't exist anymore. They spoke with Katharine Hepburn accents and serenaded their female hangers-on with their Ivy League alma-mater song. They owned the kind of white tennis shorts that are now selling on eBay for triple digits. And they really didn't like prostitutes (Jamie Lee Curtis) or poor black people (Eddie Murphy). When Winthorpe loses his money, they drop him faster than you can say forty-love. By the time the second half of the film rolls around they've basically disappeared, but you have to assume they got cleaned out in that frozen concentrated orange juice debacle. — WD

3. Hardy Jenns, Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)

With his popped collar and visible-from-space chin dimple, Hardy (Craig Sheffer) was quintessential '80s prep: rich, philandering, ready to embark on a college career of date rape and a professional career of white-collar embezzlement. "He's a total buck," as one character describes him, and even at twelve, I didn't understand that. Writer/director John Hughes does have a tendency toward broad stripes, and he painted Hardy with an industrial-size rollerbrush. "You walk out on me, where you gonna go?" he snarls at his beautiful girlfriend, played by Lea Thompson. Into the arms of true love, of course. Enjoy your status car and your receding hairline, buck. — Sarah Hepola

2. Johnny Lawrence, The Karate Kid (1984)

I still can't watch that Halloween party scene, when Ralph Macchio is running for the chicken-wire fence in his crazy shower costume and the skeleton thugs pull him down and kick the stuffing out of him. Johnny Lawrence isn't even a preppy villain in the fun way. I knew too many of him in high school to be amused. In fact, nine-tenths of the pleasure of watching The Karate Kid is simply seeing Lawrence get that screaming-bird kick to the face. They should put that on a loop and play it repeatedly for unpopular high-school kids with low self-esteem. — WD

1. Steff, Pretty in Pink (1986)

James Spader's Steff was the ultimate preppy villain during a time when wearing silk dressing gowns at keggers was cool. He spends the entire movie trying to bed Molly Ringwald's friend Andie while keeping his best friend, pretty-wuss-boy Blane (Andrew McCarthy), from getting into her pants. Despite being fabulously dressed in pastels and shoulder pads, he imbues his character with enough quiet slime that you can understand why Molly recoils every time she sees him. Spader so inhabited the bad boy with the pretty face that it launched his career, and you can still see some Steff in most of his roles today. — NA