Video of the Day: Shatner-ed
8/24/2007 6:00:00 PM
It’s a universal truth that you can never have too much Shatner. This spoof from the 1996 MTV Video Awards — made long before he’d turned lampooning himself into a second career — is one of the funniest things the man has ever done. Watch as Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, and Rescue 911 Shatner re-enact Seven’s infamous ending. — John Constantine & Faisal A. Qureshi
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Hitman Trailer
8/24/2007 5:00:00 PM
Yes, Hitman is a movie based on a videogame. This trailer makes it look about on par with better entries in the game adaptation canon, which is to say, better than a Vin Diesel movie but still worse than a Michael Bay movie. Despite its pedigree though, Hitman is worth keeping an eye on for its leading man, Timothy Olyphant. Olyphant has been predominantly a background player in drivel like Gone in Sixty Seconds since the mid-90s but has started showing some serious chops in meatier roles over the past three years. His performance as hot tempered sheriff Seth Bullock in HBO’s Deadwood and as porn producer Kelly in The Girl Next Door — hands down the best teen comedy in the past decade — proves he’s got the talent and charisma to carry a feature all on his own. Here’s hoping Hitman is an adequate stepping stone to bigger and better things. — John Constantine
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The Movie Moment(s): Buster Keaton
8/24/2007 4:00:00 PM
Buster Keaton is, without hesitation, my favorite filmmaker. While his films were hilarious, laughter was only part of Keaton’s brilliance. This being my twenty-fifth Movie Moment column, it is as good a time as any to write about the man. Rather than narrowing his career down to a single scene, I decided instead to spotlight several, each illuminating a facet of his genius.
Inventiveness
Keaton was peerless at engineering gags, often having his characters improvise them onscreen. In The ‘High Sign’ (1921), Keaton works in a shooting gallery but isn’t much of a marksman. So using a rope, a dog, a piece of meat, a wooden pedal and the shooting gallery’s bell, he fools his boss into thinking he’s a crack shot. Half the fun of Keaton’s inventions was seeing them go haywire, as when the dog sees a cat and rings the bell over and over while Buster scrambles to keep up.
Athleticism
In addition to being a comic genius, Buster Keaton was a formidable athlete. Keaton would often double for his costars — even the female ones — on the more difficult stunts but there were other instances in which he needed some help. In the Neighbors (1920) is a scene when three men, stacked on each others’ shoulders with Keaton on top, walk back and forth across a courtyard three times in a single shot. Hard to tell if the men under Keaton switched between crossings but little matter — it’s quite a sight.
Random Hilarity
Most comedies live and die by their big set pieces, but it takes a special talent to treat the downtime between them as something more than expository dead air. This is where Keaton’s knack for off-the-cuff jokes shines through. In The Scarecrow (1920), his leading lady fantasizes about being a ballerina while Buster gets chased by both a dog and her father. She kicks and twirls, oblivious to the action around her, and keeps it up through most of the film. As a title card reads, “She belonged to the dancer’s union and couldn’t stop until the whistle blew.”
Generosity
Many silent clowns were reluctant to cede the spotlight, but Keaton granted even bit players their share of choice moments. Consider the scene in Our Hospitality (1923) in which Keaton travels South via train. As the train passes, a little old man picks up some rocks and chucks them at the engineer. The engineer retaliates by throwing wood at him. After a few seconds the old man stops, picks up the logs, and walks home with an armload of free firewood. Who would not only make time for this character we never see again but also give him one of the movie’s best bits?
— Paul Clark
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Take Five: Authors on Film
8/24/2007 3:00:00 PM
Indie films rarely reach a level of convoluted recursiveness like The Hottest State, opening in limited release today. It’s based on Ethan Hawke’s first novel and portrays the adventures of a protagonist not unlike Ethan Hawke. The director and screenwriter of the film is none other than Ethan Hawke, who, no longer young enough to star as himself, cast Ethan Hawke wannabe Mark Webber in what is essentially the role of Ethan Hawke. Hawke is in the unique position of directing someone playing the role of himself in his own film adaptation of his own novel. The possibility that The Hottest State might actually be good sets it apart from other efforts by actors-turned-writers (don’t expect a big-screen treatment of William Shatner’s Tek-War anytime soon), but a few writers have turned actor with pleasing results.
Robert Benchley in ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)
Robert Benchley used to describe himself as not quite a writer and not quite an actor. He was rather successful as both and sixty years after his death is considered one of America’s greatest literary humorists. He had a side gig as a maker of short films that captured his unique comic sensibility; one story has him tied up in wires for a movie stunt and telling his wife “Remember how good I used to be at Latin?” One of his finest moments is in the best of the Hope-Crosby road pictures, narrating the film with what later critics would term metahumor. Considering that this was filmed near the end of WWII, it has a distinctly postmodern flair at times.
Fannie Flagg in FIVE EASY PIECES (1970)
So curious a disconnect is there between the Fannie Flagg who wrote the acclaimed Southern novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and the Fannie Flagg who spent the 1970s cracking wise and wearing thrift-store sweaters on The Match Game that many people just assume they aren’t the same person. But it’s the very same Flagg, same as the former TV writer, proud Alabamian, and out lesbian as well. Her film debut was a doozy, starring as Stoney and playing opposite Jack Nicholson in one of his most memorable roles in Five Easy Pieces.
Marshall McLuhan in ANNIE HALL (1977)
The all-time grand champion of author cameos in film is also every intellectual’s fantasy: in Woody Allen’s greatest movie, his character Alvy Singer is waiting on line at a theatre and is forced to contend with a blowhard expounding on the theories of then-trendy cultural critic Marshall McLuhan. Singer retaliates, at least in his own mind, by pulling McLuhan himself out from behind a lobby sign to dress down the loudmouth for his pretentious ravings. As Alvy says, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Stephen King in CREEPSHOW (1982)
Given his later history as an actor, it’s hard to tell whether Creepshow was just a career moment for Stephen King or if director George Romero just happened to coax an all-time great performance out of him. Whatever the case, the ultra-best-selling novelist was never as appealing as when he delivered a sublimely goofy take on a hapless hick, playing the title role in the “Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” segment of his own 1950s EC-style horror anthology film. Sure he hammed it up like nobody’s business, but King at least seemed to grasp what sort of movie he was making and acted accordingly.
Kurt Vonnegut in BACK TO SCHOOL (1986)
As clichéd as it was, the unique brand of movie that the ever-gregarious Rodney Dangerfield made in the 1980s had its place in our cultural landscape. They weren’t high art, or even great comedy, but they were enjoyable little comedies that always featured at least a few good jokes, and their inevitable ending scenes generated much-needed royalties for Journey and Loverboy. Back to School is noteworthy for two great literary gags: the casting of Sally Kellerman as a literature professor and of Kurt Vonnegut as Kurt Vonnegut. Thornton Melon, Dangerfield’s slacker billionaire persona, hires Vonnegut to deliver a paper on Kurt Vonnegut for his college lit class. In a way, it’s a fun echo of the famous Annie Hall scene.
— Leonard Pierce
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The Rep Report (August 24 – 30)
8/24/2007 2:00:00 PM
PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater heats up your late summer nights with "Vintage Nudie Shirts, Found Home Films, Sexy, Experimental Films" (August 24-30). The sprawling selection includes the work of Bettie Page, George Kuchar, Jayne Mansfield, Bruce Miller, Ron Jeremy, and Jorge Lorenzo, old TV news reports on prostitution (with "pimps being interviewed with paper bags over theirheads"), wet T-shirt contests, trailers for vintage nudie flicks, and other choice samples of "golden age smut". I just wish I knew how the programmers got inside my safety deposit box.
LOS ANGELES: In conjunction with its exhibit "The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820", the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents "Latin American Cinema: A Weekend Celebration” (August 24-26).The nine-picture lineup includes the Cuban masterpiece "Memories of Underdevelopment" as well as more recent films such as "The Violin" (2005), whose star, Gerardo Taracena, is scheduled to attend the screening. Admission is free of charge.
The Rep Report was deeply saddened to learn of the July death of Sherman Torgan, the proprietor of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, at the heartbreaking age of 63. Torgan was a rep-house manager of the old school, a one man band who ran his theater as a labor of love, personally overseeing every detail of the New Beverly’s creation after taking over a porn theater. The place retained what Torgan himself called a "rough around the edges" quality; it was by skimping on inessentials like decor that Torgan managed to keep ticket prices low. That philosophy set him apart not just from the multiplex gangsters but even from many a pure-hearted art house manager, and one that marked him as one of the world's natural noblemen. His son Michael has taken over the theater and promises to continue to run it in keeping with his father's vision. We wish him luck.
— Phil Nugent
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Weekly Top 10 15: Great Cameos in Film History, Part 3
8/24/2007 1:00:00 PM
Tom Cruise, AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER (2002)
By the third installment, Mike Myers’ superspy satire had achieved pop-culture icon status — and nowhere was this more evident than in the opening film-within-the-film Austinpussy. Watching his adventures committed to film, Myers got to see himself played by megastar Cruise, decked out in psychedelic gear and rocking the trademark hornrims. Of course, he had plenty of help from his all-star supporting cast: Gwyneth Paltrow as ingénue Dixie Normous, Kevin Spacey as Dr. Evil and Danny DeVito as Mini-Me. The project even managed to land Steven Spielberg as himself in the director’s chair. Oh if only, for his career’s sake, Cruise had managed to maintain this level of not taking himself so seriously.
Cecil B. DeMille, SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
Sunset Boulevard was as incisively written as any Billy Wilder film, but much of the film’s teeth came from the fact that Wilder set his dark Hollywood fable in a recognizable real-life version of Tinseltown. Like her character Norma Desmond, star Gloria Swanson was a washed-up silent film star whose career went south with the advent of talkies and Erich von Stroheim, who played her husband-turned-butler, was a great director well past his prime. But even more startling were the real-life figures playing themselves — gossip columnist Hedda Hopper shows up at the end to witness Norma’s re-emergence before the cameras, and Norma receives weekly visits from silent-movie greats H.B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton. But Wilder’s biggest cameo coup was scoring Cecil B. DeMille to play himself. At the time, DeMille was Hollywood’s reigning king of the grandiose — even his name (real, by the way) was larger than life — and as such was the only logical choice to play Norma’s dream director for her misguided Salome project. Wilder even shot the scenes of Norma and DeMille on the actual set of DeMille’s biblical epic, Samson and Delilah, for extra verisimilitude. It’s safe to say that the film’s immortal closing line — “All right Mr. DeMille. I’m ready for my closeup.” — wouldn’t have packed half the punch without the real, larger-than-life figure for Norma to address.
Brett Favre, THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY (1998)
The jury’s still out on how consciously bad the Hall-of-Fame-bound Green Bay Packers QB was trying to be in his appearance at the end of the Farrelly Brothers’ comedy hit. Let it stay out, because it’s that uncertainty that manages to give Favre’s rather unexpected-yet-perfectly-understandable-in-retrospect appearance here its special meta kick; Cameron Diaz’s Mary has been mentioning her ex-boyfriend “Brett” for practically the entire film. Little do we expect it to be that Brett. As you may have noticed, late 90s-early 2000s American comedy is full of cute, knowing cameos by major pop cultural figures of the past and present. But somehow, the Farrellys’ tone works perfectly here, turning Favre’s gimmick appearance into both a sweet third act twist and a moment of fleet-footed po-mo self-awareness.
Billy Idol, THE WEDDING SINGER (1998)
In the same way they’re rife with product placement, Adam Sandler’s comedies are also choc-a-block with cameos. We’re not quite sure what kind of inadequacy Mr. Sandler is making up for with such ostentatious references to real-life celebrities and real-life products, but some industrious Cultural Studies professor is probably compiling a seminar for it as we speak. Of all the cameos to show up in the former SNL funnyman’s films, the one that most intrigued us was Billy Idol’s in this ode to 80s-era bland-ass musical cheese. (Remember when Billy Idol fancied himself a punk? Thank God that shit is over.) Why? One very simple reason: He looks so much less like what we imagine Billy Idol looking like today, and so much like a Billy Idol impersonator, that this entry constitutes the first Screengrab Top Ten entry that we had to triple fact-check. It’s really him, looking for all the world like someone doing a poor Billy Idol impersonation.
Alfred Hitchcock, LIFEBOAT (1944)
This one will have to stand for all those other awesome Hitchcock walk-ons in his films (go here for a sampling), which began unintentionally with The Lodger (where the budding auteur joined a crowd scene to make up for a dearth of extras) and then continued on as a tradition. But Lifeboat, set as it is on a lifeboat adrift in the wake of a passenger liner’s being sunk by Nazis, presented a problem: How on Earth was Hitchcock going to make his by-now customary appearance in the middle of nowhere? The solution was simple, and notable also for another reason: The tubby genius had just lost a ton of poundage thanks to a diet, and wanted to immortalize his weight loss. Sadly, he gained it all back, which somehow makes this cameo all the more poignant.
— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw, Bryan Whitefield
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Morning Deal Report: Yo Joe, er, Ross
8/24/2007 12:00:00 PM
Nothing brings credibility and fine acting to a political thriller quite like David Schwimmer.
Sure, there’s talk of eight billion adaptations different 80s toy franchises going into big screen production (Voltron, Thundercats, etc.), but it looks like GI Joe is actually happening. I’m hoping for teaser posters with “Knowing is Half the Battle” as the tagline.
Focus Features: “NC-17? So what!”
— John Constantine
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Today in the Nerve Film Lounge
8/24/2007 11:00:00 AM
The Bothersome Man: "The Bothersome Man is intriguingly bizarre, but only in the most superficial, what-the-hell's-going-on-here? sort of way."
Right at your Door: "Gripping at first, the film turns pointless and mundane by almost imperceptible degrees; only at the very end, with its ironic Twilight Zone twist, do you finally realize that you've been had."
The Doom Generation: "Gregg Araki's Doom Generation works so hard to be outré and subversive — with "scary" industrial music, (presumably) intentionally stiff acting, campy dialogue and steaming heaps of sex, violence and cursing — that you're afraid it'll pull a muscle."
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Weekly Top 10 15: Great Cameos in Film History, Part 2
8/23/2007 7:00:00 PM
Bill Murray, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)
In the 1963 Roger Corman version, the part of the masochistic dental patient was played by the then-unknown Jack Nicholson, who scaled such heights of comic freakishness that Murray must have taken the offer of the role as a personal challenge. In the first shot of him he's practically bouncing, as if he can't wait to see what he's going to come up with when the scene is fully under way. He does not disappoint. His teamwork with the horrified Steve Martin — who, as the dentist, simultaneously channels Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man and Elvis Presley at Madison Square Garden — marks a career peak for both men. And between the two of them, Murray and Nicholson prove that, with enough talent, an actor can overcome any haircut!
Jack Elam and Woody Strode, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969)
The opening scene of Sergio Leone's ultimate spaghetti Western is a comic ode to the essence of the violent Western: waiting for the action to start. Originally, Leone had planned to cast Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach as the three gunmen — the stars he'd built up over the course of his previous films. A cute concept, but when it didn't work out, Leone instinctively cast his net for the iconic visages of two great character actors who could conjure up indelible, silent expressions of irritation, impatience, satisfaction, and relief.
Dustin Hoffman, DICK TRACY (1990)
In a movie full of name performers whose faces are encased in grotesque clown makeup, nobody is funnier or more recognizably himself than Dustin Hoffman as the gangland wallflower Mumbles, whose garbled confessions can only be understood by tape-recording them and playing the tape at half-speed. They didn't knock themselves out on his makeup, which may have had something to do with Hoffman's understandable desire to get his scenes shot and then make it back home in time for lunch: basically, he looks like Dustin Hoffman after an hour spent clapping erasers. But the speed-metal variation on his old Ratso Rizzo diction is a hoot. Give the guy some credit for knowing, unlike his co-star, that he owed us a laugh after Ishtar.
Val Kilmer, TRUE ROMANCE (1994)
A who’s who of Hollywood showed up for this Tony Scott directed, Quentin Tarantino scripted romance adventure: a character turn by Gary Oldman, a thespian showdown between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper and even memorable appearances by then-somewhat-unknowns like Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini. But perhaps no one shone more than Val Kilmer as the ghost of Elvis Presley. We never really get a full glimpse of Kilmer as The King when he shows up as mentor and figment of Christian Slater’s imagination, and because the voice and mannerisms are so dead on there is very little trace of Kilmer himself. The cameo actually serves an important plot feature, as it is Elvis’ advice to Clarence that sets off a bullet-riddled chain of events that leaves cops, criminals and coffee pots full of holes. (We’d post a spoiler warning, but just what exactly did you expect from a Tony Scott movie written by Quentin Tarantino?) Oh, also: It sounds great in Italian.
Marcel Marceau, SILENT MOVIE (1976)
Back in his 1970s heyday — when his broad movie homages were must-see comedy instead of jaw-dropping disasters — Mel Brooks cast himself as a filmmaker named Mel Funn trying to convince a contemporary movie studio to let him make a silent movie. The set-up was an excuse to cast several well-known celebrities as themselves as Mel tried to recruit stars for his project: James Caan, Paul Newman and Burt Reynolds were among the A-listers who joined the Funn. But the best spot belonged to the legendary French mime, who uttered the film’s only line of dialogue when he rejected Funn’s entreaty over the phone with a curt, “No!” Brooks actually topped this great punch line with his confused reply to colleague Dom DeLuise’s question about what Marceau said: “I don’t know … I don’t speak French.”
— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw, Bryan Whitefield
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Weekly Top 10 15: Great Cameos in Film History, Part 1
8/23/2007 6:30:00 PM
We had a fun time coming up with a whole crapload of these. So much so that it wound up being a Top 15 instead of a Top 10. We’d put in something snarky here about how all these celebrities — be they A-listers or has-beens — had ulterior motives in choosing to appear in these films to poke fun at their images, but really, we’re worried that an angry Chuck Norris will appear and tell us our theory on his fallacy is wrong. So let’s just get to the list, shall we?
Merv Griffin, THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS (1983)
A flood of remembrances have come in the wake of show business legend/raconteur/zillionaire Merv Griffin’s death last week, but precious few of them have taken note of his finest screen role: that of the mysterious and sinister Elevator Killer in The Man with Two Brains. It’s not one of Steve Martin’s better comedies but it does feature a handful of decent jokes, a gorgeous Kathleen Turner, and a big reveal at the end of the film when the Elevator Killer, a serial murderer who injects random victims with poison in lifts, is revealed to be none other than the genial, Botany 500-sporting talk show host. Few celebrity cameos in film history are as disarming as this one, where Merv stands over a fresh corpse holding a hypodermic needle and confesses, as if he were discussing Lola Falana’s new Vegas review, he’s “always just loved to kill. I really enjoyed it.”
David Letterman, CABIN BOY (1994)
Letterman actually had a high-profile movie deal in the 1980s, but it was never easy to imagine what he'd actually do in a movie. In the end, he is said to have cut his losses and refunded some of the studio's money with a great sense of relief. When he finally did turn up on the big screen, it was a drop-in appearance in the instantly infamous Cabin Boy, a baroque, eye-popping, somewhat icky vehicle for his old "Late Night" stooge, Chris Elliott. As "the old salt", he takes a few minutes out of his day to torture Elliott, grinning like a jolly sadist, laughing in his face, calling him "Sweetheart", and delivering such endearments as, "Big girls have big appetites, don't they?" And the torture never stops; to the reported dismay of Elliott and his director, Adam Resnick, Letterman has kept memories of the movie and its laughingstock reputation alive ever since by often referring to it on his TV show, the way that Jack Benny used to fan memories of The Horn Blows at Midnight.
Chuck Norris, DODGEBALL (2004)
In an excellent study of the "the ironic movie cameo" phenomenon published in Slate, Adam Sternbergh insisted that Chuck Norris's climactic appearance — in a movie that also features David Hasselhoff bawling out the German national Dodgeball team — was disappointing because the Texas Ranger "seems oblivious as to why his appearance is funny in the first place." Yet we would argue that it's this obliviousness that gives Norris's cameo here its very special charm. As Sternbaugh notes in his essay, the self-parodying celebrity cameo has gotten to be such a staple of modern entertainment that it's lost something. What's refreshing about Norris here is that he plainly isn't in on the joke, but he figures that if the sight of him brightens the day of the kids messed up on goofballs, he'll play along. In a world drowning in hip self-awareness, it's nice to know that there are still a few squares out there, and that they're happy to help. In the same situation, Steven Seagal would probably have marched from theater to theater threatening to punch out the audience.
Leonard Maltin, GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990)
Gremlins 2 is nothing like its predecessor. Where Chris Columbus went for small-town sincerity, Joe Dante turned it over to big-city irony, stuffing the sequel full of metahumor, Airplane-style background gags, surrealism and mayhem. In a movie absolutely crammed with fourth-wall-shattering winks to the audience, one of the funniest and most surprising is when Leonard Maltin shows up to give the movie an unflattering review, only to receive a dreadful comeuppance from the title creatures. Make sure to watch the video clip, a ‘making-of’ short from the age before DVDs made such things a dime a dozen, in which the movie’s actors and producers complain about shabby treatment at the hands of the gremlins and throw prima donna-ish tantrums over their billing.
Gene Hackman, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)
The story goes that when Gene Hackman called Mel Brooks to ask if he could be in his new movie, saying that he'd take any part available, Brooks didn't want to say no to the big star but had no idea whether Hackman could play comedy. Turned out he could, as was confirmed when preview audiences reacted to one of best-played comedies of the 70s by predicting that the guy in the beard was going to have some career ahead of him.
— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw, Bryan Whitefield
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