The Screengrab : william hurt

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS MICHAEL IN THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Following an especially painful round of orthodonture during my junior year of high school, my father brought me to The Big Chill to cheer me up, and I immediately fell in love with the movie, which celebrated the type of close-knit friendship that had sustained me through the many dateless nights of my adolescence. On the verge of young adulthood and the dissolution of those (mostly platonic) hometown relationships, I was also drawn to the film’s evocation of the big, chilly world I’d be facing after graduation, far from kith and kin, and started imagining myself as a cool, mordant loner not unlike William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet, Nick (except without the war injury impotence) -- the type of guy likely to attract weirdly sexy free spirits like Meg Tilly’s Chloe in droves once I got to college. Yet, in truth (as my friends were always happy to remind me), I was never really the Nick in our little group, but rather the Michael: i.e., Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy, needy motormouth, the guy with the painfully obvious motives and the total lack of game with the ladies -- but then again, at least he wound up with most of the best lines (and a pair of functioning testicles)! (AO)

STEVE MARTIN AS NAVIN JOHNSON IN THE JERK (1979)

The title is a misnomer. Navin Johnson isn't really a jerk. Jerks screw you over just for the pleasure. Jerks have intent. Jerks drive Hummers, talk during movies, and buy Carlos Mencia DVDs. Navin is more of a well-meaning idiot, which is the type of role that Steve Martin does best. He heads out to make his way in the world, but chance makes him rich before chance takes it away. Don't try to read too much into it. The search for larger meanings is admirable and all, but sometimes the gunman just hates cans. (HC)

JACQUE TATI AS M. HULOT IN MON ONCLE (1958)

The French had a way with fools. Like Boudu in Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Jacques Tati's Hulot is less an idiot than an anarchic force of nature sweeping through the modern world and blowing away all of the little lies people tell themselves to maintain a sense of order. In the sequence above, the movie visits Hulot in the bustling corner of Paris where he lives. Ignore the Italian subtitles. You don't need to know the exact words to know what is being said. Hulot's sister lives with her family in a sterile ultramodernist nightmare, presumably in a far more affluent area of Paris. Consider the awful gurgling fountain:

It's no wonder that Hulot's nephew idolizes his goofy, absent-minded, and absolutely free uncle. Unlike Boudu, Hulot is making an effort to get along in the modern world, but it's clear that everything about it leaves him befuddled and bemused. And one of the best roles of the fool is to show his or her audience why their world is confusing and ridiculous. (HC)

CARY GRANT AS WALTER BURNS IN HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

The Cockney hustler that was inside the handsome gent called Cary Grant never made his presence more strongly felt than in this version of the great American theatrical comedy, His Girl Friday, in which Grant played the ultimate comic monster, the self-centered, bulldozing newspaper editor Walter Burns -- a role that gave him the chance to break the land speed dialogue record while demonstrating his ability to make it seem charming that he was pushing everybody around and giving the thumbs-up to the occasional felony. Burns is a man who'll do anything to get what he wants, and he could be played as a man the audience loves to hate; letting Grant run with the role turns the character into the amoral, ruthless son of a bitch that audience members suddenly realize they wish they could be. The performance may be the closest that a mortal man of woman born has come to approximating the movies' ultimate embodiment of the can-do spirit, Bugs Bunny. (PN)

W.C. FIELDS IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

If you look up "curmudgeon" in the dictionary, you may not see a picture of W.C. Fields’ glowering mug staring back at you, but you probably should. Fields made a career out of playing slight variations on his signature persona -- a guy whose disdain for women, children, animals, and other races and ethnicities was merely a subset of his overall drunken misanthropy. If Fields’ movies consisted only of him belittling those around him, they wouldn’t be funny. Thankfully, Fields realized that there was no better butt of his jokes than himself, both because it made the other characters feel less like victims of his barbs, and because getting picked on by others further fueled his misanthropy. Look at the way the henpecked Harold Bissonette rails against his wife when he’s alone only to clam up whenever she’s around. What’s more, nobody could deliver a joke quite like Fields -- beginning in his trademark nasal whine, he would often passive-aggressively swallow the end of the line, as if the people to whom it was addressed were suddenly unworthy of hearing it. And Fields was peerless when it came to the non sequitur, never more so than in his classic two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer, perhaps the purest distillation of his genius. Hard to say what makes it so brilliant- is it the sight of Fields in mittens and mukluks playing the dulcimer and singing, or such quintessential Fields lines as "My Uncle Ichabod said, when speakin’ of the city, ‘it ain’t no place for a woman, gal, but pretty men go thar’." And if the repeated "it ain’t a fit night out for man or beast" gag doesn’t make you laugh, well, there’s just no hope for you. (PC)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

Morning Deal Report: Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The controversies of his past are back in the headlines thanks to a recent HBO documentary, so what better time for Roman Polanski to get back to work? Polanski will adapt the Robert Harris political thriller The Ghost, with Nicolas Cage, Tilda Swinton and Pierce Brosnan, Variety reports. “Cage will play a ghostwriter hired abruptly to finish the memoirs of an ex-British prime minister after the first scribe turned up dead. The ghostwriter's research leads him to uncover skeletons in the pol's closet that put the writer's life in danger.” Alas, this doesn’t mean Cage’s Bad Lieutenant remake has fallen through; Ghost will shoot after he completes his work with Werner Herzog this summer.

William Hurt and Zach Gilford will be fishing in The River Why, adapted from the novel by David James Duncan. Per the Hollywood Reporter, this “coming-of-age tale centers on a young man named Gus Orviston (Gilford) and his quest for an elusive rainbow trout, which is a metaphor for the man's internal search for self-knowledge.” Or maybe he’s just hungry.

Finally, that sequel to The Host you’ve been waiting for is on the way. According to Variety, Chinese director Ning Hao will helm the follow-up to the Korean horror film. The sequel “will have to tread carefully to avoid criticizing the Chinese government. Story will concern a calamity caused when people ignore a monster due to their desire for money.” Sounds like another one of those metaphor thingies.

Related:
The Roman Exile: 30 Years and Counting
Werner Herzog's Very Bad Idea

Screengrab Review: "The Incredible Hulk"

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 GMT

As one of the few defenders of Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk – and as someone who picked The Incredible Hulk to be the biggest bomb of this summer – I readily admit to having some preconceived notions about Transporter director Louis Leterrier's take on the latest Marvel comics adaptation. This would be the part where I tell you how pleasantly surprised I was to be proven wrong…but unfortunately, that didn't happen.

The big question all along about The Incredible Hulk has been: What is it? Is it a sequel to the Ang Lee movie? A remake? It's sort of neither, which turns out to be the cleverest aspect of Leterrier's movie. As the opening credits roll, we see a montage of scenes from a previous Hulk movie that never existed. A Hulk origin sequence closer to the 1970s TV show than either the comics or the previous movie plays out as Dr. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) uses himself as a guinea pig in an experiment with high-level gamma radiation. We know what happens, so why dwell on it? Within two minutes, Banner has Hulked out, smashed up the lab, destroyed his relationship with fellow scientist Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and pissed off her father General “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt), who vows to pursue him to the ends of the earth. It’s as if Letterier is saying, “Let’s just pretend we all saw this movie and be done with it.” And really, that’s perfectly in keeping with the Hulk’s Marvel comics universe, where new writers and artists are constantly taking over his story and retroactively tweaking his origins.

As the story proper begins, Banner has been on the run for five years. Now working in a Brazilian bottling plant, Banner has learned to keep the Hulk under wraps with a few simple deep breathing exercises. His serenity doesn’t last, as General Ross and his troops – including British commando Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) – track him down and unleash the beast within Banner. The Hulk escapes but the hunt continues, pretty much for the rest of the movie. In order to boost his chances against the green goliath, Blonsky undergoes a series of injections that promise to transform him into a super-soldier. Banner reunites with Betty, who helps him find Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), a genetic scientist who may be able to cure him. Instead, Sterns ends up transforming Blonksy into the Abomination, an even bigger, uglier mass of roid-rage than the Hulk.

As expected, The Incredible Hulk is louder, faster and more action-packed than the 2003 version. Every twenty minutes or so, Ross and his goons show up and there’s another big battle. (The most entertaining one, in which Ross keeps escalating the level of artillery to no avail, almost plays like a Monty Python sketch.) By the end, when the Hulk and Abomination are going mano-a-mano in the streets of New York, the movie resembles less a Marvel comic than an updated King Kong vs. Godzilla – you’re basically aware you’re just watching one big slab of pixels punching the crap out of another big slab of pixels. The Hulk actually looks pretty good most of the time, especially if it’s dark or raining. The humans don’t come off quite as well. I’m willing to bet this isn’t the cut Edward Norton had in mind, but that’s okay – I didn’t need a lot more Banner torment in my life. Roth doesn’t do much but glower, Tyler’s role is even more thankless than the Jennifer Connelly version of same, and when it comes to mustachioed generals, William Hurt is no Sam Elliott.

Leterrier does try to provide a little something for everyone. There are inside references for the comic book fans, geeky cameos by Stan Lee, Lou Ferrigno, and someone else who is supposed to be a surprise, except that his appearance is all over the TV ads in what smells like a desperate marketing stunt, and jokes about stretchy purple pants. (The best gag involves Norton’s mangling of the signature “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” line.) And we finally get to hear that immortal call to action, “HULK SMASH!” There’s even a brief stab at Ang Lee’s more lyrical, haunting tone as the Hulk broods on a cliff in a rainstorm. But the whole thing plays like it’s been focus-grouped to death, stripped of any real personality of its own. It may not end up being the biggest bomb of the summer – stuff does blow up real good, after all – but despite hints of another sequel, it provides no compelling reason for the Hulk’s big screen career to continue.

Related:
Hulk Smash?
The Summer of Super-Duds

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab celebrated the 10 Sexiest Girl Geeks in Cinema...and now, in tribute to the return of that dreamy Professor Henry Jones, Jr. (in the hotly anticipated Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), we present our equal opportunity list of ten hot nerdy guys.

As with the previous list, most of these so-called nerds, geeks, dorks and maxi-zoom dweebies are played by actors who, in real life, are pretty easy on the eyes. But their characters, at least, are misfits and loners, undervalued diamonds in the rough just waiting to be discovered by some lucky, sharp-eyed lady (or gentleman).

Why lucky? Because as Robert Carradine’s Louis Skolnick says in Revenge of the Nerds (and as we at The Screengrab know oh so well), “Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex.”

10. William Hurt as Professor Eddie Jessup in Altered States

Back in the 1980s, William Hurt was the poster child for brainy-sexy-cool, thanks to his breakthrough role in Ken Russell’s nerd-tastic acid trip Altered States. Hurt stars as Professor Eddie Jessup, a Harvard scientist who is so totally obsessed with his research into universal consciousness that he’d rather “experiment” on himself than have sex with his hot primatologist wife...and what’s geekier than that?

9. Alan Tudyk as Wash in Serenity

Not being a lady or a gay gentleman, I was a little unsure of the actual “hotness” of some of the geeks on this list, and when I ran my original #9 (Jeff Goldblum as doomed scientist Seth Brundle in The Fly) by my wife, she shrugged, “Yeah...uh...I guess.” And while no less an authority than Geena Davis apparently found Brundlefly plenty damn sexy, I nevertheless decided instead to dedicate this space to the late, lamented pilot of the good ship Serenity, who my friend Julia informs me is quite the nerd hottie. Sweet, technology-obsessed and a little bit dorky, poor Wash is gone but evidently not forgotten.

8. Cary Grant as David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby

In last week’s girl geek list, I noted that Scarlett Johansson playing a geek in Ghost World was about as believable as Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist, and I freely admit it seems hypocritical to list this uber-suave icon of urbane manliness in a top ten list of cinematic nerds...yet Grant’s stuffy paleontologist is the ancestor to any number of sweetly sexy absent-minded professor characters too obsessed with their studies to recognize their biological needs or the effect of their powerful chemistry on the world around them. Speaking of which...

7. Ryan O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up Doc?

I deferred again to my wife here in the #7 spot after she violently rejected my original pick: Jon Cryer as Phil “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink, about whom I said: “Sure, Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh ultimately chose Andrew McCarthy’s limp noodle preppie, but in the same way all my guy geek friends preferred the pre-makeover Allison in The Breakfast Club, just about every alterna-girl I know would have picked Jon Cryer’s sometimes annoying but always stylish and devoted Duckie in a heartbeat.” To which my wife, an alterna-girl in her own right, shot back, “No. He’s not a hot nerd. He’s just a dork.” So, instead, I’ve substituted Ryan O’Neal’s befuddled, wife-approved musicologist as my #7 pick, in part to beef up the 1970s content of this list, and in part because any character who spends the majority of his time obsessed with igneous rock formations yet still manages to attract offbeat beauties like Madeline Kahn’s Eunice Burns and 1970s-sex-kitten-era-Barbara Streisand’s Judy Maxwell is clearly a nerd to be reckoned with.

6. Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts in American Beauty (by Paul Clark)

When we first came up with the idea for this list, we went back and forth about the idea of including Ricky Fitts. Sure, he's an outcast at school, but does that make him a true geek? Ricky certainly doesn’t fit the mold on the surface -- no horn-rims, not especially studious, and so on. But, to quote American Beauty's tagline, "look closer." With his ever-present camera and intense gaze, he has the bearing of someone who's spent his life on the outside looking in, the way all geeks feel during their high-school years. Listen to his famous monologue about the plastic bag -- there's an analytical mind at work here that distinguishes him from his more socially-adept, less self-aware peers. Being a loner has given him plenty of time to step back from life and think about the world around him in a way most people his age don't have time for. It's also given him a serene acceptance of his life that proves irresistible to his troubled next-door neighbor Angela (Thora Birch). When she's not sneaking him up to her bedroom to have sex, he's everything a good boyfriend should be -- sensitive, empathetic, a good listener, the whole shebang. So Ricky doesn't look the part, but so what? In many ways, he's the real deal in a way those Urkel wannabes aren't, and a kind of ideal for young women who find themselves frustrated with the limited possibilities of dating popular jocks. -- Paul Clark

Click here for part 2.

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Smart People, Ellen Page reprises her wise-ass, brainy-sexy persona from Juno, reaffirming her place as the current It Girl for a brand new generation of future I.T. professionals and I.T.T. graduates.

Lord knows I enjoyed the standard-issue sex dolls of my Gen X adolescence, from Catherine Bach’s Daisy Duke to Sylvia Kristel’s steamy French maid in Private Lessons (which my parents naively allowed me to go see all by myself because it co-starred that nice Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati).

But horny fantasies aside, I knew from the get-go I was far too much of a Starlog-reading, drama club-joining, Honor-Roll attaining nerd to ever wind up with the hot blondes or the Bond babe, and so it was always the relatable, approachable freaks and geeks of cinema that gave me hope. And while most of the actresses on the following list were actually gorgeous starlets in real life, it was reassuring to believe the following characters, at least, would maybe lend you their panties if you ever needed to win a bet for a dozen floppy disks. (And don't worry, we'll get to the GUY geeks next week...but suggestions are certainly welcome!)

10. MOLLY RINGWALD AS SAMANTHA BAKER IN SIXTEEN CANDLES

Sure, she wound up with the hunky popular guy at the end, but she WAS nice enough to lend Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek her underwear, and I was always hot for Ms. Ringwald, especially when I read in later interviews that she eventually grew up, fell hard for a French guy and became quite the sex enthusiast.

9. ALLY SHEEDY AS ALLISON REYNOLDS IN THE BREAKFAST CLUB

A pivotal character in my early development, who inspired a life-long love of freaky Goth girls but also broke my heart, dropping the knowledge on my adolescent ass that even the misfit girls would usually choose the Jocks over the Brains of the world if given half a chance. Traitor!

8. MEG TILLY AS CHLOE IN THE BIG CHILL

Sexy, exotic and a little odd-looking, Chloe made me want to be the kind of cool, smart rebel her soulful misfit would dig (a.k.a. William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet Nick) as opposed to the gabby neurotic Jeff Goldblum-y type I actually was (and am).

7. HOLLY HUNTER AS JANE CRAIG IN BROADCAST NEWS

Friends still mock me for my obsession with Holly Hunter’s t.v. producer character, but Broadcast News was the movie to beat in 1987 for nailing the friends vs. lovers dilemma faced by supportive, dorky guys in love with female “friends” who think of them as brothers. The scene where Albert Brooks’ character finally tells off Jane, then dumps her from his life is still one of my all-time favorites, finally teaching me the best way to avoid “nice guy” syndrome with girls was not to be so goddamn nice all the time.

6. DAPHNE ZUNIGA AS ALISON BRADBURY IN THE SURE THING

This Gen-X version of It Happened One Night dramatized the other side of the friends vs. lovers dilemma: once you finally figure out how to attract girls, do you go for great sex or great conversation? With Alison Bradbury, John Cusack’s Walter Gibson found the perfect balance.

Click here for part 2!

The Ten Best Murderous Duos in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The life of a killer can be a lonely one, whether pursued professionally or as a hobby. In last year's Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner, who based on some of the stories about his on-the-set behavior that have hit the papers ought to have had some experience with having no one to play with, was so lonesome that he had to summon up an imaginary friend (William Hurt) to give him someone to talk to on those long nights of stalking and shooting. (In the course of the movie, a real person who knows about his secret life approaches him and asks if he can apprentice with him as an aspiring psycho, but since this asshole is played by Dane Cook, having to put him up with him just means Costner needs to lean on the nonexistent Hurt more than ever.) Michael Haneke's new English-language version of his 1996 Funny Games also underlines the need for a killer to bring along a spare, someone with whom he can trade wisecracks and rely on to keep an eye on the prey and one hand on the remote control. (If you haven't seen the movie, don't ask. And if you haven't seen the movie, also don't see the movie.) Then there's Pete and Sidney, who work for Joe Brody in the classic The Big Sleep. After Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe meets them, he asks Brody about the weedier, goofier one: "Is he any good?" "Sidney?" replies Brody. "He's company for Pete." ("He kills me," says Pete, by way of an unsolicited testimonial.) These pairs kill us:

Henry (Michael Rooker) & Otis (Tom Towles), HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1990)

When watching a couple of characters prancing through a movie laying waste to half the cast, you might let your mind wander to the question of just how these folks met. Are there conventions? Classified ads? It's easier to understand why a serial killer would want another pair of hands than to envision how he'd go shopping for someone to supply them. There are any number of ways that such a conversation could go wrong. Not the least of Henry's virtues is that it addresses head on the issue of how a solo killer goes about trying to establish a franchise. Henry is already well into his serial-killing career when, after a good long stretch on Otis's couch, he concludes that his old friend might have the stuff to join him on his visits to the homes of strangers. For a while, it does look as if having the fun-loving Otis along has made it more rewarding to rampage around town performing random acts of dismemberment. But, as our nation has learned since 2000, being a good person with whom to have a beer is not the best qualification for a job requiring careful planning and precise execution. Careless and uncontrollable, Otis finally proves himself an unacceptable risk and winds up as one more load of filler weighing down a Hefty bag. Like Rick in Casablanca, Henry is forced to consider the possibility that he is destined to be one of life's romantic loners.

Mingo (Earl Holliman) & Fante (Lee Van Cleef), THE BIG COMBO (1955)

There’s a lot to love about Joseph H. Lewis’ nasty little noir: the gorgeously dark camerawork by John Alton, the snarling screenplay by Philip Yordan (its vicious snap most clearly evident in an early scene where the mob boss, played toothily by Richard Conte, chews out a losing boxer), the barely sublimated sex and the creative violence. It’s one of the best movies of its kind, and criminally underseen by audiences both today and when it was released. One of the most enjoyable bits of the movie, though, is the presence of Mingo and Fante. These two characters, with their bizarrely unlikely names, are the goons of Conte’s Mr. Brown, and they’re memorably played by the lunkheaded Earl Holliman and the domineering Lee Van Cleef, respectively. Alternately menacing, comical and even sympathetic, they’re two of the best-written minor characters in noir history, but one of the reasons that they’re fondly remembered by a handful of film buffs today (Joss Whedon named a couple of characters in his Firefly series after them) is because, predating Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever by a good twenty years, they are perhaps the first murderous duo on the big screen to be portrayed as gay. Of course, this being the ‘50s, neither Yordan or Lewis could come right out and say so, but it’s made plenty clear for anyone who’s paying attention: Fante and Mingo share a room together, sleep feet apart, bicker like a married couple, express a great deal of, er, manly fondness for one another, and even dine together. Which, in fact, leads to the movie’s big oh-what-a-giveaway line: holed up in a ratty dump waiting for the heat to die down from their latest killing, our gruesome twosome are reduced to dining on take-home lunchmeat, leading Mingo to lament, “I can’t swallow any more salami!” Even if the movie version of The Big Sleep had been allowed to be as explicit about the sexuality of Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook as the book was, they wouldn’t have been this much fun.

Al (Charles McGraw) & Max (William Conrad), THE KILLERS (1946)

These guys have a special weapon: the dialogue from the classic original short story by Ernest Hemingway. In the story, two strangers walk into the small town diner where they plan to kill "the Swede" for reasons unspecified, and, feeling serenely untouchable in their big-city arrogance, proceed to taunt the rubes while they sit there and wait for their target to walk in. ("We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.") The first fifteen or twenty minutes of this movie amount to probably the most faithful film adaptation that Hemingway ever got: McGraw, the star of the cult noir The Narrow Margin (and a man who looked as if he'd been carved out of granite and was royally pissed off about it) and Conrad (TV's Cannon and the narrator of the Bullwinkle cartoons) just play out their little scene together, and then the Heningway story runs out. The movie, which was co-written by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks, and which is not bad at all, proceeds to fill itself out to feature length by having an investigator, played by Edmond O'Brien, fill in the backstory of why the Swede — Burt Lancaster, in his film debut — had a price on his head. There was a sort-of remake in 1964, directed by Don Siegel, which is best remembered as Ronald Reagan's last film as an actor. (He plays the head villain and gets to slap Angie Dickinson around.) The remake, which hews closer to the Lancaster movie than to the Hemingway, eliminates the O'Brien-investigator figure and has the killers themselves — called Charlie and Lee, and played by old pro Lee Marvin and younger hepcat punk Clu Gulager — decide to find out why they'd been hired. This version lacks the crackle that the earlier one had, but it does have a scene where the title characters trap Norman Fell in a steam bath while Gulager mockingly wipes his sunglasses on Mr. Roper's head.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) & Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), LA CEREMONIE (1995)

Bonnaire and Huppert are two of France's greatest and most fearless actresses, and it's a wonder it took a director so long to put them together. But when Claude Chabrol finally did so in his masterful thriller, the result was quite possibly the finest psychotic duo in French cinema. Bonnaire plays Sophie, an illiterate yet hyper-competent young maid for a rich family, and Huppert is Jeanne, a nosy, gossipy postal clerk who becomes her friend. "What a pair," Sophie's employer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) exclaims. "One can't read and the other reads our mail!" It's clear that the two women need each other — Jeanne, with her playfully forceful personality, draws Sophie out of her shell, while Sophie gives Jeanne a sympathetic ear compared to the other townspeople who shun her for the accidental killing of her young daughter. Soon, the two of them are partners in crime, getting into all manner of mischief around town and at the charity where they volunteer. But after Sophie is fired for trying to blackmail the family's pregnant daughter, she and Jeanne sneak in one night to take revenge. The night begins innocently enough — some torn clothing here, some ruined bed sheets there — but quickly turns deadly once the girls see the shotguns hanging on the wall. Jeanne wants to have fun by scaring them, while Sophie insists on loading the guns, yet it's entirely possible that they hadn't planned to kill anyone until Cassel happens upon the gun-toting duo in his kitchen. Once they've killed him, they have no choice but to kill off the rest of the family as well. For all the big-screen psychopaths who plan their murders down to the last detail, cases like Sophie's and Jeanne's are arguably more chilling, as the killings aren't a premeditated act of vengeance but the climax of a prank gone horribly wrong. Funny games, indeed.

Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) & Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

Like Sophie and Jeanne, Heavenly Creatures' heroines Pauline Parker (Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet) are a pair who first bond over their shared outcast status. In their case, they both suffer from health problems, and as their classmates take exercise, they become fast friends. Together they rule over a lurid, elaborate fantasy world of their own creation. The pair are inseparable, spending every possible moment together, and they eventually their frenzied teenage hormones lead them to experiment with sex. But more than anything else, it's their fantasies that sustain them and help them to escape their difficult lives in 1950s New Zealand, but they also lead to their downfall. From the beginning, they look down on anyone else, and eventually this disdain turns to paranoia about those who would threaten their happiness together. Of all the perceived threats to the world they've created, the most threatening is Pauline's pragmatic, hardworking mother, so one day the girls decide to join her on a leisurely stroll, and when they're alone on a path, they bludgeon her to death. Heavenly Creatures was based on a real-life case, and while the facts might have lent themselves to a sensationalistic treatment, director Peter Jackson keeps us with his heroines all the way. The film follows Pauline and Juliet into their fantasies (rendered in loving detail by a pre-Lord of the Rings Jackson), mostly because it's the only way to truly understand what led them to carry out their hideous crime. Along the way, we grow to love the sinners even as we hate their sin, and it's because of this that the film's final scene, in which Pauline and Juliet are forced apart by the courts, is almost unbearably sad.

— Paul Clark; Phil Nugent; Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SCARFACE (1983)

Here’s something funny about Oliver Stone: he seems to have a lot more fun when he’s writing movies than when he’s directing them. While the movies where he’s behind the camera have become self-important bores, the movies where he’s behind the typewriter are highly enjoyable, if completely demented. Conan the Barbarian may have been the purest distillation of his bloodthirstily goofy aesthetic, but it was the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface a year later where he really let his freak flag fly. A perfect example of a movie that’s compulsively watchable without actually being very good, Scarface also proves that the one thing more enjoyable than a movie with non-stop vulgarity is a movie with non-stop vulgarity in an incredibly over-the-top quasi-Cuban accent. (A chainsaw execution can’t hurt, either.) Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t an obscenity artist; he is but a humble craftsman, a busy businessman who relies on the word "fuck" because he hasn’t got the time to learn any other ones. For every cleverly crafted "Why don’t you try sticking your head up your ass? See if it fits," there’s a workmanlike get-over like "You know what? Fuck you! How about that?" How about that, indeed. It’s hard to know if Scarface would have been the deranged, hyperactive masterpiece that it is without Pacino’s constant Hispanic-causing-panic vulgarisms, but it surely wouldn’t have been as much fun. If you don’t believe us, try to imagine Paul Muni saying "This town is like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked." Now that’s comedy!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

David Mamet's ode to testosterone-soaked salesmen is a veritable symphony of profanity, with even legendary milquetoast Jack Lemmon attempting to wrap his mouth around words like "cocksucker." (Not to speak ill of the dead, but he's no Ian McShane.) Alec Baldwin is the soloist who takes home top honors, though his inspirational speech to the troops does not rely solely on foul language for its power. With his reptilian delivery, lines like "coffee is for closers" and "third prize is you're fired" sound nearly as venomous as the blunt rejoinder "Fuck you – that's my name!" Though he doesn't say it in so many words, Baldwin makes the point that the sales game is a dick-measuring contest and everybody but him is coming up short. Like all the best motivational speakers, he uses props. "It takes brass balls to sell real estate," he announces, brandishing a pair for effect. Don't try this in your own boardroom unless you have good lawyers.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

When the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes started to come out, what shocked a lot of people wasn't the president's amorality so much as the language with which he expressed it. His obscene ramblings suggested a potty-mouthed genie bubbling and rumbling and thrashing beneath the surface of his carefully fostered image as the last defender of Middle America, subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and Norman Rockwell illustrations. In Robert Altman's one-man show, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall), sealed in the wood-paneled tranquility of his study like William Hurt set to de-evolve in his isolation tank in Altered States, runs through his whole life and political career in a spastic monologue punctuated by sputtered out "shit!"s and "fuck!"s. It all builds to the moment when Nixon, having considered blowing his brains out as penance for his sins, decides that this would give too much satisfaction to the real monsters, the ones who "elected me, not once, not twice, but all my goddamn life," and signs off with an endless, Tourette's-like chant of "Fuck em! Fuck 'em!!" As he bellows out the same two words, again and again, Altman frames his wild face in the screens of the TV monitors that line the room. The genie has been isolated.

POETIC JUSTICE (1993)

John Singleton's Poetic Justice actually played against Tupac's ever-growing reputation as an out-of-control thug and notorious player. His character Lucky is a postman who gets dissed in the very first scene and then has to endure a road trip with the same girl that made him the butt of the joke. This is every guy's worst nightmare – confined space with a girl who shot you down. Unless you're counting her role on Good Times or Rhythm Nation 1814, this was essentially Janet Jackson's film debut, and even though she may have told us she was nasty, most people still assumed, looking at that angelic face, that she was probably very nice. This scene is so memorable because all of that is blown to pieces as she trades fuck yous with Mr. Thug Life himself. Although the scene can certainly stand on its own in terms of pure firepower, you might want to brush up on the back story – outlined in our previous Top 10 Offscreen Feuds list – to help you understand the uncanny authenticity of the venom being spit here.

NIL BY MOUTH (1997)

When it comes to vulgar language in movies, there is quality, and then there is quantity. Whether or not Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, counts as a lodestone of quality obscenity, it is the all-time grand champion in terms of quantity. It’s actually a fine little film, and Oldman’s script about growing up in a dysfunctional working-class family in South London is quite compelling at times, but where it truly excels is in its non-stop barrage of obscenity. No less than the Guinness Book of World Records has certified it as the film containing the most iterations of "fuck": the word appears an astonishing 470 times, or almost four times a minute. It’s that sort of dedication that separates the pretenders from the true masters, and Oldman doesn’t stop there: he also favors us with the word "cunt" a whopping eighty-two times, or once every minute and a half. Most of the fucks and cunts issue from the lager-stained mouth of Ray Winstone, playing a character based on Oldman’s own father. (Oldman dedicates the film to his old man, which must have made him feel pretty good about himself.) Some films don’t even have as much punctuation as Nil By Mouth has "fuck"s; if its director grew up in an environment anything like the one portrayed here, it’s a wonder he can communicate at all. Other films may be more artful in their use of the f-word, and other films may save it for when it counts more instead of going for total sensory overload, but until someone manages to make a movie in which someone uses the word "fuck" in every frame, then Nil By Mouth will be the reigning king.

– Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Bryan Whitefield

Check out Part 1 here.

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

There are long movies, and there are really long movies. But there's also that notorious third category: The Long-Ass Movie. You know them. Usually they have to be split into two or three parts. Sometimes they have to be released as mini-series, with abbreviated versions put out in theaters. Occasionally they're hacked to pieces by studios and distributors, and become founts of controversy. More often that not, they're made by Germans. (We're not kidding. Check the list.) And most of the time, though sadly not always, they're great — ambitious, sprawling, uncompromising, and riveting. There's something really special about a long-ass movie, which, for our purposes, we're classifying as a film over four hours long. You never forget the experience of sitting through it. We certainly didn't. Here's our list of the Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.

HAMLET (1996) Running time: 242 mins.

It's highly unlikely that anyone in Shakespeare's time actually saw Hamlet in full. As many critics and biographers have noted, the full text of The Bard's masterpiece would run over four hours if performed — a prohibitive length even today, despite such modern conveniences as lighting, electricity, and weekends. Clocking in at a limber four hours and two minutes, Kenneth Branagh's full-text version of the play struck a remarkable balance: an uncompromised performance that was also relentlessly cinematic. Some called Branagh's camera tricks show-offy, but he was simply following in the footsteps of one of the great linguistic show-offs of all time. The film's baroque visual style complemented the verbal gymnastics of Shakespeare's sweet tongue, and the result is not only the most faithful adaptation of Shakespeare ever filmed, but also, for our money, one of the absolute best.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) Running time: 280 mins.

Don't laugh. The two-hour, thirty-eight-minute U.S. theatrical release version of Wim Wenders's insanely ambitious sci-fi epic romance was a messy, albeit fascinating, journey through an ultra-globalized millennial world, with William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin bouncing around the planet recording with a revolutionary camera designed to help blind people see, accompanied to snippets of songs from the director's favorite rock acts (Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, etc. — the soundtrack CD for this thing was a mainstay in many a contemporaneous college dorm room). The full, nearly-five-hour version, it turns out, wasn't nearly so messy. Rather, it was a sober, compelling, and visionary lament for the ways in which the oncoming technological transformation of society would transform human contact; Wenders's portrait of a hyper-connected world predated the Internet revolution. More importantly, it had even more of that awesome music.

1900 (1976) Running time: 315 mins.

Unjustly tarred on its initial release as a disaster, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, a highly personal film despite its five-hour running time, has withstood the test of time far better than anyone would have expected. Its big-name cast, surprisingly, doesn't hold up particularly well — thanks to a sometimes shaky script and a not insignificant language barrier. But as an epic of great scope and a continuation of Bertolucci's tremendous visual-storytelling techniques, it's a raging success. Five hours fly by in the presence of such gorgeous filmmaking, thanks to the sensual, earthy tone of the film, the solid pacing, and the director's extreme care. Bertolucci apparently envisioned 1900 as his own response to the success of The Godfather — he would tell the modern history of Italy, just as Francis Ford Coppola had told the modern history of Italian-Americans, with a similar sense of range and scope and sweep. At the time of its release, no one would have credited Bertolucci's film as successful on that level, but if he'd had the foresight to do as Coppola did and release it as two separate films telling a single story, it's easy to imagine that 1900 would have enjoyed a much better critical reception.

NAPOLEON (1927) Running time: 330 mins.

Abel Gance was one of the towering French directors of the silent era, one of those pop-eyed geniuses whose only reservation about the movie medium was that it would be a shame if it turned out to have any boundaries at all. The massive epic that is now Gance's best-known work was originally intended to be only the first chapter in a multi-part historical epic consisting of six enormous features. You get a taste of what Gance hoped to achieve at the end of this picture, when three different projectors are used to show contrasting images on three screens, achieving something like a split screen image to the nth degree. Unfortunately, this silent landmark was completed the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon was released in America in a savagely truncated version that didn't even attempt to preserve the triple-projection imagery. Gance would continue to work, but most of his wildest ambitions would go unfunded and unfulfilled. He didn't become fully appreciated until the film historian Kevin Brownlow assembled a restored version that, with live musical accompaniment, played to ecstatic responses in packed theaters in 1980 and 1981. (Thankfully, Gance lived to see it — he died late in 1981.) That initial restoration ran five minutes short of four hours, but Brownlow kept going back, and by 2000 he had extended the film by another thirty-five minutes. It remains a thrilling mixture of audacious filmmaking, charming corn, and some very strange politics: Napoleon is so thrilled by the French Revolution that he sets out to bring democracy to other countries by invading them — evidence that the French, of all people, created the Bush Doctrine.

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (2000) Running time: 345 mins.

As huge fans of Peter Watkins, we found that the number of Watkins-related items on Screengrab has been shockingly low of late, so we'll take any opportunity we can to plug his work. La Commune, his epic film about the Paris Commune of 1871, which in its full form runs five hours and forty-five minutes, is in many ways a summing-up of Watkins's career that tests the methods and techniques he'd developed over the course of more than thirty years. The Commune was a group of intellectuals, students and workers who took over a section of Paris in 1871 and formed an experimental government. True to form, Watkins took over an abandoned factory and staged the rise and fall of the "Commune" as covered and reported on by modern TV crews, who take turns interviewing the non-actors who represent the political leaders, the common people, the military forces working to smash the Commune, et al. He even tosses in a dandyish news anchor who spreads anti-Commune sentiment on a competing network, "Versailles TV." Ever the iconoclast, Watkins refuses to consign the fervor of Communards to the distant past, and by doing so he celebrates the revolutionary spirit both past and present, as when a discussion between the characters gives way to a contemporary debate about globalization. It may be the crowning achievement of one of the strangest film artists of his time — a man who sees himself as trying to bring history alive in order to educate the masses, but who has no apparent ability to make films in a way that might entice the masses to want to see them.

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