The Screengrab : woody harrelson

Morning Deal Report of the Living Dead

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

We take no blame for the fact that Beverly Hills Chihuahua debuted at the top of the U.S. box office with a whopping $29 million weekend take. It’s true that I am the proud owner of a Chihuahua-American, but he wanted nothing to do with what he perceived as a showcase for offensive stereotypes. Eagle Eye was second with $17.7 million, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist took in a finite $12 million for third place. Blindness didn’t attract many eyes and finished outside the top 10, but both Bill Maher’s Religulous and the conservative coalition’s An American Carol made the lower reaches of the list, with Maher’s documentary boasting the higher per-screen average.

George Romero can’t seem to stop making zombie movies. He’s already shooting an as-yet untitled film – we fearlessly predict the word Dead will be in there somewhere – in Ontario. “Plot involves inhabitants of an isolated island off the North American coast who find their relatives rising from the dead to eat their kin,” Variety reports. “The leaders of the island feud over whether or not to kill their reanimated relatives or preserve them in hopes of finding a cure.” That’s a no-brainer, gang.

Screengrab It Girl Kat Dennings will team up with Woody Harrelson and Sandra Oh for the oddly-spelled Defendor. “Written by Peter Stebbings, who also is making his directorial debut, the film centers on a regular guy (Harrelson) who believes he has a secret superhero identity. Dennings will play a teenager he befriends, while Oh is cast as his psychiatrist,” says The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Religulous"
George Romero Runs the Voodoo Down

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And now, the war films that didn't quite make our official Top 25...

HONORABLE MENTION

LAND AND FREEDOM (1995)

Land and Freedom is Ken Loach at his most unabashedly leftist and over-earnest, but by Jove it is enjoyable! It certainly helps that unlike many other Ken Loach films, Land and Freedom is not set among pale, pudgy and poorly nourished people in some post-industrial British shithole. Well, it may start and end there, but no mind, that isn't what you will remember. The story quickly whisks you off to the heady days of the Spanish Civil War. A young English Socialist goes to Spain to fight the good fight and finds himself chanting "¡No Pasarán!" among the Catalonian hills amid leftist in-fighting galore, and plenty of sexy comrades who believe in free love. As icing on the cake, Ian Hart plays our hero (you may remember him as a young John Lennon in Back Beat — if you swing that way. No one does sullen English working class desperation with quite the same verve.

HAMBURGER HILL (1987)

This movie, directed by the British John Irvin from a script by James Carabatsos, who served with the First Air Calvary Division in Vietnam, is the plainest and most direct of all the 'Nam movies. It introduces you to the guys in a U.S. Army battalion and then documents the ten days they spend trying to carry out their orders to take an occupied hill that affords them minimal cover from the fire raining down. Although Hill shows some of the soldiers complaining about how unappreciated their efforts are back home, the film has no real political statement to make and no larger messages about the nature of warfare aside from the obvious ones, principally that the war looks a lot different to the officers who are off somewhere deciding which orders to give than it does to the guys on the ground who are staring up at the building about to collapse on top of them, and dying for a decision that makes no sense to you sucks. A lot of Vietnam movies have been made with the stated aim of providing a requiem for the people lost in that war; of all of them, this one gets that job done with the least fuss and confusion.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951)

This was the first war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, a World War II infantryman who would later tell interviewers how proud he was when a military representative complained to him that his movies would have no value as recruiting tools. Like his follow-up film, Fixed Bayonets, it's a Korean War picture that serves as a showcase for Gene Barry, a big, brusque galoot with a beady-eyed, unshaven mug who Fuller judged to be the ideal actor to play a grunt. (Suggestions from one studio that they enlarge the budget and try to reel in John Wayne sent Fuller swooning in horror.) With its garage-sale props, pissed-off acting, and quick bursts of chaotic action, it perfectly represents the mixture of cartoon, off-Broadway theater, whirligig violence and real anger that struck Fuller as the appropriate response to war. Spielberg later paid homage to the movie in the second Indiana Jones picture by giving Indy's child sidekick the same name (Short Round) that Fuller gave to the Korean kid who attaches himself to his hero.

WAG THE DOG (1997)

If you think this comedy about a political spin specialist (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman, doing his patented Robert Evans impression) helping to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal by stirring up public support for an attack on Albania isn't really a war movie, what channel have you been watching? At the time of its release, just as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was breaking, the movie seemed prescient, but David Mamet's script borrowed its basic idea from a novel, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, in which the president was George H. W. Bush and the phony war was the 1991 attack on Iraq; the novel depicted real-life Republican slimeball Lee Atwater literally handing over the worked-out plans for the war and its likely effect on the president's approval rating on his death bed, along with the advice -- which the White House failed to heed -- that George not get overexcited and be sure to save the plan until closer to the 1992 election so that it would do him some good. Mamet and company may have cost the project some of its edge by making it about a fictional president and a fictional war, thus rendering it more "universal." On the plus side, they did give us the image of Willie Nelson, hard at work on his new novelty propaganda song, trying his damndest to think up a rhyme for "Albania."

UNDER FIRE (1982) & WELCOME TO SARAJEVO (1997)

These two movies are both about white English-speaking reporters trying to cover violent trouble spots in remote corners of the world while having to grapple with their ethics about playing nonjudgemental observers of the horrors going on in front of their noses. (Oliver Stone's Salvador is in a similar mold except that James Woods' Richard Boyle, who by most official professional standards has the loosest ethics of any reporter imaginable, is so sure he knows what's right and what's wrong that he isn't troubled about a thing.) In Under Fire, the setting is Nicaragua in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The hero, a photographer played by Nick Nolte, agrees to help the rebels keep up morale by faking a photo "proving" that their dead leader is still alive. The politics of the movie flew in the face of the Reagan administration's policy that the Sandinista government was unacceptable and needed to be taken down by proxy warriors. The movie was, accordingly, buried, but the director, Roger Spottiswoode, and the writer, Ron Shelton, manage to achieve a clear-eyed view of all the competing forces propping up the Somoza dictatorship or trying to bring it down, including a fun-loving psycho of a professional mercenary (Ed Harris), a mysteriously well-connected Frenchman played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Richard Masur as Somoza's mealy-mouthed American flack, who's trying to turn things around with media spin while Somoza's soldiers are shooting down people in the street. In Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, which is set during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovia (and which was shot on location there while the ruins were still smoking), Stephen Dillane plays a British journalist who weighs the pros and cons of adopting a little girl and smuggling her out of the country. Challenging and involving, the movie is also blessed by one of Woody Harrelson's most entertaining wild man turns as a well-respected establishment TV journalist whose off-camera behavior in the field is pure double-live gonzo.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Seven
Seven

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Review: “Surfer, Dude”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It’s not always a pretty sight when documentary filmmakers make the leap to fictional features. See – or rather, do whatever you can to avoid seeing – Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon and Errol Morris’s The Dark Wind. As I implied in this post yesterday, I’m a big fan of S.R. Bindler’s documentary Hands on a Hard Body. Even so, I wasn’t exactly stoked to learn his follow-up (nearly a decade later) would be a surfing movie starring The Shirtless One, Matthew McConaughey. I dunno, maybe it’s just because I watched the entire goofy-ass David Milch series John From Cincinnati, but there’s something about the whole mystical-spiritual aura surrounding surfing that makes otherwise talented people a little loopy.

Surfer, Dude definitely qualifies as loopy – even that comma in the title is a little too self-consciously quirky. McConaughey, a friend of Bindler’s since high school, produced the film through his production company j.k. livin and brought his essential dudeness aboard in the lead role of Steve Addington, a free-spirited “soul surfer” who lives for the waves. Upon returning to Malibu from his latest world tour, Addington is informed by his manager (Woody Harrelson) that his board and shorts sponsorship contracts have been sold to Eddie Zarno, a former surfer turned multimedia mogul. Zarno has big plans for Addington, including a role in a beach house reality series and a virtual reality videogame bearing his image.

Addington’s “not feelin’ it.” He’s an all-natural dude and all he needs is his friends, his weed and his waves. “I’m not some assclown in a green room. I’m a surfer, dude!” Despite his manager’s warnings that cash is in short supply, Addington wants nothing to do with the digital world. His spiritual crisis arrives when the waves disappear. As the days pass with no surf to ride, he goes on a fast (including the ganja), but can he remain true to himself and resist selling out to the Man? Duuuuude.

Surfer, Dude has a green theme in more ways than one – in addition to McConaughey and Harrelson, Willie Nelson is on hand as a goat farmer to complete the trinity of Texas stoner icons. But the movie is so lightweight, it’s hard to invest too heavily in Addington’s existential dilemma. It’s a vanity project to the core, an ode to its producer-star in all his toned-and-tanned golden glory. With his lazy honeydew drawl, allergy to shirts and “awright awright awright” party-guy vibe in full effect, McConaughey isn’t playing a character so much as his US magazine persona come to life. His wink and nod towards his lovable rogue image recalls the Burt Reynolds of the late 70s, and that’s one way of looking at this movie: it’s Smokey and the Bandit with surfboards.

Related:
Woody Harrelson Eats Your Brains
Trailer Review: Fool's Gold

Morning Deal Report: Woody Harrelson Eats Your Brains

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Welcome to Zombieland. Who woulda thunk the zombie craze would still be going strong at the multiplex? Yet here we have Woody Harrelson signing on to star in a new horror comedy from the writers who brought you The Joe Schmoe Show. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Zombieland “revolves around a mismatched pair of survivors who find friendship and redemption in a world overrun by zombies. Harrelson plays one of the men, a zombie fighter named Albuquerque.”

There’s a strong whiff of Deliverance coming off The Mountain, which Jayson Rothwell (Malice in Wonderland) will pen for Legendary Pictures. “Story centers on a sheriff, recently transplanted from the inner city, who assembles a search party to investigate the disappearance of hikers in the Cascade Mountains and discovers the menacing side of the remote wilderness,” says Variety. Even scarier is another title under development at Legendary: Clash of the Titans. Release the Kraken!

Those of you who loved Meet the Spartans (coming soon to Unwatchable) will no doubt go crazy for National Lampoon's The Legend of Awesomest Maximus. “We're excited to embark on another National Lampoon original production, especially with a cast of this caliber,” Lampoon Chief Executive Officer Daniel Laikin tells The Hollywood Reporter. In case you’re wondering, that cast includes Ian Ziering, Will Sasso, Tony Cox and Rip Torn. I’m laughing on the inside.

Related:
George Romero Runs the Voodoo Down
Consumer Report on "Meet the Spartans"

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

SHOWGIRLS (1995)

“Do you know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!” And that hilarious quip from strip club “comedienne” Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom pretty much sums up the philosophy towards women in this abortion of a cult classic by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I get it...this campy, overwrought drag show bitch-fest about amoral sex worker Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is so bad it’s good! And we can all just laugh through the parts where Gina Ravera’s Molly (the only vaguely redeemable or recognizably human character in the movie, and a black woman to boot) gets brutally raped by a loathsome white rock star. (I love it when they act out that part in the drag queen version of the show at my favorite hipster bar!) Garish, ridiculous and aggressively stupid, Showgirls is hard for me to enjoy ironically, since it so clearly embraces and truly believes in its own fetid realpolitik Hollywood philosophy that love is a lie, “art” is whatever makes money, winning is everything, men are scumbags, women are worthless (especially if they’re not hot, naked and young), the world is a shithole, if you’re not clawing your way to the top every single minute (and/or don’t know how to properly pronounce the most expensive status symbol brand names) you’re a fool and a loser and deserve what you get. Yeccch. Showgirls ain't just misogynistic: it pretty much hates everyone. And the feeling is mutual.

INDECENT PROPOSAL (1993)

If Demi Moore is, or was, a star, it's not because she's talented (she can't act a lick) or because people like her (a lot of them don't) but because she manages, just through her very presence, to convey the impression that denying her the attention she craves might have consequences that are just too dire to contemplate. Like Madonna at her least interesting and most hard to take, she seems to be all about ambition for its own sake, but possessed of a steely, confrontational gaze that says: You will take me seriously. Although others will prefer to honor her for her services to American literature in The Scarlet Letter, Indecent Proposal may be the definitive Demi Moore movie statement. Here, she takes up where the Material Girl left off in the '80s; Madonna demonstrated that pure commercialism was hip, and this movie gives Moore the chance to show that a woman can assert herself and take control of her life by whoring herself out. When we first meet her, she's totally in thrall to her boyfriend, Woody Harrelson -- his dreams (of making a haul gambling in Vegas to fuel his doomed business venture) are all that matter. But after Harrelson craps out, she agrees to gazillionaire geezer Robert Redford's offer that she sleep with him for a million dollars. Harrelson, who wants the money but also wants some credit for feeling bad about it, ends up basically serving as her pimp, but when she's had it with his whining she makes it clear to him that this was her decision -- she's her pimp. And she's right -- although Harrelson has been her one true love and her ennobling reason for accepting the offer, once he goes into his snit, she has reason to dump him, which she does, thus conveniently giving Daddy Warbucks his opening to step up and sweep her off her feet. Then, because Redford, apparently a big Cheers fan, can't stand to see Woody Harrelson feeling suicidal -- and also, maybe, because the young poor guys whose girlfriends dragged them to this movie would tear out the theater seats if Moore stayed with the old, rich guy -- Redford ennobles himself by gracefully doing a far, far better thing than he has ever done before and giving her back to Harrelson. Moore agrees, somehow failing to notice that she's not just continuing to define herself by which guy she's with, but letting the guys dictate which one of them that will be. Not that I'd want to have to choose myself if I were her; Harrelson has never come across as goofier, and the awestruck, glamour-lighting treatment that Redford is given here just tends to emphasize how much his sun-kissed visage was starting to look like the bottom of a potato chip bag.

KISSES FOR MY PRESIDENT (1964)

In this election year, let us spare a moment's reflection for the sacrifices made by those who came before us, like whoever had to sit through Kisses for My President, a Great Society-era comedy in which a woman -- Polly Bergen -- becomes president of this great land, an idea that at the time must have seemed considerably more far-fetched than anything in the Warren Commission Report. Bergen's Leslie McCloud wasn't the first pretend woman president in American movies -- that honor may fall to the nameless character played by Ernestine Barrier in the 1953 Project Moonbase, which was set in 1970 -- and she may not even be the most pathetic. (Tip your hat to Loretta Swit's President Adams in Whoops Apocalypse.) But she may have been the most retrograde, a sad example of a would-be world leader overtaken by events on the home front. Although Bergen is actually a decisive, effective commander in a dangerous, confused and (this being a 1964 Hollywood comedy) kooky world, she has to fight to stay focused on her job because her husband, Fred MacMurray, is having a twenty-four-seven hissy fit about how unmanning it is to be the First Gentleman. Fred finally solves his problem by getting Bergen pregnant, forcing her to step down so that Dick Cheney can become president. Special prosecutors have been appointed over less.

LEGALLY BLONDE (2001)

Call it last-wave feminism: it has a target market, not a constituency, and they’re the kind of women who don’t even like to use that particular f-word. It’s the feminism of sorority girls with trust funds and breast implants, the feminism of drunk girls making out with each other in main-drag bars. It’s the feminism of marrying up, of buying at full price, of a career as a means not to equality, but to superiority: and Legally Blonde is its favorite movie. The 2001 fish-in-the-wrong-brand-of-bottled-water comedy made a fortune, and turned Reese Witherspoon into a major star; but beyond that, it inspired a legion of imitators that all followed a now-familiar formula. Nice was the new smart, fashionable was the new educated, and rich was the new liberated. It’s easy enough to brush off Witherspoon’s Elle Woods as simply another iteration of the classical comedic underdog, but that only works until you consider the fact that her underdog is rich, well-dressed, trendy and drop-dead gorgeous. She enrolls in Harvard Law School (and is accepted with insulting ease) more or less to spite her equally wealthy, handsome ex-boyfriend, and the movie’s idea of conflict is simply pitting her against a variety of snobbery slightly different than the one she’s used to. The girl power championed by Legally Blonde is the power to wear a push-up bra with pride, and to blend the power of crass nouveau wealth with that of elite establishment power. Sound like any president you know?

Click here for Part One of Girl DisemPowerment.

Or click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wesley Snipes Fought the Law, and the Law Won Three Out of Eight Counts

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Wesley Snipes has had his day in court. As we reported here previously, Snipes was hauled into a Florida courtroom by the Internal Revenue Service and charged with six misdeamor counts based on his alleged failure to file tax returns between 1999 and 2004, and felony counts of conspiracy to defraud the government and filing false tax refund claims. In recent years, the feds have lost a few similar cases due to what experts view as a trend among disgruntled juries to side with the accused in order to tell the I.R.S. where they can shove it. If Snipes had gotten off scott-free, it would have been a singular victory for the "tax deniers'" movement and a terrible humiliation for the prosecutors. As it happened, the jury sort of split the difference, finding Snipes guilty on three of the misdemeanor counts and absolving him of responsibility for the felonies. At the same time, they found the actor's two co-defendents, Eddie Ray Kahn and Douglas Rosile — both of whom are connected to American Rights Litigators, a Florida-based tax protesters' outfit — guilty of felony counts similar to the ones lodged against Snipes.

Both Snipes and the chief prosecutor, Robert O'Neill, professed to be delighted with the verdict. Using all his thespic skills to cover up his grief over the verdicts against his tax advisers, both of whom could be looking at as much as ten years in prison, Snipes told reporters that ""it does feel good, it feels great." Meanwhile, his lawyer, Robert Bernhof, continued to maintain that his client had never meant to do anything wrong, but had simply been confused over whether he was legally obligated to pay taxes, had asked the I.R.S. about it, and would have sent them a check immediately if they'd just gotten back to him. O'Neill responded to the verdict with a statement saying that "Filing tax returns is not optional. It is a legal requirement;" now that we've all got that straight, Bernhof says that Snipes is "ready to pay and file." Now the lawyers will set about determining just how much Snipes owes the government; in a worst-case scenario, he could still be sentenced to as much as three years in jail. In the meantime, I intend to start working on an Internet-urban myth calling attention to the fact that, with Snipes's I.R.S. troubles, Woody Harrelson's pot bust, Jennifer Lopez's felony gun charge in the and Robert Blake's arrest for murder, there's some kind of curse working its way through the cast of Money Train. Chris Cooper, watch your back!

Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When contemplating a subject for the “Vanishing Act” column, I often find myself wondering, “Why hasn’t this person worked in so long?” In the case of Michael Cimino, I did not ask this question. My query was more along the lines of, “How many incriminating photos of which top Hollywood executive blowing what particular kind of farm animal did this person have in order to keep working for so long after Heaven’s Gate?”

Indeed, Gate is such a storied, monumental flop in the annals of motion picture history, it’s some sort of credit to Cimino that it took him so long to vanish. This is particularly true when you consider a slate of aborted projects that makes Terry Gilliam look prolific and bankable by comparison. For instance, did you know that at one time, Cimino was actually hired to direct Footloose? Personally, I would like to see documentary footage of the meeting at which this decision was reached. I’d much rather see that than ever again sit through Desperate Hours or Year of the Dragon, two Cimino films that actually were made. (Quoth Footloose producer Craig Zadan: “Cimino wanted to make a darker movie. We wanted to make an entertainment.” And Kenny Loggins rejoiced.)

The man has never lacked for ambition. Other Cimino projects that never got off the drawing board include an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, biopics of Dostoevsky and Janis Joplin, and a multi-generational American Indian saga to be filmed entirely in the Sioux language. At one time or another, legend has it that he was slated to direct The Dogs of War, The King of Comedy, The Dead Zone and Mutiny on the Bounty. (There’s gotta be a sequel to Final Cut in here somewhere, right?)

Cimino’s final completed feature to date is 1996’s The Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson as a wealthy doctor who is kidnapped by a terminally ill gangbanger hoping to find a magical lake of healing. Grossing a grand total of $23,107 at the box office, the barely released Sunchaser appears to have done what Heaven’s Gate could not: make Cimino a complete untouchable.

In 2001, Cimino published his first novel, Big Jane. The following year he gave a rare interview to the Independent, dispelling rumors that he’d had a sex change operation and talking up a big-screen comeback with an adaptation of Man’s Fate, “Andre Malraux's dense, heady novel about the squelched 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai.” It never happened.

The good news is: they love him in France! Last year, Cimino earned his first film credit in over a decade, contributing the three-minute segment “No Translation Needed” to the omnibus film Chacun son cinema. Don’t call it a comeback yet, but at least it’s a start.

The Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray, KINGPIN (1996)

Bowling is enjoyed by millions of Americans of all ages, but in the Farrelly brothers' second film Kingpin, the professional bowling circuit is portrayed as being forever trapped in the seventies. Professional bowlers are seen as sleazeball would-be lounge lizards, dressing in garish clothes, doing cock-of-the-walk victory dances, and relentlessly chasing women when they're not bowling. But in Kingpin, the most telling remnant of their faded vocation is almost certainly the hairdos they sport. In the seventies, Harrelson's Roy Munson and Murray's Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken were well-coiffed slicksters. Two decades hence, they try, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their youthful appearance by engaging in that age-old solution practiced by creepy old men the world over — the comb over. True to their characters, Big Ern is better at maintaining the façade — his 'do looks like a woodland creature parked itself atop his pate, but at least it doesn't reflect the light. But once the rivals take to the lanes for the climactic showdown, Big Ern shows his true colors. Usually a cool customer, he lets the stress get the better of his hair, and it gradually begins to detach from his head, until it resembles the world's largest ripped seam. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet's Clementine speaks of having mood hair, but we'd like to think that, as with so many great things in cinema, Bill Murray got there first.

The Leningrad Cowboys, LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA

Rock'n'roll has a history of some pretty questionable hairdos, but none like those worn by the Leningrad Cowboys. Almost surely the most rockin' band to get their start north of the Arctic Circle, the Cowboys first entered the scene as the brainchild of director Aki Kaurismäki, who assembled some of his rocker pals for his 1989 stone-faced mockumentary, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. In the film, the Cowboys, tired of playing in Siberia, mount an American tour, despite their uncertain grasp of the English language. But if their songs mark them as foreigners, their hair is positively alien, with all members sporting uniform black pompadours, each with a large, unicorn-like forelock pointing out into the distance. As the film progresses, we discover that this hairdo is actually a congenital signifier of musical skill — the musically-challenged cousin who stalks the combo has but a tiny tuft to his name. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the U.S. tour is mostly a washout, but they'd find more enduring success at home following the fall of the Iron Curtain. They appeared in two more features, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert film Total Balalaika Show, in which they teamed up with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, as well as over half a dozen music videos directed by Kaurismäki. Finally, the Cowboys made their triumphant return to the American stage for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All the while, the band remained true to their roots, never touching so much as a strand of those terrible, awesome hairdos.

Demi Moore, STRIPTEASE

Some might think the obvious choice here would be G.I. Jane, but somehow even a number-one blade on a pair of clippers only revealed that Demi Moore had a perfectly shaped head, and didn't diminish her hotness in the least. The same cannot be said for the bangs-and-blow-dry look of Striptease. Yeah, we know she's supposed to be playing a stripper, but those are clearly hair extensions, and not very flattering ones at that. Most people at the time were probably distracted by the reveal of Moore's surgically enhanced breasts (we liked the originals just fine, thank you) and there are certainly many places the finger of blame can be pointed in this nuclear stinkbomb of a movie — but you shouldn't underestimate just how bad a haircut had to be back then to make Demi Moore look unattractive.

Kevin Costner, THE BODYGUARD (1992)

The story behind one of Sir Kevin's more laughable haircuts (and, if you've seen his mullet in Robin Hood, that's really saying something) is actually kinda touching: The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard was originally conceived as a vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen way back during the 1970s. When the film was finally made in 1992, starring Costner and Whitney Houston, the star decided to try and channel McQueen; to do so he adopted the legendary icon of cool's trademark close-cropped haircut, which looked fantastic on McQueen but downright surreal on Costner. That said, Costner did have the last laugh: The Bodyguard was one of his worst films, and a stain on screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's career (it had been his first script — turns out he made up for it with The Empire Strikes Back), but it wound up being a huge hit. Indeed, we're not unconvinced that Costner's follicular follies in this film didn't lead indirectly to the George-Clooney-and-his-Caesar-haircut craze a couple of years later. There you go, folks — one more societal ill you can blame on Kevin Costner.

Nicolas Cage, NATIONAL TREASURE (2004)

Full disclosure: For weeks the spot for this entry stood empty on this list, with simply the words "Nicolas Cage, FILM TO BE DETERMINED LATER" holding its place. Because let's face it, any number of films starring Nicolas Cage from the past few years could go here — from the god-awful toupee he sported in Ghost Rider to the goofy balding curls he fretted over in Adaptation (of course, we don't hold that last one against him, not only because his bad hair was a plot point in that film, but also because we have this disturbing suspicion that, had nature been allowed to take its course, that's what Nicolas Cage's real hair might actually look like today). But we're going with National Treasure, for the simple fact that we spent the whole film staring at the slug-like patch of weave at the very tip of the actor's forehead. Seriously, this isn't hair, it's a lid. In these later years, Cage and Kevin Costner have switched places, but if you'd asked us fifteen years ago which of the two would allow himself to go bald gracefully while the other kept trying new ways to make himself look like he had something resembling a "full" "head" of "hair," the answer might have been different.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

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