The Screengrab : winona ryder

The Hype Report: The X File on Winona Ryder

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Being the latest in an infrequent series devoted to movie-related puff pieces so over the top that they're a show all by themselves..]

So it turns out that Winona Ryder is in the new Star Trek movie, where she plays the Vulcan ambassador Sarek's baby mama, and Vanessa Thorpe's profile of Ryder and the current state of her career has kind of science-fiction vibe to it itself. Did you know that Ryder was once "acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation - the generation, that is, that had become known as 'X'?" It's news to me, and I think I'm of the generation that had become known as 'X' myself, so long as we're all committed to writing in the style that has become known as "funny-looking'." Thorpe must have worried that we'd think it was just her, so she cites a back-up source: Ryder's father, who says that twenty or so years ago, his daughter and Johnny Depp were "the hottest couple in the United States." All together now--ewwwwww!! Is it possible that when all those folks at the red carpet premieres leaned across the police barricades and screamed, "You're the most promising, most beautiful, and most fashionable star of your generation," they were talking to Johnny? Thorpe herself undercuts her argument by describing Ryder's features as "elfin", a term I've always associated more with the likes of Michael J. Pollard or the guy on Two and a Half Men who isn't Charlie Sheen than anyone who might qualify as the most beautiful anything. It's possible that Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings have forever rewritten the rule book on this one, but not in my apartment.

The thing is, I've always thought that Ryder was beautiful, and that's why I never tortured myself a lot--a little, but not a lot--wondering why she had a career. It was easy for men, including men as smart and weird as Depp and Tim Burton, to have high hopes for her in her Beetlejuice days: she was, one more time, a very beautiful, very young girl who liked to tell interviewers that was reading Ian McEwan and do guest spots in Mojo Nixon videos. You could probably hear the puddles forming from all those geeks' hearts melting across the country. Thorpe seems to take it on faith that there's a general agreement that she was just dazzling in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence--where, to show her commitment to her craft, she allowed the makeup people to do her best to homely her up--and in the Gillian Armstrong production of Little Woman, which is indeed probably the best movie that has her close to its center. But it's also true that in both these movies, which we made when she was in her early twenties, she comes across as, emotionally, about twelve years old. When she was engaged in real life to Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, it was reported that no less an expert on grown-up behavior than Cher had warned her that she wasn't ready for such a leap. in the movies, seeing her married off to either Daniel Day Lewis or Gabriel Byrne was creepy, in ways the filmmakers could not have intended.

Ryder's last big-deal role was probably in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, a movie that wound up belonging her co-star, Angelina Jolie (who won an Oscar for it), and with good reason. Thorpe does her best to characterize Ryder's fallen star sound the result of some combination of a conspiracy and a perfect storm of "bad creative decisions, or perhaps just bad luck, which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight." Yes, there was the shoplifting incident, which fed into other stories, like the one about her flaking out on the set of The Godfather III, gave her a reputation for being a troublesome fruitcake. But the fact is that Ryder's demons are small-time compared to those of Robert Downey, Jr., and there was always somebody willing to work with him while waiting for him to prove himself insurable again. Ryder was much in demand when she was barely an adult because she was beautiful and unusual and willing to work, and a number of people who got their foot in the door of the industry that way learned to act as they went along. Ryder never did. A lot of these people were discarded by the industry as their looks faded; what's most special about Ryder, who at 37 is still very easy on the eyes, is that her looks held up just fine and still Hollywood was eager to discard her, because she showed no sign of ever learning to act a lick. She and Downey were both in Richard Linklater's rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, and the amazing thing was how much of him came through even as a cartoon, while her improved-upon screen image had the same hollow shell behind it that it always had.

Maybe Ryder will get her comeback: stranger things have happened, and if it does, good for her. But it's annoying to see writers present her career as a story of a major talent that's been neglected or gone to waste, because such talk amounts to a slight of other, genuine talents. So many really gifted actresses have to fight harder for parts as they grow older, and some of them never really win a round. Given that, how is it anything but simple justice that Ryder should have trouble getting good roles when the salient fact of her career has been her failure to seem to grow up? All she had to offer the camera was her face, and if the general feeling in Hollywood is that that's not enough to compensate for the trouble she's apt to cause, keep in mind that she's less trouble than a lot of people who manage to keep themselves in work. And then there's the wildy gifted people who don't stay in the race at all. "If Ryder's artistic rehabilitation works out over the summer," Thorpe writes breathlessly, "she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent to River Phoenix, but unlike him she has survived." If I read this correctly, in the comparison between Phoenix, whose career included some indelible performances before it was cut short, and Ryder, whose career doesn't and wasn't, Ryder wins because, for reasons connected to a fluke of mortality and blind luck, she's the one who's still employable. Seriously, does anyone really want to go there?

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Scott's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek" - Nick's Take

Nick Schager — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Hardcore Trekkers can debate whether J.J. Abrams has committed heresy with his franchise-restarter Star Trek. For those not deeply invested in Gene Roddenberry’s humanist sci-fi series, however, this summer spectacular will prove a largely thrilling surprise, its blend of humor, romance and action so kinetically orchestrated that calling out its shortcomings feels like excessive carping. By constructing a story around planet-devouring black holes that function as time-travel portals, Abrams not only affords himself a premise fit for grand intergalactic conflicts but also a handy explanation for why Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban) and their fellow Starfleet peace-keepers only sort of resemble themselves. It’s an alternate reality Star Trek, and all the better for it, serving up the type of breakneck thrills and operatic excitement that’s been absent from this sci-fi universe since 1982’s Wrath of Khan. A distinctly modern blockbuster that comes on like gangbusters and rarely lets up, it re-confirms that Abrams – after energizing Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible saga in 2006 – is a director tailor-made for event pics, his sleek, lens-flared cinematographic style and vigorously to-the-point pacing well-suited for the demands of mega-budgeted tentpole extravaganzas.

In this reconfigured Star Trek, whose mythos occasionally recalls Star Wars, Kirk’s dad dies saving his starship’s inhabitants and, specifically, his wife and newborn baby, and Kirk himself grows up to be a devil-may-care bad boy squandering his potential in cornfielded Iowa. Convinced by paternalistic Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to follow his father’s footsteps by joining the Starfleet Academy, he immediately finds himself in conflict with Spock, a rather disagreeable know-it-all struggling to reconcile his dual heritage as a logical Vulcan and (thanks to human mom Winona Ryder) an emotional Earthling. Much of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s script centers on Kirk and Spock’s combative relationship, though along the way it also deftly provides introductions to the rest of the iconic Enterprise crew, including amusingly grouchy McCoy, mini-skirted sexpot Uhura (Zoe Saldana), tough Sulu (John Cho), goofy Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), and witty Scotty (Simon Pegg). As befitting an origin story, Abrams lavishes most of the attention on establishing his characters’ various relationships, a guiding directive that he admirably pulls off, with the writer/director sneaking in trademark catchphrases and allusions to signature moments in Star Trek history while allowing his new cast to make the revered characters their own.

Pine channels William Shatner’s ladies-man egomania with a playfulness that makes light of the legendary Kirk’s machismo, Urban’s McCoy grumbles with a gusto that would make DeForest Kelly proud, and Quinto gives Spock a smarty-pants attitude that differentiates him from that of Leonard Nimoy’s original Vulcan, who [spoiler alert] eventually figures prominently in the narrative proper. That plot involves Romulan madman Nero (Eric Bana) traveling back in time to exact revenge on Spock and the Federation for his home world’s demise, a scheme to destroy Earth that inevitably feels shoehorned into a film whose primary concern is setting up interpersonal dynamics that can be further developed in sequels. Thanks to the tacked-on nature of Kirk’s battle with Nero, as well as a few too-curt editorial choices that don’t maximize the scenario for thrills, Star Trek falters slightly during its climax. Yet it’s a minor speed bump on an otherwise brisk ride, one that avoids indulging in the franchise’s characteristic social/political allegory in favor of straightforward, uncomplicated sci-fi melodrama and mayhem. Light on its feet, free from the self-seriousness of its predecessors, and shrewd enough to keep one wanting more by not overstaying its welcome, Abrams’ breathless reboot achieves the improbable, forcefully reviving a series that many, including myself, believed had deservedly been left for dead.

Scott's Take

Sundance Preview: Five Movies to Skip

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of tonight’s kickoff of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I’ve been previewing the must-see films: Tuesday we looked at documentaries and yesterday we checked out the narrative features. But it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. Every film festival of note screens its share of duds, and you don’t want be wasting valuable time you could spend riding a giant inner tube down a snowy peak. (Seriously, if you’re in Park City this week, do this. It’s super fun.) Here are five movies I’d scratch off my list if I happened to be in town.

BLACK DYNAMITE

Sure, this could be entertaining. The trailer makes it looks like pure blaxploitation pastiche, as if it’s the missing third piece of Grindhouse. The Sundance guide does nothing to dissuade me from this perception: “Black Dynamite is a throwback with an attitude. Hilarious, campy, hot, and sexy, it plays with every cliché from 1970s film and television, with a few new ones thrown in for color.” Personally, I think that could get real old real quick, but then, I sat through both I’m Gonna Get You Sucka and Undercover Brother, so maybe I’m just burnt out.

THE INFORMERS

Less Than Zero and American Psycho have their defenders, I suppose, but none of them are currently typing these words. So this description doesn’t particular light my fire: “Sex, drugs, and new wave...Los Angeles in the early 1980s: a time of excess and decadence, and nobody captures it better than Bret Easton Ellis as he coadapts his own acclaimed novel for the screen.” That’s not a world I have any interest in revisiting, although given that the cast includes Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder and the late Brad Renfro, I wouldn’t mind seeing a warts-and-all making-of documentary. I’m guessing it was not a placid, well-oiled production.

SHRINK

In another time – it seems so distant now – I would have watched Kevin Spacey read the phone book. His string of ‘90s performances, including Glengarry Glen Ross, Swimming with Sharks and The Usual Suspects left me eager to see what he’d do next. Then he caught the worst case of Oscar-itis since Nicolas Cage. (Pay It Forward. K-PAX. The Fucking Life of David Fucking Gale!) Now I can scarcely stand the sight of him, and Shrink sure doesn’t sound like the movie that will change that. “What happens when the people we count on to hold us together…are barely holding it together themselves? Jonas Pate's Shrink is a striking, fast-paced exposé of the ‘other’ Hollywood, featuring folks living outside their comfort zone and the people who put them there. Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey) is a psychiatrist with an A-list clientele, including a once-famous actress (Saffron Burrows), an insecure young writer (Mark Webber), and a comically obsessive-compulsive superagent (Dallas Roberts).” Kevin – get help!

SPREAD

The Sundance guide’s description of Spread is simply overflowing with sentences that make me never want to set foot in a movie theater again. ‘Los Angeles is often the customary site for mythmaking in the American cultural iconography. It is a place, for instance, where the legend of the sexual exploits of the male gigolo seems perfectly at home in the decadent universe of Hollywood dreams and nightmares. Surely inspired by the classic tradition of American Gigolo and Shampoo, Spread is such a perfectly tuned, contemporary depiction of the trials and tribulations of sleeping your way to wealth and success that, guilty pleasure or not, it’s irresistible. Especially so since it’s driven by the iconic persona of Ashton Kutcher. – ” Aaaand, this is the point where I make a break for the bathroom and hug the toilet close to my face. I didn’t even get to the part about his romancing of “middle-aged client” Anne Heche. There are some visuals I don’t need in my head.

SPRING BREAKDOWN

I don’t want to hate on Amy Poehler or (especially) Parker Posey, whose big screen appearances have been all too scarce of late, but this looks like absolute dogshit. “For Judi, Gayle, and Becky, tragically unhip bosom buddies pushing 40, “make-your-own-pizza night” constitutes the pinnacle of revelry. But when Judi’s fiancé turns out to be gay, Gayle’s face repulses a blind guy, and Becky’s beloved cat kicks the bucket, they’re ready for real pampering. Dusting themselves off, the trio heads for some R&R;on South Padre Island, where Becky’s supposed to chaperone her boss’s daughter.” Seriously, try to get through the trailer above. This is a Sundance movie? Time to hit the slopes!

Star Trek Can't Be Metrosexual; Or, Why Action Heroes Must Have Manly Haircuts

Vadim Rizov — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:59:00 GMT

So the long-awaited Star Trek trailer dropped, by all available evidence, sometime on Saturday and was exhaustively analyzed on the Internet by everyone capable of typing with an interest. As a franchise now over the forty-year mark, there's legions of the (overly-)invested just waiting to see what J.J. Abrams was going to do to Gene Roddenberry's long-straggling franchise. (Never mind that the Mission: Impossible had been kicking around for just as long when he got around to doing the third installment; presumably no one was that invested in the series' '88 iteration, whereas there's some desperate souls out there who still want to talk about how awesome Deep Space 9 was.)

And, of course, no one can agree on anything. But we can all agree on one thing: men who spend too much time on their hair aren't manly.

Yes, Abrams' Star Trek cast is full of pretty young things who'd be just as home on network TV making 13-year-old girls' hearts sw jasoon: Chris Pine, a TV journeyman, as Kirk, and Zachary Quinto (who apparently is on this show called "Heroes" that I really have never bothered to watch) as Spock. The smaller parts have been filled out with better but presumably less expensive supporting actors: Eric Bana, Simon Pegg, John Cho. (God bless the smart-ass who cast Winona Ryder as Spock's human mom; to suggest that her career has sunk so far that she had to find marriage on another planet is pretty hilarious.) No one, however, seems to be interested in their qualifications. Old-school Trek fans have recently been suggesting that the success of the original show rested upon its casting "real" actors with presence in the leads. This is obviously insane: Shatner was a journeyman actor going around doing bad things like trying to be one of The Brothers Karamazov, Leonard Nimoy was a guest-star on pretty much an TV series that would have him, etc. They lucked it in being a show that, whatever its campy excesses, had enough bold-faced Ideas to engage college students and create its own visual iconography — one that would subsequently be confused for a wonderful and brilliant vision, which it isn't. It's just part of the American pop-culture landscape.

Regardless: the big problem seems to be that everyone's haircut is too pretty. One "sott68" was one of the first, over at Ain't It Cool News, was the first to raise an important concern: "No Hetero kid actors available?" he wondered. "Kirk looks a bit womanish." The conservative commentators over at right-wingnut film site Dirty Harry's Place had similar concerns: "If I were a commander in a military-type body like Starfleet," explained one Jared, "any pretty-boy with the frosted hair that looks like it was commissioned in a beauty-salon instead of a barbershop would have to scrub the latrines with a brush made up of the hair we shaved off his head." One "whiskey" gets a little more explicit: "We are talking here [...] the kind of gay vibe that Hollywood insists on pushing. Guys don’t like it — they want leading men who are tough, not highly groomed, salon-friendly, sort of gay Russell Brand types."

Forget about the latent homophobia disguised as some kind of "respect" for the original; if a bunch of Star Trek nerds wants to have a nice day worrying about Kirk's masculinity (and pillory the buzzword "metrosexual" further to death), let 'em have it. What I'm really intrigued by is the idea that you can measure action-hero-viability via hair. One time I made a horrible mistake and went to the Atlas Barber School for a $4 hair-cut, only to find out that what I wanted wasn't possible; real men, it seems, get their haircuts with clippers; layering is for effeminates. Apparently this same kind of logic applies to action heroes.

But when you think about who's been cast lately as ass-kicking heroes, these commenters aren't that far off; they're merely responding to a casting stereotype that's been going on for years. Nothing against Jason Statham (no one's a bigger Transporter fan than me) or the growly-voiced likes of Vin Diesel, but if you look at the list of frequently-shaven-headed actors who've been trying to kill everything that moves on-screen in recent years, then yes: it does definitely look like J.J. Abrams isn't just taking his casting ideas from what kind of 20something inspires teen viewing on TV, but he's actively trying to queer things up, Kirk-Uhuru sex scene or no. At least Schwarzenneger and Stallone got to keep their hair, as ridiculous as it is. If Star Trek lets action stars get nice hair-cuts, then I'm all in favor of turning Star Trek into the Brokeback Mountain of sci-fi space action.

A high-quality trailer is here; far as I'm concerned, it's just fine.

Kat Dennings Battles Giant Grasshopper

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Scrape the thick layer of self-congratulatory hipster sludge off Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and you’ll find a sweet, funny little heir to the grand tradition of the “crazy New York all-nighter” movie. It works in large part due to the chemistry between Michael Cera – who, yes, only ever plays one character, the meek nebbish with great comic timing, but it worked for Woody Allen, so shut up – and Kat Dennings, my new future ex-wife. (Hey, she’s not really a teenager, you know! She’s 22! See, it’s not quite as creepy as you thought!) As Norah, Dennings somehow finds the gray area between vulnerability and ironic detachment, and she more than holds her own with Cera in the funny department.

Or, as Nick and Norah screenwriter Lorene Scafaria told the L.A. Times, “She's like everything that Molly Ringwald and Winona Ryder and Julia Roberts were, wrapped up into one amazingly talented girl.” I’m not sure I’d sign on with that or even that I can imagine such a creature, but we’ll let that slide. Since she wasn’t stamped out of a cookie cutter, Dennings struggled early in her acting career. “Soon she was heading out on auditions and facing endless rejections. ‘And they'd say, “Oh, you're too this or too that. You're not this enough. Your teeth, your hair,”’ recalls Dennings, who has never conformed to Hollywood's narrow standards of beauty. ‘It's terrible. It's the worst environment for a growing girl or person in the world.’”

You know what’s a much better environment for Dennings? The blogosphere! We’re all very nice here, and if you could see us, you’d know we don’t have such narrow standards of beauty. As it happens, however, Dennings has been blogging since 2001. At the aptly named katdennings.com, you can read about her epic battle with a giant grasshopper, as well as such posts as “I held something Mr. T held,” and observations like, “The cantankerous Polish fisherman within me has rapped his cane on my chest cavity yet again, muttering incoherent threats from behind his pipe.” We’ve all been there.

Related:
Trailer Review: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Screengrab Review: Charlie Bartlett

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

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

Morning Deal Report: Hilary Duff Stays Cool

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

We’ve all heard of coming-of-age comedies, but a “knowing-your-age” comedy is a new one on us. That’s how the Hollywood Reporter describes Stay Cool, the latest project from the Polish brothers (Northfork). Hilary Duff has joined the cast that already includes Winona Ryder and Chevy Chase (!) in the story of “a successful author (Mark Polish) who is forced to confront an unrequited high school crush (Ryder) when he returns home to deliver a commencement address to graduating seniors. Duff will portray Shasta O'Neil, a sexy high school senior who flirts with the visiting author and invites him to the prom.” Great, now Hollywood is stealing ideas from my dreams.

Let’s head on over to Salvation Boulevard, an adaptation of an upcoming mystery novel by Larry Beinhart (author of American Hero, which became Wag the Dog). Per Variety, the story “revolves around a private detective who investigates the killing of a professor. The exercise proves to be a clash of faiths: The detective is a born-again Christian, the dead man an atheist, the accused killer an Islamic foreign student and the D.A. is Jewish.” Sounds like the setup to a George Carlin routine, but the most intriguing element of the project is the director, George Ratliff. Ratliff is probably best known for his fire-and-brimstone documentary Hell House, but the real gem in his filmography is the now ultra-rare Plutonium Circus, about the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, TX. Track down a copy if you can.

Finally, isn’t it about time for a comedy about the dawn of the Internet porn era? Oxymoron Entertainment agrees, so their first feature will be Middle Men, co-written and directed by George Gallo (Midnight Run). The script concerns “a straight-and-narrow businessman brought into a world that would eventually turn into a multibillion-dollar industry,” according to Variety.

Related:
Home Is Where The Porn Is

Christina Ricci: Should I Be Concerned?

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I never saw Mermaids or The Hard Way, so my first impression of Christina Ricci was her mordant embodiment of little Wednesday in The Addams Family movies, marking her instantly as a Goth-y cool successor to the Winona Ryder of Beetlejuice and Heathers.

In the great high school of the entertainment industry, Ricci always seemed like one of the rebel kids in the corner, making wry wisecracks about the vapid popular girls, dating hipster misfits like Adam Goldberg and charting a course through an impressive array of cult classics, interesting flops and mainstream hits as a smart, sexy actress with indie cred to burn.

And then, I watched her Tuesday night appearance on Leno.

Now, I understand it must be hard living your entire life in the spotlight, surrounded by the beautiful people of Hollywood while constantly reading about yourself as an “offbeat beauty.” She’s often complained of her giant forehead, she’s battled anorexia and, as I only just read here on the Screengrab, she disliked her appearance so much at one point “that she covered all the mirrors in her house,” shades of her pig-snouted character in Penelope.

So, yes, I know enough about basic female psychology to understand that sometimes even the rebel chick in the corner may secretly yearn to be one of the popular girls, and there’s nothing wrong with going cheerleader blonde and playing up your glamorous side...

...but, egad, Christina, please don’t turn into just another Beverly Hills bobble-head! I mean, maybe her screen persona has always been more interesting than her talk show persona, but I had to go back and re-watch the Leno appearance to see if her interview about her shoe closet and her O.C.D. luggage-packing habits was really as vapid and boring as I remembered. (It was.)

And Christ a’mighty, that Speed Racer clip they screened was horrible, and Christina was horrible in it. I mean, we're talking Sci-Fi Channel original movie horrible. Sure, I know it’s a children’s flick and the visuals POP! But the preview of Christina’s Trixie making goo-goo eyes at Emile Hirsch’s tree-sappy Speed Racer made me yearn for the electrifying screen presence of Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke.

Here’s hoping for better when XtinaRic teams with charisma powerhouse...egad...Orlando Bloom in New York, I Love You.

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: Taxi!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

We were looking forward to, in light of the Friday premiere of Teeth, bringing you a Take Five featuring nothing but movies featuring a vagina dentata. Unfortunately, the search for five such films proved rather, well, unsettling. So instead, you get this list, about taxicabs. Why taxicabs? Because this Friday also brings us the debut, in New York and L.A., of Taxi to the Dark Side, a new film from Alex Gibney, the prolific documentarian who also brought us Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, No End in Sight, and Who Killed the Electric Car?. His new effort focuses on the dismaying tale of an Afghani hack who was caught up — in error — in the U.S. anti-terrorist net, shedding yet another angle on the seemingly infinite human stories that can be found inside the confines of a taxi. Taxicabs and Hollywood films came into their own at about the same time, and ever since then, some of the most memorable scenes in cinema have involved having someone drive someone else around and urban area for cash. Taxi to the Dark Side, like most things involving the terror war, is likely to be a bummer, so here's some further taxicab confessions to get you from point A to point B.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Well, you knew we were going here, didn't you? There's no more indelible vision of life behind the wheel of a cab than in Martin Scorsese's masterwork, one of the greatest screen treatments of alienation and unfocused rage ever captured. From the scenes of Travis Bickle's yellow cab emerging from New York steam-clouds to the look on his face as a murderous passenger (played by Scorsese in full mile-a-minute mode) spells out the grim fate that awaits his cheating wife to the final, anticlimactically calm chit-chat he shares with his fellow hacks after he's somehow emerged a hero from a maniacal bloodbath, Taxi Driver perfectly captures the banality of brutality that lurks on the mean streets of New York and only emerges in the scary moments of privacy that we think we share with cabbies. For an excellent companion piece to this essential American film, track down American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, a documentary biography Scorsese filmed at the same time of the unstable, hilarious, deranged young man who plays the gun dealer in Taxi Driver.

HEAVY METAL (1981)

Much as with the rest of the film, there are many levels at which you can appreciate the "Harry Canyon" segment of this legendary (or, rather, notorious) Canadian animated production based on a number of strips from the French-language fantasy comic anthology of the same name. You can enjoy the low-grade stunt casting of TV hack Richard Romano as futuristic New York City hack Harry Canyon. You can enjoy the attempt at animating the striking, ultra-detailed visual style of outstanding Spanish underground cartoonist Juan Giménez, and think of how much more enjoyable it would have been if the producers had more than $200 to spend on the segment. You can give yourself over to the goofball interpretation of 1940s noir dialogue set in the far future and written by a 1970s pseudo-hippie. And, believe it or not, you can actually appreciate one of the more interesting revisions of the cynical-cabbie-and-his-fare-on-the-lam. But honestly, we'd advise you to do what millions of other people have done when watching this movie: light up a fattie and wait for Harry to get it on with the hot alien chick.

D.C. CAB (1983)

Crap-movie auteur Joel Schumacher didn't just come out of nowhere. No, the man behind such memorably rotten movies as The Number 23, Batman & Robin and Dying Young has, in fact, been making unwatchable movies for three decades, and this was one of the first. Schumacher actually wrote this stinker as well, which delivers on the promise of its title by being set in Washington, D.C. and featuring taxicabs, but is somewhat of a letdown in other areas, such as its claim of being a 'comedy' despite having no jokes and its claim of featuring a 'cast' even though no one in it can act. Still, it's instructive to watch in order to see why Barney Miller's Max Gail didn't become a big movie star (answer: because he's a terrible actor), how many bad movies Bill Maher was in before he hit it big with his talk show (answer: fifty billion kazillion), why anyone ever thought that Adam Baldwin might have potential (answer: his brother Stephen made him look good by comparison), and what the eternal appeal of Mr. T is (answer: it's fun to watch him yell at people). A must-see, if your only other option is Batman & Robin.

NIGHT ON EARTH (1991)

One of Jim Jarmusch's most inconsistent films, but that's the nature of the beast: it's an episodic tale of five people in five different cities taking five different taxis to five different places for five different purposes, and the movie stands or falls by the strength of the performances and how deeply the viewer identifies with the characters in each segment. One of the problems with the film, and one reason why it enjoys a generally low critical opinion, is the 'lead' story, a cutesy and uncompelling bit of stunt casting with Winona Ryder (then Hollywood's It Girl) and a bored-looking Gena Rowlands. But the Helsinki segment is deeply affecting, one of the most moving stories the often ice-cool Jarmusch has ever delivered; the Rome segment features one of the last performances by Roberto Begnini that can't be described as insufferable; and the Paris segment is downright charming. All told, it's not a complete success, but it's a small and sometimes effective movie, one that perfectly captures the often-surreal interactions between driver and passenger familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time in taxis.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, okay, we're cheating. There are a million other movies about taxicabs, and almost any of them would be a better fit on this list than The Big Lebowski. But dammit, it's one of our favorite movies all the same, and even though only about three of its 117-minute running time is spent in a taxicab (understandable, since it's set in modern-day Los Angeles, where everyone has their own car), for our money, it's the funniest three minutes in a cab ever captured on film. The miserable cab ride home from Malibu after mistreatment at the hands of the sheriff — and exacerbated by a cabbie (played by a furious Ajgie Kirkland) who insists on exposing him to the Eagles — is one of the most memorable scenes in a movie full of great, funny moments. And it's not just stuck in there, either; like many scenes in the Coen's delightfully flipped noir, it's an echo of The Big Sleep. In that unforgettable adaptation of Raymond Chandler's impenetrable detective yarn, Bogie (as Philip Marlowe) seduces a friendly cab driver while on his way to chasing down a lead; here, the Dude has no such luck, ending up by the side of the road with Don Henley ringing in his ears.

Morning Deal Report: Ellen Page Whips It For Drew Barrymore

Peter Smith — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Rumors confirmed: Ellen Page will star in Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, Whip It!. According to Variety, the film "follows the exploits of alterna-teen Bliss. . . [who finds] herself after joining a female roller derby team." Story by one "Maggie Mayhem." Yup, this sounds like an Ellen Page project all right. Ellen Page: the Winona Ryder of the '00s? Discuss.

Dario Argento is working on Giallo, "an English-language homage to the genre that made him a cult helmer." (That would be giallo, I take it.) Argento's daughter Asia costars with Ray Liotta and Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays "a solipsistic, penis-obsessed lout who makes movies." No, I made that up.

Forest Whitaker to play inspirational basketball coach.

Morning Deal Report: Wino Forever

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Winona Ryder (odd picture, eh?) has joined JJ Abrams' Star Trek. Wonders never cease. Now, the last time she jumped into a science-fiction franchise, it was. . . uh oh.

I love videogames. And I love movies. But the two really don't belong together. The most annoying trend in videogames over the past fifteen years has been the desire to turn every game into an "interactive movie." The pleasure of a videogame is not narrative; it's explorative, physical. As for movies based on games, I think the record is pretty clear. In any case, Mark Wahlberg will star in Max Payne, playing "[a] cop who is haunted by the tragic loss of his family and has little regard for rules". . . um, why do you people even need a license? Can't you make this shit up on your own?

Josh Hartnett will star in an adaptation of Don DeLillo's second novel, End Zone. "Yet to be cast," says Variety, "is a teacher of international terrorism and mass destruction." Yep, that sounds like DeLillo.

— Peter Smith