The Screengrab : yaphet kotto

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

13. OCTOPUSSY (1983)

Okay, to be honest, I’m the only one at Screengrab who voted for Octopussy as one of the best James Bond films of all time. But even though it’s been a long time since I saw it, I’m pretty sure I can safely stand by my vote. First of all...it’s frickin’ called OCTOPUSSY! Newspapers and TV stations across the United States (in the Age of Reagan, no less!) had to advertise what sounds like the dirtiest, freakiest porn flick of all time...how great is that? And to think many of those same newspapers and TV stations balked at revealing the full title of Zack and Miri...I only regret the MoviePhone Guy wasn’t around back then to say, “You’ve selected...Octopussy!” My friends and I would have called twenty times a day! Uh...but I digress. So anyway, aside from that bitchen title, the film also featured a pretty cool, well-paced story featuring an elephant chase, knife-throwing circus performers, a sweet fight on the wings of an airborne jet and a weird lady cult of acrobatic assassins. True, Roger Moore was really showing his age (and would retire after his next Bond adventure, the dreadful View To A Kill), and sure, the movie is goofy as hell...but, for me at least, goofy more often than not equals fine entertainment value.

12. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

The apotheosis of Roger Moore; as you might expect, the secret was to build a hell of a show around the smirking old thing and give him something to react to. After the comparatively low-tech Man with the Golden Gun and the ugly-looking Live and Let Die, the producers decided to kick out the jams a little, and Ken Adam, the legendary production designer who'd worked on most of the Bond films of the 1960s and '70s, was encouraged to just go nuts. In addition to the sets, the movie boasts perhaps the most succulent and wittiest of the Bond babes -- Barbara Bach, a.k.a. Mrs. Ringo -- as well as a villain for the ages in Richard Kiel's hard-to-finish-off Jaws, and even a theme song (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and performed by Carly Simon) that you can still hear on the radio without throwing up in your mouth hardly at all.

11. LICENSE TO KILL (1989)

Timothy Dalton never got much love as James Bond, and with good reason: his interpretation of 007 was humorless and constipated, and one of his two at-bats in the role was 1987’s snoozer The Living Daylights, one of the dullest Bond films in the entire series. And while License to Kill played more like a feature-length Miami Vice episode than a spy caper, it was nevertheless a pretty good action movie. The villain (Robert Davi’s evil drug lord Sanchez -- based, at least according to Wikipedia, on real-life supervillain Pablo Escobar) gets his goons to feed ageless, indestructible CIA agent Felix Leiter to a shark (after raping and killing the poor bastard’s wife on their wedding night...a plot twist WAY too dark for any Bond film to carry), after which Dalton’s character goes rogue, resigning from M16 to get himself some payback. Once it gets past the gruesome downer of a set-up, however, the film introduces Carey Lowell as drug courier and CIA informant Pam Bouvier, one of the smartest, most charismatic “Bond girls” of all time, then continues to improves with a compelling cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Sanchez and Bond, featuring a peculiar Wayne Newton cameo (as a shady televangelist!) and climaxing with the best tanker truck chase this side of The Road Warrior.

10. LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Granted, this is something of a nostalgic choice. As I mentioned in the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs list a couple of weeks ago, Live and Let Die was the first Bond movie I ever saw, and it took many years for me to get over the idea that Roger Moore was the 007. I'm aware that almost anything positive I say about the movie can also be held against it. For example, I could give it credit for having the most racially diverse cast in the series, but then I'd have to admit that some of the characters do not represent the most, er, enlightened portrayal of African-Americans on film. My theory is this: after the failure of George Lazenby, the producers weren't taking any chances in launching their new Bond, so they raided American cinema for all the trendiest action movie trimmings. The story pits Bond against a voodoo-dabbling heroin magnate and his Harlem drug ring, a convenient excuse to plunder the then-hot blaxploitation pictures for wild afros, gaudy cars and the latest in jive talk. When the action shifts to the American South, the movie just as shamelessly embraces the gators, speedboats and cottonmouth drawls of hixploitation. It almost turns into Smokey and the Bandit for awhile, with the arrival of peckerwood Sheriff Pepper. I can understand how the purists would object to all this, but I've always gotten a kick out of the voodoo vibe, Yaphet Kotto as the exploding villain Kananga, luscious Jane Seymour as the fortune teller Solitaire and Roger Moore running across a bunch of crocodiles.

9. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

For all its continued bankability, the Bond series was in a creative rut after four decades. Given the self-parody of the late Moore adventures, the lean Dalton years, and the diminishing returns of the Brosnan movies, how could the producers of the Bond films rejuvenate their cash cow? Why, with a reboot, of course! And what better way to do so than to double back and adapt Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel in the process? A new take on the series would require a new leading man, and Daniel Craig was just the man for the job -- younger, leaner, and meaner, here was a guy with bigger things to worry about than how his martinis were made. Casino Royale makes it clear from the outset that this is a whole new ballgame, when we first see Craig’s Bond undertaking the missions that earned him his license to kill -- filmed in stark black and white, no less. And through Craig’s steely blue eyes, we experience a fresh take on the usual Bond story -- no nifty gadgets, no villains bent on world domination, and no convoluted methods of torture (in a decidedly lo-fi touch, the captured Bond gets whacked in the tenders with a knotted rope). Of course, the action scenes are still pretty kickass, especially an early parkour-style foot chase. But what really makes Casino Royale special is Craig’s relationship with Vesper Lynd, played by the luscious Eva Green. Vesper is Bond’s equal in many ways, and the closest the character has come to finding his match since Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And this makes her eventual betrayal all the more effective -- not simply because of how much it messes our hero up, but also the lengths to which he must go to steel himself against the pain in the future. Essentially, Casino Royale finds James Bond becoming the 007 we all know, and when he finally states his name at the end of the film, we have no trouble believing him.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews in Cinema (Part I)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.”

So says Seth Rogen’s full-time slacker Ben Stone at the start of 2007’s Knocked Up, heralding a recent shift in the pop culture persona of the Chosen People from neurotic schlimazels of the Woody Allen variety to bad-ass playas like Bana.

But, although the concept of “Jewish action star” is a relatively new phenomenon, film history is filled with tales of Hebrew heroes (and heavies), from ancient Egypt to modern Israel.

And thus, in tribute to the upcoming June 6th release of Adam Sandler’s meshuga Israeli commando/hair-stylist comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, we here at the Screengrab are proud to present...THE TOP 12 TOUGH JEWS OF CINEMA!!!!!

ERIC BANA AS AVNER IN MUNICH (2005)

Well, of course we had to start with this one. Bana’s Avner, a Mossad agent tasked with tracking down and executing the terrorists responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, isn’t a stone-cold, tough-as-nails killer like his fellow assassin Steve (a dead-eyed Daniel Craig). Not that he isn’t formidable in his own right, surviving explosions, raiding PLO compounds, dodging other assassins and negotiating tense Middle Eastern Mexican stand-offs. But Avner is more than a rage-fueled killing machine, leavening his combat skills with love of family and the mental toughness to question the wisdom of fighting violence and hatred with ever more violence and hatred. Plus, if we’re to believe the ill-conceived, much-maligned “climax” of the film, Bana’s character is tough enough to maintain his mojo during volcanic sex with his wife even while suffering vivid flashbacks of terrible murders he didn’t actually witness. Me, I usually just think of baseball.

JEFF GOLDBLUM AS DAVID JASON IN DEEP COVER (1992)

This anti-Drug War crime thriller supposedly stars Laurence Fishburne (as a fast-rising drug dealer who's actually an undercover cop), but the movie belongs to Goldblum as the lawyer for the local head (Gregory Sierra) of the drug cartel. His character embodies his culture's traditional pursuit of success through education and hard work, but he's also at least half crazed from envy of the thugs he keeps out of jail with his motormouthed brilliance. Their hair-trigger willingness to give in to their violent urges makes him feel unmanly and overcivilized. (Sierra insults Goldblum by calling him "bar mitzvah boy"; Goldblum, in turn, naively thinks he's paying Fishburne a compliment when he likens him to "some beautiful panther or jungle storm...a dangerous, magnificent beast.") After Sierra beats a man to death in front of Goldblum, he asks him if it's the first time he's ever seen a person die, and Goldblum responds with a dreamy monologue about witnessing a fatal accident when he was a kid at summer camp. He sounds as if he 's remembering his first kiss. Goldblum finally snaps, joins Fishburne in toppling Sierra in a bloody coup, and winds up decked out in black leather and slicked-back hair, machine-gunning Clarence Williams III as if in retaliation for The Mod Squad.

JAMES WOODS AS MAX AND ROBERT DE NIRO AS NOODLES IN ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

Sergio Leone's final film is an opium dream of a gangster epic starring De Niro and Woods as lifelong frenemies, two products of the Brooklyn Jewish ghetto of the tenement era who grow up to become kings of New York during the Depression years. Part of the tension of their love-hate relationship comes from the fact that they represent clashing approaches to getting the most out of life. Max, the Bugsy Siegel figure, is an unstoppable bullet of wordly ambition, a volatile schemer who won't hesitate to shoot or bitch slap anyone who gets in his way, questions his plans, or looks at him cross-eyed. For most of the film he seems to roll right over the more careful, romantic-spirited Noodles. He ultimately fakes his own death, so that he can disappear into a new life as a respectable, rich businessman (and marry the woman--Elizabeth McGovern--who's the unattainable love of Noodles' life), leaving his old pal broke and stranded with survivor's guilt for thirty-five years. But after Max has played out his string and summons the now-aged Noodles to put him out of his misery, telling him that he's "the only one I can accept it from", we see that Noodles, the mother hen, is one of those people who was born to be sixty, and that everything up to now in his life has been preparation for the moment when Max comes begging, and he says no. It's all been worth it just to get to the end of their lives so that he can say, "I told you so."

CHARLES BRONSON AS BRIG. GEN. DAN SHOMRON IN RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Though it may seem hard to believe now, there was a period of about ten years there where most of the Western world recognized the Israeli military as perhaps the last example of unfailing competence and dependable strength put at the service of a cause that was just--in a nutshell, the good guys. This glorious public relations phase began in the summer of 1967 with the Six-Day War and had its last great hurrah with the rescue mission to recover the hostages taken by Palestinian and German hijackers who sought refuge in Uganda. "Operation Entebbe", which happened to unfold in the early hours of July 4, 1976, as America was gearing up to celebrate its own Bicentennial, was such a movie-ready news event that it was dramatized in three separate movies that went into production practically overnight, including two films originally made for American TV and an Israeli feature that was directed by Menahem Golan, later of the notorious Golan-Globus Productions. The best of them, by miles, was Raid on Entebbe, directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and released to theaters internationally after premiering on NBC TV six months after the actual events. The cast, which was very classy A-list by seventies TV-film standards, included Peter Finch (who died a week after the original broadcast, and who won an Oscar for his performance in Network shortly thereafter) as Yitzhak Rabin and Yaphet Kotto as Idi Amin, but it's Bronson who gives it that all-important shot of testosterone. He doesn't really have that much to do except fill out a uniform and bark orders into his walkie-talkie, but the important thing is that it's Charles fucking Bronson in his Death Wish-era prime who's in charge of this mission, bestowing upon it his macho gravitas and leathery glamor. By comparison, the 1986 Delta Force had to try to squeeze whatever juice it could out of the combination of a past-his-prime Lee Marvin and an not-yet-ironic Chuck Norris on a rocket cycle.

LENA OLIN AS MASHA IN ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY (1989)

In this adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, Olin is a house on fire as a ferociously sexy Holocaust survivor who's having an affair with Ron Silver as a Polish Jew who's been transplanted to New York after spending World War II hiding in a hayloft. (He's now married to the girl, once his servant, who loaned him the layloft.) Fear and guilt have made Silver so nervous that he's a spectral wreck, but her time in Hell has left Olin disinclined to care what anyone thinks of her and determined to take whatever she wants and apologize to nobody; when she finally kills herself, it's her final "fuck you" to a world that doesn't deserve to have somebody as hot as her livening it up. Honorable mention goes to Anjelica Huston as Silver's first wife, who he meets again in New York years after having assumed that she'd died in a concentration camp. His first words to her after they'be been reunited: "I... I didn't know you were alive!" Her smiling reply: "This you never knew."

WOODY ALLEN AS DAVID DOBEL IN ANYTHING ELSE (2003)

I was going to include Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Meyer Lansky in Bugsy here, but Kosher Nostra mobsters are well-represented elsewhere on the list, and since the Woodman was disparaged in the introduction as the personification of non-threatening Jew-hood, I figured it was only fair to mention his uncharacteristically empowered portrayal of gun-toting, windshield smashing, paranoid conspiracy theorist David Dobel in the underrated, unfairly maligned romantic tragedy, Anything Else. Like his work in the far superior Stardust Memories (which critics also hated), Allen’s performance here (as an unreliable mentor to the likeable, lovelorn Jason Biggs) is cranky and misanthropic, but also darkly funny and refreshingly prickly, with the courage of its own piss and vinegar convictions. Dobel may be just as much of a hard luck case as some of Allen’s previous incarnations, but this character would rather fight than mope, choosing anger over depression in his confrontations with the injustices of the world. Like his cool, successful Bizzaro World alter ego Nick Fifer in Paul Mazursky’s 1991 curiosity Scenes From A Mall, Dobel is the rare Allen character that strays from the comedian’s typical comfort zone to hint at the Tough Jew lurking just beneath the tsuris.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Larry the Cable Thief

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:35:00 GMT

Truth, justice and the American way are being pursued in a California courtroom, where valiant crusaders are attempting to thwart the June DVD release of Witless Protection, starring Larry the Cable Guy. Finally, a cause all right-thinking Americans can get behind.

Via the Hollywood Reporter comes the news that Universal Pictures has filed suit against Lionsgate, the perpetrators of Witless Protection, described in the complaint as “a box office flop as well as a critical failure.” That’s not a crime, unfortunately, or we could all file suit. Instead, Universal accuses Lionsgate of character theft. According to the lawsuit, Witless Protection lifted the character of “a short-tempered, humorless FBI agent named Alonzo Mosely” directly from Midnight Run, the 1988 buddy movie starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. You’ll recall Mosely as the character played by Yaphet Kotto, who must be seriously strapped for cash as he reprises the role in Witless.

Universal, which regards Midnight Run as “one of the jewels in its extensive film library” and dismisses Witless Protection as “inane,” seeks to “impound and dispose of all copies of the film, and it wants all profits, should any exist.” A dubious proposition, that, and although we’d have no qualms about wiping every copy of the movie off the face of the earth, the lawsuit may set a dangerous precedent. For instance, what are we supposed to do with our new script, Larry the Cable Guy Gets Torn Apart by Rabid Wolves?

Reviving Richard Fleischer: "Violent Saturday" and "Mandingo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland. Written by Sidney Boehm, who also did the script for The Big Heat, it serves up Lee Marvin as the nastiest of a trio of bank robbers who impose their bad morals and worse manners on a quiet little town where they may fit in a little than the locals want to admit. It was made the same year as James Sturges' better-known rural thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, where Marvin and Ernest Borgnine both served as muscle for the local forces of darkness. Borgnine is in this one, too, but cast against type as an Amish farmer who has understandable cause to worry that his religious proscription against violence may not be strong enough to survive its encounter with Lee Marvin. The film, which enjoyed a brief period of revival and acclaim in the mid-80s when it was discovered by critics and used as a club against Peter Weir's tonier Witness, is a reminder of how well Fleischer's no-frills filmmaking technique worked when applied to simple but gimmicky thriller material, as in the 1952 The Narrow Margin and Armored Car Robbery, both testaments to the grip of nuts-and-bolts noir and the nut-cracking sturdiness of Charles McGraw's jawline.

The "Film Comments Selects" series at Walter Reade Theater is showing Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place on February 21 and 24, thus giving audiences the chance to see the director of Gandhi, Richard Attenborough, sweat up the screen as a serial killer who strangled eight women and left it to an innocent fellow played by John Hurt to be hanged in his place. But the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here may be the chance to see the 1975 Mandingo (screening on February 23) on a big screen, assuming that no one tears it down before the closing credits roll. This anti-Gone with the Wind, set on a Southern slave-breeding plantation presided over by James Mason, was made in 1975 from a script by Norman Wexler, the ad executive turned wild man screenwriter who wrote Joe and Serpico. (Wexler, who reportedly served as a model for Andy Kaufman's loathsome lounge-singer character Tony Clifton, was notorious for such stunts as blowing off a man trying to make conversation with him on a commercial airplane flight by telling him that he was on his way to assassinate President Nixon. Wexler's seatmate notified a flight attendant, who in turn notified the FBI, and when the plane landed, Wexler wound up having to talk to a lot of people he would rather have not talked to.)

Kehr takes the position that "Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." This is a very interesting take on the picture, though some will feel that it may amount to putting a little too much thought into a movie that climaxes with Perry King reacting to the news that his wife (Susan George) has been having an affair with his prize slave, played by the heavyweight champ Ken Norton--King finds out the hard way, after his wife has given birth--by sticking Norton into a boiling cauldron and jabbing him with a pitchfork. But however seriously you end up taking Mandingo, it's definitely one of a kind, and very entertaining, if you can handle the fact that Eric Cartman would question its political correctness. (I remember that it was briefly on rotation on HBO around the time that my high school buddies first got cable, and for a long time, they were much taken with King's line, "I fancied her, so I bought her! She's gonna be my bed wench!" I can promise you, however, that use of this line in the real world got them no action whatsoever.) Devotees of hambone turns will want to see it just for the great James Mason drawling his lines, sitting with his bare feet on a black kid's tummy (it's supposed to be good for the arthritis), and generally giving the kind of performance that gives one visions of the star constantly asking the director, "Now, that last take, you're just going to show it for laughs at the wrap party and then burn the negative, right?" There was actually a sort of sequel to Mandingo called Drum, and it had a script that Wexler had worked on and a cast headed by Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Yaphet Kotto, who you might think would raise the stakes a bit from Perry King, Susan George, and Ken Norton, but it had none of the, um, magic of the original, and is beloved by no one. Fleischer didn't direct it. So maybe he's some kind of auteur after all.

That Guy!: Laurence Fishburne

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

February is Black History Month, and since we enjoyed combing through the stacks in preparation for last week's featured That Guy!, Yaphet Kotto, we figured we'd continue on in that vein and take a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. We've discussed before how it's much harder for a woman to make a reputation playing character roles; actresses tend to be valued more for their looks than their acting skills, and women who aren't traditionally beautiful have far fewer opportunities to build a career based on their chops and personalities than do men who aren't conventionally handsome. Similarly, it may actually be easier for African-Americans to become character actors, for no other reason than for a very long time, leading man roles were generally denied to them. With his commanding demeanor, strong and handsome face and forceful personality, there's no reason that Larry Fishburne shouldn't have become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and for a brief period in the early 1990s, it seemed like he would be — but for various reasons, it became clear that even at that late date, the movie business had only one opening for Serious Black Superstar, and it was already being filled by Denzel Washington. (It still is, for that matter.) So Fishburne — a rare black child star who became an even rarer black actor who never fell into stereotypical action or comedy roles — had to settle for nabbing some of the highest-profile second-banana roles available. Fishburne has always been a remarkably gifted actor, even as a child, and despite often being cast as a militant, a prophet, or some other variety of visionary, he's willing to take the piss on occasion (witness his almost satirically self-important voicing of the Silver Surfer in the recent Fantastic Four sequel), and is actually a lot more fun in light comic roles than anyone gives him credit for, as he showed when he played Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. Still not yet fifty years old, Fishburne has a lot of good roles ahead of him, if he doesn't give up acting altogether and move into writing, directing or producing — all areas at which he's shown talent. And if he never became America's next black superstar, he did get to marry the luscious Gina Torres, and that ain't bad as a second prize.

Where to see Laurence Fishburne at his best:

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It wasn't his first movie — the former child star had already impressed audiences with his teenage turn in Cornbread, Earl and Me — but Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam nightmare was certainly the film that put young Laurence Fishburne on the map. As Mr. Clean, he gives the purest and most human performance in the movie, and his death is the most touching and tragic. It's all the more astonishing that Larry (as he called himself at the time) was only fourteen years old when filming began, having fudged his age to get the part. Of course, the filming of Apocalypse Now took so long, he was approximately thirty-eight years old when it wrapped.

BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

This was the movie that seemed to predict superstardom for Fishburne; so successful and influential was it at the time of its release that it's also the film that inspired him to start going by Laurence instead of Larry. John Singleton's directorial debut, Boyz N the Hood is one of the first, and undoubtedly the best, of a mini-wave of ghetto-realist gangsta films, and despite heavy competition from pre-living-joke-status Cuba Gooding and Ice Cube (and Angela Bassett, with whom he would later shine as Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It?), Fishburne anchors the cast as the morally complex, conflicted Furious Styles.

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Wachowski Brothers' high-toned blend of wire-fu, gunplay and slapdash philosophy holds up less well with each year that passes by. But at the time of its release, it perfectly synthesized a number of elements of the zeitgeist into an action movie that, if it wasn't as smart as it thought it was, at least wasn't dumb. Fishburne landed the role of a lifetime as the mystical hacker Morpheus, and it's a testament to his acting skills and more or less permanent sense of gravitas that he managed to avoid magical Negritude in a role that pretty much defines the magical Negro. It probably also managed to buy him a pretty nice house, so who's complaining?

That Guy!: Yaphet Kotto

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A lifetime of playing character roles may not have exactly made Yaphet Kotto into Hollywood royalty; but he doesn't have to settle. He's the real thing: though a lifelong New Yorker, Kotto is the son of a genuine Cameroonian prince, the great-grandson of the king of the Douala people in the late 1800s, and (according to the man himself — and are you going to call Yaphet Kotto a liar?), the great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. That ought to get him a seat on the House of Lords and nice swanky country estate, but until his relatives stop treating him like, er, the black sheep of the family, he'll have to keep on being one of our all-time favorite African-American character actors. It's easy to see why Kotto is often cast as a soldier or a tough cop: even at age seventy, he struts through life in his powerfully built 6'4"-inch frame looking as if he owns the place. Although he resembles nothing less than a real-life John Shaft, with his strong features and a wide grin that hovers between gregarious and feral, he hasn't always had an easy time of it: in addition to being born with the wrong color skin to make it as a Hollywood superstar in the '50s and '60s, Yaphet Kotto is also a devout Jew, going back generations to his African roots. (He's a real study in contradiction: he's also a staunch Republican, rare enough for urban blacks and almost unheard of in Hollywood.) Some of his best moments have been on televison; he was particularly outstanding as Lt. Giardello on Homicide: Life on the Street, and he provided some hilarious moments in Michael Moore's short-lived series TV Nation when he tried to get a cab in NYC, being passed by time and time again in favor of a white guy who was a multiple felon. But he's likewise got a storied film career behind him, and even if film buffs can't agree on which of his memorable movie roles is the best, we can all agree that he deserves better than to be slumming around with Larry the Cable Guy.

Where to see Yaphet Kotto at his best:

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Perhaps Yaphet Kotto's most well-known role came when he snagged the part of the villain in the eighth official James Bond movie. It's a bizarre little number, too, a slightly manic mix of traditional 007 spy-caper fare and overheated '70s blaxploitation. It's into this milieu that Yaphet gets thrown head first, and he does his best with what's probably an unsalvageably offensive character: a West Indian would-be dictator named Kananga who also happens to rule the Harlem heroin underworld as "Mr. Big". Kotto veers nicely between hammy and menacing, and if nothing else, he provides us with one of the most ridiculous on-screen deaths of all time.

RAID ON ENTEBBE (1977)

Forest Whitaker was rightfully applauded for his portrayal of Ugandan strongman Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland, but in fact, he was only following in the footsteps of the mighty Yaphet Kotto. In this 1977 made-for-television movie (directed by Irvin Kershner, best known for The Empire Strikes Back — a movie for which Kotto turned down the role of Lando Calrissian for fear of being stereotyped), the focus is on the famous Israeli commando raid in which Amin played a prominent part. Kotto would absolutely own the role with his physicality and forceful personality until Whitaker came along; it earned him an Emmy nomination the following year.

MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

One of the problems with putting together a That Guy! entry for someone like Yaphet Kotto is that there's just so much to choose from. We could literally pick a dozen roles to fill this last slot — his memorable appearance as Parker in the first Alien movie; his role in the blazingly over-the-top racial potboiler The Liberation of L.B. Jones; his brief but enjoyable appearance in the hooty blaxploitation flick Truck Turner; or his turn as Bill Laughlin in the crazed Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Running Man. And that's to name just a few. But we'll always have a soft spot for his role as permanently beleaguered FBI man Alonzo Mosely in the terrific Midnight Run.

Trailer Review: Witless Protection

Paul Clark — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The late Pauline Kael once remarked that she didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon. That's sort of how I feel when I hear about Larry the Cable Guy, surely one of today's most inexplicable comedy superstars. Here Larry, who has since given up his second job as a health inspector, is now spending his non-cable-installing hours as a small-town lawman who mistakenly takes responsibility for a sexy government witness (hence the title... get it? GET IT???). Far as I can tell, Larry's only discernible talents are turning "blue collar comedy" into a kind of hick minstrel show (was his surprisingly charming voiceover work in Cars only two years ago?), and enlisting talented actors to play characters even more bumbling than him. I realize that Yaphet Kotto, Peter Stormare, and Joe Mantegna are hardly marquee names, but even nowadays they're clearly above this tripe. The word "slumming" seems woefully inadequate...